Congratulations! You’re about to embark on the path of blacksmithing, a totally original pursuit that nobody’s ever done before! Sure, would I rather you do something interesting that actually adds to the tapestry? Of course! But who knows? Maybe you’ll take these skills and do something cool in a few thousand years. This book will teach you everything you need to get started. The rest you’ll have to figure out yourself!

  Harvey snorted as he read the introduction. Maybe there were races in the multiverse that lived thousands of years, but he wouldn’t be making any groundbreaking innovations in the world of hammering hot iron anytime soon. He stepped into the smithy, lit a lantern, and got to reading.

  He read by lamplight for hours, soaking in every page like he had with his coding textbooks back in college. The endurance potion worked wonders, making him feel like he’d already gotten a great night's sleep. At least for the moment, all the worries of the trial melted away as his mind was filled with blacksmithing.

  Thoughts of carrionwing watching him from the tree crowns were replaced with the 7 fundamental blacksmithing techniques. The face of an angry stonetusk charging towards him was supplanted by the different hammers and when to use them. He pored over every page and was surprised at how well-written the book was, despite the initial sarcasm of its author.

  He’d always been a fast reader, and his eidetic memory let him do pretty well in school without needing to study much. This was on a whole other level. He didn’t know if it was stats or something strange about the book, but it was like the words were carved into his mind as he read them. Foreign concepts became clear in a single page. A subtle heat began to spread through his body, like his insides were enjoying a warm day as spring turned to summer despite the frigid night air biting at his skin. With every page, it grew stronger, until on the final page it rose in his chest like a hot air balloon. Just as he was on the verge of pain, a gentle ding rang in his mind, and the book disintegrated in his hands.

  Your Weave Stirs. A potential profession awaits definition at the Loom

  His mind raced as he read, and he burst out of the front doors. He couldn’t wait. The notification confirmed that all he needed to do was reach the loom, and the empty profession slot on his status screen would finally be filled. The moon was still high in the sky, but he brought his lantern swinging wildly behind him anyway.

  Just as he was about to throw open the chapel doors, a noise stopped him in his tracks. A low rumble was coming from inside the building, like the growl of a dog warning an intruder. Panic shot through Harvey as he thought of all the veilstriders sleeping inside. From the sound of it, a Bloodrunn had worked its way in, but hadn't started attacking yet. He didn’t want to spook it into violence, so he gently opened the door and poked his head around the corner, wand at the ready.

  The rumble grew louder, and it wasn’t until his lantern illuminated the face of a man in a sleeping bag just inside the door that he realized. It wasn’t a Bloodrunn. It was dozens of exhausted veilstriders snoring.

  His trip to the loom would have to wait...

  It irked him to put this milestone on hold, but it wasn’t fair to wake everyone up just because he was a little impatient. Slowly, his heart rate calmed as the shock and excitement passed. Closing the doors behind him, he realized that even with all the new ideas crammed in his head, he had no idea where to start.

  He knew a little about a lot of different aspects of blacksmithing. It taught him techniques, how to use standard tools, and some specifics about different materials, including the methods for creating wrought iron and steel.

  He also knew that there would be some major hurdles in getting the forge operational. His main problem was a lack of proper tools, and while he thought some could be built himself, there were other hurdles he wasn’t sure how to jump over yet.

  The wooden door creaked behind him as he returned to the dusty forge, and he surveyed the equipment with new eyes. His profession had to wait, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t dive in.

  For now, he took stock of the tools he did have and laid them out on the various workbenches.

  He had ball peen and cross peen hammers with serviceable heads on shaky wooden handles. They would eventually need to be refurbished, but attaching new handles should be easy enough if they ever broke. He had one rusted set of crucible tongs, a set of wolfjaw tongs, and two broken halves of another. With a new bolt, he could piece them back together. In a crate on one of the wooden shelves, he found various chisels, punches, wire brushes, files, and a hacksaw. Most had broken handles or were so dull they’d be useless. Still, with some tender loving care, he should be able to cobble together a decent toolbox.

  Satisfied, he turned towards the bigger problems.

  Inspecting the grindstone, he was relieved to see the stone wheel still intact, as that was the one part he’d never fix in the short term. The main problem was that the wooden components had rotted through, particularly the bearing into which the axle holding the stone level slotted. They had plenty of scrap wood he could use to repair the foot pedal and bearings, but it would be a bandage and not a surgery.

  The anvil and heavy stone it sat atop were still in good shape. The wooden barrel for quenching the worked metal had rotted through long ago, and a stain on the floor indicated whatever oil had been left had leaked out. The metal bands holding it together were still in decent shape, so he pried the nails securing them loose before piling the wood in a corner.

  He needed something to quench his creations in, but there was no way he was skilled enough to make a watertight barrel. He paced back and forth, moving his body always helped jump-start his mind.

  A flash of inspiration struck, and he rushed to the stable next door. Inside, multiple metal feeding troughs stood against the wall. They were dented and dirty, smelling like rotten pig slop, but he didn’t care. He dragged the smallest one into the forge, placing it next to the anvil. It likely held more water than he wanted, but it would do the trick.

  One problem solved, he searched for the next. He needed fuel and knew that most blacksmiths used charcoal as an easily renewable source since not everyone could be next to a coal mine. He could use the campfire as a last resort, but it would be wildly inefficient compared to what he hoped to find somewhere in the Smithy.

  He smiled when he finally found it, a rusted iron box sunk partly into the dirt with a bent metal door, cracked slightly ajar. Opening the door, he saw a pile of black charcoal stacked inside. An existing kiln was a lifesaver, as it was both fuel storage and the perfect place to efficiently create charcoal in an oxygen-deprived environment.

  Checking another item off his list, he turned to the most critical piece of the process. The forge was squat, made up of bricks stacked to just above his knees. A heavy, flat stone formed the hearth, half exposed to the open air and half tucked under the chimney vent. Sitting deep under the brick hood, Harvey spotted the tool he’d been missing. A crucible.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Picking it up, he was disappointed to see tiny cracks spiderwebbing through the slag-covered bowl. It should still be usable, but he’d have to be careful.

  All things considered, the forge was in decent shape, aside from a few loose bricks where the mortar had cracked away. He couldn’t afford to waste any heat, so he’d need to patch those up before he made his first attempt. If he didn’t, the metal wouldn’t get hot enough, and the smithy would get hotter than the Arizona desert.

  The preferred fix would be clay, but he had no idea where to find any. He remembered learning in geology that riverbeds often had clay deposits since the rushing water naturally filtered out the clay from the soil. Sadly, the only river he’d seen was during the vision, and it could be hundreds of miles away based on how fast they’d been moving.

  For now, the best he could do was mix up some mud and cake on as much as possible. It wouldn’t last long, but he could at least start testing.

  He didn’t have any leatherworking tools to fix any holes in the bellows, so relief washed over him as he pressed down and heard air rush out of the nozzle and into the tube feeding the firepot. It creaked and groaned as new air rushed to refill the bladder. He had everything he needed to melt some ore and start pounding away.

  Right now, he had a theoretical knowledge of how blacksmithing was supposed to work, but without the proper environment, he wouldn’t be able to test any of it. It was like coding, he could write a perfectly good Python script in a text document on his computer, but without a command prompt or coding environment all the code would do is look pretty. He needed to get his environment ready so he could start debugging everything he learned and hopefully make something useful for Veil’s End.

  After some deliberation, he decided the first order of business should be repairing the grindstone. If he could sharpen their axes, the wall-building crews could work a lot faster while saving merit on buying more.

  A three-legged stool lay beside it, and Harvey righted it before taking a seat. The frame was sagging under the weight of the heavy stone wheel. It looked like an old sawhorse with a gap in the middle, and a broken wooden pole hung down from the crank handle towards a pedal on the floor. At one point, someone could’ve used the pedal to keep the stone spinning, but there was no way the current apparatus would be moving any time soon.

  Almost every piece was made from wood other than the crank, axle, and grindstone, so replacing them would be almost as much work as building a new one. Harvey traced his finger across the frame, lost in thought until he yanked his hand away, a splinter lodged in his finger.

  “Damn it.” He muttered to himself before pulling it out with his teeth.

  He was worried that any attempt to get it spinning would collapse the whole thing. There had to be a better solution. Looking over at the trough he’d planned to use for quenching, he had an idea. It was a four-foot-long rectangle, about a foot and a half deep and two feet wide. He pushed down on its sides, and it had no problem holding his weight. There were others he could use to quench, so he dragged it over to the rotting machine.

  The trough would have no problem fitting the grindstone, he would just need to create wooden supports to sit on the sides that he could mount the bearing blocks to. Then all he needed was level holes for the axle to slip through. He’d fill the trough with enough water to submerge the bottom of the stone and get to work. Eventually, he’d want a new pedal to make things easier on himself, but for now, the crank would be enough.

  He felt like a kid trying to “invent something” in his garage out of old scraps, laundry baskets, and tape. There was no way his solution would be pretty or durable, but he was in survival mode. Survivors didn’t have the luxury to care how ornate a knife was. All that mattered was that it cut.

  He retrieved an axe and some wood from the burn pile and got to work carving four boards and two large blocks. They came out jagged, an axe not providing the same clean finish as his dad’s planer. Still, close enough. In this instance, the trees being abnormally hard worked out in his favor. He took the long metal bands from the barrel to the anvil, retrieved the sharpest chisel he had, and grabbed a hammer. His experiment would definitely take the edge off his tool, but if he were successful, he’d have exactly what he needed to solve that problem.

  Positioning the chisel above the iron, he hammered until the barrel band split, prying off a strip for a makeshift bracket. The nails he’d stolen from the barrel weren’t long enough to secure the boards together, but attaching a bracket to them was no problem.

  Lining up the boards as best he could, he placed his new brackets and nailed them into place. Before long, he had a crude base that he set atop the trough.

  Hell yeah! Who needs an instruction manual! He thought, pumping his fist.

  He moved to step 2, carving taller rectangles that would sit on top of the base and support the axle. He wasn’t exactly sure how to drill a hole without an actual drill. Punch it and pray, he decided. A real blacksmith would burn him at the stake for using a punch tool meant for hot metal to carve a hole in some wood, so he was happy nobody was around to witness his heresy.

  Stacking the blocks atop each other, he hammered away. Once he was sure the holes would at least be close to the same height, he widened them until they could snugly fit the axle. An obscene number of brackets later, his bearing blocks were mounted.

  Next, Harvey carefully unbolted the crankshaft from the axle before extracting it and the stone from its old stand. He nearly collapsed under the weight, but managed to catch himself. Echoes of his dad shouting “Lift with your legs!” appeared in his mind as he strained his back to extricate the wheel. Hobbling over, he slid the far end into his new frame.

  The stupid thing nearly slid off the trough, not being tied down at all. He lunged, bracing with his legs just in time before desperately sliding the other side into place. Gasping for breath, he wiped the beads of sweat from his brow.

  “Of course it was going to slide away. How dumb are you?” He muttered as he reattached the crank arm.

  When he was sure the grindstone was where he wanted it long-term, he carved four chunky poles and connected his makeshift frame to the floor. Tentatively, he turned the crank. When it didn’t move, he pushed less tentatively. It screeched, chewing the wood instead of sliding smoothly. Not ideal, but it started turning faster as the axle wore the wood down like sandpaper.

  Harvey took the half-empty gallon jug of water he’d been drinking and poured it into the trough. It barely covered the base, so he spent 40 more of his dwindling merit on eight more gallons of water to add to the trough. Struggling to carry 4 gallons at once, he grumbled that he had chosen the wisdom class instead of the strength-based one. Gary cut massive trees down like a chainsaw. What could he do? Read books faster? Although thinking back, he’d probably be dead by now if all he had was a sword.

  The wheel only needed to dip a few inches into the water, so once he was close, he started dropping rocks down into the trough until it was at the right level. Slowly, he spun the crank. A giddy smile crossed his face as he grabbed his chisel, took a seat, and started sharpening.

  The same heat returned to his chest as sparks began to fly. He tested the edge and accidentally drew blood. He couldn’t believe he’d actually done it. The back of his neck started to burn, but the sensation vanished as fast as it appeared. When nothing happened, he turned back to his tools.

  Harvey worked into the early morning light, sharpening chisels and axes until his arm couldn’t turn the crank anymore. His setup wobbled precariously if he wasn’t careful, and the lack of a foot pedal meant he had to strain to crank and hold tools steady all at once. He didn’t care. For the first time, he felt like a real blacksmith.

  People would be getting up soon. He thought he could feel his weave thrumming faintly, pushing him to run to the loom. He took the freshly sharpened axes and placed them outside. Looking up at the moon, he could see it would only be a few more hours before people started waking up.

  He felt like a kid on Christmas morning, wishing the sky would move faster.

  I’ll wait for sunrise, hit the loom, and go to bed. He thought. It’s pretty cold, though, so I might as well lie in my sleeping bag to warm up while I wait.

  The second his head hit the floor, he was fast asleep.