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Of Arms and Arcane: Chapter 183
🕑 Added 2025-01-10 16:09:38 +0000 UTCWhen night came, Professor Sageira, Dad, and I were back in the forest clearing we used for refining the Primal Aura technique. The first thing we did was get Dad started with mana pathway tempering.
Fortunately for him, all the magical monitoring devices Professor Sageira cooked up just to monitor me so I do not accidentally kill myself were still around and fine-tuned to the different levels of thresholds. We started at the lowest setting.
After that, Professor Sageira got Dad started on how to increase the flow of mana in his body. The nice part was that he had all the monitoring devices to tell him that he was making progress, which was more than I got when Professor Sageira and I got started on this project.
That first night, Dad did not get much done. Dad spent the whole night getting the hang of purposely speeding up the circulation of his mana. Towards the end of the training session, Dad managed to get the hang of it, but instead of the constant and smooth increase in flow, Dad increased his mana flow rate in sharp pulses, which was more than his mana pathways could take.
This interrupted my training as the monitoring devices Dad was hooked up to all went off, signaling that something went wrong. A few seconds after the monitoring devices went off, Dad coughed up blood and started bleeding from all his face holes and even his pores.
Thankfully, Professor Sageira was nearby to stabilize and heal him before things got seriously bad for Dad, and after half an hour's rest from the healed internal trauma, Dad was back at it again, but this time, Professor Sageira was paying more attention to Dad while she assigned me to more physical and mental exercises while under the influence of Primal Aura.
By the end of the training, Dad was feeling so weak that I had to help him get up on his feet. All the healing he had experienced when he made mistakes had taken a toll on his body, and when we came home before dawn, I had to wake the house chef to whip up a hearty meal for Dad before he crashed for the night.
After I ate with Dad and made sure he did not fall asleep and faceplant in his food, I helped him to bed. This woke Mum up, and she greeted us before I went to bed myself.
When I woke up for lunch, Dad did not join us because he was too tired. We saw him again only after dinner.
From that day onward, we brought rations to training so Dad had something to eat after each healing.
***
The daily training continued for days, which turned into weeks until the school term officially started. That was when our training schedule changed to every other day. To be honest, it was a big relief for my whole family, Mum included, as she was now able to see more of her husband awake instead of sleeping off the exhaustive night training.
During this training, Dad started losing an unhealthy amount of weight due to the repeated healings, despite eating a double portion at every meal. It was only recently that he gained control of his mana flow, significantly reducing the number of times he suffered internal injuries from his mistakes.
But Dad’s progress in training came with unforeseen consequences. It was impossible to hide his rapid weight loss and the bags under his eyes. This caused the house staff to worry, and soon, rumors of Dad's failing health spread throughout the territory, and I was somehow roped into the rumor. The staff noticed that I was not sleeping at night, and rumor has it that Dad is using the cover of night to secretly pass on his knowledge to me in preparation to take over the running of the territory when he passes on.
After we learned of this rumor, we had a good laugh and decided not to correct the rumors. The only thing my parents did to ease the worries of the house staff and Dad’s men was to assure them that their livelihood was not in jeopardy, and despite Dad’s current condition, he was in no danger of dying any time soon.
I could not say whether they really believed my parents, but in the following days, I noticed the staff became much more deferential to me. I guess they think I am going to be their new lord soon.
Now that my schedule did not consist of purely eating, sleeping, and training like a maniac, I had come to truly appreciate my free time. So, on one such free day as today, I find myself in my workshop, stacking alternate thin plates of two types of steel to form a billet. I aimed to make a kitchen knife for the house’s chef to thank him for the trouble of constantly waking him up early to feed Dad when he came back from training, hungry and tired.
After I was happy with the number of layers on the billet, I wrapped it in wet parchment, then coated it with ash, mud, and straw before putting it into the forge and burying it with more charcoal. Then came the boring part, working the bellow while waiting for the billet to come up to temperature.
As I was working the bellow, I pondered how to avoid wasting my time on it short of hiring someone to pump it for me. That is when I remembered an internet video of a guy using his wife’s hairdryer to blow air into his charcoal for a BBQ, which got me thinking.
I got access to copper wires, steel, and electricity, which is easily taken care of with the application of some magic, and I am pretty sure I saw some loadstones on sale at the alchemist store. This opens the door for me to make an electric motor. I made a simple one to power a toy car in my previous life, and now that I have the resources of a noble family and magic that can bend and sometimes break the laws of physics, I can see many applications. A blower for my forge can be a simple fan with a shroud over it to direct airflow, and if I scale up to a more powerful motor, I can even make a forging power hammer.
That reminds me, I will need to check if there is a pattern system in this world, I could make some serious bank if I manage to create an electric or magic motor and scale it up.
As I fantasized about what I would recreate in this world, I occasionally checked in on my billet until it reached the correct temperature, at which time I pulled it out of the forge and brought it to my anvil.
I then reached out for the hammer that I created while I was at the Royal Academy. Unlike most of the blacksmith students, I sometimes use aura to put more strength into my strikes, but that led to many broken hammer handles and scolding from my dwarven blacksmith teacher, Haldor Steelbeard. He then told me that a proper blacksmith eventually makes their own tools and that if I wanted to get rough with the tools I was using, it would be better if I made my own, so I did.
When I was done, my first hammer was a simple affair: a mana-steel hammerhead with a mana-conductive wood as the handle. All enchanted with durability and mana-conductivity in mind.
Now, with a hammer in hand, I sprinkled charcoal ash on the bright, hot billet to act as a flux, manifested my aura, and used all my strength to hammer down on the billet, forge-welding the different layers of steel together.
As I rained hammer blows down on the billet while rotating it, I soon had a bar that I cut, folded, and fluxed before forge-welding the folded layers together and sticking it back in the forge. As I worked the bellow again, I wondered how the patterns on the kitchen knife would turn out, which reminded me that I needed to visit the alchemist to get acid for etching so the Damascus patterns could be revealed.
