God Of Crafting
Chapter 105 - 105: The Scythe

"Today is the very first day when I looked at the idea of crafting… and considered it a chore."

If anyone were to ask me just weeks… no, days ago, this would be the sentence I would put my hands on the line never to utter.

And then, just a few days later, the reality proved to be a lot more bothersome and a lot less interesting than my amateur eyes allowed me to see it.

Crafting was fun. There was no hint of doubt about that in my soul. But for me to reach any of the actually interesting parts of the crafting, I had to patiently go through the drag of preparing everything with great focus, patience, and peace of heart.

I mean, I did it.

After three hours of playing around with molds, casts, and liquid metal, I managed to complete the first half of the body of my scythe's blade. And the very next thing I did…

Was to start the process all over again, with the sole intention of making a twin to what I just finished so that I could pair the two of them up.

And so, I furnaced the shit out of the high Mytrhil, preparing the mold for it while it slowly melted down under the influence of the spiritual-qi-infused flames.

Then, I cast the second part of the body before pressing it down in its form with a special lid. Then, once the metal settled, I cracked the mold open with a hammer before moving it over to the venting machine…

And this time, I managed to shrink the whole process from three hours to just two hours and a half!

"Now it is done, right?" Claire asked when she saw me put the two pieces of my scythe's blade together, side by side. And despite how unlikely it might seem, after over five hours of just sitting around and watching me sweat as I crafted in the high heat oozing from the furnace, the sparks of curiosity in her eyes actually ignited again.

"Dear, I'm barely getting started!" I protested while overplaying the whining in my voice. "For real, though, I'm only done with the easy part. The actual challenge…" I looked over at the finished halves of the blade's body, "it only starts from now on."

Ever since nearly six hours ago, the precious metal continued to boil up in the furnace, while constantly going through the swings of the temperature whenever I opened the furnace to pull stuff out of it or to put something new inside. To top it off, it was constantly tempered by the spiritual-infused flames of the furnace, bit by bit, changing its qualities.

"What's the hard part, then?" Claire asked, only to watch me go and grab both the dustified crystals of the very last pile of the materials and their respective, bigger cousins in the form of small crystals.

"To create the inertia part of the machine," I replied before leaving everything down on the table before going for the win and actually bringing out the very metal that I kept boiling for so long.

Over such a long time of heating up, and cooling down only to grow hotter again, this metal… changed.

It no longer appeared to have any desire to go back into its solid form…. An illusion created by just how much heat was trapped into it, heat that released from the insides of the metal soup whenever it outside would cold down even the tiniest bit.

And right into this soup, still bubbling up within the crucible, I poured all the qi-storing and qi-tempering crystals, before stirring the entire mixture up and then adding the boxes of the powdered crystals, by opening one of them up, pouring the dust inside the crucible, stirring the whole mixture up and then repeating the process all over again.

Bit by bit, the relatively clear liquid of the reflective, metal soup turned into a strange, thick slurry with bits of the crystals occasionally appearing on the surface to reflect the artificial light of the lamps of the workshop.

And it was only with this pre-prepared slurry that I moved over the finished body of the blade before taking aim… and pouring it all down into the small indentation that ran along the whole length of the blade and was reflected in both of the blade's halves.

Bit by bit, drop by drop, the slurry fell into the indentation and filled it up, still remaining in this half-liquid half-slurry form.

'It's kinda like a pitch from that legendary pitch drop experiment,' I thought, watching just how much this thick liquid struggled to fall off the edge of the crucible and then slowly spread out in its designed space.

'It seems that I made way too much of it,' I thought when comparing what was left in the crucible after filling the indentation in one half of the blade's body… Only to then move over to the side a bit before repeating the process all over again.

In the end, I hardly used half of the slurry I prepared, leaving the rest to go to waste along with the crucible that I held it in. And while it was still possible to somewhat salvage it, or at least parts of the precious materials used to mix it out…

Right now, I have a much more important task to focus on. It was to bring the two halves together and mold them while making sure not a single drop of the slurry would get enough time and momentum to flow out of its designated chamber.

Slam!

With a powerful strike of the smithing hammer, I forced a simple, crude-even nail into the two halves of the body before hammering it down to make sure one would need quite the force to split them up.

"Now, just to add the blade…" I thought as my eyes moved over to the third and the cheapest out of the three kinds of metal I prepared. It was nothing more but the perfect kind of tooling steel, with properties just perfect to be used for a cutting edge.

And, as I quickly proved by taking mere moments to melt it down before pouring it all down in its place, it served as a great seal to connect the two halves of the blade into a single whole!

"Haaah…" I heaved a long, exhausted sigh once I finally dropped the heavy piece of tri-natured metal onto the table, leaving the task of grinding its edge down to make it sharp for some other day.

"What now?" Claire asked, as she somehow sensed that finally, I was actually done.

"I still need to polish the edges, decorate it a bit, sharpen the blade itself, connect it with the handle…"

I squinted my eyes before gritting my teeth and standing up… And then working for just a few minutes more to get the boomstick, as Chihiro named it, lock it in its place before hammering it down into its socket, effectively combining the two elements into a single whole.

"Now, while it still lacks its finishing touches, it's more or less done," I announced as I stared at a crude yet fancy-looking weapon in my hand.

"So?" Claire then asked again while dropping her hands down onto her hips as she stood in a confrontational pose while staring me down. "What's so special about this blade?" she asked before moving her hands up only to cross them over her chest.

"Oh, it's just two small things," I replied, only to infuse a small bit of my energy into the outer part of the scythe's handle before taking a swing…

And watching how the spiritual energy infused into the weapon took the shape of its blade, elongating along the path of the attack and effectively extending the blade backward to twice its size, almost as if leaving a cutting force in the wake of the blade… only to then vanish as if it was never there, to begin with.

"Woah…" Claire stepped back, her eyes widening as she tracked the flow of the spiritual energy. "Wait, if that's one of the things," she muttered before gulping her saliva down and slowly raising her eyes up to my face. "Then what is its other secret?"

In response, I opted to just offer the girl a smile.

"And that, my dear, is something I really shouldn't show here, with all those expensive machines around!"