A Different Weight Class
Ability grows with the skill's level, and inherited knowledge expands.
"It's really there."
Fresh from washing his hands, Dohyeon stepped out of the restroom, stared blankly at the unfamiliar lines that had appeared along the bottom of his status window, and muttered.
"A level...? Skills like this exist?"
Going by the description alone, a level seemed to sit where a rank sat on an ordinary skill. It was common knowledge among the Awakened that if you used a skill, or bent it, past the limits of its rank, the rank itself would rise. For hunters and craftsmen of long years, or those overflowing with talent, he had heard it wasn't frequent—but it did come around, from time to time.
"Still. Raising a level looks easier than raising a rank."
A status window usually offered nothing but a skill's basic information. Which meant that growing in ability as the level rose, and expanding the inherited knowledge along with it, was no hidden trick. It was simply how Black Iron Rule worked.
"Lucky me. Until now the only skill I ever earned on my own was Appraisal, and a Refining-type skill just turns up like this."
Appraisal was what he had won by staring at equipment until his eyes nearly fell out of his head and laying enchantments over it. This time he had done nothing of the sort, and a skill had appeared all the same.
"Heh. If Byeongsu found out, he'd keel right over."
His goal had been to obtain a Refining skill by the time he finished the course. He had gone and gotten one on the first day. Dohyeon glanced at the hammer he had, without quite meaning to, carried off with him.
"Did someone seal the ability to grant an ability inside the hammer? How does that even work?"
The System had called that old, shabby hammer an Inheritance Medium. It was not chance, and it was not a miracle, that had placed the ability to grant an ability inside it. Someone had intended it. Someone had bestowed that power on the hammer deliberately.
"If I grow this skill... could I do the same?"
The thought that he might one day wield that mysterious power set Dohyeon's heart pounding.
He hurried back to his station, looked at the iron billet gone cold, and shook his head.
Seeing it like this, I finally feel how absurd a skill Black Iron Rule is.
Before he had it, he had thought his hammering decent enough. Looking now, the billet was a sorry sight.
The hammer marks are all different depths. I hit it with nothing but strength, and one side's already warped.
Dohyeon shoved the billet back into the forge.
Before Black Iron Rule, the forge-light had been nothing but a soft red, and it had simply looked pretty. The scene was the same, and it did not look the same at all. He could see how far the billet had come to a red heat, the warmth sliding across its surface, the faint difference in color between the edges and the heart.
Take it out.
"Take it out."
Dohyeon flinched. He had been lifting the tongs, watching the billet flush orange, when that heavy voice caught him off guard.
"...Yes, sir."
The timing matched. So the knowledge from Black Iron Rule is the real thing.
He drew the billet in a natural motion and set it on the anvil, and Master Choi Gwangcheol's head tipped at a crooked angle.
"Your movements are natural, unlike before. No... they are becoming natural."
"Sir?"
"The iron will go cold. Strike. Quickly."
Interest seemed to have caught him. Master Choi Gwangcheol took a place at Dohyeon's side.
Clang—! Clang—!
Different from before.
Clang—! He had barely swung, and already the motion was settling into his body, the hammer ringing in an even pulse. Exhilaration rushed up through him.
I could do this all day!
"Stop."
One last noisy clang of steel, and Dohyeon's hammering ceased.
"Why..."
He looked up, reproach in his eyes, but Master Choi Gwangcheol went on with that stern face peculiar to him.
"You have learned a skill of the Refining line, I see."
"...I got lucky."
He had committed no crime, and still Dohyeon found his eyes sliding away.
"I have no mind to ask the skill's name."
"A man who holds a crafting skill learns the related techniques quickly."
Worried the boy might take this for an interrogation, Master Choi Gwangcheol spoke at a length unlike him.
"Yes. It's helped me a great deal. More than I expected."
"You, however, are rather extreme."
"I was watching even before your hammer split."
Master Choi Gwangcheol looked down at Dohyeon's hammer.
"You were not skilled from the start. And yet you do not repeat the same mistake."
Dohyeon said nothing.
"Once wrong, you correct it at once. What you got wrong, you do not get wrong again."
Master Choi Gwangcheol's eyes narrowed.
"It seems you have obtained something rather fine."
He went on, giving the papers in his hand a shake.
"Well. An assistant manager of Cheongeun Workshop—it would not be strange if you had come prepared."
"Yes... I did prepare a little."
He had no particular wish to hide what Black Iron Rule could do. There also seemed no need to go out of his way and correct the master's misunderstanding.
"Then we move on to the next task."
"Only me, sir?"
The other trainees were still at their straight-strike drills, unchanged.
"Only two of you. You, and that third son of Geumha Workshop."
Dohyeon glanced toward Baek Jincheol's station. Jincheol was hammering a billet, drawing it out long.
"Striking the same place over and over is training meant to teach you to hold the hammer's path, and its force, steady."
The billet had cooled before anyone quite noticed. Setting it back into the forge, Master Choi Gwangcheol began to explain.
"Perhaps because you gained a skill, the time you took to grow accustomed to the hammer was abnormal."
"...Thank you?"
"Even so, the aim of the lesson has been met. We have no choice but to proceed."
When the billet began to glow orange, Master Choi Gwangcheol moved it up onto the anvil.
"Draw this iron out to twice its original length."
"I just have to stretch it long?"
The instruction had been vague, and so Dohyeon asked.
"I will show you."
A hammer was in Master Choi Gwangcheol's hand before Dohyeon quite saw it get there, and it came down on the billet, ripe and red.
Clang—! Clang—!
His stance holds steady, and still it shifts—fluid. He matched every blow to the condition of each part of the billet, and the sight reached Dohyeon like a feat no ordinary hands could manage.
Knowing a thing, and seeing it with your own eyes, are nothing alike.
Was it the gap between knowledge poured into him and knowledge his own eyes confirmed? He knew the posture and the knack in his head. Watching them happen was another feeling entirely.
The length is growing, and the thickness is coming down even, through the whole of it. Let a thing grow longer, and it naturally grows thin. But Master Choi Gwangcheol's billet never caved on one side only, never spread. From the first inch to the last it stayed even—an exacting distribution of force, a delicate control. Impressive work with a hammer.
"Hm. Now you try."
The billet, drawn out to more than twice its length, was set aside, and Dohyeon fed a fresh one into the forge.
Better than only knowing. Better than merely watching. Doing it myself will be better still.
The feeling came to him then. He could sense what it would take to raise the level of Black Iron Rule.
The first day of the inaugural session of the Government-Funded Crafter Training Program came to a quiet close.
Master Choi Gwangcheol, the other instructors, and an administrative officer from the Association had gathered in one place to talk over the opening day of lectures.
"The theoretical portions certainly didn't seem to hold much interest."
Instructor Kim Cheolhyeon, who taught Introduction to Hunter Equipment Studies, had spoken, and the instructor seated beside him nodded.
"They all came expecting the practical work, after all. Wouldn't it be all right to cut back the theory and add more hands-on time?"
That was Instructor Oh Cheollyong, in charge of Monster Material Processing Practice. Across from him, the Association officer shook his head.
"The syllabus has already been filed, so revisions would be difficult. Better, I think, to expand the self-study hours left to the instructors' discretion, and encourage practical work that way."
They talked through feedback and improvements for the first lectures, and somewhere in it the subject drifted, naturally, toward the trainees.
"The ones who stood out would be Trainee Baek Jincheol of Geumha Workshop, and Trainee Lee Dohyeon of Cheongeun Workshop."
As it happened, both of them had come out of major workshops.
"Trainee Baek Jincheol is a B-rank craftsman in his own right, so he hardly needs mentioning. And Trainee Lee Dohyeon's passion was remarkable."
Instructor Kim Cheolhyeon said it with a pleased smile, and Instructor Oh Cheollyong's gaze turned to Master Choi Gwangcheol.
"Master. You conducted the Equipment Crafting Basics practical today, didn't you? Were there any trainees who stood out?"
At Instructor Oh Cheollyong's question, Master Choi Gwangcheol thought a moment before he spoke.
"...There was a trainee who had learned a skill related to Refining."
"Ah. That would be Trainee Baek Jincheol. You mean the young man, yes?"
The Association officer kindly offered an explanation.
"The third son of Geumha Workshop. I heard he applied because he wanted to learn a thing or two from you, Master."
"This old man knows that boy as well. I am speaking of another young man."
"It looked to me as though he learned it in the course of today's training."
"...Today?"
Where Master Choi Gwangcheol was concerned—the most senior man in the industry—the two instructors believed what they were told without question. Even they, however, found what he had just said difficult to credit.
"Is such a thing possible?"
"The young man I mean was Trainee Lee Dohyeon, of Cheongeun Workshop."
"Trainee Lee Dohyeon—you mean the one who came up as an enchanter?"
"Watching him today, he learned quickly. I asked, and he said he had acquired a skill related to Refining."
At Master Choi Gwangcheol's words, interest lit in both instructors' eyes.
"An enchanter, learning a skill related to Refining..."
"Could Cheongeun Workshop have a method for obtaining skills related to Refining?"
"If they had, it would have been a lifetime contract. Not a resignation."
Master Choi Gwangcheol did not seem interested in the means by which Dohyeon had gained the skill.
"Even so. I can tell he did not come here lightly."
The first day of the inaugural session of the Government-Funded Crafter Training Program.
Lee Dohyeon tore away the name tag that had branded him a man of Cheongeun Workshop.