Chapter 148 - The Devil’s Fang

Chapter 148: Chapter 148 - The Devil’s Fang

Leo stood in front of the anvil, the devil’s scale billet resting on top of it. He began scrolling through his inventory. He found a handful of metals and steels that looked promising at a glance — ordinary steel sat right there in stock, ready to use.

But as he turned the bar over in his hand, his eyes kept drifting back to the devil’s scale beside it. Steel could physically hold the scale in place well enough, sure, but there was a hard limit to what it could actually do beyond that — it wouldn’t transmit the devil energy properly, which would leave the whole pairing effectively pointless.

Worse, pairing them might actually corrode the steel over time and chip away at its durability instead. He needed something that could conduct devil mana cleanly, without breaking down under exposure to it.

His attention moved next to the lightning ore — the same material he’d used to forge Stormbreaker. That metal could definitely withstand the stress involved. But the moment he brought it anywhere near the billet, the two pushed apart from each other on contact. Lightning mana and devil mana clearly didn’t want anything to do with one another.

He also briefly considered purifying the devil scale using holy energy and eternal flame together, the same approach he’d taken with Caelum’s sword. But this time, Leo actually wanted to preserve the devil energy intact, since it could contribute a useful secondary effect to the finished weapon.

That ruled out every holy-attributed metal in his inventory as well.

Leo sighed, muttering mostly to himself. "If Elly were here, I could just ask her to sort through the inventory for me."

He’d assigned Elly to work alongside Elona a while back, handling the guild’s administrative side — hierarchy structuring, mission assignments, ore mining logistics, income generation, all of it. She’d taken on full responsibility for running those operations day to day. Since Elona had been tied up managing the real-world auction, Leo hadn’t wanted to pull Elly away from any of that just to help him sort materials.

But the moment he’d muttered her name out loud, she answered right away.

"Master. The vice guild leader has returned, and all the guild’s arrangements and systems are already fully in place, so I’ve had some free time on my hands. I’ve actually been observing you for a while now. And since you just called my name directly — here I am." A small hologram flickered into existence beside him.

"Allow me to go through the recently collected material stock, Master," Elly said.

Leo blinked, caught off guard by how quickly she’d responded. As an AI, she’d apparently finished everything he and Elona had assigned her well ahead of schedule.

He nodded to himself, impressed despite himself.

"Master, I believe this material would suit the item you’re currently forging very well. This metal should pair cleanly with the scale." Elly brought up the name of a material that showed up as extremely limited in quantity.

[Devil Iron]

Leo immediately pulled the iron bar in question and examined it closely. It felt dense, genuinely durable. His forge sight confirmed as much — the composition and grain structure both looked solid at a glance.

But something about it still felt off, not quite like a pure metal. Looking closer, he noticed two distinct types of grain running through it.

He pulled up the item’s description and finally understood why.

It turned out to be an alloy, formed by refining raw metal together with the remains of devil bone. The whole mixture had been processed under extreme heat until every trace of the devil’s inherently destructive nature had been burned completely out of it, leaving behind something dense, durable, and fully receptive to devil mana.

This is it. This was exactly what the sword needed.

The scale would serve as the heart of the blade, generating devil mana continuously, while this iron would form the body carrying it.

Leo compared the two materials side by side, and the match looked ideal on paper. But the moment he started heating the metal, a new complication surfaced — Devil Iron expanded noticeably under heat, while the scale barely shifted in volume at all under the same conditions.

That mismatch meant the two materials would behave completely differently through heating and cooling cycles, which could eventually lead to fracturing if left unaddressed.

Leo decided to work on the Devil Iron first and see how it responded on its own.

He laid the ingot into the eternal flame, and once it had taken on a deep red-orange glow, he pulled it free and set it on the anvil, starting with light, controlled hammer strikes. Gradually he increased the force behind each blow, working to realign the iron’s internal grain structure to more closely match the scale’s.

The iron went through repeated rounds of purification and hammering under the eternal flame’s heat.

By the end, the metal had been compressed about as tightly as it could go, its expansion capacity and the grains responsible for it tightened down to their practical limit. That should, at least, narrow the gap between how the two materials expanded and contracted.

Leo set the iron bar down on the table, then lifted the scale and hovered it just above the surface of the metal, watching carefully to see if the two would repel each other. They didn’t. He pushed a trickle of mana into the scale, and it responded immediately, releasing a faint pulse of devil mana outward.

Then something remarkable happened. The devil mana detached from the scale entirely and traced a visible path across the surface of the iron sitting in front of it.

Tiny crimson lines flickered to life within the metal — then vanished again almost instantly.

Leo tried again, feeding more mana into the scale. The same thing happened.

He tried a third time, this time tracking the process carefully through his forge sight.

What he found surprised him — the scale wasn’t trying to alter the metal’s physical structure at all. It was behaving more like it was teaching the iron how to carry the mana properly, pulse by pulse.

With each repeated attempt, the Devil Iron grew steadily more receptive. The crimson lines began forming faster, lingering a little longer each time.

[Ding!]

[You have discovered Resonance Annealing.]

[Devil mana resonance annealing completed.]

[The Devil Iron’s internal structure has been rearranged to properly carry devil mana.]

Leo stood there stunned for a moment before a grin spread across his face.

He already knew what ordinary annealing was, of course — but resonance annealing was something entirely new to him. Elly flickered back into view beside him. "I’ve never observed a process like this before. I’ll be recording it into the database for further analysis."

Alright. Now let’s see about turning this into an actual sword.

Leo wanted the scale to form both the core and the cutting edge of the blade itself. Devil scale was hard enough, and destructive enough by nature, that it made perfect sense as the sharpened edge.

He summoned the eternal flame again and heated both the metal and the scale to separate target temperatures, accounting for the fact that the scale was still quietly absorbing some of the ambient heat on its own.

Once both pieces reached the temperature he was satisfied with, Leo laid the Devil Iron directly over the scale and brought his hammer down.

Clang.

The two materials simply slid across each other on impact, even under that much heat.

They weren’t bonding at all.

Leo studied the surface of both pieces and quickly spotted the issue.

He went back and hammered each surface separately this time, deliberately raising a fine texture of ridges and shallow grooves across both — a deliberately jagged, uneven surface on each piece.

Then he reheated both materials.

He set them together again and applied heat once more.

Clang.

This time the Devil Iron compressed down and actually began bonding, interlocking properly with the scale beneath it.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

Leo could see a growing number of crimson lines traveling steadily from the scale into the Devil Iron now.

A proper pathway was forming, one built specifically to carry devil mana through the finished blade.

He kept hammering, slowly folding the Devil Iron around the scale on both sides, careful to leave only the very edge of the devil’s scale exposed — that exposed strip would eventually become the sharpened cutting edge.

The forge rang out steadily under the weight of Leo’s hammering, the work demanding strike after relentless strike.

Both Hugh and Sigil had long since stopped their own work to watch, drawn in by what Leo was doing.

Leo himself had lost all track of anything beyond the rhythm of the hammer — every grain alignment, every interlocking surface registering deep in his mind.

[Ding~]

[Ancestral Cadence activated.]

He sank fully into the rhythm, letting it carry him.

And then, for the first time in a long while, that old passive talent of his triggered again.

[Ding~]

[Ancestor’s Echo activated]

His movements began shifting on their own. The style of his hammering changed strike by strike — at times he moved like a monk delivering a quiet lesson, at times like a knight locked in the middle of battle, at times with a kind of effortless elegance that seemed almost too refined for something as brutal as forging. Occasionally, faint symbols flickered into existence around his hands before fading just as quickly.

Hugh recognized the scene immediately, having watched Leo slip into this state plenty of times before. But it was the first time either Sigil or Elly had witnessed it firsthand.

Sigil stood there completely transfixed, fascinated by the shifting styles bleeding into one another. Elly, meanwhile, stayed focused on recording and analyzing every second of it in real time.

Through all the shifting styles, one thing never changed: heat, turn, hammer. Heat, turn, hammer.

By the time the scale and Devil Iron had been fully refined into a single blade, it was almost impossible to tell, just by looking at it, that two entirely different materials had gone into making it.

Leo gradually came back to himself and inspected the finished sword.

He gave a satisfied nod, then let the eternal flame roar up to its full intensity. The sword blazed a deep red-gold, looking like it might melt away at any second — but it held. Something else entirely was happening during this stage instead.

Leo was deliberately pushing the alloy above its critical temperature. He kept increasing the heat until it crossed that threshold, then held it steady there for an extended stretch, watching as the alloy’s internal structure transformed moment by moment under the sustained heat. Every rough, uneven surface smoothed itself out. The entire grain structure gradually aligned, every distorted or misaligned grain falling into place, until the grains themselves stopped existing as separate entities at all — the whole thing had become one continuous structure.

Once every grain had fully transformed, Leo slowly brought the heat back down and let the blade cool naturally in open air. He didn’t quench it directly in anything. He simply let it rest and cool on its own.

[Ding~]

[Extreme heat required for normalization has been reached.]

[Normalization has been carried out.]

....