Chapter 42
1.
A lightning-fast wake-up.
I had a mountain of work to do.
With a mountain of work piled up, my eyes opened automatically.
If this were work I hated—some rotten, miserable job—my whole body would feel like a thousand pounds as I burrowed back under the blanket.
But it wasn't like that at all.
If anything, my body felt light because it was something I wanted to get done as quickly as possible.
As always, while washing my face, I gave Ruby, who was brushing her teeth beside me, a
“Ow.”
flick on the forehead.
Then I headed for the kitchen.
Doloris apparently had business to attend to inside the Tower first thing in the morning.
Her main place of work was the Tower to begin with, so it wasn't anything strange.
Knowing that I took ciabatta with me every morning, she had placed freshly baked bread on the table.
Beside it were sliced tomatoes, ham, and romaine lettuce, so I could eat them however I liked.
Seriously, the food culture in this world is so poor that even a sandwich puts you in the top 0.1 percent.
“Of course, that's just by my standards.”
I piled a generous amount into a bowl that looked like a basket and headed for the garden.
I opened the workshop door, went inside, and closed it behind me.
A blacksmith gets straight to work instead of wasting time on idle chatter.
At times like this, being a child who can't smoke is actually a good thing.
The accessory I had to make was… earrings.
The Heir of Fire's basic specialties lay, above all, in metallurgy and the production of large-scale equipment.
I was excellent at working with iron, and I was pretty good at most things, but.
“Making delicate little accessories like this isn't exactly….”
It wasn't my specialty. That was the domain of the small-handed elves.
Even so, I was naturally confident in the material for the earrings—the metal part that would serve as their frame.
I had gotten a tiny taste of that skill last time.
The Forest Child's material preparation and jewelry-making techniques that I had learned while making Frostless Spring.
If last time had been a collaboration where I merely scooped up a spoonful to sample….
“This time, properly.”
I intended to make earrings by blending the elves' passionate craftsmanship with the Heir of Fire's metallurgy.
A true collaboration between the two races.
My goal was to create accessories that had no place in history.
First, I had to choose the materials.
I carefully lifted the pouch full of ore and spread its contents across the table.
- Rumble….
Various kinds of ore came into view.
There were many important factors in making a divine artifact, but if I had to name the most important one….
『A divine artifact must be forged from metals, minerals, and jewels whose nature resonates with that of the god.』
Since it was a divine artifact, I should ultimately use minerals connected to the god.
Or something the god liked.
“Yunaaa.”
As always, I asked my cyber informant Yuna to crawl the web for me.
“Organize all the information related to Gaia and summarize it for me.”
[Got ittt]
…Of course, I wasn't just playing around while making Yuna do all the work.
I had things to do too, you know.
Namely, sorting the ore.
If this had been only a month ago, I would have been sorting out how much chicken breast cost per gram on the Hot Deals board, let alone sorting ore.
Now I was sorting ore instead.
Iron ore with iron ore, jewels with jewels.
Just as I was establishing criteria and briskly picking them out.
[Oppa, I have a rough result]
“Oh, already?”
Faster than I expected.
[But since she's a god]
[…Hmm, it wasn't easy to find proper information]
[I mostly filtered out divine oracles and things posted on communities… focusing on the wiki]
“Okay.”
I had just finished sorting the ore as well.
I skimmed through the posts Yuna had selected.
The first thing that caught my eye was a community post.
[Have you ever encountered a god while climbing?]
“This board is….”
It was the climbers' board.
It seemed to be a place where people climbing the Tower shared information.
─────────────────
I passed in second place and was supposed to receive the Administrator God's blessing, but I got Gaia instead
She gave me the Blessing of Earth, but that's not the important part
I can't sleep after seeing Gaia Mama in person…
─────────────────
ㅇㅇ: Damn, I'm jealous. I met some fucking goddess of fire and my body caught fire. She just roasted me with flames.
ㄴ OP: ?? Wasn't she supposed to give me a blessing?
ㄴ ㅇㅇ: I d o n ' t k n o w, f u c k, i t ' s s o h o t
ㄴ ㅇㅇ: She was saying that catching fire for her was a blessing or some shit.
ㄴ OP: ㄷㄷ.. That's scary.
ㄴ ㅇㅇ1: Gaia doesn't usually summon men. The poster's probably a woman.
What was with this extreme difference in temperature?
They had encountered the same god, yet one couldn't sleep and the other had burned alive.
Choosing Gaia might have been the move of the century.
I clicked my tongue and moved on to the wiki.
[Gaia is the goddess of the earth]
As I read downward, I looked through the divine artifacts that had been offered to her over the years.
Divine artifacts weren't common at all, so it seemed the wiki recorded them as they were offered.
“……Huh?”
But then.
“This is supposed to be a divine artifact?”
They were all pathetic.
Their workmanship was so poor that it was embarrassing to call them divine artifacts.
Give me two hours and a hammer right now, and I could make something better than this.
To begin with, only a handful of races could forge divine artifacts.
Once you excluded elven accessories, all that remained were these pathetic objects.
It looked like people with no talent had offered them while calling them divine artifacts.
“...So even if you offer something like this and get it recognized as a divine artifact, she gives you a blessing.”
I felt a sense of déjà vu.
In my past life, back in graduate school.
The sort of people who scribbled out idiotic proposals just to secure research funding… then pocketed every bit of the grant money.
They offered things without a shred of sincerity… and took only the kind, gentle Gaia's blessings.
She must have recognized even this sort of thing as a divine artifact and granted them blessings.
Even after digging through the community and the wiki, the opinions about Gaia were all the same.
She was described as extremely kind and gentle.
Apparently, she didn't get angry over ordinary discourtesy.
So everyone had taken her for a pushover.
I shook my head.
I hate people like that more than anyone: when someone treats them well, they don't feel grateful. They only scheme about how to take advantage of them.
I closed the wiki window.
My mind was made up.
I had intended to put my heart into it from the start, but now I would put even more sincerity into it.
“I'll make it properly and come back with a proper blessing.”
I shook my head and sat down in front of the ore I had sorted.
“Yuna, take a memo.”
[Yeah.]
“The frame will be white iron… the reason being.”
Since she was the Goddess of Earth, I wanted it weighty and radiant rather than flashy.
That also reflected her spotless nature.
The second ore….
“Ochre Essence.”
This one was nonnegotiable. It was literally ore formed from condensed earth's essence.
There was no material more fitting.
And finally.
- Tap, tap.
I fell into thought as I tapped my fingers against the table.
“Green jade.”
A symbol of the color in which all things sprout.
I couldn't leave out green.
─────────────────
[Materials: White Iron / Ochre Essence / Green Jade]
─────────────────
Now that I had chosen the materials, the next step was the design.
To point out the current limitation.
I couldn't melt the iron completely into liquid, pour it into a mold, and let it harden.
The forge couldn't serve as a smelting furnace.
So the method I chose was filigree.
Twisting or coiling thin metal wire.
It was a technique for creating petal-like patterns, filling the outer frame, and joining everything together.
In other words, I would make an earring by bunching and shaping a single metal wire in every direction.
Then I would insert the green jade and Ochre Essence into that frame.
Filigree was normally done with relatively soft gold or silver, but.
The Dwarf Encyclopedia said that white iron had remarkably low hardness.
So it should be suitable.
How many should I make?
“Two.”
Earrings were fundamentally a pair.
The structure would be as follows.
The white-iron frame would create a space for the green jade, and the Ochre Essence would reinforce that space by joining it to the white-iron frame.
And… if I put green jade inside it.
It would look as though the earth held the essence of ochre, while that essence held green sprouts.
“The concept is perfect.”
For reference, I had consulted Yuna's big data for the design.
The very famous and expensive jewelry brands.
They were future jewelry designs built on thousands of years of accumulated aesthetic sense.
The era I had lived in was one where people's bellies were full and food was plentiful.
People tended to stake their lives on appearance and aesthetics.
I intended to show an aesthetic that this mere medieval age could never hope to match.
“If I need to draw the wire.”
Then I had to do what I always did.
“Thermal shock exfoliation.”
It would be difficult, but it was work I had no choice but to do.
It would take at least two weeks.
Last time, I had only done it with Flame Ore….
This time, I had to do it with both white iron and Ochre Essence.
- Tap.
I placed an ignition stone in the forge with a smile on my face.
- Fwoosh!
The fire flared up in the forge.
It was time for manual labor.
2.
Thermal shock exfoliation was incredibly difficult and miserable work.
But seeing the results pile up neatly did make me feel at ease.
Besides, whenever I started thermal shock exfoliation.
Doloris would embrace me as though she had been waiting for it.
You know, like the cold-mat method for sleeping.
The benefits were perfect too… all I had to do was work.
The Imperial Princess hadn't given me a separate deadline.
Basically, people in this world never asked blacksmiths how long production would take.
“...It's because she's a noble. A noble.”
There was no noble like this noble.
They didn't even ask because they were afraid of offending the blacksmith.
Thanks to that, I could extend the schedule as much as I wanted without worrying about anyone's opinion.
“Well, wouldn't you say about three months?”
I didn't know the exact answer.
So as time passed.
Before I knew it, two weeks had gone by.
“Damn.”
The last of the Ochre Essence was running out.
Beside me, pale sheets of metal were piling up.
The difference from last time was.
Now I had to roll those sheets up and thread them together like string.
The real disaster, the real hell, was starting now.
“When this job is over, I have to get a smelting furnace….”
Even if I had to sell Old Wood +20, I had to acquire one.
Honestly, asking Doloris made me feel awkward too.
Of course, she always asked whether there was anything I needed.
But how could I keep taking things from her? I had some shame, after all.
“Yuna, put up the blueprint.”
[Yep yep]
Yuna and I had already finished discussing the earrings' perfect appearance.
At first, our opinions had clashed, but after realizing that I couldn't beat Yuna's philosophy and knowledge.
I simply accepted all of it.
- Shraaak.
A blueprint appeared in the air….
I saw a design where the lines intertwined like flower petals.
“It is pretty.”
It was pretty even when I looked at it again.
The problem was that I now had to make it myself.
“All right, then.”
I rolled up my sleeves and picked up a pile of white-iron sheets.
From now on, I would roll these up and draw them into wire.
If I kept at it, I would eventually reach the end.
Graduate school was the same, and this was the same.
- Ssslither….
Like that.
- Ssslither….
Another shitty two weeks passed.
If I had one fatal flaw, it was that.
I had overestimated myself far too much.
The act of twisting wire to make something was quite difficult in itself.
But since I had been doing everything so well lately, I thought I would naturally be good at this too.
Of course, the result wasn't bad.
[Oppa, the match rate with the blueprint is 95.5%… Please stop…]
“What are you talking about?”
But then.
“That won't do.”
Just kill me.
If there was a problem, it seemed my compulsive trigger had been set off during the work.
Who the hell were you to look down on me?
My first attempt.
When the item I made had an 85 percent match rate with the blueprint, I had nearly passed out on the spot.
I thought it was telling me to die.
Like the first rhythm game.
It was the feeling of staring blankly at 134 GOOD ratings.
I did improve as I kept at it, but I still couldn't break past the cursed 96 percent.
[Oppa, 96 percent was about a machine in a factory!! Please!!! Can I take back what I said then?]
There was another reason things had turned out this way.
According to Yuna, an earring factory would ship a product once its match rate exceeded about 96 percent.
So naturally, I was aiming for 96 percent.
Some time later, I learned that was a number achieved by machines.
Yuna had probably said it to stop me. Instead, hearing it made my fire burn even hotter.
I'm really sorry, but I know how to fight machines.
I couldn't get crushed by a machine and lose my job again like this.
The Luddite movement, which smashed machines to pieces.
If there was no target for that movement, then I only had to raise my own abilities.
Matching a machine's level of competitiveness—that was what humans had always lacked.
That was what I had believed.
Remember that spirit.
[Are you really planning to become a machine…?]
“No?”
A man's romantic ideal: machines.
The ultimate expression of the Luddite movement was for me to surpass machines myself.
“Higher.”
Rather, I would make the machines unemployed. I would take away their jobs.
That was what I kept insisting….
But I did feel that something needed to change.
All right, let's think about the difference.
What was different from Frostless Spring last time, causing these unsatisfactory results to keep popping out?
“……Wait a second.”
At that moment.
A fundamental question came to me.
Back then, when I made those stockings. What had I been thinking as I moved my hands?
……Huh?
Only then did I realize it.
“I wasn't thinking about the person who would wear this.”
That was right.
All I had looked at until now was the match rate with the blueprint.
I had been fixated on nothing but a number….
This wasn't a mass-produced product stamped out in a factory.
The person who would wear these earrings was Gaia in the divine realm.
In the human realm, it was the Imperial Princess.
“Then of course I should make them while thinking of the Imperial Princess.”
When I had sewn Doloris's stockings, I had moved my hands while picturing Mama's face every moment.
What texture would feel comfortable against these feet… which spots mustn't chafe.
How smooth her legs were, how broad her thighs were, and how beautiful Doloris would look wearing them….
[........]
I had sat the person who would wear them right in front of me.
I had sewn them one stitch at a time, tailoring them to that person.
But this time, I had forgotten the most important thing.
“Okay, Yuna.”
[Yeah….]
Now I could finally see the path forward.
“Put up a picture of the Imperial Princess in front of me.”
Choose a pretty one.
[ㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠ]
At last, I opened my eyes.