The First Commission

The man introduced himself as Park Doyun.

A D-class hunter who had awakened half a year ago.

He said he had obtained the sword a few days earlier from a Tower reward chest.

"It was fine when it was appraised."

Doyun looked down at the sword snapped cleanly in two.

"They told me it was a weapon with high mana conductivity. But after three swings, it broke."

He held out his phone.

The screen still showed the appraisal information from when the sword had been evaluated.

I hated the name from the start.

They had no idea what the material even was, so they named it after the color and the shape.

A system that put out something like this as an "appraisal" had clearly never met a real craftsman.

"Only three times?"

"Yes. I didn't even hit a monster with it. I was just swinging it through the air at the training grounds when it ended up like this."

That wasn't a sword.

It was a stick you could use three times.

I picked up the broken blade.

Grandfather startled and grabbed my wrist.

"Ihyeon, you'll cut your hand."

"The edge isn't even sharpened."

"Still, put gloves on first."

He pulled work gloves over my hands himself.

Doyun's eyes narrowed.

"Does your granddaughter know how to look at swords?"

"Our Ihyeon has a pretty good eye."

Grandfather answered as if it were nothing.

It already felt a little late to brush it off with "a good eye."

I examined the cross-section of the blade as if I knew nothing about it.

A silver-gray metal with a faint blue sheen.

Crystal grains that would glitter like stardust once they held heat.

Hoeseongcheol.

It had been a rare metal even in my previous life.

Light, hard, and excellent at conducting mana.

If it had been made properly, it would never have snapped after three swings through empty air.

If it had been made properly.

"Did the bastard who made this ever even see a sword?"

"Pardon?"

Doyun asked back.

Grandfather laid a hand on my shoulder.

"Ihyeon. Speak nicely in front of a customer."

"…Has the person who made this ever seen a sword before?"

I switched to polite speech, but the content didn't get much prettier.

I turned the blade sideways.

The problem was easy to find.

The mana channel that should have run straight down the center of the blade took a sudden turn right before the hilt.

And not just once.

To create some uselessly flashy pattern, it had been twisted seven times.

The exact spot where the sword had broken was the third corner of those turns.

"Why did they bend the mana channel here?"

I couldn't understand it.

"They said they were going to dig a waterway and then punched a hole straight through the middle of a pillar."

"What does that mean?"

"It means this spot got weak."

Doyun looked back and forth between me and the sword.

"There was nothing like that in the appraisal results."

Apparently appraisals didn't reveal the maker's conscience either.

The more I looked at the sword, the more of a spectacle it became.

The thickness of the blade was different on the left and right.

They had crammed far more metal than necessary into the tip.

A fist-sized ornament hung from the end of the hilt.

That ornament was made entirely of Hoeseongcheol as well.

They had used more of the precious metal on decoration than on the actual sword.

"And why is this so heavy?"

"I was told the ornament was for balancing the weight."

"They made the front heavy and then hung something even heavier on the back."

Putting a rock on each side of a scale doesn't make it lighter.

The balance might even out.

The user's arm would fall off first, though.

"Did they make this sword so they could stand it in a display case and pray to it or something?"

"Is it that much of a mess?"

"It's so bad I almost feel sorry for the mess itself."

Doyun's face darkened.

Maybe I had been a little too harsh.

"Have you taken it to other workshops?"

"I went to three places."

"What did they say?"

"They said it was an unknown metal from the Tower, so they wanted twenty million won just for the repair. And even then they couldn't guarantee success."

That wasn't an amount a D-class hunter who had only been awakened for half a year could casually afford.

"So you came all the way to a closed-down ironworks?"

"The appraisal value came out to thirty million, so I couldn't just throw it away. I heard this place used to work with special alloys, so I came on the off chance."

For Hoeseongcheol, that kind of appraisal value made sense.

It wasn't wrong to say there were only a handful of such weapons in the country.

Even in my previous life, there couldn't have been many pieces that wasted this much Hoeseongcheol.

I hadn't been too harsh.

I could ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠have cursed more.

Grandfather set the sword down.

His eyes belonged to a man who knew better than to casually handle a metal he had never seen before.

"Ihyeon, can you fix it?"

"Yeah."

Doyun looked at us with a puzzled expression.

"You're asking your granddaughter?"

"Her eye for metal is better than mine."

"But the repair will still be done by you, boss, right?"

Grandfather didn't answer right away.

He looked at me once, then examined the broken sword again.

"Our ironworks will take full responsibility and fix it for you."

It wasn't a lie.

Doyun seemed to take that as meaning Grandfather would fix it himself.

His stiff expression eased a little.

"But we can't restore it to its original form."

"Why not?"

"Because the original form was wrong to begin with."

I pointed at the huge ornament on the end of the hilt.

"I'm going to cut this off and use it on the broken part."

To join Hoeseongcheol, you needed more of the same Hoeseongcheol.

Fortunately, the maker had wasted the precious metal on decoration.

Incompetence was finally useful for once.

"If the ornament is gone, won't the rank drop?"

"You're not seriously saying a sword's rank is decided by how big its decorations are, are you?"

"Well, no, but…"

"Then we're fine."

Doyun couldn't decide easily.

Leaving a thirty-million-won item with an ironworks he was visiting for the first time—of course he hesitated.

After a long stretch of fretting, he looked down at the broken sword.

In its current state it was just two long pieces of scrap metal anyway.

"Please take care of it."

"It'll take a week."

"That long?"

"If I just stick it together, I can finish today. As long as you don't mind it breaking again."

Doyun shut his mouth.

Grandfather cleared his throat and continued.

"We'll contact you in a week. If we find any problems while working, we'll let you know first."

"How much for the repair?"

Grandfather looked at me.

I held up one finger.

"About a million won."

"That's fine."

"I'll leave it in your hands, boss."

Doyun left his contact information and walked out of the ironworks.

Only after the door closed did Grandfather stroke my head.

"Our Ihyeon got her first commission."

I didn't touch the sword that same day.

First I transferred the broken cross-section and the circuit onto paper.

How far to grind it down.

How much heat to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠apply.

What thickness to cut the ornament into before inserting it.

Fixing a bad design was more annoying than making something from scratch.

You had to dig up every single mistake someone else had made.

The design took two days.

On the third day I started the actual work.

Grandfather handled the dangerous parts.

First he cut off the ornament at the end of the hilt.

We shaped the cut Hoeseongcheol into a slender rod.

I didn't simply butt the broken faces together.

I ground both sides at an angle to widen the contact surface.

Grandfather stopped the grinder and showed me the cross-section.

"Is this enough?"

"A little more."

"This side?"

"Yeah. We have to strip everything down to where the mana channel used to be."

If you leave a broken circuit behind, the same spot will break again.

Repair wasn't about covering up a wound.

It was about cutting out the rotten part and making it anew.

Next came the heat.

Even though it was Hoeseongcheol, it didn't need some absurdly high temperature.

What made this metal precious was the crystal structure that held mana. The working temperature itself wasn't much different from good steel.

Of course, melting and refining a full Hoeseongcheol ingot was impossible in this ironworks.

But all we needed to heat this time were the small piece cut from the ornament and the broken faces.

In my previous life I had heated Hoeseongcheol with moonlight flame.

There was no moonlight flame here.

Instead there was an oxy-acetylene torch for the ironworks.

Grandfather stacked firebricks around the joint to make a small heating chamber.

The flame was rough, but once the heat was trapped inside the bricks it was more than enough to bring the joint up to temperature.

Grandfather held the torch while I watched the color of the metal.

Red.

Orange.

Then a pale blue light spreading between the crystal grains.

"Now."

Grandfather pulled the flame away.

We slipped the Hoeseongcheol cut from the ornament between the two halves of the blade.

In that instant the remaining decorative circuit flashed blue.

Mana rushed toward the broken faces.

The inserted Hoeseongcheol was shoved to one side.

"Ihyeon!"

Grandfather jerked the torch back.

But it was a reaction I had expected.

I took a small chisel and severed the circuit at the third corner.

The blue light vanished as if it had never been there.

"If any of the mana channel is left, it pulls force to one side before you can even join it."

I added one more remark for the person who had made the sword.

"Even when it breaks, it has to be a pain."

Grandfather looked back and forth between the circuit I had cut and the cross-section where the blue light had disappeared.

He no longer asked questions every time he was surprised.

I put on the Strength Assist Gloves.

I lowered the face shield and picked up the hammer.

"Ihyeon, if it gets hard, stop right away."

"Okay."

"Don't take the hammer on your wrist."

"I know."

"And never toward the flame—"

"Grandfather."

"Right. You need to concentrate."

The circuits in the gloves lit up.

Clack.

The metal joints moved with my fingers.

I brought the hammer down.

Clang!

The Hoeseongcheol threw off sparks.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

With every blow of the hammer the split crystal grains locked into each other.

I wasn't as fast as I had been in my previous body.

I didn't have the strength either.

But there wasn't a single error.

Where to strike.

When to ease off the force.

My hands remembered all of it.

Grandfather kept the temperature steady with the torch.

I moved the hammer in time with that flame.

Modern fire and the craft of a previous life joined together on a single sword.

The last hammer blow finished.

The crack was gone.

Now came the real repair.

I straightened the existing mana channel into a clean line.

I rounded every corner.

I erased the decorative circuits that had been uselessly devouring mana.

I ground down the overly thick tip and corrected the uneven angles of the blade.

Finally I reshaped the heavy hilt ornament into a small disc.

The sword's weight dropped by nearly a third from what it had been.

Just because the join was finished didn't mean I could hand it back to the customer right away.

I let it cool slowly for a full day, then checked the cross-section again.

I tapped it to make sure there were no hairline gaps and checked that no mana was leaking anywhere.

On the last day Grandfather fixed the sword to a test stand he had built.

We hung weights on it for hours, but the joint never opened.

It took one day longer than planned.

Only on the eighth day was the repair complete.

When he got the call, Doyun came to the ironworks that evening.

The repaired sword looked nothing like it had at the start.

The flashy ornaments were gone.

In their place a single straight blue line ran down ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the center of the blade.

Doyun carefully lifted the sword.

"It's light."

When he moved his wrist, the tip followed naturally.

"Much lighter than before."

"That's how it was supposed to be."

Doyun poured mana into the sword.

Blue light raced from the hilt to the tip without a single hitch.

In that moment something appeared before Doyun's eyes.

A system window I couldn't see.

"Huh?"

His expression froze.

He blinked several times, then looked down at the sword.

"What's wrong?"

"The rank…"

He swallowed dryly.

"The sword that was D-class went up to C-class."

In a trembling voice Doyun read out the appraisal result.

Even the name had been fixed properly.

This time the system seemed to have recognized the material.

Grandfather looked at me.

I looked at the sword.

C-class.

Just from stripping away a few useless parts, it had risen that far.

How badly had the original maker botched it?

"The mana conductivity tripled, and it even got a durability bonus."

Doyun's voice grew louder and louder.

"This isn't a repair."

"I fixed the broken parts, so it's a repair."

"So the boss fixed it himself after all?"

Doyun looked at Grandfather.

Grandfather's gaze flicked toward me for a moment.

I shook my head.

Saying an eight-year-old had fixed it would only make the explanation longer.

More importantly, I still hadn't told my parents that I was swinging a hammer in the ironworks.

"It was fixed at our ironworks. That's true."

Grandfather answered carefully.

Doyun nodded as if that was only natural.

"Incredible. I don't understand why someone like you would close an ironworks."

"I didn't really do much…"

"And modest on top of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠it."

Grandfather's expression grew complicated.

I turned my head to hide a laugh.

"If I have equipment problems in the future, may I come again?"

"We'll have to decide after looking at the item."

"Of course, boss."

Just then a deposit notification chimed on Grandfather's phone.

There was roughly one extra zero compared to the amount we had agreed on.

"Customer, I think you sent the wrong amount."

"The rest is for the rank increase. Even so, I'm still coming out far ahead."

From the first commission I already had the funds to make the next piece of equipment.

Doyun bowed several times and left the ironworks.

That day, the closed ironworks gained its first regular customer.

A regular who, instead of me, mistook Grandfather for a master craftsman.