Our Dream
The barbecue joint was packed wall to wall. Tucked into a corner seat, Dohyeon and Byeongsu were working their way through the meat.
"What have you been scheming, making a man wait a whole month?"
"Try not to fall over. This is going to solve most of the problems that come with running a workshop."
Ever since the call about Byeongsu's failing health, Dohyeon still hadn't told him about obtaining the Black Iron Law. Byeongsu looked thoroughly fed up, and Dohyeon didn't care in the slightest. He was sure of himself.
"There'd better be something to show for draining a whole basin of my blood."
"Heh. Once you see it, you might offer your blood up on your own. Careful."
When Dohyeon had drawn that blood for the Detection Rune and the Designation Rune, his clumsy handling of the syringe had left Byeongsu's arm a mess of bruises.
"Yeah, yeah, I don't care. Just show me already. You made some kind of product, right? Making something well and selling something are two completely different things."
"All right. Here. Open it."
Yielding to the nagging, Dohyeon handed over a single, handsome box.
"Hoo. That box looks way too nice. Weren't low-rank hunters our target?"
"Why do you have to run your mouth?"
"Aren't you a little too sure of yourself?"
Dohyeon was unusually full of swagger, and Byeongsu's face crumpled at the sight of it.
Click.
"...A bracelet?"
"..."
He clearly hadn't expected jewelry. A flicker of surprise crossed his face, but his eyes stayed calm as he looked the Health Bracelet over.
"Mm-hm. Make sure you check it with Appraisal, too."
"Yeah, yeah."
It had been a while since Dohyeon had watched Byeongsu at his actual trade, but he wasn't nervous in the least.
Master Choi Gwangcheol acknowledged this, and he's an A-Rank craftsman. Go on. Try to find a flaw.
Leaving Dohyeon waiting, half hoping to be picked apart, Byeongsu examined the bracelet at his leisure.
Hm. A design I've never seen. From the way he's acting, he made it himself.
Fond of the kid or not, he had no intention of going easy.
Clean finish. Titanium? Harder than I expected.
After a pass over the outside, he turned to the inside. Four small plates were set into the inner band at even intervals, each engraved with a different rune, a hair-thin mana circuit linking them together.
He blinked.
Did I see that wrong?
It was an enchantment almost too fine to be inspecting in a barbecue joint. Byeongsu drew the bracelet up to his eyes.
One. Two. Three. Four.
He hadn't misread it. Four runes, interlocked through a single circuit.
His enchanting was always ridiculous, so that much I can swallow. But did that Dohyeon brat really make a bracelet that can hold this?
The space was tight. The runes interfered with one another. Shift a single circuit and the whole thing would warp. And yet the bracelet in front of him showed no such warp at all.
He built the bracelet this way from the start—so it could take the enchantment!
Dohyeon's offhand remark came back to him. Byeongsu slid a look his way.
"...You can actually make things?"
"Actually? An A-Rank master heaped praise on this."
It hadn't quite been heaped praise. Even so, the Health Bracelet was not a piece it would have been strange to praise that highly.
"...Appraisal."
Done with the exterior, Byeongsu used Appraisal on the bracelet at last.
"Hey, why is this B-Rank?! And what the hell is Blood Purification?"
It was exactly the reaction Dohyeon had been waiting for.
"Inside a person's blood vessels?! Are you out of your mind?!"
At a shout that amounted to a rave review, Dohyeon grinned and emptied his glass.
"Who needs a side dish."
"So let me get this straight. You learned Refining, and your Enchant went up to B-Rank. That's what you're telling me?"
"How many times are you going to ask? The rank went up after I finished the bracelet."
Byeongsu asked again anyway, and Dohyeon poked at the meat, bored with the whole thing.
"I just can't believe it. I can't."
He was in high spirits, though. He knocked his drink back with gusto.
"Man. Live long enough and you get gifts like this. Thanks, Dohyeon. Now I can drink without a worry in the world."
"Easy. Before I go tattling to your wife."
On Byeongsu's wrist, the Health Bracelet caught the light and glittered.
"Hey. You didn't make one of these for anybody else, did you?"
"I gave one to the instructor who lent me the practice room?"
Dohyeon said it as if it were nothing. Byeongsu's brow furrowed, then smoothed again.
"Well... one is probably fine. But just in case—no selling, and no gifts. You hear me?"
"I'm not a kid."
It was a rare stern look from Byeongsu, and Dohyeon nodded.
"There's no one else I'd give one to anyway, and they take so much work that selling them's awkward. And there's something more important than that."
A technique that governs the properties of matter, its transformations, and the principles by which form takes shape.
As the skill level rises, its power grows, and the inherited knowledge expands.
Dohyeon laid out for him how he had come by the Black Iron Law.
"A hammer shatters and hands you a skill. If it weren't for this bracelet, even I wouldn't believe it."
Craftsmen who worked accessories, like bracelets, and craftsmen who worked equipment were kept apart. The standard behind it was nothing special. Production skills simply each had a range of their own—weapons, armor, accessories. A narrow skill covered only one kind. A broad one might cover all three. Every skill's reach was different, and an object that fell outside that reach could not be given a rank at all, no matter how outstanding the craftsman.
"You've heard what the Black Iron Law does, so you know. I haven't found a limit on what I can make yet."
As he finished, he tapped a small object out of his pocket.
"Nail clippers?"
"Appraise them."
"No way... Appraisal."
Nail clippers forged from titanium alloy—light and sturdy.
Sharpness
Even thick toenails can be cut without any effort.
"It has a skill—no, it has a rank?!"
Byeongsu looked every bit as shaken as when he had appraised the Health Bracelet, and Dohyeon went on with a proud face.
"Before the enchantment, it was F-Rank."
"...What?"
"I granted it Sharpness, and it went up to E-Rank."
"Hold on."
Byeongsu's expression hardened strangely.
"It had a rank even before you enchanted it?"
"Yeah."
Ordinary everyday tools were not made to accept mana. They could not withstand a complex enchantment, and even a low-level one wore them out fast with prolonged use.
"On plain nail clippers?"
"Well, they're titanium."
Trivial or not, they were something he had made. Dohyeon did not seem to enjoy hearing them dismissed.
"...Making nail clippers out of titanium is one thing, but enchanting them? I thought you were taking classes. What have you actually been doing?"
"..."
While Seonggu and Jincheol had been swinging their hammers in earnest, Dohyeon—with nothing else to do—had tried his hand at nail clippers on a whim.
"They were small, and more complicated than they looked, so I made them for practice. I wasn't aiming for anything."
The whole time he worked, Seonggu and Jincheol had stared at him like he was some clueless brat. Dohyeon had simply wanted to make them.
"Hyung, that's not the point. Look. Nail clippers aren't a weapon, and they aren't armor, right?"
"...Anyone who used them as a weapon would be insane."
"Not an accessory either, right?"
"So what—you're going to make magic tools and sell them?"
Dohyeon kept stringing the questions along like a game of twenty questions, and Byeongsu squinted at him.
"Hyung. I don't think I want to make only equipment."
"Out of nowhere?"
"I realized it while I was making that."
Dohyeon pointed at Byeongsu's wrist.
"A bracelet that cleans out blood vessels."
He grinned.
"It was fucking fun."
"It's a blue ocean, I'll give you that... but is there even anything there you could call a market?"
Byeongsu rubbed his chin, sunk in thought, and soon let out a heavy sigh.
"If word gets out, they'll tear you limb from limb. I'm not joking. There's hardly a major corporation that hasn't tried researching magic tools."
"And none of them succeeded?"
Byeongsu shook his head.
"They succeeded. The unit cost just never worked. The effect was too weak, or it broke right away, or the production cost was insanely high."
And more often than not, all three came as a set.
"From what I've heard, they've all pulled out. But who knows. What happens if some green kid strolls into the market holding up a pair of nail clippers."
The words had an edge to them. Dohyeon nodded.
"If we ate that, we'd burst."
"You still want to do it?"
"..."
Byeongsu looked ready to help in earnest if he said yes. Dohyeon let out a short laugh.
"Not now... Let's try it once we've gotten bigger."
"So you do think things through."
Byeongsu looked genuinely startled. Dohyeon shrugged.
"And even if we sold them, frankly—who'd buy?"
"Heh. We'd be lucky not to get treated like snake-oil peddlers."
If they took the Health Bracelet out on the street and started hawking it tomorrow, people would take them for a cult, or a pyramid scheme.
"First we make a name as craftsmen."
"With hunter equipment?"
"Yeah. Weapons or armor. Somewhere people are already spending money."
Dohyeon held up three fingers.
"We make equipment, we repair it, and we take custom orders."
A fourth finger.
"We show them that what I make can be trusted."
And the last.
"Then we widen it. One thing at a time."
"Into magic tools, you mean."
"Right."
"Sounds romantic."
"You chasing a little romance too, hyung?"
Dohyeon thought of Master Choi Gwangcheol—gruff on the surface, quietly chasing a romance of his own.
"That instructor of yours knows a thing or two."
"Oh—hyung, I heard the Association's going to support me starting a business?"
"What? Why are you only telling me this now?!"
Midnight was drawing near, and they had drunk well past their share.
"Hang on... the papers I got are right here."
"Agh. Trying to read documents after drinking—my eyes are going."
The dream the two of them shared showed no sign of setting.