Chapter 147- Back to Forging (The Devils Scale.)

Chapter 147: Chapter 147- Back to Forging (The Devils Scale.)

Luna had finally settled, her tears slowly stopped dripping. As her emotions calmed, the death mana vein running through the chamber calmed down along with her.

Leo was still on his knees, holding her close, one arm wrapped around her while his other hand kept gently stroking her hair. The Guardian breathed deeply beside them, the weight of what they’d all just witnessed still sitting heavy in her chest.

Blacky padded over next, tail wagging, and leaned in to sniff curiously at the chalk marks still scrawled across the board — only to sneeze directly after. He turned to Luna, licked her cheek once, then settled down beside her and pulled her gently into his side, still licking at her hair affectionately.

A small laugh slipped out of the little girl.

Leo and the Guardian both froze instantly. The girl who had stayed silent through everything had just laughed, clear as anything.

Leo had genuinely started to wonder if she couldn’t speak at all — but apparently, laughter was still very much within reach.

"Alright, stay here with big sister and with Blacky for now," Leo told her. "I’ll be back in a few days, okay?"

Luna nodded.

Leo stood and turned to leave. When he reached the door, he glanced back, gave her a small wave, and spoke once more to the Guardian. "I’m leaving her in your hands. I’ve already left food supplies too — don’t let her go hungry. She can apparently eat a small mountain of foods."

With that, he made his way back towards the forge, where Sigil and Hugh were already deep in work.

Hugh had decided to stay on permanently. Elona had already arranged for her own people to manage his old smithy back in Ironhaven, which now operated as a storefront for the guild. Whatever they could handle locally would be forged right there in the smithy; anything beyond that got routed to the guild’s forge instead.

...

Meanwhile, back in the real world, inside the Space Z office, Elona and her secretary sat reviewing the guild building situation. The same three folders lay spread out in front of them.

"Top priority is the Durham property," the secretary said. "It’s the closest match to what you asked for — ground floor, brick construction. The plumbing needs full replacement, but outside of that, it’s mostly minor modifications and some retrofitting."

"Let’s go see all three in person," Elona said. "If even I’m not satisfied after that, we’ll just build from scratch instead."

She left the office with her secretary and a pair of bodyguards to inspect the properties firsthand.

...

Leo finally reached the forge. The heat hit him the moment he walked in — the room was already burning hot, hammer strikes ringing out steadily from somewhere inside.

Hugh and Sigil were both fully immersed in their work, giving everything they had.

At Sigil’s hearth, a strange flame burned — death fire tangled together with eternal flame, somehow both searing hot and bitterly cold at once. The combination gave the fire an unsettling, almost wrong quality to look at directly.

At Hugh’s forge, a different blend burned instead — eternal flame fused with dark ashen fire, radiating something close to the regal presence of a phoenix.

Leo took in both sights for a moment, nodding to himself in quiet admiration at what they were each pulling off.

He claimed an open hearth of his own, where his eternal flame roared to life at full strength.

He pulled the dark scales out and laid them across the table — the devil’s scales, three of them in total.

He picked one up with a pair of tongs. It was heavier than expected. The outer surface was black and hard to the touch, and beneath that surface, Leo could feel the faintest trace of vibration running through it.

He turned the scale over carefully, studying it from every angle. The internal grain ran diagonally, cutting from one end of the scale toward the other.

He checked the remaining two. The second had a noticeably tighter grain structure, while the third carried the strangest pattern of all three. On the surface, none of them looked any different from one another — but a faint pulse of devil mana moved steadily through each one’s internal grain.

Leo quickly concluded that melting them outright wasn’t an option. Even if he managed it, the material would almost certainly lose whatever properties made it valuable in the first place — unlike ordinary metal, it wouldn’t simply reform into the same substance once it cooled and solidified.

I’ll need to heat this evenly too, he thought. If I don’t, the outer layer will expand well before the inner structure even has time to respond.

He studied the scales a while longer. This wasn’t metal, not really — it had its own internal architecture entirely. Where steel relied on a crystalline lattice, this material followed something closer to a magical grain structure, one that carved out pathways for devil energy to travel through.

Leo gripped one scale with the tongs and lowered it into the burning eternal flame. At first, nothing happened. Then the pitch-black surface slowly shifted toward a dull crimson, tiny sparks beginning to lift off it in thin streams.

Along with the sparks came dark flecks of foreign energy and impurities, burning away as they left the material.

The eternal flame refused to let any of it linger.

Leo watched closely, carefully regulating the flame to heat the scale slowly and evenly, working the outer layer first before letting the heat creep inward toward the core.

A few minutes passed before the sparks and impurities finally stopped rising altogether.

He lifted the scale free and set it down on the anvil, raising his hammer, ready to strike—

But just then, the eternal flame throughout the whole chamber suddenly stirred. The flames surged upward without warning, heat spiking sharply — and it wasn’t just the temperature. The air itself seemed to sharpen, pressing in like a thousand tiny needles bearing down on everyone in the room at once.

Hugh, Sigil, and Leo all froze in place.

Then, without further warning, a large ball of fire bearing a crude, almost cartoonish expression manifested in midair.

The pressure in the room eased all at once.

A familiar, arrogant voice rang out — one Leo had genuinely missed, frustratingly knowledgeable and impossible to reach no matter how many times he’d tried.

And now, here it was again, manifesting right in front of him.

"How’s it going, brat?" the voice said.

"Surtr...?" Leo stared at the fireball floating before him, now roughly a meter across. "You got bigger."

"Brat, you’re always off doing something reckless and stupid. What is it this time?" Surtr asked, his gaze sweeping across the chamber.

His eyes widened the moment they landed on the scales. "Brat — did you kill a devil? Where did you even find three scales of this caliber? These look like they came off a high-rank devil." The fireball’s emoji-like face turned back toward Leo, incredulous.

"Yeah, I killed one — with a lot of help, to be fair. But forget that for a second, what happened to you? You just vanished, said something about cultivating, and that was it. You doing okay?"

"Better than before, actually. I’ve grown a fair bit stronger since we last talked," Surtr replied, his fireball face managing to look smug despite having no real features to speak of.

Leo opened his mouth to respond, but the devil’s scale pulsed again in his grip, demanding attention.

He brought his hammer down with force, but the scale pushed back against the strike, refusing to yield.

Surtr noticed immediately and offered a suggestion. "That’s a devil’s scale — carries devil energy inside it. Don’t try to force it into submission. Give it a path to actually consume the flame instead. Looks to me like it’s hungry for more heat."

Leo frowned down at the scale, considering that.

He lifted it back over the hearth and resumed heating it with the eternal flame, this time using his forge sight to look deep into the material itself. Following the grain lines carefully, he spotted a narrow thread of crimson light running through the black scale’s interior.

His eyebrows lifted at the discovery. Surtr added, "See that? The material already knows exactly where it wants the heat directed."

"Your job now is just to guide it there, slowly."

Leo exhaled and carefully spread the thread of eternal flame wider across the surface. The outer layer of the scale glowed red, but the center stayed stubbornly dark. "That’s too much heat on the outside and not nearly enough reaching the center," Surtr observed.

Leo nodded. "Let’s try that again, then."

He steadied himself and traced the grain pattern more deliberately this time, guiding his eternal flame along the path he’d found. Slowly, the scale began drawing the flame in and consuming it.

Once it had taken its fill, the resistance finally eased.

Leo raised his hammer again and brought it down. This time, there was no pushback at all.

The first strike landed clean.

Clang.

A second strike followed, then a third, then a fourth.

Clang.

Clang.

Each blow compressed the heated structure a little further, and the faint red lines running beneath the surface began aligning themselves, falling into straight lines running parallel with the material’s natural grain.

It was shaping itself to match the physical form taking shape beneath the hammer.

Leo slowed his pace deliberately. The scale kept changing under each strike — growing thinner, stretching longer with every pass.

What had once been a chaotic tangle of lines beneath the surface was now cleanly organized. Leo could almost trace the path of devil mana flowing steadily along those lines, like watching blood move through a vein.

The scale had transformed entirely, now resembling something closer to a proper metal billet than the strange material it had started as.

It still wasn’t shaped anywhere close to a finished blade yet. But Leo had successfully turned a non-metallic material into something workable, something with real form.

Surtr had gone quiet, watching the whole process unfold — until his shape suddenly flickered, like he was starting to fade out of existence.

"See you around, brat. This is just a projection of me manifesting here — my actual consciousness is still deep in cultivation elsewhere." With that, Surtr vanished.

"Wait—" Leo barely got the word out but Surtr was already gone.

He shook his head and turned his focus back to the forge.

The grain alignment within the scale had grown noticeably more flexible than before.

Leo studied the reshaped scale and briefly considered adding a second one into the mix — then shook his head, dismissing the idea almost as quickly as it came.

No. That’s too much material to sink into something we’re ultimately just going to sell off. I only need this to reach epic rank, nothing higher. I should find a complementary metal to pair with it instead.

Let’s see what else I’ve got stashed away, Leo thought, already scrolling through his inventory for options.