Chapter 222 - Progress in smithing proficiency

With Eve already passed out, I pulled up my robes and fixed the thread holding my undergarments before grabbing the piece of cloth that separated us during our intimate moment from Pengu and throwing it on my beloved, as to cover her naked body. Even if our little friend was just a magical beast, it still had enough intellect to consider it sentient, making it hard on me to let it see anything that I would like to keep for myself.

Before getting myself to start crafting, I actually sat down on the floor with my back rested on the cold, coarse wall and immersed my consciousness in the ability shop provided by Bonger. Even if I knew that the sight that appeared right in front of my eyes as soon as I voiced out the wish to see it in my mind was nothing else but an illusion, I still scrolled through it like if I was browsing some website with memes back on the earth.

I guess the application of all the abilities I had were fitted to my own perception and understanding, for the sake of making it easier for me to use them. While it's only my guess, I think that all these interfaces that Bonger showed me so far, were derived from the information gathered in my brain, instead of working along with the local common sense. At this point, I couldn't help but wonder what would an average cultivator blessed with the same system see?

Pushing those lingering thoughts aside, I turned my attention back to the list of abilities. Regretfully, there wasn't any specific classification to them, making me unable to hide the vast majority of them, centred around offensive or defensive aspects. Shovelling through the countless fighting techniques and skills in the search for some crafting related abilities was boring, but I couldn't shake off the feeling that some kind of treasure was hidden amongst all those fancy named and mostly useless manuals.

Soaring Dragon Jump? What am I, a giant lizard? Why not call it a big jump instead?

Crushing Elephant's Stomp? Why not name is a heavy stomp?

With the names like that, do you expect me to shout them out while using them only to divert all the glory from winning the fight to the embarrassment of acting childishly?

Trying to hold back my disdain to the extent that would allow me to continue browsing through the names, I actually found some techniques that appeared to be worth investing my points in, but regretfully, they did not have any applications that were of use for me now! Maybe when I will get a bit too many points to use in the future, I might consider buying them out, but for now, I was looking for something specific, that would fix the most burning problem of my crafting.

No matter how much knowledge levelling up my smithing ability would infuse in my brain, I had to acknowledge that with the complicated process of crafting equipment, even a single lapse or misinformation could easily destroy the effects of using valuable materials or lofty techniques. This was something that dawned upon me when I was thinking back about the events in the city's smithy, where I believed that local blacksmiths were tempering their steamingly hot weapons in bail of water. Only after going through those memories again in an attempt to find something that I could apply to my own crafting, did I realise that this transparent liquid that they were using, didn't act like water at all!

Yeah, it made the sizzling noise when the red hot metal was inserted in it, they made the material cool off rather quickly… but there was not even a hint of steam coming off from the bail!

When I realised this small thing, I also recalled a small detail from the rather popular TV series where modern craftsmen competed in creating medieval weapons.

Using water to quench the blade was the most common misconception that occurred among those who lost their place in the show at the very beginning! While the point of using oil to do so was repeatedly stressed out in the series, I didn't pay enough attention while watching it to carve it into my brain properly, resulting in all the weapons that I crafted so far being far weaker than they could be if I quenched them properly!

If I were to continue crafting my pieces of weaponry while following the fragmented knowledge about the entire process, I would never be able to reach the pinnacle of the swordmaking, wasting a lot of potential hidden in both the materials that I was using and the techniques that system made available for me!

Surely enough, while I wasn't able to find any recipes that would allow me to simply infuse the materials into the sphere similar to the one created by item randomiser, I was able to obtain a "blacksmith's eyes" and "mana forge" for only one hundred attribute points each!

The second one didn't need much explanation. In short words, it allowed me to create a subdimension where I was free to shape, form, change the temperature or do anything that would otherwise require any kind of smithing tool. The blacksmith's eyes, on the other hand, allowed me to see the statistics of any item in my possession, related to the craft.

With the description of the second ability being rather vague, it took me a short moment of testing to learn that while I was able to learn the distribution of any kind of material inside the items that I held either with my hand or in the quickly casted mana forge, or see the statistics of the weapons even before finishing them when I tried inspecting the spoon that I made only to unlock the trinketer ability, it only show what kind of materials it was made off, while not even mentioning the wood!

After using up almost two and a half thousand points on raising my smithing ability to its current pinnacle, investing only two hundred of them to further improve the quality of my crafts, was genuinely not a bad deal at all!