The Path a Descendant of Fire Walks

And so several days slipped by.

By day I heated and quenched; by night I collapsed face-first into Dolores's special chilled bread. Translucent, soft red silk piled up day after day—and my living conditions improved right along with it. Meals were delivered morning, noon, and night. I no longer slept only after dark, either; Dolores forcibly put me to bed whenever she felt like it, so naps became part of the routine. She'd claimed she only came when I was tired… yet somehow she just showed up at any hour and pulled me into her arms.

Then one day, when she arrived far too early and I fixed her with a sulky look, she flustered and pulled a sheet of paper from her robes.

"I came to show you the response to Lionel's gloves."

Apparently she'd been saving it in case I got moody. The final bid: one hundred seventy thousand gold. One point seven billion won.

"Guilds, knight orders, climbing parties, noble houses—as starter equipment for early climbers, they may well be the finest humanity has produced… so the price came out rather high."

"Whoa."

When I marveled, Dolores covered her mouth and asked, "Pfft. Do you want to sell them?"

"Hmm…"

I rubbed my chin, thinking it over.

"No."

There would be better uses for them. I'd accidentally become an auction-house legend, but I still didn't want to sell.

Time kept moving regardless. And before I knew it—

"Yuna. Mast. You ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠know, a mast?"

I tugged the corner of my mouth up as I peeled the final layer from the ore. Almost nothing left now. The fist-sized fire ore had dwindled until only a red glass bead the size of an ant remained—its internal mana compressed into a single point. This one was destined to be the topping. The final jewel garnish to be sprinkled over the oversocks.

"Let's go."

It was time to return to being a Sun Dwarf. Precious translucent crimson silks lay heaped in soft mounds. Now I had to turn them into thermal oversocks.

But something snagged at me about simply copying the recipe for the apprentice thermal oversocks as written.

"Ugh, this is hideous…"

Whether they'd designed them to be stuffed inside bulky shoes or not, there wasn't a shred of aesthetic sense anywhere. Crude. Clunky. Function and nothing else. Sure, swapping the materials alone would improve them in several directions—but make Lady Dolores wear something like this?

Absolutely not.

"Isn't there anything better…?"

The manual I was reading was a beginner's text for apprentice blacksmiths. Sticking to the fundamentals would have been enough. But I wanted to aim higher.

[I've been looking… but ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠I can't find anything like an advanced course.]

"Yeah?"

That was a little strange.

I was flipping through the manual at random when—

"……?"

—on the very last page of the apprentice manual, tucked in a corner, a short passage was written.

"……This."

The moment I saw it, I understood exactly what it meant. If you had melted the theory into your mind and tempered the fundamentals into your body—if you could put the Sun Dwarves' detail and principle into practice at every stage of the process—then why stand forever on a recipe someone else had written for apprentice blacksmiths?

"………."

With a soft shff, I spread the red silks I'd drawn out over the past several days across the workbench.

Keep the detail. Engrave the fundamentals and the principles into your flesh. But the path—I cut that myself.

Truth be told, I was a complete outsider when it came to aesthetics. And when the subject was clothing rather than some subculture gacha-game heroine, even more so. But I wasn't worried.

"Yuna. What's the prettiest stocking design you can think of?"

[Hweh?! Yuna's taste?]

Her energy spiked instantly. Technically I wasn't asking for Yuna's personal taste so much as something aesthetically excellent—but they'd probably be about the same. If you lack an eye for beauty, you ask someone who has one. And Yuna's aesthetic sense could honestly pass for humanity's strongest. She'd absorbed every fashion trend that had ever existed across the globe and held all that information at once. A sea of data, basically.

[Hmm… well, you know?]

I waited a moment.

[I think beautiful stockings share three common elements.]

[First, transparency. Second, the ankle line. Third—whether guys like them.]

"What—what are you even saying right now."

[I'm serious! I didn't make this up. People actually say this.]

Is that real? I flinched for a second. Then I opened the stocking fabrication process Yuna had sent over—how you would do it without machines—and lost the ability to speak.

"…So I have to do this by hand."

An endless repetition of needle and cloth. Looking back, it was almost funny. Because I was a blacksmith, I'd only ever pictured heating and hammering metal. You know—the whole burly-forearms image. But a blacksmith, it turned out, had to take responsibility for something a little deeper than that. Counting stitches the size of needle eyes through the night.

"Do it. I can do it."

Yeah. Fuck it. Nothing's impossible.

And so… my first hell began.

I don't want to describe every step in detail. Even I went hazy just thinking about it. One stitch. Another stitch. Unravel the translucent silk into thread and catch it on the needle's tip. Then knit a cylinder upward. The one genuine mercy was that the cloth tore cleanly along the grain and unraveled into usable thread.

"Ah, dammit."

The moment I thought I was making progress, the grain would shift and I'd have to unravel it all over again. I kept ripping it out to recreate the perfect angle of Dolores's heel. My eyes grew bleary… the sensation in my fingertips crumbled.

Tok. Tok.

I stopped counting how many nights had passed. It was harder than any work I'd done so far—and the process was so brutally honest that I couldn't even entertain the idea of skipping a step.

"Is there a knitting machine?! A knitting machine?!"

[Nope…]

Sadly, no machine existed to cast the stitches for me.

"I'm going into full concentration mode—so no matter what happens, do not talk to me, got it, Yuna?"

[Okay…….]

"Am I being a little intense?"

[A little…]

"Yeah, love you too."

And like that—two weeks went by.

"Heh heh."

The sly mage, Isabella.

"You dare fling me all the way to the border?"

Dolores's forced-return magic had hurled her truly, truly absurdly far away. She'd spent a long while swallowing her anger in private—and at last, she had managed to come back. Being softhearted by nature, taking her frustration out on anyone else had been impossible. She even succeeded in slipping stealthily, sneakily into the mansion.

Well. She'd gotten in, yes. But honestly, she was rattled.

"……."

From her perspective, Dolores was still someone terrifying when angry. She'd waited nearby, watched her leave on an outing, and darted inside in an instant. The boundary wards were about twenty times fiercer than before. Piercing them had drained a considerable amount of mental strength.

"Ugh. Scary woman."

She just wanted a quick look at Lionel's face and then she'd go. While cooling off, she'd even refined her opening a little. What kind of evaluation would he give her? It felt rather like presenting a newly crafted spell to an old master and waiting for the critique.

The moment she stepped into the mansion, what met her eyes was this:

"Eek…."

Magical embroidery carved into the empty air of the mansion. Lettering inscribed throughout the estate so that only a mage of her caliber would be able to read it—prepared in case anyone breached the boundary wards.

"She's genuinely terrifying… Still, at least she called me a dear friend. I'll take it."

She was clicking her tongue and trembling her way across the mansion when—

WAAAAAAAH!

"……?"

From far off toward the garden, from the little wooden cabin, a howl rang out. A man's voice, but quite young. Anyone could tell who that was.

"Lionel!"

Isabella sprinted that way in an instant. Ordinarily she would have loathed even a single blade of grass clinging to her skirt—but in this moment she hiked the hem high in both hands and went.

Todododo.

She flung open the workshop door.

"……?"

And the scene that greeted her inside. She'd expected an ordinary storage shed. What met her eyes instead was a forge, ore, hammers, a cooling bath—and at a side table, an extremely pretty, no, an insanely pretty pair of stockings, being stitched one careful stitch at a time by—

"Lionel?!"

In that instant, Isabella's thoughts accelerated. Scattered fragments locked into a single line.

"You… you really… the gloves…?"

The corner of her mouth began to climb. She let go of the skirts she'd been clutching and—

Kong kong kong!

—bounced around the workshop in little hops. If this was true, the entire story changed. Even the chess piece alone had been that valuable. If ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠those gloves truly belonged to Lionel—

Tak!

Isabella thrust a finger straight at him with all her might.

"Lionel—you will be my disciple!"

Even Dolores's murder threats were worth risking for this. And so, standing proudly before her bold declaration, Lionel said:

"……I want to die."

"……?"

He expressed his will to live.

"Sh… ah, she told me not to swear… yabal…."

"……Huh? Me…?"

He didn't even glance her way. Every last nerve was poured into casting the next stitch of the stocking.

"Lionel…?"

"……."

"Um, Lionel… disciple…."

She called a few more times, but Lionel never answered. About ten minutes passed. Over the years she had received countless offers to take someone as a disciple. People had begged her—please, just teach me one scrap of knowledge—until she was sick of the love calls. And yet Isabella herself had never once extended her hand first. That precious first offer of hers—

"Hiiing…."

The finger she'd thrust out lost its destination and drooped.

"You're so mean…."

In the end, Isabella hung her head and trudged out of the workshop. And then—

"Lady Isabella?!"

Sebas, crossing the garden, spotted her and rushed over in shock.

"W-whatever brings you all the way here…! When did you—"

"…I'm going home."

"Pardon…?"

"I just wanna go…."

Isabella didn't even answer the head butler's questions. She sniffled, whimpered softly… and left the mansion alone.

Two weeks had passed.

My body was screaming. But today, I wasn't irritable.

"Yuna? Morning."

Because truly—only one last stitch remained.

[……Oppa, I have so much to say to you.]

"Yeah, after I finish this."

I cast the final stitch. And then—

"Done!!!!"

At last, every scrap of cloth had been worked into a single pair of oversocks—stockings. From toe to ankle, the vivid red grain flowed like water; a gentle heat shimmered across the finely knit surface. Hold them to the light and the interior showed through translucent; tilt the angle and the sheen came alive again.

It shouldn't have taken this long, honestly. I'd added a feature. Fold them and they became socks; stretch them out and they became stockings. Cramming in that deranged function had inevitably eaten more time. Of course, every recipe had been pulled straight out of Yuna's head.

And on the side table—the last remaining core of the fire ore, a scarlet bead, waited for the final step.

"…Pretty."

The fire ore, shrunk to its absolute limit. All I had to do was set it onto the stockings. My hands were shaking. After wringing every ounce of strength out of myself for two straight weeks, of course they were.

Tok.

With trembling fingertips, I rested the bead at the end of the stocking. The cloth surfaces peeled free by Thermal Shock Peel rushed toward it as if finding their way home—slipping, sliding, drawn into the glass bead. Strand by strand, the red threads gently wound around the jewel and wove themselves in.

Charrnrrrk…

And before long, cloth and bead locked together without a single gap, as if they had always been one.

"……Ha."

Now the real final process. I picked up the finished stockings and stepped out of the workshop.

"……."

It was hard to breathe. For this crafting—for the first time—I had not referenced a Dwarven recipe. I had taken only the detail I'd learned from them into my hands, set the blade, and cast the stitches. Detail upon detail upon detail, in my own way alone. In the spirit of the Dwarves, I had walked my own path.

Which raised a question. Had I truly been a Sun Dwarf? Would they acknowledge this equipment?

"……."

In the very center of the garden, where the sunlight fell strongest, I lifted the stockings in both hands and raised them toward the empty air. I squeezed my eyes shut.

One minute. Two minutes. Time passed. Ordinarily a mark would have been engraved before long. But even after several minutes… not a single sound came.

"……So it didn't work."

I nodded. Fine. I'd just do it again. Gently coaxing my own heart, I opened my eyes. And then—

"……."

—before me, a rectangular tablet blazing with golden light was floating in the air. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠And at its center, a familiar emblem was inscribed. The Apprentice Blacksmith mark of a Descendant of Fire. The shape of a sun with eight tongues of flame radiating outward. According to the description, the first seal carved by one who forges the sun.

"……."

As if entranced, I stretched out a finger. And then—

Ssssss…

—along the tip of my index finger, a golden thread began to draw a trajectory through the air. Light flowed exactly as my fingertip moved.

…No way.

A name rose naturally in my mind. Lionel. Crossing the sun emblem on the tablet, I slowly drew a stroke beneath it.

L.

The first letter of my name.

Chijijijijik—!

In that instant, golden light erupted from the toe of the finished stockings. The mark I had just drawn—the sun, and the L engraved beneath it—settled onto the crimson silk, brimming with gold, etched clear and sharp.

My first 2-star piece of equipment. And written beneath it: Official Blacksmith L. I stared up at the words floating in the air for a long time. Along with the joy of being recognized as a Descendant of Fire, I raised both hands and clenched my fists—then, absently, my gaze fell on my own hands.

"What a mess."

Scraped all over. Needle pricks everywhere. Calluses layered on top of calluses. Didn't feel all that bad, though. I had nothing to be ashamed of.

I tugged the corner of my mouth up and gripped the stockings.

Dolores. For two weeks she had walked the mansion on frozen feet. For two weeks she had lost sleep over someone, and more than once wet the corners of her eyes trying to put that someone to bed.

To that person—I intended to give spring.