Elijah turned to Lucas, a reverent expression plastered on his face.
“But for real, you saved my ass there. Handling that massive flock of steel-winged ravens with such effortless ease—hard to imagine anyone else pulling it off.”
They found themselves in a chamber full of cadets, all standing in neat rows with massive yet compact furnaces burning in front of them.
Right next to the furnaces were anvils, and beside them were postmortem tables on which lay dead bodies with their faces covered.
Lucas gracefully swept back his long silver hair. His blue and white uniform made him stand out from the sea of cadets in the room clad in red and black.
Six months had passed since the Elemental Hydra attack during the first-year practical exam. After a brief hospital stay, Lucas had to return to the academy.
In his second year, Lucas chose to replace cooking with forging as his elective. He thought it could be a skill that would come in handy someday.
Besides, if he could get even decent at forging, he could easily save a lot of Edit Points and even use the Edit Pen on his creations.
But now, six months later, on the day of his semester-end forging exam, he couldn’t regret his decision more.
Forging was complicated, far more challenging than anything he had in mind when picking it up. Not only did it require a lot of skill and practice, but also persistent hard work.
Hard work—the one eternal enemy of Lucas. It wasn’t as easy as waving a pen like he was used to.
He had to scout materials, gather items, smith a perfect mold of the object he wanted to forge with utmost mastery, and then extract the Gift of the dead person, which he would later infuse with the object.
Creating enchanted items was far more straightforward but still exceptionally difficult. He had to learn the elven runic language since he would have to inscribe those runes on the item to enchant it.
However, the process wasn’t as simple as that. Lucas needed to be cautious of the amount of mana he poured while inscribing the runes, as different amounts at different moments could lead to distinct and sometimes unwanted results.
He also had to carve multiple runes to support a single enchantment or create one rune that could produce numerous enchantments. Mental calculations and theory processing became a regular part of the routine.
If that wasn’t challenging enough, in some cases, he had to figure out how to inscribe multiple runes on a three-dimensional item’s surface, especially for runes affecting higher dimensions like dimensional rings.
It was akin to programming, although Lucas wouldn’t know, having never written a single line of code in either of his lives.
But basically, forging was hard.
Luckily, on his quest to master the art of forging and smithing, he befriended a chestnut-haired half-dwarf.
Yes, Elijah had been a great help to him.
Not to be racist, but since Elijah was a half-dwarf, forging came naturally to him. So, he taught Lucas a lot, simplifying the lectures, offering him his notes, and even running a check on his runes. He was a genius at this thing.
Letting out a sigh, Lucas fixed his gaze on the very same half-dwarf standing on his left, who was looking back at him with a sincere expression.
Elijah shrugged. “What?”
Lucas shook his head. “You could’ve easily dealt with those ravens, so don’t act so modest.”
“Well, yeah, obviously. But it’s nice not to do the heavy lifting for once,” Elijah beamed. “Every forging partner before you that I’ve ever been paired up with was weaker than my Grandma. There was this girl that I had to carry back on my shoulders!”
He moved over and used a pair of tongs to pull out the scorching hot crucible from the blazing pits of the furnace containing the incandescent molten metal extracted from the steel-winged ravens.
He poured the molten metal into the mold sitting atop the anvil, letting sizzling plumes rise in the air with a burst of blistering white steam.
Lucas rolled his shoulders. Elijah had been like this ever since he met him. He acted modest and sincere, but in reality, he was a klutz and a bit of an airhead—true to his character portrayed in the novel.
“Do it now,” Elijah called out to him.
The molten metal took the shape of a slender blade inside the mold. Now was the time to extract the Gift and infuse it while still in the process of being forged.
Lucas swiftly stepped to the face-covered corpse lying on the table beside the anvil and summoned a knife in his hand.
He carved open the corpse’s abdomen up to its solar plexus and put away the knife. Crafting a few hand signs, he quickly started invoking a spell in high-elven.
Shimmering particles of blinding white light flowed up from the open stomach of the dead body, coalescing in front of Lucas’ hand.
The silver-haired boy then stepped up to the mold and poured the orb of glowing light particles into the molten metal.
Usually, all one needed to do to make a relic was to extract a gift and infuse it with an item. But there were several conditions.
For example, the object in question must complement the Gift and work well with it. If someone’s Gift is to see in the dark and you infuse it with a ball, the ball won’t activate the Gift. Whereas if you infuse it with goggles, you could see in the dark using them.
There is a workaround regarding the first problem. For example, if you infuse the Gift of seeing in the dark into a ball and then create a rune, allowing one to harness the dark sight by touching the ball, then you’ll create a perfectly working relic.
In this case, the dead body’s Gift that Lucas extracted was to make anything he touched sharper. In fact, the more resilient one’s defence, the sharper the edge of the thing in his hands would get.
Lucas and Elijah were trying to modify this Gift using a few runes. They were attempting to forge a sword that would get sharper the stronger one’s defence.
And they were so close.