Devourer Of Destiny - Chapter 140

Ebon Dirge had to exert a bit of effort to not laugh in the woman’s face after her reaction to the destruction of her “perfect” sword. Keeping someone where you wanted them between the peaks of hope and troughs of despair was an intricate process, and a single out-of-place outburst could spoil the whole thing.

Eloise’s problem was simple to describe and complex to solve. She had been too lucky, too soon, and it had become her misfortune. Artificing was a process of trial and error, not a mere combination of ingredients, and failure while learning was a given. Her teachers had been right enough about that, but none of them had the requisite cruelty to break the woman’s deadlock.

The sword she had crafted was excellent, as such low-grade items went. Dirge had made a great show of examining it when in truth he was indulging in distraction; if he had relied solely on his physical strength, he wouldn’t have been able to make a clean break in the blade. The agitation of a minuscule stress point and the flash freezing of the blade’s internals had allowed him to snap the weapon in half; in combat, this kind of control would be difficult for even him to pull off, but holding the blade in his hands made it simplicity itself.

Why go through that effort? To break Eloise’s conception of “perfection” with a very visible demonstration. After her other failures in forging, she had resorted to trying to recapture the essence of what she had made before and had done no better with it. In order to progress, to learn, to improve, and to excel, she needed to move beyond that prideful blade she had created.

“Now, my dear,” Dirge told the still-shocked smith, “pull out the scrap of what you were working on earlier and let’s look into making something new and better.” He tossed the broken sword on the conference table with a clang that made his new student jump.

To her credit, Eloise only paused for a moment before she called out the wreckage of her most recent attempt at smithing, letting it materialize on the conference table surface. A more weak-minded individual might have started an argument or flounced from the room, but she seemed to have quickly understood that she was on an inescapable path here.

“You are no doubt wondering how you are going to manage this without all of your fancy equipment from the forge,” Dirge told the smith, who merely nodded in reply. “For this particular forging, I will operate as your equipment. All of the processes your forge and its tools perform are perfectly capable of being handled by a cultivator, as I will show you. Now, I am not familiar with the precise instruments you prefer to use so you will need to inform me, but I also encourage you to experiment beyond the bounds of the tools you have used so far. Is that all clear?”

Eloise nodded again in silent response.

Dirge gave an exasperated sigh. “You’re going to have to be more communicative than that, my dear. You’re the one doing the creation here. I am not going to dictate how this is made, I am only going to perform tasks and make observations and suggestions as we go through the process.”

“Yes, Miss Sable,” Eloise replied in a subdued tone. She then took a deep breath. “I guess the first step is to reduce all of the materials to their base components.”

“You guess?” Dirge queried with an arched eyebrow.

“Let’s melt it all down,” Eloise replied, her voice becoming stronger, harder.

Dirge smiled. “That’s more like it.” He levitated the scrap — old and new — and generated a whirlwind of flame that spun the debris around inside. Within a couple minutes, the different metals and alloys had all be separated out and cleansed of any artifacts of the failure, becoming floating spheres of molten metal that he flash-froze the surfaces of and let clatter to the table. “Next?”

Eloise was wide-eyed watching the process, her dark eyes scarcely blinking throughout it as though afraid she’d miss something. “That’s–”

“The fruits of precise and delicate control, Eloise,” Dirge said, smiling. Yes, let the woman thirst for that kind of personal control over the process. He could have appropriated a forge somewhere, but this forging was also a showcase of capability, the type of thing she could learn from him.

Dirge himself wasn’t an excellent artificer by any stretch of the imagination, but this was hardly the creation of a divine weapon that was going on here, and his in-depth training with precise control of essence was quite handy at this level. Given Eloise’s response to the little demonstrations so far, he understood that such fine control wasn’t part of her curriculum. Such methods seldom were; young cultivators were encouraged to operate with proven spells and techniques, not to wield essence in such a raw manner.

“What’s next, Eloise?” Dirge asked. “We haven’t got an eternity available in this room.”

Eloise frowned. “What’s the purity on these metals?”

“What they should’ve been raw,” Dirge replied. “I only scoured the external impurities and separated different materials from one another, keeping the alloys intact as they were in their structures.”

“Do you think we could purify them higher?” Eloise asked.

“Is that a good idea right now, Eloise?” Dirge responded. “Higher purity doesn’t always mean better or more suitable. Take gold, for example: sufficiently impure, it can be forged into jewelry and ornaments. Purified to the highest standard, and it’s fairly useless on its own. How about you experiment with that another time and we go with what you already have? Your problem isn’t the materials.”

Eloise nodded and Dirge saw that she was getting the point: she was second-guessing the process, down to the materials, when none of that was the problem. “I-I need a way to dictate the internal diagram. Normally I do it in wire.”

Dirge raised a palm, and a sphere of water spun into existence over it. “Roughly trace it in here and we can refine it once cast.”

Eloise blinked rapidly for a moment before she put a finger into the sphere and started the tracework. Dirge was cheating a bit outrageously here, as her finger movements were irrelevant to what he was tracing out inside. Since the forgesmith’s foremost surface thoughts were on the diagram, he merely pilfered and copied that and let her play with the water for a few minutes to mask that he’d already handled the work.

As she finished, Eloise pulled her hand out of the sphere and looked at it, noticing that not a single drop had clung to her. Then she looked inside the sphere and gasped. Suspended inside the sphere was a perfect rendition of the diagram she had in mind, all formed into a winding tubular pocket of air.

“Adequate?” Dirge asked his amazed pupil. “If so, I’ll go ahead and cast it.”

Eloise nodded vigorously. “That’s perfect! Let’s go ahead with that.”

Dirge levitated the metal ball that was the diagramming alloy and made it molten once again. He then poured the liquid metal into the ball and let it fill in the air pocket. He was a bit thankful right now that his host didn’t sweat, or else he might have shown signs of the exertion in that way by now; even with a peak Foundation Building cultivation base, this many layers of delicate work was taxing to maintain all at once.

Once the diagram had been filled, Dirge again froze the remaining alloy — given its sourcing from two swords worth, the excess was to be expected — and let the water ball evaporate, revealing the completed wire-like diagram.

There were various methods to enhancing essence conductance in artifacts, from the use of certain special materials to the engraving of runes to this method of using a lesser quantity of conductive alloy arranged in a form that would essentially form a spell when essence was injected into the weapon. With this method, the diagram would be at the core of the blade and wouldn’t be susceptible to external damage like runes could be, while also not being limited to the brute force application of a pure blade of some attuned material.

With a great sigh of relief, Eloise reached out and picked up the mass of wires and examined it from top to bottom. “This is amazing, Miss Sable! I didn’t even think you could do it like this.” She looked up from the object in her hands, her eyes brimming with unshed tears of joy. “Is this something I could learn?”

Dirge gave the girl a half smile. “Of course, Eloise, and it’ll be even better when you do it yourself because you’ll only have to trace it in your mind. Now if you can stop crying, there’s still a lot more work to be done here.”

Eloise gave her first laugh as she set down the diagram and wiped the tears from her dark cheeks. “Of course, Miss Sable.”

And so the pair continued working with the rest of the components and metals. Eloise’s confidence seemed to be restored, and soon she was chattering away openly as she offered her opinions on possible improvements. Dirge had a mountain of textual knowledge of the subject, but it wasn’t precisely collated and at his fingertips, and so he erred on the conservative side of things, but he knew that he’d made a new convert with his unconventional and effective methods. His new pupil had moved past trying to replicate her past success and was looking forward to the new things to learn and discover.

Finally they reached the stage of having something that looked like an assembled sword, still red-hot and radiated waves of heat as it floated above the conference room table. “Um, so how are we gonna quench that, Miss Sable?” Eloise asked with a trace of trepidation present in her eyes, perfectly understandable given her most recent failure.

Dirge chuckled. “I’ll handle that part for you this time, my dear,” he reassured his pupil, conjuring a sheet of liquid and rapidly sweeping it across the width of the blade. He simultaneously exerted control over the internal temperature; what looked like a flash quenching was a highly compressed instant in which he delicately manipulated the temperature of each component so that as they shrunk in the cooling they wouldn’t damage each other.

Dispersing the sheet of fluid, Dirge examined their handiwork. It was a golden blade that was kite-shaped, the center wider than the ends, its point narrower than it base, mounted on a hilt of silvery-white metal.

Eloise gulped as her again moist eyes reflected the blade. “Just some polishing and it should be ready for a test, Miss Sable.”

“Allow me,” Dirge said, smiling. He pointed a finger at the blade and an arc of lightning lashed out and connected with the blade, electricity visibly crackling over its surface for a moment. When he withdrew his finger — it was an unnecessary set of gestures, both pointing and retracting, but part of teaching was in the presentation — the blade and hilt had been polished to a shining finish. “Is that adequate?”

Eloise nodded. “May I?” she asked, motioning to the floating blade.

“Of course. It’s hardly a success until you’ve tested it,” Dirge replied.

Eloise grabbed the sword by the hilt as Dirge released its levitation. She stepped back from the table and gave it a couple of swings, nodding as she assessed the weapon’s balance. Then she held it up with the point directly pointing at the ceiling.

A blue flame burst out along the edge of the sword’s blade, and Eloise’s small smile turned into a wide grin as she let the flames play momentarily before snuffing out. “It’s perf–”

“Eloise!” Dirge barked. He hadn’t gone through this entire pain-in-the-ass process just to watch her backslide.

The young smith’s dark skin visibly flushed at the rebuke. “Sorry, Miss Sable. I meant to say it’s beautiful.”

“That’s better,” Dirge replied approvingly. “So then, does this sword have a name?”

Eloise’s smile returned. “It sure does, Miss Sable,” she announced. “You may think it silly of me, but it’s almost like the sword has spoken to me. Its name is Woerender.”