Chapter 4587: Shaping the Vessel (Part 1)

"Gaining wings, elemental eyes, and amazing physical prowess sounds like a huge improvement for someone who can’t light a match with chore magic and needs a horse to travel. And don’t get me started on how tall and gorgeous you Balors are." Quylla sighed in envy.

"When you put it that way." Urhen cleared her throat in embarrassment and dropped the subject, wondering what she would look like as a human and if she’d ever manage to Awaken.

***

Village of Lutia, Proudhammer Works main branch, at the same time.

With a dull orange core and an adult body, Senton wouldn’t experience a painful bottleneck at least until the green, and even then, it would just be a matter of letting his body adapt to the breakthrough.

Lith’s treatments limited the amount of impurities accumulated in his body and improved his looks and metabolism, ensuring he wouldn’t die from excessive or insufficient resistance to his current mana flow.

Despite those precautions, Senton often felt the need to take a break from the practice of Accumulation and the dull, repetitive spellcasting of chore magic. When that happened, he didn’t sit around on his thumbs.

Senton went back to the smithy, his second love beside Rena and their family, and spent a few days working the metal side by side with his employees. He always felt a bit guilty about that, but Lith reassured Senton every time.

"It’s fine, Senton. Using magic for the sake of it requires a kind of passion I don’t have either." Lith said, shrugging. "Even as a kid, I only studied enough to learn and master new spells, and then I put them into practice.

"Hunting, healing, and doing the house chores was my way to practice magic without getting bored out of my skull after five minutes. I don’t see why you can’t do the same in the smithy. Just add magic and don’t forget your lessons."

Senton’s core was too weak to heat ores enough to smelt them or to temper red-hot metal with water magic. To make matters worse, he didn’t have much mana either.

Using too many chore spells forced him to use Invigoration so often that, after a couple of hours, the breathing technique lost its effectiveness and Senton needed to sleep.

For someone used to working for hours on end, stopping so soon was shameful at best and humiliating at worst.

At first, Senton tried to do everything with magic. The quality of his crafts was so poor, and he worked so briefly that many blacksmiths wondered what the point of his visit was. After realizing his limits, Senton switched to fusion magic.

He displayed skill, prowess, and endurance that earned him his colleagues’ admiration and allowed him to craft some of his best pieces, but gave him little to no insight into his newfound magical powers.

It took Senton a while to find the right compromise between magical practice and professional pride, but it was worth the effort. Now he used Fire Vision to monitor a furnace’s temperature and have it repaired whenever he identified uneven hot and cold zones.

He also used Fire Vision to check that the piece he was currently working on was properly heated. When it wasn’t the case, Senton tapped into his dull orange core and the fires of the furnace to address the issue.

Instead of creating the heat, Senton scooped what he needed with fire magic and focused it on the still-cold areas of the metal. Similarly, he used water magic during the tempering process to improve its efficacy.

He used Spirit Magic only to remove small pieces of slag that conventional smelting methods missed and to compensate for mold imperfections that became noticeable only after pouring the molten metal.

Such techniques greatly improved the quality of his pieces and required little mana, so that he could use Invigoration sparingly and work as long as he wanted.

’It’s amazing how much one can achieve even with an orange core.’ Senton thought as he worked on a Dragon-themed ceremonial blade. ’It’s no wonder Raaz had so much fun fishing with magic even before Awakening.’

With time and practice, Senton learned to keep the metal’s temperature high for a few seconds after pulling it from the forge, and to check whether an alloy had amalgamated properly by testing its conducibility with jolts of electricity he produced with air magic.

He also learned to recognize soft spots by listening to the sound the hammer produced with earth magic. Even non-enchanted metals didn’t respond to elemental spells, but the impurities hidden within were a different story.

Most of the time it was something near the surface that he pulverized with darkness magic, but when it was deep in the metal, Senton melted the piece and carefully smelted it before starting over from scratch.

Little by little, Senton found new ways to incorporate chore magic into his crafting techniques and make it part of his daily life.

’Lith is right. Mana is indeed like water. It shapes itself to the vessel that contains it.’ Senton thought as he maintained and amplified the smoldering heat coursing through the ceremonial blade he was hammering into shape with fire magic.

His chore magic spell spread heat evenly across the blade he had just pulled from the forge, and with each blow the blunt lump of metal became sharper. Senton hammered one side of the edge and then the other, being careful it tapered without becoming brittle.

’One mistake and the grinding wheel will break the blade instead of sharpening it, and hours of work will go down the gutter.’ Senton thought as the metal cooled down, requiring more strength to get bent by the minute.

He lacked the mana to amplify the heat enough to keep the metal soft, so rather than waste his limited strength to achieve a mediocre result, Senton shoved the blade halfway into the furnace and watched it turn red again.

Soon the hammering resumed, but the metal cooled down before Senton was done, forcing him to stop again.

’This is such a waste of time.’ He inwardly sighed. ’I have to wait until the entire blade heats up even though I have to work on a small section of it.’

Once his skill, years of experience, and a touch of Fire Vision confirmed to him the temperature was right, Senton pulled the blade from the furnace and placed it on the anvil.

’If only there were some kind of device that heated only the edge, this would take...’ His mind and hammer froze for a second as the revelation hit him. ’No device can do it, but I can. I can manipulate the heat in the same way Raaz did when fishing!’

The hammering resumed, but this time, when the metal started to cool down, Senton focused the heat on the blade’s edge, making the rest of the metal harden faster, but keeping the temperature stable where it mattered.

Senton managed to work longer and better than before, and he was still smiling when he put the blade into the furnace to reheat it. His smile disappeared as another intuition struck him.

’If fire and water are the same, why can’t I draw the heat from the furnace like I draw water from a well?’