You Won't Throw Me Away Later, Will You?

While waiting for the forge to heat up enough, Dohyun headed to the storage room.

To make a knife, he first had to choose the metal.

Carbon steel, stainless steel, alloy steel. The slabs covered one wall.

Following the habit he'd used in the game, he stroked the metal surface with a bare hand. Then he tapped it with his knuckles to hear the ring.

‘...This one's better.’

He picked out the high-carbon steel, whose tone rang clearer, along with the wrought iron beside it.

The so-called forge-welding method: centering the carbon steel that would provide hardness and wrapping it with wrought iron to absorb impact.

For a Western-style chef's knife that had to be both light in the hand and razor-sharp, this combination was the right answer.

He had made kitchen-category items to death in the game too.

If he counted only the requests from chef NPCs, there were hundreds.

For meat-heavy dishes, the carbon-steel ratio went like this; if delicate vegetable slicing was involved, the blade thickness went like that.

Familiar patterns flooded his mind in a rush.

The blade should be about 0.5 millimeters thinner than the chef's original one. The balance point, slightly toward the blade.

The handle should be one size smaller, and the grip surface where the index finger touched should be subtly hollowed out so the finger could hook in naturally.

Then all he had to do was mix in a suitable amount of metal with good affinity for spiritual power.

Clang, clang, clang.

Within the heat of the forge, the lump of metal slowly began to take shape.

By the time a chef's knife was taking shape at Dohyun's fingertips,

‘......Wow.’

Seo Ji-an, who had been watching beside him, was unconsciously holding her breath.

She had stubbornly followed him all the way from the hotel and was now squatting in a corner of the workshop, watching.

‘...A real master really is different.’

Even in a single hammer strike, there was no wasted motion. Smoothly, without hesitation.

When she heard there was an unaffiliated artisan, she promptly secured an exclusive broker contract.

Of course, she'd already known he wasn't ordinary. That he could inscribe formulas, and that his spiritual power was no joke.

So she had never hesitated to sign the contract.

But she'd never actually seen with her own eyes what those fingertips were shaping.

And now.

Seo Ji-an couldn't take her eyes off those fingertips.

After being hammered, ground, and refined for a long while, when at last the knife finally took on a convincing shape,

‘...Already?’

By feel, it seemed like barely an hour had passed.

And yet the knife already had the proper shape of a chef's knife.

‘So now all that's left is to finish the handle?’

Seo Ji-an thought as much.

But Dohyun thought differently.

He smirked.

If he stopped here, he'd just be a blacksmith.

‘...But I'm not just any blacksmith.’

The most fun part started now.

‘Let's see... what should I engrave first?’

Right. Let's do it the usual way. The usual way.

Thinking about it, there were quite a lot of chef players.

Oddly enough, other non-combat professions had fallen out of favor, but chefs alone remained bustling.

Well, there were certainly foods you could only taste in another world.

The romance of wandering unfamiliar lands and cooking with ingredients he'd never seen before.

There were plenty of players who fell for that charm.

Thanks to that, Dohyun had made chef players' knives so many times he was sick of it.

Right. He should lay down the basic setup for the kitchen knife first.

First of all, [Weight-Reduction Circuit].

Chefs make cuts thousands of times a day with nothing but wrist strength. So if the knife is heavy, the wrist goes first.

Of course, if you grind the knife thinner, it does get lighter.

But then the rigidity dies and the blade bends.

Weight and strength are proportional to a certain degree.

Gain one thing, lose another.

That's why he engraved circuits.

The path of the circuit was drawn in Dohyun's mind.

He ran a single main line along the spine, then split branches toward the blade like leaf veins, spreading them evenly across the whole knife.

If spiritual power flowed through this route, the energy would move through every corner of the knife, distributing the metal's weight evenly.

Like metal becoming lighter when submerged in water.

Up to here, it was just a light knife.

The real thing came next.

‘...I need to open a path for the energy to flow.’

The energy circulating through the circuit would slosh and gather in the direction the knife moved.

So it's featherlight when lifted. But the instant it's brought down, that gathered energy adds force to the blade.

The wrist stays comfortable, yet when cutting, it goes deeper and harder with less force.

In other words, the knife helps with the user's cutting.

‘...Perceived weight about one-third, cutting power roughly double.’

Of course, if he overdid it, the knife could veer off on its own. He had to keep it within a range the hand could adapt to.

Dohyun's fingertips slid from the spine toward the blade.

Swish— swish—

Wherever his fingertips passed, faint trails of light spread like veins.

‘Done. Hmm. I need to engrave it quickly before the knife cools. Quickly. Next. Next.’

Dohyun's fingertips slid along the blade again.

Normally, circuit engraving was done with a dedicated tool. But just like in the game, Dohyun didn't do that.

With mana at his fingertips—

‘...No, I said spiritual power, not mana.’

Anyway, he condensed that spiritual power to an extremely high density at his fingertips and brought it straight to the metal to engrave.

Compared to using an engraving tool, this way was much faster and more precise.

What he'd just inscribed was [Self-Sharpening Circuit].

The blade would stay as if it had just been sharpened.

Next was... ah, [Anti-Stick Circuit].

So ingredients wouldn't stick to the blade.

No need to shake the knife off after every cut.

A quick swipe on the handle too, one more circuit.

[Automatic Balance Circuit]

Now the center of gravity would automatically fine-tune itself to suit the user's hand.

While Dohyun carefully inscribed the circuits one after another.

Seo Ji-an's face grew more and more rigid.

‘...Wait a second.’

Seo Ji-an was, nominally, a broker in the sorcery world.

Even without combat ability, she could size up the value of most things at a glance.

That was her livelihood.

But what she was seeing now—

‘No, engraving a spell formula... with bare hands?’

Normally, when engraving a formula onto an artifact, you used a dedicated engraving tool.

Because formulas were originally so fine they were practically invisible to the naked eye, and human hands couldn't handle that level of precision.

It was a delicate, exacting job that could take ages just to engrave a single line.

So in the sorcery world, formula engraving was a specialized field not just anyone could learn, and anyone who mastered it was, no matter what they engraved or where, called an 'artisan' first and foremost.

In the first place, today's commission had only been to make a single custom chef's knife worth five million won. Not to craft a ritual implement.

And the very idea of doing ritual work on something as ordinary as a chef's knife, not even a weapon, had never once crossed her mind in her life.

But Dohyun—

He was just sweeping his fingertips across it, yet complex formulas were being engraved one after another on the chef's knife.

And not just one or two lines.

Enough to densely cover the entire knife.

‘How... how is that possible?’

Of course, in theory, bare-handed engraving was more precise than using a tool.

Because there was no medium interfering between the hand and the formula.

But that was only theory.

Condense spiritual power at the fingertips as thin as a needle.

And maintain that hair-thin thickness without even a hair's breadth of wavering for the entire length of a single formula line?

The engraving tool existed for a reason.

They borrowed a tool's power because it was precision human hands could never possibly reach.

Yet Dohyun possessed a delicacy and speed that even using a tool wouldn't let one imitate, let alone dare to.

With bare hands.

And he was doing it as casually as breathing.

Godlike control of spiritual power.

That was what was happening before her eyes.

‘...Is control of spiritual power like that really something a person can do?’

Cold sweat ran down Seo Ji-an's spine.

Then all of a sudden.

One question that had never been resolved flashed through her mind.

It was that incident at the goblin market.

Dohyun had made a talisman without mirror-grade vermilion ink or a brush. He'd simply dragged a finger across a blank sheet of yellow paper.

And it had been a vicious thing powerful enough to blow away an entire vacant lot.

The same had been true yesterday in the hotel kitchen. He had only touched a blank sheet of paper with his finger, and a swarm of malevolent spirits that even a second-rank sorcerer couldn't guarantee victory over had been turned to ash on a single sheet.

No matter how she thought about it, she couldn't even begin to guess what method he'd used.

A talisman was supposed to be carefully drawn with ground mirror vermilion and a brush, focusing one's energy. How could a few finger strokes on blank paper become a talisman?

But seeing that scene now—

‘No way...’

Now she thought she understood a little.

Could that monster really...

have gone so far as to...

engrave a formula into...

something as disposable as a one-time-use talisman...?

*

"W-wait a moment! Mr. Dohyun!"

Just as he was about done, Seo Ji-an suddenly cut in in a panic.

‘What? What's wrong with her?’

Dohyun set down the chef's knife he had been working on and turned toward Seo Ji-an.

"Am I misunderstanding something...? This is the knife I'll be giving the chef, right? But the chef is just an ordinary person...!"

‘Ah, that's what she's talking about.’

That made sense, since ritual implements usually drew their power from the user's own spiritual power.

Unless they were absurdly high-grade cursed relics, that is.

Seo Ji-an held her breath, waiting for what Dohyun would say next.

‘What on earth is he going to do...?’

"Ah, there are ways."

Dohyun answered as if it were nothing and walked toward the materials room.

These circuits would only work if spiritual power flowed into them, so for an ordinary person who didn't know how to handle spiritual power, engraving them or not would be no different.

But even then, there was a way.

It wasn't as if everyone in the game knew how to handle mana.

There were plenty of NPCs born without mana, and plenty of players who weren't used to handling it.

In those cases, no matter how high-performance the equipment was, it was useless.

That's when Dohyun had devised something.

Clack.

What he took out of the materials room was a transparent pebble no bigger than a single finger joint.

A small crystal with a faint blue light rippling inside.

This was—

[Spirit Stone (靈石)].

He'd glanced at it briefly while skimming a book yesterday.

A natural ore said to be mined deep underground while already imbued with spiritual power. In other words, it was this world's equivalent of petroleum.

It contained a certain amount of spiritual power on its own, so even people not born with spiritual power could, by breaking it or activating it, experience the effects of sorcery for a brief moment.

Say you went on a request and your body's spiritual power was temporarily depleted?

Normally, you'd die!

But if you carried this spirit stone with you?

You could use the spiritual power trapped inside it to get out of a crisis!

So it was one use and done.

Once it had drained all the spiritual power inside, it was just an ordinary pebble, a thoroughly one-time-use consumable.

The [Spirit Stone] denomination he'd seen at the goblin ATM came to mind.

It was easy to assign value to, and since it contained a sip of spiritual power itself, it seemed to be used as currency here too.

In short—

To the people here, spirit stones were nothing more than disposable batteries you cracked open, used once, and threw away.

"Oh? Spirit stones?"

Seo Ji-an, who had followed him over, tilted her head with a puzzled look.

"You're putting that on a chef's knife?"

"Yes."

"That... spirit stones aren't usually used like that. You burn them together when activating talismans, or break them in emergencies to use them... I've almost never seen them set into a weapon. Then you'd have to redo the craftsmanship every time you used it..."

‘...So that's how it was after all.’

It was exactly as Dohyun had guessed.

Well, it was understandable.

In this world, they'd only know spirit stones as things that were already filled.

Without saying anything else, Dohyun placed the spirit stone on the worktable.

He condensed spiritual power at his fingertips and carefully shaved the edges of the spirit stone down.

Swish—

He trimmed it into a size that would fit into the end of the handle, smoothing the corners.

If it was too large, it would ruin the grip; if it was too small, its storage capacity would be lacking.

‘...This should be about right.’

"W-wait a second, Mr. Dohyun. Are you carving the spirit stone right now...?"

Seo Ji-an moved closer to the worktable, eyes wide.

"Yes."

"Spirit stones aren't something you process... If they break, all the spiritual power inside just leaks out..."

"Then you just shape it so it won't break."

At Dohyun's flat reply, Seo Ji-an looked like she wanted to ask more, but soon shut her mouth.

Because a thin circuit was already being engraved across the surface of the spirit stone, following Dohyun's fingertips.

Swish—

‘...This is the key part.’

Even in the game, mana stones were one-use items.

The same as the spirit stones in this world. Once the mana inside was used up, they became nothing but empty shells.

The reason was simple.

The mana circuits naturally engraved in mana stones were structured like an upside-down lobster trap opening.

Mana could flow out easily, but from the outside, it was blocked from flowing in.

Because the pressure of the mana condensed inside the mana stone was so high, the circuit naturally formed only in a direction that pushed outward from the inside.

Like air leaking from a balloon.

So once a mana stone had gone empty, no matter how much mana you tried to pour in, it wouldn't go in.

The circuit itself was designed as a one-way street, so there was no path in.

‘...But still.’

If the 'circuit itself' was the problem.

It wasn't much of a problem for Dohyun, who knew how to engrave circuits.

There was no need to touch the existing circuit.

All he had to do was carve out a separate channel for injection, one that led straight to the spirit stone's core.

All he needed was to open a single new path in.

This idea alone had driven the players who struggled with mana shortages in the game absolutely crazy.

Whether it was someone else's mana or their own, once it was filled, they could keep using it over and over.

‘...This should work here too.’

Since the principle of spirit stones seemed almost the same as mana stones.

Dohyun condensed spiritual power at his fingertips, thinner than a strand of hair.

Then he lightly touched a point on the spirit stone's surface and drew a straight path toward the inner core.

Swoosh—

He pierced through the surface and headed straight for the small point of light nestled at the very center of the crystal.

A thin passageway reaching straight to that core was drawn in a single line.

That was all.

On top of that, he added just one more thing.

A supply-control circuit that kept the stored spiritual power from pouring out all at once and instead let it drip out only in the amount needed when it sensed the blade's movement.

Because if it poured out all at once, it would be drained in no time.

‘...Done.’

Dohyun inserted the processed spirit stone into the groove at the end of the handle that he'd prepared beforehand.

Click.

It looked as if a small jewel had been set into the end of the handle.

Then he drew the final connecting line linking the main circuit carved into the handle and the spirit stone's circuit.

Swish—

The moment the spirit stone and the knife's circuits linked as one.

Whirr—

The chef's knife in his hand awakened with a faint vibration.

‘Good, connection complete.’

Now only the finishing touches remained.

He smoothed the handle once more and gave the blade a final oiling.

‘...Now for the last step. Infuse it with spiritual power.’

Dohyun closed his eyes and gently wrapped his palm around the spirit stone at the end of the handle.

"......"

After steadying his breathing for a moment, he lightly called up a single thought in his mind.

He could feel the energy inside him travel down through his palm and trickle along the newly opened passage into the spirit stone's core.

Like water filling an empty bowl, the spirit stone slowly began to hold spiritual power.

The blue light that had rippled faintly when he first shaved it down gradually grew deeper and more vivid.

"M-Mr. Dohyun..."

Seo Ji-an's voice from behind sounded strangely low and subdued.

"Yes."

"Right now... into the spirit stone... spiritual power...?"

"Yes."

"...You're putting it in...?"

"Yes, that's how you charge it."

"......"

Seo Ji-an's face slowly stiffened.

Spirit stones were normally things you took the spiritual power out of and used.

You bought them already filled, used them once, and threw them away when they became empty shells.

The idea of putting spiritual power back into an empty spirit stone.

It was something no one had ever done, not even once.

Because it hadn't been possible in the first place.

And yet Dohyun—

After holding the spirit stone in his hand and seeming to do something with it for a moment, he simply did the impossible.

He had turned the spirit stone into a rechargeable battery.

"......"

Seo Ji-an could no longer say anything.

Her mind could no longer keep up.

Dohyun took his hand off the handle and lifted the knife.

Under the lights, the smoothly ground blade flashed silver.

The small spirit stone set into the end of the handle rippled blue in the reflected light.

‘...At this rate, three months should be easy.’

Well, if it wore down, he could just refill it anyway.

He'd offer after-sales service, so once the edge started to dull, he'd just tell them to come back.

Of course, he had no intention of doing it for free.

He smirked.

Dohyun gave his wrist a light flick.

Whoosh—

It was more like a feather than a lump of metal. Yet the weight sat just right toward the blade, so a satisfying heaviness followed the downward cut.

It was exactly the diagram he'd pictured in his head.

"Finished."

Dohyun gently set the knife down on the workbench.

"......"

It was quiet.

When he peeked back because there was no sound behind him, Seo Ji-an was still frozen, mouth half-open.

She looked as if she hadn't even realized the work was over.

"Ji-an?"

At Dohyun's call, she finally flinched back to her senses.

"Are you okay...?"

"Ah!"

She hurriedly straightened her posture, but her gaze still wouldn't leave the knife.

Then she suddenly shot up from her seat.

"Do you perhaps... need anything else?!"

"Pardon?"

"No, I mean... you've been standing there working for ages. You're thirsty, right? I'll go buy you a drink right away! What would you like? Coffee? Tea? Or maybe an energy drink..."

‘...What's going on?’

The person who had been quietly squatting in the corner watching just a moment ago now had a completely different look in her eyes.

"Ah, I'm fine."

"Oh, don't say that! You still haven't really had a proper meal, have you? You barely ate lunch at the hotel either. I know a really good Korean set-meal place nearby—should I book a private room there for you? Or if delivery would be easier, I can get that right away..."

"I'm really fine."

"Th-then should I at least rub your shoulders? I may not look it, but my hands are pretty strong. Or maybe a cup of warm tea... Ah, not tea, a massage chair! I put one in my room on the second floor; how about trying that? It's really amazing. I picked it out myself—"

"Ji-an."

"Yes!"

‘...She finally stopped.’

At Dohyun's single call, Seo Ji-an's mouth snapped shut.

‘...Why is she suddenly acting like this?’

Now she had come right up close with a face like she'd made up her mind about something serious.

Seo Ji-an fell silent for a moment.

Then she neatly folded both hands and looked straight up at Dohyun.

"...Mr. Dohyun."

"...Yes."

Her eyes glistened as she took one more step closer.

"Please don't throw me away later...?"

‘...?’

What on earth.

What was that supposed to mean?