CHAPTER 103 Rebirth of the Master and the Forging of Raiten

The mud in the Lower City below Crossgard had the consistency of thick, greasy sludge mixed with soot and slaughterhouse waste. Navigating the edge of the slums—where the city guard patrols ended and the domain of masterless deserters and debtors began—required putting all aesthetics aside.

Walking beside me, Karys avoided deep puddles with disgust, her lupine ears twitching at every rustle behind ruined fences, while Shnee stepped across the stones with unnatural, elven grace, leaving barely visible, crystalline traces of frost beneath her soles.

"Silas said that crazy old man lives at the very end of Soot Alley," Karys remarked, sniffing and wincing at the stench of burnt fat. "Supposedly, he used to forge weapons for the elite of the Upper City until the Craftsmen Guild kicked him out on his ass for 'dangerous experiments'."

"Which means he pursued material efficiency instead of blindly pounding out the same outdated templates," I replied with cool, Dantean amusement, keeping my hands in my pockets. "On plain common sense, if a guy preferred ending up in the gutter over making cheap junk for the aristocracy, it means he has a backbone and the mind of an engineer, not a merchant."

Around the corner, on a clay-paved square beneath a cracked, rocky cliff, stood a ruined smithy. Lazy, gray smoke trailed from the crumbling chimney, and the irregular, dull scraping of a damaged anvil echoed from within.

However, the idyllic scene was ruined by four thugs in leather armor bearing the emblem of the local debt syndicate. One of them, a massive brute with a studded club, was currently kicking the heavy oak door of the smithy, yelling at the top of his lungs:

"Open up, you old, drunken trash! By decision of the Guild, we're seizing your basalt anvil for unpaid debts! You'll be pounding nails on a rock if you can't pay for your license!"

A hoarse, tough voice barked from inside: "Get the fuck out of here while I'm still in the mood to swing a hammer! That anvil is ancestral property, you thieving scum!"

The brute spat into the mud and raised his club to force the latch.

"On plain common sense, gentlemen, you're disturbing the work schedule of an important subcontractor," I called out coldly, emerging from the shadows of the alley.

The thugs spun around abruptly. The brute sized up my black shirt, my arrogant smirk, and the predatory Pillars standing behind me.

"And who the hell are you, wise guy?!" he shouted, raising his club. "Get lost before..."

He didn't finish.

I didn't use a single grain of magic. I merely took two quick, springy steps in Lynx Footwork, closing the distance in a fraction of a second. My right hand shot out in Quick style—two precise, surgical finger strikes into his shoulder plexus and popliteal tendon. The brute let out a pathetic gasp, his arm went limp, his club splashed into the mud, and his knee buckled with a loud crunch. Before his forehead touched the ground, a light pulse of telekinesis grabbed the remaining three thugs by their armor, slammed their heads together in mid-air, and hurled them into a deep puddle of soot.

The entire pacification took four seconds.

"Change of plans, gentlemen. You gather yourselves in two seconds before I melt your belt buckles into washers for my oak furniture," I stated with casual, arrogant ease.

The thugs, dragging their unconscious boss out of the mud, scrambled toward the market at such speed they splashed the walls.

The smithy door creaked open. In the threshold stood a massive, bearded man with a scarred face and deeply set, remarkably sharp eyes. Despite a worn, singed apron and muddy hands, he exuded the pride of a self-taught innovator. This was Grim.

"Who are you?" the blacksmith grunted hoarsely, inspecting me from head to toe before glancing at the subdued thugs. "You don't look like a tax collector or an official from the Upper City."

"Name's Dave," I replied, crossing the threshold without asking. "And I'm looking for the only blacksmith in this town with an open mind and the courage to forge a weapon with me the likes of which this world hasn't seen since the ancient era."

Grim snorted mockingly, but a spark of curiosity lit up his eyes. "Pretty words, kid. But in this smithy, we don't pay with poetry. Show me the raw material, because if you brought me ordinary silver or iron ore, I'll throw you out myself."

Instead of answering, I reached into the leather pouch at my belt. With a quiet, metallic thud, I pulled out a heavy ingot of magnetic obsidian from the 100th floor of the Wild Dungeon, followed by a glowing, polished, crimson Kaelar Core, pulsing with the wild, compressed energy of an anomaly boss.

When those two items landed on Grim's heavy oak table, absolute, dead silence fell over the smithy.

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Grim froze. His experienced blacksmith hands began to tremble subtly. He walked over to the table, leaned over the materials, and cautiously—as if touching a relic—brushed his finger against the edge of the obsidian.

"Holy shit..." he whispered in profound, engineering shock. "This is... an alloy from the depths of S-rank. Thermal conductivity is near zero, crystalline density exceeds all known standards... No known magic furnace in the Guild could reach the temperature to melt this! Their traditional magic would slide right off it like water off a rock!"

"Give me a break, Grim," I smirked, leaning against the doorframe. "I know you've been experimenting for years, looking for more efficient processing methods than those rigid, stupid templates from the Upper City. They call this metal dead stone because they're limited. We're going to melt it and forge it."

Grim looked up at me. In his eyes was no longer a drunken slum craftsman—he was a brilliant, self-taught innovator who had just been given the chance of a lifetime.

"How?!" the blacksmith gasped. "What are you going to heat it with?! What are you going to strike it with so the anvil doesn't snap in half?!"

"I'll be your living furnace, vise, and reactor," I declared firmly. "You guide the hammer, shape the steel, and manage the structure. I supply the temperature, pressure, and stabilization. We're forging a Meiken."

Grim straightened up, took a deep breath, and slammed his fist into his palm with such force the tools in the smithy clattered.

"To hell with the Guild! Fire up the hearth!"

What took place over the next six hours in Grim's dark smithy was a pure, symphonic spectacle of engineering and fire.

The main obstacle was processing the 100th-floor alloy. Ordinary fire didn't even make it glow.

Dave stood by the anvil. His sapphire eyes blazed with a powerful, predatory light. Instead of using traditional magic, he released microscopic, compressed electrical arcs of his lightning magic from his channels. Sapphire lightning struck directly into the core of the alloy, generating temperatures exceeding six thousand degrees Celsius inside the molecules. The metal began to slowly, osmotically soften, emitting an almost blinding, crystalline-violet glow.

"It works! Holy hell, it actually works!" Grim yelled, shielding his face with a leather sleeve while his eyes sparkled with tears of pure awe.

To prevent the molten, immensely dense alloy from spilling across the anvil and ruining its structure, Dave encased it in an invisible, microscopic pressure cage of his telekinesis. The telekinesis compressed the liquid metal with hundreds of tons of force, holding it in a perfect rectangular matrix.

"Now, Grim! Strike!" Dave called out.

Grim swung his heavy ancestral black-steel hammer. But before the face touched the hot alloy, Dave—through physical contact with the anvil and hammer handle—infused a layer of hardened Gōtai (KAI) reinforcement into the tools.

BANG!

The sound of the impact echoed like an artillery shot. Instead of shattering Grim's hammer to splinters, the steel tool withstood the impossible resistance. Sapphire sparks erupted into the air, settling in frozen, telekinetic orbits around the anvil. Every strike from Grim—guided by the brilliant instinct of a self-taught master—gave the blade perfect, fullered geometry.

Next came the moment to embed the Kaelar Core into the straight, angular crossguard mount.

The crimson core fit into the socket with millimeter precision. However, it was alien, wild, and saturated with the former boss's signature.

"Dave! You have to change the owner in the source!" Grim shouted, wiping sweat from his forehead. "Otherwise, the core will reject the mount and blow the hilt apart!"

Dave gripped the guard in his hand. He didn't use complex rituals. He simply pumped a dense, narrow beam of his sapphire mana directly into the core's inner channel.

Inside the crimson crystal, a violent molecular reaction occurred. The red color boiled and evaporated, and the owner signature in the core's source snapped over to Dave's soul in a fraction of a second. The core blazed with a deep, crystalline, pure sapphire hue, perfectly tuning to his sapphire lightning!

"Now the inscription!" Grim yelled, handing Dave a hardened chisel. "We need to burn a binding rune onto the blade! What should I carve?!"

Dave took the chisel. For a second, silence fell over the smithy. No complex theories passed through his mind—just pure, uncompromising intuition took control of his hand. Dave's eyes flashed sapphire, and his hand carved deep, angular Celtic runes into the fuller with unbelievable fluidity:

"Where the Sapphire Thunder falls, the shackles of Destiny shatter."

With a shiver down his spine, Grim pulled a small, unique stamp from the furnace and burned the Astral Anchor Rune onto the edge of the guard—an ancient glyph linked directly to the source of free energy in Dave's soul.

Finally came the quenching process.

The blade was submerged in a large vat of specialized mineral oil. The roar of rapidly evaporating liquid and dense plumes of white steam filled the entire smithy.

When the steam cleared, Grim pulled the sword from the oil using tongs and, carefully wiping it dry with a rag, placed it before Dave.

This was Raiten.

The charcoal-black damascus steel blade shone with a raw, matte luster, while the Celtic runes along the fuller smoldered with a quiet, sapphire light. The crossguard was straight, angular, featuring the sapphire Kaelar Core set in the center and two empty, black slots on the sides. The black-wrapped hilt rested in the hand like an extension of the arm, and the pommel shaped like a predatory Lynx head with the letter "D" carved underneath perfectly balanced the entire weapon.

Grim stared at the creation with tears in his eyes, leaning against the anvil.

"My family has been forging weapons for ten generations..." the blacksmith whispered hoarsely in disbelief. "But this... this isn't a sword. This is a masterpiece of engineering and destruction."

Dave gripped Raiten's hilt. He balanced it in his hand—the sword felt ideal, devoid of any inertia.

To test the Astral Anchor (Leviathan Recall) function, Dave swung and, with a casual smile, hurled Raiten through the open smithy door. The sword flew like a missile, embedding up to the hilt in a massive basalt boulder fifty meters away in the square.

Dave pulled his right hand from his pocket. He closed his fist and pulled a subtle pulse from his soul.

BOOM!

With a roaring sonic boom, Raiten ripped out of the rock, shattering the basalt into fine dust, and blasted through the air at incredible speed, landing perfectly, smoothly, and inertly into Dave's right grip!

Karys and Shnee, standing outside, watched the display with arrogant, pride-filled smirks, while Grim simply collapsed into a chair, shaking his head in sheer bewilderment.

"Time to head back to the manor," I concluded with a predatory smile, sheathing Raiten into the black basalt scabbard on my back. "We have a new weapon, and the city is about to burn."