Secondary Profession (2)
Their daily routine was set.
Mornings were for martial training. Afternoons, each of them honed their assigned secondary profession. Evenings were free time.
In the evening, whether someone wanted personal drills, time on the community boards, or plain rest, no one interfered. Focus hard in the hours that were scheduled; rest completely when it was time to rest. Over the long haul, that was the path that raised efficiency the most.
Everything outside those free hours, though, was mandatory.
That afternoon, Hyun Si-woon claimed a decent patch of ground and tried out the Low-Grade Blacksmith Crafting Kit.
Fwoom!
A modest plume of smoke rose, and a crude forge popped into existence—a furnace breathing hot air, a heavy anvil, and a tool rack hung with hammers and tongs of every size. Small and rough, but it had everything a smithy needed.
Weirdly cool.
Seeing the mini forge from the Tower of Despair take real form was something else. The other members were the same. They spaced themselves out around the edge of the village—a sewing workshop, an alchemy lab, a carpentry shed, a jewelry bench, an open-air kitchen. The grand grind had officially begun.
— Tch. Fools.
Ha-wol stood with her arms folded, watching the scene with open scorn. She had been throwing cold looks their way since earlier.
— This lady warned you. It will do you no good. Spend that time on martial training instead.
You only think it's useless because you tried a few times and quit.
— How many times must I say it is not so! Even among the Rankers this lady knew, there were those who took that tedious grind seriously. Every last one of them gave up in the end. You come to understand it eventually—the rewards are meager, the process is viciously hard, and further down the road the efficiency collapses to nothing!
See? You're still saying they all quit. They never finished.
— …Are you even listening to this lady?
I hear you. But nothing in the Tower of Despair is meaningless.
Si-woon fixed her with that stubborn, relentless look of his. The harder and more painful something was, the greater the reward waiting at the end. That was the Tower of Despair's charm.
If anything, this is perfect.
A smile touched the corner of his mouth. Ha-wol's warning didn't feel like a threat—it felt like confirmation.
Good thing not just anyone can do it.
— Do you truly believe those countless Rankers quit because their will was weaker than yours? They were seekers who devoted their entire lives to a single path.
I know. They just couldn't get interested in this kind of simple, brutal repetition.
There was something Ha-wol didn't know—the racial trait of the Korean gamers who had raised Si-woon. A nation of people who would kill the same monster hundreds of thousands of times for a single item, who would spend years of their lives hunting on loop with only sleep as a break just to keep a ranking. Ha-wol's idea of grinding was a noble process for raising sword mastery or grasping enlightenment. For them? The game grind itself was sacred. Honestly, it was closer to mania than nobility.
Besides…
Earlier, hadn't she been the one telling him to pick blacksmith?
— Ahem. That was merely a manner of speaking. Go on, then—work hard. This lady will watch closely to see exactly when you quit.
"Yeah, yeah. Let's see how this goes~."
Si-woon hummed under his breath as he unrolled the blueprint. It was a mess—parts dimensions, material ratios, heating temperatures, hammer angles, all logged in numbers.
Complicated, sure.
But it didn't look impossible.
First things first—a Sturdy Iron Ingot.
Unfortunately, ingots weren't a monster drop. The drop was iron ore; you had to refine pure molten iron out of it through smelting. He had ore in abundance—a thousand pieces just in the inventory he had brought back.
So how do I actually smelt this?
Unhelpful as ever. In the game you tossed it in the furnace, hit it a few times, and it happened automatically. Reality apparently wanted him to do it by hand.
Just try it.
He scooped a few chunks of iron ore into a crucible and shoved it into the furnace flames.
Whoosh!
Orange fire swallowed the crucible and roared. Time passed. The ore only glowed cherry-red; it showed no sign of melting.
I was supposed to melt it… Sylphe, Salamander.
Whoosh! Fwooom!
— Kyarr?
A handsome flame lizard and a fairy-like Sylphe appeared.
Work the bellows and melt this for me.
With the spirits' help, the process shortened dramatically. The fire blazed, the temperature spiked in an instant, and the ore slowly dissolved into molten iron.
"Nice!"
Si-woon carefully lifted the crucible with tongs and poured the lava-hot mass into the ingot mold that came with the kit.
Hisssss!
Acrid smoke rose as the metal cooled and took shape. A short while later he pulled from the mold something that looked like a decent rectangular chunk of iron.
But the moment he set it down—
Clunk.
—it failed under its own weight and shattered with a dry crack into several pieces. The surface was rough; the break was riddled with bubble holes.
Failed to craft Sturdy Iron Ingot.
"Damn."
Si-woon kicked the failure aside without a word.
— Pffft…!
Ha-wol clapped a hand over her mouth, laughing—so Si-woon stuffed the Formless Sword straight into his inventory. For the duration of the work, Ha-wol was sealed.
Again.
He hadn't expected to get it right the first time. He kept repeating the process—raising the heat, adjusting the cooling time. The result never changed.
Failed to craft Sturdy Iron Ingot.
Failed to craft Sturdy Iron Ingot.
Ten times out of ten, he got the same crumbly lump of metal.
So you're not going to hand it over easy, huh?
It wasn't as simple as melt-and-set. Something was missing—and the problem was he didn't know what. Classic Tower of Despair unhelpfulness.
"Hah."
He paused the hammering and thought. When this camp had first been founded, some of the residents had clearly had trades—farmers, carpenters… and a faint memory of one old man.
There was a smithy.
A small forge where the villagers used to repair farm tools. Si-woon headed straight for it.
"Heavens! What brings our young hero all the way out here?"
A white-haired old man greeted him. From a few words with the villagers, Si-woon gathered the man was a fourth-generation blacksmith. The moment he heard that, his spirits soared. He asked at once.
"Hmm?"
The old man took the failure Si-woon held out and tapped it with a small hammer. A dull, lifeless sound answered.
"This here's just iron dung. Iron dung."
"Iron dung?"
"You just melted the ore and poured it, didn't you? No wonder you got a rock instead of iron. What about all the impurities inside?"
"Please explain it to me, sir."
"Iron, you see—it's mixed up with dirt and stone from the start. Melt it as-is and all that junk stays in, so of course it comes out crumbly. You've got to pull those impurities out before it becomes real iron."
Old Man Kang pointed at the furnace.
"When you melt the ore, throw in some powdered limestone or crushed seashell. Those grab onto the junk and float it up to the top. Easy enough to skim off then."
Si-woon's eyes lit up.
"Could you show me once?"
"Hmm, let's see. I only ever watched my grandfather do it a few times as a boy, so I can't promise it'll come out right…"
A modern smithy bought its iron; it didn't pull metal from ore. But the old man couldn't ignore the light in Si-woon's eyes—especially not when this was the benefactor who had saved the village from Ma Gang-il's tyranny.
"Watch closely, then."
He layered iron ore and charcoal in the crucible, then sprinkled in a handful of white powder from beside him.
"That's limestone powder. Put it in when you melt the ore and the stuff grabs every bit of dirt and dust and floats it right up—that's the idea."
Whoosh!
The old man worked a bellows that looked decades old, and with each whoosh, whoosh the furnace fire roared higher. Proper bellows work, no spirits required.
Amazing.
A smile settled on Si-woon's face. He was properly hooked on the process now.
Before long a black layer of foam rose over the molten iron. The old man skimmed it off with a long rod.
"But that's not the end of it. What you get this way is sponge iron—still full of leftovers, still soft and crumbly."
The purity already felt different. The old man poured the skimmed metal into a small pit in the ground and let it harden into a rough lump.
"The real work starts now. Iron only becomes iron when you beat it."
With tongs he lifted the still-glowing sponge iron and put it back in the furnace. The metal heated quickly; he watched its color and adjusted the bellows.
"You don't just swing down. You have to listen to what the iron is saying. Too cold and it cracks; too hot and it goes soft and mushy. When it takes on a red like the evening sunset—that's when the iron is soft enough and still strong enough to take the force."
At the perfect temperature he pulled the iron free and set it on the anvil. The hammer in his hand began to move with a rhythm.
Clang! Clang!
Not loud, but precise. Each strike rang clear and deep, and from the sponge-like surface of the iron, dark-red impurities sprayed out like sparks in every direction.
"See? You beat it over and over like this, drive out every last bit of junk left inside, straighten the grain of the metal—only then does it become something worth using."
He hammered, returned it to the fire, hammered again. Through the cycle the crumbly lump grew denser, smaller, harder. When he finally stopped, what lay before him was only palm-sized, but heavy, even-textured—a lump that could honestly be called iron.
Only then did Si-woon truly understand what Ha-wol had been talking about.
Yeah. This is going to be brutal.
And yet it was strange. Why was it that the harder it looked, the more excited he felt?
Back at his own workspace, Si-woon started again.
Sunset-red, he said.
He ran the same smelting process as before and produced a rough lump of sponge iron. He returned it to the furnace and waited for the temperature Old Man Kang had described. The moment the iron glowed with the clear red of evening light, he pulled it out and set it on the anvil.
Clang, clang!
He began to hammer—not blindly. He put the focus of Moon Point into the hammer's tip and let the fluidity of Moon Line follow the grain of the metal.
Ha-wol said it once.
All laws return to one. Every principle in the world ultimately leads back to a single source. Swinging a sword, writing with a brush, even beating iron with a hammer—at their essence, none of them are different.
Martial arts and forging technique fell into a strange harmony.
How much time passed?
"Hah."
A smooth, heavy iron ingot had been born. Si-woon tapped the finished piece lightly with a small hammer.
Ting—!
A clear, pure note, like glass, rang through the smithy.
Successfully crafted Sturdy Iron Ingot.
"Hell yeah."
He savored the moment—but all he had finished was a single material for a low-grade hammer.