BXBX NOVEL Chapter 310 - Stop Messing Up
"You need to know what material is actually best for something, right? Maybe when someone goes against certain monsters, they’ll need certain materials to make the fight easier, like silver for werewolves." Koro suggested, and Eisen slowly shook his head. "That is indeed important, but that wasn’t exactly what I meant. Let’s say two people ask you to make a knife for them. Both are out of the same type of steel, both with a wooden handle. The materials are exactly the same. Do you understand what I’m saying now?" Eisen asked once more, trying to give someone else the chance to respond, and while Rouge actually started speaking, he was swiftly interrupted by Koro, who continuedd giving his own answers.
"Oh, so body type? Like, you need to make sure that people can move around with a knife properly, so you’ll need to change the shape to fit that?" He asked, and once more, Eisen shook his head. "Still not quite right. Rouge, do you want to answer?" The old man asked, and the rather short and thin young man nodded his head.
"Yeah... Well, do you mean that even if both want a ’Knife’, it can just be for very different things? A knife can be used for preparing leather, for dismantling, cooking, or in the end also fighting. And the shapes of items for those different tasks vary a lot as well. And then it can get even more specific within the area of one task..." Rouge answered as he scratched his cheek, noticing the rather annoyed glare from Koro next to him, but Eisen interrupted that miniscule exchange quite swiftly.
"That’s exactly right. Koro, what you were doing was exactly what you shouldn’t do. Yes, there are a lot of times where people will come for knives they can use in combat, but especially you should know that knives aren’t just for fighting. After all, you used to be a Chef’s Apprentice." The old man pointed out, and Koro slowly nodded his head with a frown on his face.
"Anyway, let’s move on from that. The reason why I’m telling you about this is that it is always best if you are able to familiarize yourself with as many different types and shapes of items as possible, so that you don’t have to do any ’Tests’ and can just go ahead and work on the item right away. That’s something that will be learnt over time as well, but theory is still something important even within smithing. Here, I have a book on different metallic items that can be made just through Blacksmithing, you’ll be making a few different items from this book." Eisen told them, and after he did so, he flipped to the first page that he wanted them to work on. And while they started individually working on that item, Eisen started working on what he himself wanted to do when it came to smithing, the items for the other Originals, and for that, he already took out a few pitch black crystals which he had Jyuuk prepare for him.
They were the necromantic Mana Crystals which were created by practically attempting to turn a regular mana crystal into an undead, and Eisen would be using these to work on an item for the very same Beastperson that gave these to him.
First things first, Eisen would alloy this crystal with the metal, which he already prepared the materials for. As he had found out sometime before, it seemed as if regular crystals could be alloyed with metal in the same way that regular metals would be alloyed with each other, and it didn’t have to be done from the most basic level like with Metallic Potions.
The reason for that seemed to be just that the biological materials that would be added to metallic potions usuall burnt up and became useless if they were just added to the mixture. But what the old man could do right now was to simply grind down the necromantic mana crystals and add them to the molten down metal.
And that metal base was quite simply steel alloyed with a little bit of lead. Within the area of metallic symbolism, Lead was a metal quite often connected to death due to its poisonous nature, which was quite perfect for the type of weapon that Eisen wanted to make. And as he didn’t really expect Jyuuk to be the kind of person to lick his weapons or randomly scratch people with it, the only ones that could really be affected by the lead in any were the monsters Jyuuk would be fighting against, although they had other issues to worry about when they were fighting against him.
Either way, as Eisen had expected, due to the necromantic mana crystals the metallic alloy had turned into a quite deep black color. And after Eisen turned the alloy into a few smaller ingots, the old man began to repeat the same process that he had been doing when working on Kiron’s weapon, simply folding the ingots into each other while hammering his mana into it to spread it around. And as the weapon was supposed to be something of a mixture between a staff and a regular meelee weapon, the additional magic combatibility added to everything in that way really only helped.
And after a while, Eisen had a relatively large piece of metal in front of him. It wasn’t really all that much metal when compared to Kiron’s weapon, but it was rather comparable to the amount of metal that Eisen had needed for the Zweihänder before.
What followed next was Eisen then taking that deep black metal, which for some reason seemed to have only gotten darker after Eisen infused it with his mana which was the complete opposite to what happened with Kiron’s sword before, and shaping it into the shape of a half-crescent to create the type of shape one would expect from a scythe. And after that half-crescent had been finished, Eisen sat down in front of the grinding wheels which he had went to get before and then began to grind the inside of the metal to create a nice sharp edge, before he placed the blade to the side. After all, it wasn’t finished yet, but he would be working on the grip during the woodworking-lessons which came on another day. All of the crafting-lessons would continue every day until everyone got to the islands, where everyone would then first work on setting up the temporary base, which was also a good time to get started on different lessons in the area of masonry.
After Eisen finished his own item, he walked around the five other workstations that he created with his element before and took a look at the items that the others made. To no surprise, everyone managed to do quite well with the exception of the Kobold, but there seemed to be a clear visible gradient of quality that could be seen on the item caused by the Kobold’s rather rapid growth. And as the material that the Kobold was working with was simple iron, as it was also incapable of working on steel at the start, as it had to work on the blacksmithing skill like any other entity first, it would be rather easy to re-use the iron some other time.
According to Sigurd, the way that Dungeon Monsters learned and leveled up their skills was rather unusual. For one, they had a limited amount of ’Skill Slots’, currently set at 1 due to the rank of the dungeon, and that skill couldn’t get to a rank higher than the dungeon’s rank, although it would level up at an insane speed until it reached that rank.
That was also the reason why Eisen chose to not teach all of the Kobolds at once, instead wanting to have them learn other production-related skills. One of them would get masonry, one would get woodworking, one tailoring, and the last one would get alchemy. He was unsure whether or not he should maybe choose enchanting for one of them, but that would most likely be a rather bad idea considering that none of the Kobolds seemed to have double-digit intelligence, which was a thing that really showed in the general manner that they interacted with the world around themselves.
"Alright, all of you, show me what you made." The old man then said with a smile on his face as he looked at the five in front of him, and they brought the items forward, and he soon noticed that especially Rouge and Parc came a long way. They hadn’t gotten rid of their individual bad habits just yet, but the overall quality of their items was astronomically different to the items they made before.
Stahl’s item was quite good as well, far better than Eisen expected from a beginner in this area, but he was happy that his Grandson seemed to have gotten some of the old man’s craftsmanship talent. And then, when Eisen looked at Koro’s item, he couldn’t believe what he saw.
"This is..." The old man muttered to himself, and with a smug smile, Koro crossed his arms and nodded his head.
"Mhm, I used the same techniques as you did!" He answered, and Eisen looked back at him with a blank expression that immediately made everyone, beside the one person that should have reacted, shudder.
"What did you do?" The old man asked with a frown, trying to figure out of he heard him wrong for some reason, but it seemed like Koro misunderstood that question.
"You were folding mana into the metal, right? I did that too! I didn’t really get the reason behind the folding, but it seemed to have worked pretty-" Koro exclaimed, although he soon was faced with a rather surprising sight. The metallic item that he had just worked on slowly started to glow due to the heat coming from Eisen’s hand, before the old man simply formed a fist with the nearly-molten steel in his hand and completely crushed the item, turning it into a hot lump of metal.
"Koro, when exactly did I ask you to do that?" Eisen asked as he simply stared at the young man in front of him, who now also slowly began to realize that Eisen wasn’t impressed, but incredibly angry.
"W-Wait, but I thought-" Koro began to stutter, but Eisen just stepped over to Koro’s forge and threw the metal into the forge before he interrupted him.
"Then stop thinking." The old man told him, before cleaning his hands of the metal residue and looking back at Koro. "If you don’t stop trying to be so much better than the others by not following my lessons, then you can leave right now and you’ll be the first one who’s going to be on the ship when we go back to the continent." Eisen exclaimed, before Koro simply looked up at him confused.
"Don’t try and tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about now. You used incredibly unnecessary techniques that will just end up wearing the metal out considering that we’re re-using the steel for other items after this. Using mana while forging can do wonders for items like the ones I am making, that are supposed to be a final product, but it will only make the steel harder to re-use. And on top of that, you didn’t even do what I told you. I said to make a very, very simple letter opener. You made a dagger. The dimensions are literally inside of the book." Eisen said told him with a deep frown before rubbing the bridge of his nose.
"I knew I should have checked on you while you were working as well, but I thought I could at least trust you with physical crafting..." The old man sighed, but then shook his head and stepped up to the book with the different examples of items inside of it, then flipping to another page.
"Let’s hope you can do better next time." Eisen said with a frown, and Koro slowly nodded his head as he returned to his own workstation while Stahl, Rouge and Parc did the same silently, although the Kobolds caught Eisen’s attention quite swiftly. Not only the Blacksmith-Kobold, but the other four were on their back, showing Eisen their stomachs while shaking heavily. At the very least these guys seemed to respect him even more now.