The rise of the pervert primordial

While thinking on how to convince the lynx to come to their side for good, Aster reached the isolated “smithy” which Angela had prepared according to his request, or it would be more accurate to say that his request was… the minimum requirement, considering what lied ahead of them.

There were large different work tables with perfectly classified materials placed on top of them, a furnace and a forge that basically only needed to be lit up, piles of charcoal and a set of practically every available tool related to not only blacksmithing but other types of craftmanship.

As one would expect from the receptionist girl, she paid extreme attention to the details.

‘Since I didn’t tell her to preheat the forge nor the furnace, she went and prepared materials not only for blacksmithing, not bad’, thought Aster as he saw not only processed iron ready to be turned into steel billets, but also pieces of wood of different length, iron ore and even large bones which had been cleaned.

“Mmm, this will save us some time, for now, you have more or less seen how I work with the furnace and the forge, right?”, said Aster to the little wyrm who was happily sliding next to him.

“Hissss”, Espi nodded at Aster in response, but then she was surprised when she heard his next words.

“Perfect, then I want you to process a batch of iron ore and also turn some of the already processed iron into steel billets for me”.

“Hisss?”, naturally the little wyrm was a bit confused about Aster’s request, her profession wasn’t blacksmith after all.

“Your profession manual is “companion” therefore you should be able to obtain an exclusive mission if you do the same activities as me, at the same time this will help me with my training in “Galaxy Forging” so it’s a two birds one stone kind of situation”.

“Hissss!”, Espi nodded and then put hands to work, or more accurately… tail to work, the little wyrm doesn’t have hands but that doesn’t mean she has troubles to hold onto things, she could either use her tail or her mouth to grab onto stuff, in fact her grip strength far surpassed that of anyone in the group, in terms of raw destructive power she surpassed even Aster.

After all, with his fists alone Aster couldn’t break a tree in half but Espi could do so with a lash of her tail, not without also hurting herself in the process though, of course, if weapons were included then Aster was the absolute strongest as of current, as that is what spirit beasts like the little wyrm have to “pay” in exchange for superior innate bodies, the incapacity to properly use spirit treasures.

The same doesn’t apply to simple “tools” as that monkey which dragon Lilia bullied during her date with Aster, proved though, which is why Aster was even more interested in the profession manual he had chosen.

‘To be honest there were other blacksmithing manuals of the highest grade that were available, which sounded “better” than Galaxy Forging, but this one in particular was the most interesting’, thought Aster as he was reminded of the specific part among the description of Galaxy Forging which convinced him to go with it.

“Every single thing in the galaxies exists to be forged and with each variable a completely different result will be obtained, therefore the possibilities are infinite”, said Aster, that was the part of the description which convinced Aster of choosing this manual.

The interesting part is that the first mission regarding his manual which Aster got, was to not read past the first chapter, which basically listed a way to process different materials to turn them into equipment.

And no, we are not talking about just metals, carving, grinding and other techniques to process different materials were included in the first chapter of the manual, but while Aster will focus in that for a few hours, he wanted to test the “each variable” part, by making Espi be the one to process the materials he’ll use for smithing later.

And that resulted in the interesting sight of the little wyrm using her tail to grab a hammer to crush iron ore to then toss it into the furnace, proximity to fire won’t make Espi feel even the slightest discomfort, her scales make her highly resistant against heat and cold.

Of course, even if she is a dragon, she can’t hold onto the hot metal directly as a mortal ranked beast without having some of her scales burn, but her already high fire resistance combined with a heat resistant glove used to protect her tail will allow her to not need to use tongs, though it might look a bit funny.

“Hissss~”, the little wyrm paid no attention to such details and continued filling the furnace to then lit it up, before doing the same with the forge and this is where she wore a work glove with her tail, that was the last moment Aster directly watched over her.

Now that he had confirmed that Espi would be safe during this little experiment, Aster focused on his own training, and for that he grabbed a random wood pole of one meter of length as well as an axe, a carving knife, a wood cutting hand saw shaped as a long knife with a subtle curve on its back as well as pile of sandpaper and placed them at one of the empty worktables, not without wearing his protection gloves.

Aster took a second to start a “timer” in his mind, to then put hands to work, the process to make a wood sword which is what he was aiming to do, isn’t hard by itself, the problem is how much it takes him to make one that is recognized for the mission he accepted, you see he has to make ten of them in thirty minutes.

So, he first wanted to see how much it took him at his regular speed to make one, for starters Aster drew lines at 5, 20, 25 and 50 centimeters from one of the ends of the wood pole.

Then using the saw, he cut around the line at the 25 centimeter mark to then change the position of the wood pole to a vertical one.

Now, using the axe Aster diagonally cut the sides of the cylindrical wood pole, starting from the 50 centimeter all the way to the 25 mark, being careful to leave a decent width to the center of the pallet as that will be the body of the sword.

Once he had made the initial diagonal cuts, he simply turned the wood pole around and used the axe to cut downwards until he had a relatively flat pallet starting from the 25 centimeter mark, while above it the wood pole was still of a cylindrical shape.

And here is when the marks at the 5 and 20 centimeter area came into play, Aster used the hand saw to cut around those and then repeated the process of earlier by removing a large quantity of wood using the axe.

The result was that there was now a rough “pommel” and “guard” of cylindrical shape, while the area in between them was the handle of the sword, of course Aster removed some parts of the wood where the handle was positioned with the carving knife, because the area was too small for the axe to be able to do all the job.

Without stopping even for a second, Aster used a ruler and a marker to draw the guidelines for the bevels of the sword as well as for the tip, to then carve them with the knife, for the finishing touch he used the sandpaper to smooth the surface of the blade, making it resemble a real sword quite a bit more.

“Five minutes, that’s not good”, mumbled Aster as he saw the finished wood sword, having memorized the process Aster grabbed the wood sword and then slashed it against a large boulder.

“Crack!”, under the interested eyes of Guardian, a crack appeared on the large boulder as the wood sword broke in half, then Aster saw how the count for the mission regarding his “Absolute”, the one he took as his attack type manual, went up by one, while the count for the Galaxy Forging mission returned to zero after a couple of seconds.

It wasn’t because the wood sword was destroyed, but because he stopped working in making wood swords, the mission required him to make ten in thirty minutes but apparently if he stopped working in it for more than twenty seconds the count was restarted.

“Sheesh, as always the requirements for these missions are really harsh, the rewards are also worth it though”, said Aster as he stretched his body to then grab another wood pole and start over again.

This time however, he didn’t waste time in making marks, the wood poles were grouped based in their size thanks to Angela’s hobby of classifying things up to the last detail, so by memory Aster made the cuts and then shaved piece after piece of wood with the axe finishing the pallet that will turn into the blade, to then make the pommel, guard and handle.

To finish it, Aster carved the bevels and the tip before smoothing the blade with the sandpaper.

‘Mmm, four minutes if I make it by memory sounds good but reducing time won’t be as easy past this’, thought Aster.

To complete the mission, he had to finish one sword every three minutes, but even if he moved at his highest speed, Aster calculated that he would take three and half minutes to make one.

“What takes the most time is sanding the blade…”, mumbled Aster as he smacked the sword against the same boulder as the previous one, destroying it in the process, increasing the count for his attack type manual while the blacksmithing one went back to zero again.

Aster grabbed a third wood pole and repeated the same steps up to carving the bevels and the tip being a bit more careful with the carving knife, so that the result would be decent even without using the sandpaper, with this he indeed reduced the time to three minutes and ten seconds.

Which sounds good, the problem is that he didn’t see the count of the blacksmithing mission go up.

“Crack!”, after destroying his third creation and not seeing even the counter for the Absolute manual’s mission changing, he confirmed that his third creation wasn’t recognized as a sword.

Most people at this point would try to go for a smaller sized sword, however less than a meter could arguably fall in the “dagger” area and his missions were clear, he had to make and destroy swords, that doesn’t mean Aster ran out of ideas though.

‘Swords don’t need to have double edges all the time’, he thought as he grabbed another wood pole to repeat process, this time he only carved bevels on one side, resulting in a single edged sword with a flat back which he sanded, reducing time to three minutes and fifteen seconds.

As Aster smacked the fourth result against the boulder to see it breaking, in a different way than his previous results, he got an interesting idea.

“Some blacksmiths purposedly don’t refine the back of their single-edged swords, to make them more durable…”, with new inspiration he grabbed the fifth wood pole and repeated the same process as with the fourth one, with the difference that he didn’t sand the back of the blade this time, leaving even the bark of the wood, similar to the “pommel” and the “guard”.

To Aster’s delight, the counter for the Galaxy Forging did move, so the result was counted as a sword, and he took three minutes and three seconds to make it.

And this is where the hardest part of the mission started, the fact that one is able to craft a wood sword in three minutes doesn’t mean one can repeat the same another nine times in a row.

Because no matter how precise one is, let alone a mortal but even a cultivator’s movements are not always exactly the same, that’s why casts and formations for mass produced goods exist.

“Damn it”, cursed Aster as he reached the fifth sword out of ten in a row, only to realize that he had taken twenty extra seconds for it, so he directly abandoned that round, waiting a minute for the counter to restart.

After making a few tests to see from which point did the mission’s time started to be taken into account, Aster decided to change the process from individual crafting to something more akin to an “assembly line”, to explain it simply he was going to work in the ten swords at the same time.

He wanted to make use of the focus he gained when doing a single step to reduce time, which in paper sounded easy, however that is only if the material reacts the same way to the same treatment.

“Crack!”, that wasn’t Aster smacking a finished sword against the boulder that was the seventh wood pole splintering because there was a small imperfection near its core, which meant that there would be a crack on the either the edge or the back of the blade, so this round was a failure.

“I saved around thirty seconds by moving in steps for the ten swords at the same time, let’s use them to make simple tests on the wood poles”, concluded Aster.

This time he added an extra step, which consisted in knocking on the wood poles at three different areas, using his sharp hearing sense to make an idea of how was the core of the wood pole, at least he could discard the ones with big imperfections, which numbered around ten or so of the pile of one-meter sized wood poles that he had.

Neither Angela nor whoever helped procure the wood poles could be blamed for the previous, it took Aster whose hearing is only inferior to Mira, some effort to find about this after all.

Aster looked at the sun and realized that it has been more than one hour since he started, as monstrous as he is, it took this much of him just to reach the starting point, there were simply too many aspects to take into account to complete these missions which gave a single time reward that broke mortal limitations.

“Wait a second… the tools and my own status”, mumbled Aster as he looked at the saw, axe, carving knife, sandpaper and his own slightly heavier than usual breath.

The work he has done wasn’t particularly hard, but the precise control needed increased the difficulty past normal levels, one had to be a mortal master at the aspect in question to be capable of achieving these kinds of missions.

Aster was kind of brute forcing his way through them, well, the sword slashing one was easy because he was in his element, and probably when he gets one tailored for blacksmithing, he will ace it as well, but this one was clearly meant for carving wood swords even if it wasn’t specifically stated, because there is absolutely no way to make ten swords with metal from scratch in thirty minutes, and the same applies for bones as it is a much more delicate material to work with than wood.

After resting for a couple of minutes, cleaning the tools and making sure that the wood poles he was going to work with were all in good condition, Aster isolated himself from anything but the idea of finishing ten wood sword in thirty minutes or less.

The lynx which has been looking at Aster with interest changed her focus to the little wyrm, the reason is simple Aster was going to take thirty minutes to see if he succeeded, but Espi’s progress could be seen with every second, since she was working on the anvil.

“Clang!”, the little wyrm, imitated what she has seen Aster do with the hammer by holding onto it with her tail, she hammered the processed iron to flatten it, tossing it into the forge continuously to keep it at a high temperature before continuing working with the hammer.

“Hissss!”, of course Espi is not a blacksmith, so even just processing the steel billets was not an easy task, the little wyrm hissed with frustration as she saw a small crack appear on the surface of the steel she was working with, she had missed one of the moments to heat up the steel and a fissure resulting of working in steel which wasn’t hot enough, was the result.

Of course, this wasn’t just a random mistake, the first billet in which the little wyrm worked burned, making the steel decarburize, which Espi noticed because the sound it made when hammered lost that sharp clinking tone, so the little wyrm discarded it.

And now, she had made the opposite mistake of not heating it enough to ensure the malleability level of the steel, therefore she also had to discard her second try, luckily, she wasn’t having trouble with the furnace, as it didn’t require to do much, the most important part was when she separated the impurities from the iron ore after crushing it into smaller pieces which she found easy.

“Grrrr”, the lynx which had remained an observer until now actually approached the little wyrm to “comfort” her after seeing the frustrated light in Espi’s pretty green eyes.

The little wyrm might not be haughty but she does have her pride as she is a dragon after all, but here the source of her frustration is that she is Aster’s tamed spirit beast, she has a unique kind of bond that she doesn’t share with anyone else, so she wanted to be able to help him in anything he might need.

She also has observed how Aster works with metal and was actually interested in it, due to one of her most precious possessions, the spatial treasure which Aster had gifted her, because an idea has been imprinted in the mind of the little wyrm since that time, “Wouldn’t I become stronger if I could use a bow like Kana or a sword like Aster?”.

Which is definitely not the train of thought a spirit beast would have… before attaining human form, and that is actually a good thing, it means that the little wyrm is in the right path, because there is a difference in being “smart” which Espi is and being “wise” which is what spirit beasts gain through the Transcending realms.

“Hissss!”, with renewed enthusiasm over Guardian’s words of encouragement, the little wyrm grabbed a new piece of processed iron to then place it on the forge, all this while she stole a gaze at Aster who was completely focused in the task at hand.

There were discarded half-finished wood swords piling at his sides, because he had restarted the last step of making the ten swords in steps, a couple of times already as he had made a small mistake here and there in some, which would lower the possibility of the resulting product being considered a proper wood sword.

“Hissss~”, the previous helped Espi calm down, if Aster didn’t seem to care about failing then she shouldn’t let a few mistakes frustrate her as well.