WeTried Translations

Translator: [IncomeElastic]

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◈ I Became a Blacksmith the Rankers Are Obsessed With ◈

Chapter 007

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I'm the Person Who Came to Help You

* * *

After successfully crawling the Inner Tower community,

the first thing I asked Yuna for was background knowledge about this world.

"So, this is like some sort of memoir?"

A memoir someone had written a while after the Tower appeared. It looked like a good way to get a handle on what kind of world this was.

[Yep, that's what I said, isn't it?]

[Read this one thing and you're basically set, in my opinion]

The content turned out to be a bit longer than I expected.

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It's a familiar concept now, but the Tower appeared one day without any warning.

Faced with a structure of unknown origin, humanity had no choice but to bring everything to a halt.

Of course it did, something of a height no one had ever seen before had appeared overnight.

But the Tower held many things that didn't exist anywhere on the ground.

Minerals no one had ever seen, herbs no one had ever touched, technology no one had ever even imagined.

And beings that weren't human... dwarves, the Elf tribe, and dozens of other races besides.

They had been living inside the Tower from the very beginning.

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Hold on, hold on....

"Wait a second."

[?]

"One-line summary."

That's what AIs are for. Summaries.

[Tower appears → humanity begins climbing → nations disband their armies and form climbing corps → noble houses send their heirs into the Tower → wars decrease, but the Tower itself turns into a battleground where interests clash instead]

"Damn, you've actually got a good head for this."

[Aw, stop it~]

[So apparently, most people ended up calling the Tower a proxy war]

"...Yep, this really is a Tower-climbing story."

The place I'd landed in was exactly that kind of world.

* * *

"Warm."

Ever since Dolores said that,

it felt like every sound in the room had vanished.

Ruby was asleep on the bed, and maybe even snoring a little.

I stood in front of her.

Dolores stayed still, looking down at her own hand.

A few seconds must have passed, longer than I'd expected.

I had no way of knowing what she was thinking right now.

Only,

- Glint.

I just hoped that glowing pattern at her wrist would lead the way for me.

* * *

Water trickled inside the glove.

The sensation was unfamiliar to Elysia von Dolores.

Warmth. What kind of feeling was that again?

Dolores thought back on the past.

Elysia von Dolores had entered the Tower together with six sworn sisters.

Their climb outpaced every other team's, and people came to call them the Apostles of Dawn.

It was around then that the epithet High Ranker attached itself to her name as well.

Then, one day.

"......."

Dolores realized her body was breaking down.

The congenital Nine Yin Meridian Affliction, an illness that was practically a curse woven into House Dolores.

A disease in which the nine meridians carrying mana froze shut, one by one.

A curse against which the family had already tried every elixir and every treatment that existed, across countless generations.

But no cure existed, only ways to slow its advance.

She'd told herself it couldn't happen to her. She'd thought she would be the exception.

But the family's curse bound her all the same.

While her sworn sisters opened their Upper Dantians one after another, she alone stayed frozen in place.

The Upper Dantian was a door that never opened for anyone whose meridians were blocked.

She sought out every physician known as a master healer inside the Tower. Outside it, the same.

The last one she went to was the Great Sage Gorgonyu.

The White Gloves he made for her.

And the gear she'd gathered from all over.

That was the best she'd managed, and it was everything she had.

The problem was, even though the illness's progress could be stopped...

it stopped there. Just stopped, and went no further.

As time passed, the numbness crept over her fingertips, and... her toes went numb right along with them.

At some point, days began stacking up where her own body no longer felt like her own.

'This is as far as I go.'

In the end, she left her sworn sisters behind and stopped climbing.

When their ancestors had faced this same situation, they'd secured an heir through marriage.

That was the way of House Dolores.

But she chose instead to raise a disciple tied to her not by blood, but by the heart, so the Dolores curse wouldn't be passed down.

She didn't want to hand this suffering down to anyone.

Some stretch of time passed like that, each day slipping by inside a heart gone numb.

That day too, she'd thought it was a choice no different from any other.

Just a kid with good eyes, nothing more and nothing less.

She'd simply hoped her disciple would find a companion to climb the Tower with, and picked a kid who looked sharp-eyed.

It wasn't even grand enough to call a real choice.

But now.

That kid had given her a pair of gloves.

- Trickle....

Water was seeping out from between the glove's fingers.

The ice was melting. It was warm.

'Warm?'

What kind of feeling was that again?

Having suffered from the illness for so long, Dolores could read her own body's condition with total precision.

Her meridians were thawing? The blockage was clearing?

How was that even possible?

And on top of that, this pattern was a Sun Dwarf pattern.

Not even an ordinary blacksmith's pattern, but one only artisans who'd survived brutal trials could earn.

Gear made by the Sun Dwarves' elite smiths was something she herself had always wanted, so she knew exactly what it meant, better than anyone.

It simply wasn't something you could get just by wanting it.

'Heir of Flame....'

That was what they called them, wasn't it.

In her entire life, Dolores herself had seen this engraving exactly twice.

Once on armor granted by the imperial family to one of her sworn sisters.

The other, on the Genesis Sword sold at the 125th-floor auction house.

And now, the third.

This glove the boy had made for her.

Of course, the shape of the engraving was a little different.

But the two engravings she'd seen before hadn't matched each other either, so that wasn't an issue.

'...The third.'

An engraving so rare that even she, a High Ranker, could count the times she'd seen it on one hand, sitting on a glove made by some kid from an orphanage.

If it were some absurd fake, this would actually be simple. She could just punish him and be done with it.

The problem was, it looked genuine.

Absurd as that was.

This glove was clearly, slowly undoing the meridian blockage, something even the Great Sage Gorgonyu had only ever managed to halt.

That wasn't something a mere fake could do.

Dolores looked down at her hand again. Then slowly lifted her head.

"Can you explain this?"

She had no choice but to ask.

* * *

Explain.

Explain what.

This wasn't even really the kind of thing that needed explaining, was it.

I made it, and Teacher put it on. Win-win, wouldn't you say?

Her expression did look a little surprised, honestly.

- Drip.

Watching the water drop that fell from between the glove's fingers hit the floor, it seemed like something had actually worked.

If it had gone wrong, I'd probably already be dead.

"Explain."

"Yes, ma'am."

So basically, Dolores was asking how I'd made this.

And I had to answer.

'...I'm actually a Sun Dwarf.'

That line wasn't going to fly.

But from everything that had happened so far, Dolores seemed able to tell truth from lies.

And on top of that, she'd always drilled one thing into me.

'Speak only the truth.'

So I needed something that wasn't a lie, but could still talk my way out of this.

Wring it out, Kim Yujin. No, Lionel.

You can do this. If it's you.

"...I've learned the metalworking arts of the Sun Dwarves. The 'Heir of Flame' arts, I mean."

I made a point of stressing the words "Heir of Flame" as I said them.

This wasn't a lie.

I'd read their manual, studied the leatherworking section closely, and produced results.

Strictly speaking, it wasn't metalworking, but.

some people used the word broadly enough to cover blacksmithing skills in general.

My answer didn't have to be precise, but I figured I should leave as little room for rebuttal as I could.

Dolores's eyebrows twitched slightly.

"Where did you learn it?"

"I read it in a book."

"What book?"

A brief silence.

"A Sun Dwarf text."

Every time I answered, Dolores's eyebrows twitched.

Every word of it was true, so from where she stood, none of it could possibly make sense. How would some backwater orphan get his hands on a book belonging to a dwarf living inside the Tower?

An Heir of Flame's book, no less.

"...Hah."

At this point, what I really wanted was to earn her trust.

What even was trust? Honestly, trust was just an illusion.

I thought back for a moment, to an old memory.

A game I used to play as a kid. Once I'd saved up a fortune of 100 million, I went straight to the marketplace that same day to finally be happy.

And that's when I met that person.

'I'm the person who came to help you.'

Looking back, that's about the least trustworthy thing a person could say, but I believed it back then, and my 100 million vanished into thin air.

And now, I could use that exact line. Why?

Because Dolores could tell when I was lying.

And this time, it was true.

I lifted my head.

"I'm the person who came to help you, Dolores."

The will to help was real.

Even if the motive behind it was really just about saving my own skin, that was a separate matter.

"......."

Dolores studied my eyes once more, as if trying to gauge the truth of it, then...

- Rustle.

she slowly sat back down in her chair.

And then.

"Sit down."

She invited me to take a seat.

I had no idea what this meant, but for now, I wanted to believe it was a good sign.

I sat down and waited quietly, and

Dolores slowly opened her mouth.

"Ten million gold."

"......."

"That's the winning bid on the Genesis Sword that went up for auction once. Made by an Heir of Flame."

I had no idea about the exchange rate, but it was clearly not a normal figure regardless.

"And that's not even the end of it. There might have been backroom deals on top of that. The 125th-floor auction house is notoriously opaque, you know."

"I see."

I didn't understand a word of it.

"If I had to compare it to something."

Dolores paused for a moment, seeming to search for the right comparison.

"It's roughly equal to about half a year's budget for a duchy. Insurance included."

"......."

"Or, it would be about a year's expedition budget for one of the top climbing teams, back in the day."

Whoa.

She'd kindly given me two whole examples, but without knowing the exchange rate, none of it really landed.

Just then.

[I ran a rough conversion, and that's enough money for you and me to live together for 333,000 months]

A hundred billion?

A hundred... a hundred... a hundred billion?

Meaning, enough to keep my little-sister subscription running for 333,000 months....

The sudden, staggering figure left me stunned.

'Just what is the Genesis Sword, anyway?'

[I'll show you the appraisal report that's public]

Yuna answered, apparently noticing my curiosity.

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[the Genesis Sword][★★★★★] [Unique Equipment]

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『I want to cut down a star, she said.

It was an absurd wish, but I spent my whole life answering that wish with this sword.

Now, the only thing this sword still cannot cut is the death that took her from me.』

- Sage Artisan Ogeron -

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【A sword that lost its owner drifted into the auction house. No one who buys it would do so intending to cut down a star.】

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What even is this?

This is way too cool. It's even romantic, on top of that.

I should've done something like this myself. Compared next to my own "Toss it, toss it. No wait. Give it to Eric. Eric," I felt endlessly embarrassed.

Next time, I'd have to engrave something a bit more serious.

Right as I was marveling at text with a gravity clearly on another level,

I came back to my senses, Dolores was staring straight at me.

"Of course, this glove won't fetch anywhere near the same price as the Genesis Sword."

I hadn't expected it to.

Anyone who saw that and still expected as much would just be a shameless opportunist.

Dolores went on slowly.

"But a sword that's already been made only ever gets sold the once, whereas."

She lightly brushed her fingertip over the gray sun engraving on the glove.

"whoever made it can always make something else."

- Slip.

Dolores slowly took off the glove, as if it were something precious. A completely different attitude from before.

Her bare hand, freed from the glove, was warm and thawed.

Soft, fluffy fingers. The back of her hand a pale pink.

It was, by any measure, the hand of a noble lady.

But from the very moment the glove left her hand, her fingertips began to turn pale.

Frost spread across the back of her hand, and it took less than five seconds for a thin sheet of ice to creep all the way up to her wrist.

"......."

Dolores looked down at her hand for a moment and frowned.

- Tap.

She set the glove down neatly on the table.

"I think I need to make a quick trip into the Tower."

"What?"

"I'm going to take it to the verification office. To find out whether this really was made by an Heir of Flame."

"...Yes."

Honestly, I was confident about the verification.

The status window itself had been telling me as much from the start, after all.

Dolores tucked the glove she'd taken off into a pouch that looked expensive somehow, then

called my name as though something had just occurred to her.

"Oh, and Lionel."

"Yes."

"What was our promise again?"

Our promise.

I'd had a week to find some way to surprise Dolores.

It just hadn't been through magic.

"I was supposed to... surprise you."

This counts as passing, right? I'd definitely surprised her, as far as I could tell.

"Even if."

Dolores paused for a moment.

"Even if the verification comes back saying this glove isn't an Heir of Flame's work, it doesn't matter."

"...What?"

"Because you've already kept your promise."

She smiled.

It was the first time I'd seen her smile.

"I really was surprised."

Apparently.

"So don't be so scared, that's all I'm saying."

I felt like I'd succeeded.

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