WeTried Translations

Translator: [IncomeElastic]

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ I Became a Blacksmith the Rankers Are Obsessed With ◈

Chapter 025

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Thermal Shock Delamination

* * *

Erien, asking point-blank where I live, no lead-up at all.

"Why would she want to know where I live?"

We'd never even seen each other's faces, and she jumps straight to something this personal?

And on top of that, she's calling me things like a future Child of the Forest.

Maybe opening that document is a bigger deal than I thought.

[Um... so, I did some digging, big brother.]

Yeah.

[You know how blacksmiths are basically extinct among the Dwarves, right?]

I know.

That's right. Demand for blacksmiths was sky-high, but Heirs of Flame had all but died out, which apparently put everyone in a serious bind.

[The Elf tribe's equivalent of an Heir of Flame is the Child of the Forest....]

Ah...?

Wait a second.

[Honestly, Yuna thinks it's not just the Elves....]

[The Sun Dwarves are probably looking for you too, big brother... 🙄]

Back when I was just an ordinary undergrad.

There was a day when a lab assignment refused to cooperate no matter what I did, all the way past dawn, and I ended up stuck with it clear into the next morning.

Then, the moment I turned to finally head home, my advisor was sitting right behind me, I had no idea since when.

- Let me teach you something good.

With those words, I got dragged into the professor's office, and after that day...

Let's not talk about it.

Anyway.

So I guess that means I'm exactly the kind of talent their whole group desperately needs.

It really is a problem when you don't have enough grad students.

[I don't think it's grad students you're short on, it's professors...?]

It's that bad...?

Anyway.

Now I get why Dolores has been so desperate to keep me hidden.

"Then how about I just ask what I actually want to know?"

In other words, just questions.

Keep the information I hand over to a minimum, something like that.

[Yuna thinks that sounds good]

Okay.

I set the DM aside for now and went back to reading the section on gem-crafting.

That one line that had been bugging me earlier.

'The crafting of gems begins with physical labor.'

Why. Why, of all things.

They're supposed to have evolved to rely less on brute strength, being such a small-framed race.

And then, as if to betray that expectation, the line that followed.

[Being small of frame and small of hand, the Elves are capable of a fineness of work no other race can imitate.]

"......."

So basically, the smaller the hands,

the more delicate, precise work becomes possible, is what that means.

Guess every field has its own particular pain.

I kept turning pages.

Whatever the field, step one has to be devouring the theory.

Once you know the theory cold, any application becomes possible.

It just takes time.

One hour.

Two hours.

I read straight through for hours without even noticing how much time had passed.

There was one core thing I was trying to pull out of this manual.

'How exactly do you make something like that stocking-like fabric out of a mineral?'

Tmir's soles were apparently made from a material woven straight from gemstone.

I had no idea how you'd even go about turning a gem into fabric like that.

And the conclusion I came to...

"No shit, are you serious?"

Along with the shockingly wild process behind it.

Right when I figured my research was more or less done.

- Slam.

The workshop door burst open.

It was Dolores.

"...... Maman?"

Wondering what was going on, I looked up at her.

Dolores's eyes were wet.

She strode over and, before I could even think to stop her, wrapped me up tight in her arms.

"Gack."

'W-wait a second...'

I'd already been running purely on dopamine and focus, no caffeine or anything else to fall back on, barely keeping exhaustion at bay as it was.

"I can't stand this, it's breaking my heart...."

Her embrace closed in around me all at once. Both arms locked around my body so tight I couldn't even move.

The cool chill against my back from her Nine Yin Meridian Affliction, and... soft, plush, pillowy... her body pressed against me...

A softness and comfort like being wrapped in a cooling mat. What even is this...

Drowsiness crept in.

I felt every scrap of sleep debt I'd been putting off get settled all at once, and my eyes slid shut.

"Wa- wait, that, that thing...."

With my eyes already closing, I pointed at the warming footwear.

'Please, just throw that thing out....'

Never managing to actually say it.

I fell straight to sleep.

* * *

I opened my eyes.

"Huh, what."

My last memory was,

not some ergonomically designed, plush cooling mat...

but passing out in Dolores's arms.

I guess I really had pushed myself too far. Just straight-up blacked out.

The moment I opened my eyes, what filled my vision was a floating message window.

[New Messages][56]

Whoa, someone's in a hurry.

I got up and stepped out into the hallway.

Honestly, I was in a bit of a hurry myself right now.

There's nothing like the excitement of the walk to the lab the morning after you've finally mastered a whole body of theory.

Same kind of thrill as hearing a rhythm game studio just dropped a new chart.

Having gotten my hands on a whole new crafting method, I was riding that exact high right now.

I got straight to my feet.

"How many hours did I sleep?"

[From 6 PM yesterday to 11 AM this morning, about 17 hours?]

Well, I slept good.

Between catching up on all the sleep I'd been missing, my body felt refreshed.

I threw myself out into the hallway.

Having eaten nothing for 24 hours straight, I headed for the dining hall, intending to grab whatever I could find.

There happened to be a ciabatta sitting on the table, so I just grabbed it, shoved it in my mouth, and walked to the workshop.

- Chomp, chomp.

The path to the garden.

What the hell is this?

Minus the fresh air and the flowers in bloom, this is starting to feel exactly like heading into the lab with coffee glued to my mouth all over again.

Didn't I already graduate from grad school?

The thought lasted only a moment, but my body kept moving. I opened the workshop door and stepped inside.

Ruby and Maman Dolores had apparently gone off to the nearby forest for magic training.

I'd caught wind of it in passing, secondhand.

Thanks to that, the house was empty,

which meant I could actually focus on work.

The moment I got in, I cranked open the tap on the massive tub and let the water gush out.

- Creak.

Cool water began filling the tub.

It's the cooling basin. Think of it as the place where superheated minerals get to take a cold shower.

"Whew...."

While the water filled, I swallowed down the ciabatta and ran back through yesterday's theory.

The core of gem-crafting I'd figured out yesterday.

The technique of crafting.

- Chomp, chomp.

I'd already sketched out roughly what to do in my head.

Make the 'Sun Dwarves' warming footwraps out of material drawn from the 'Elf tribe's' crafting technique.

The materials needed were simple.

We needed to draw thread and fabric out of gems and ore.

How? Under normal circumstances, that's just impossible.

You can spin thread out of ores like asbestos or basalt, sure, but gemstones are a different story.

Even with modern technology back on Earth, it's a domain that's basically impossible.

Diamonds, rubies, sapphires, gems like that are hard, sure, but they don't have the property of drawing out long like a fiber.

But.

Here, it's different.

I pulled a couple pieces of Ember Ore out of my mineral pouch.

The red gems were giving off a faint, gentle heat.

This heat, this is mana itself.

The raw ores of this world all carry mana within them. That's exactly why mages and blacksmiths use them as raw material.

And that mana, apparently, is both bundled up inside the ore and wrapped in layers around its surface, like a net.

'You peel that net off.'

Stripping the membrane of mana held within a gem or mineral, and drawing it out into cloth.

For ordinary minerals, you'd fully melt them down and push the melt through a nozzle to spin thread, a process called "melt-spinning."

But the process here is a little different.

That's the theory underlying every piece of Elf-tribe crafting technique.

Mana Knitting.

Seeing beats hearing a hundred times over.

I'd already run the simulation in my head more than a hundred times.

I shut off the tap on the now-full tub and called out for Yuna.

"Yuna?"

[Mm]

I laid out, in words, the whole process I'd worked out and understood from my reading.

"...if we do it like this, would it work? Go ahead and DM that to the Grand Chieftain. Oh, and tell her I missed her messages because I'd just woken up, would you?"

Gotta have manners.

Now, once I've done this last cross-check.

Just one final verification on whether the theory holds up, and then it's go time.

- Ding.

The reply came instantly.

【Erien】: The Child of the Forest is awake!!

【Erien】: Checking on your crafting the very moment you wake, that's exactly what a Child of the Forest would do. Our elders were always the same way. There's a saying passed down through generations, that the fingertips move before the eyes even open...

Long.

Eighty percent of it was pure emotion, ten percent bragging about Elf ancestors.

I scrolled straight down and checked only the conclusion.

【Erien】: The method you described is the traditional technique our past Children of the Forest used as well! There's absolutely nothing wrong with it!!

Okay.

"Can you tell her thanks?"

[Yeah]

【Erien】: Thanks?! Why would you say that? Of course this is what I should be doing!!

【Erien】: Actually, I'd love to send you a gift, could you tell me your address?

I closed the DM window and focused back on the work.

The verification was done.

"...First time lighting a fire."

I picked up the black stone sitting beside the forge.

The Ignition Stone. I'd heard about it in passing once during the workshop orientation.

Strike it a few times with a hammer, then toss it into the forge along with the charcoal, and it catches fire, or so I'd been told.

For some reason, it looked like the kind of thing that would boost your stamina and skill haste.

I set the black stone down in front of the forge and picked up my hammer.

"Earthborn Hammer."

Been a while.

Sorry, I've been so busy with the enchant hammer I haven't touched you at all.

"Don't worry."

Today, I'll use you until you're sick of it.

- Thunk, thunk.

After a couple hammer strikes on the Ignition Stone, I tossed it into the forge along with the charcoal.

Almost at once.

- Whoosh!!

The red stone split apart with a red glow, and the flames caught in the pile of charcoal.

I looked down at the Ember Ore in my hand. A faint warmth seeped up through my fingers.

Every warming glove and footwrap I'd made up to now had relied strictly on "insulation," with only a faint bonus heat effect from a Sun Dwarf engraving tacked on.

This, though, was a material that generated heat directly.

A mineral that looked something like translucent red glass, not quite a gemstone by any strict definition.

I was going to use this.

Once the fire had burned up enough.

I dug through the charcoal with my tongs and buried a single piece of ore inside it.

Then covered it back over with charcoal.

"Whew...."

Now, it starts.

- Creeeeak...

I stepped on the pedal.

The bellows pushed out air, the charcoal drank in oxygen, and the fire grew.

It was supposedly a lot lighter now thanks to the lubricant, but it was still grueling work.

- Creak... creak...

- Drip... drip...

Sweat trickled down my forehead and dripped onto the pedal.

The heat pouring off the forge sent the whole workshop's temperature climbing in no time.

I'd opened every window I had, but it wasn't doing a thing.

- Creeeak...

I worked the pedal in a trance.

Right as sweat soaked me through and kept blurring my vision, forcing me to wipe it away again and again.

"... How many minutes?"

[20 minutes]

Ember Ore starts to melt once you hit the 30-minute mark.

"That's enough."

I immediately dug through the charcoal with my tongs and pulled out the glowing red-hot Ember Ore.

And then.

- Ffffssssshhh!!!

I plunged it straight into the cooling basin I'd filled with water earlier.

- Bubble, bubble...

The water boiled up instantly, steam clouding my vision.

- Bloop.

- Bloop.

- Bloop.

- Blooop.

I rode along with the rhythm of the boiling water...

"Now?"

- Thunk...

I raised the Earthborn Hammer and struck the side of the cooling basin.

- Thunk, thunk, thunk...

Striking it over and over in a steady, consistent rhythm.

Apparently you're supposed to strike right on the beat, as close as possible.

I've got this. This is exactly my specialty.

It feels like playing a rhythm game in the middle of work. It goes a lot better if I imagine a Hit Circle right in front of me.

The vibrations spread out through the water...

and soon.

A reddish shimmer rose to the surface of the water, like a heat haze.

Something that refused to mix, floating up the way oil does when it's poured over water.

That's it.

I immediately grabbed the strainer sitting nearby.

Not too early, not too late, right before the membrane could scatter apart.

In that split second.

- Swish!

I slid the strainer in and carefully scooped up the membrane floating on the surface.

The sudden temperature shock caused the mana clinging to the mineral's surface to separate away, membrane and all.

That's the principle behind it rising up in the form of a thin film.

The Elves' completely unhinged crafting theory.

"Thermal Shock Delamination."

I immediately spread the limp, jelly-like membrane I'd fished out onto the wooden frame I'd set up nearby.

I had to set the fabric's shape before it cooled and hardened.

Smoothing it out with my fingertips, feeling it slump and burn against my skin.

- Swish...

I hung it out to dry under the sunlight.

The warm sunlight and the heat the fabric itself still carried worked together,

and the dampness in the once-soggy membrane dried away in no time.

"......."

While it had been wet, it looked like nothing more than a limp, transparent skin.

Now, though, faintly see-through, showing hints of what lay beneath...

"Silk."

It had become a piece of red silk.

I sank straight down where I stood, the result still clutched in my hand.

Silk about the size of my palm.

"Hah...."

Making just this one piece felt like it had wrung a good two liters of water straight out of my body.

The repeating process itself is simple enough.

All I had to do was repeat this, over and over, until I had enough fabric piled up to comfortably make a pair of warming footwraps.

"Hey, is the water hot?"

[No. It's not hot.]

"What about the stone?"

[Not hot either]

I reached into the cooling basin and pulled out the Ember Ore.

It had shrunk, ever so slightly, in size.

"So I just have to keep repeating this, then."

Peeling the mana wrapped around it away, layer by layer, turning it into fabric.

Until the mana bundled inside was finally exposed.

"......."

I pushed back my sweat-soaked bangs.

As I sat there, dazed.

[Um... hey, big brother? Yuna thinks this turned out amazing. Really, really.]

[You know I don't just praise you for nothing, right]

I know.

I know, but I'm too wiped out right now to get the words out.

"Can you snap a photo and send it over, so I can check if this actually came out right?"

Let's get the Grand Chieftain's confirmation on it.

- Click.

【Anonymous】: (photo)

【Anonymous】: Did this come out right?

The Grand Chieftain read it instantly again, same as always.

This time, though, there was no reply for a good long while.

"...... What's with this person...."

Doesn't answer right when it actually matters, huh.

"......."

Well, leaving the judgment call up to someone else isn't exactly the smartest way to do things anyway, in my opinion.

It looked similar enough to the Mana Knitting results shown in the manual, so it probably wasn't a big deal.

I got up off the floor and picked the tongs back up.

"... Again. Let's do it again."

- Shff.

I cleared away the charcoal and tossed the Ember Ore into the middle of it.

- Creeeak...

Time to work the bellows again.

I'd long since given up counting how many times I'd done this.

On the worktable, translucent red silk had piled up into a decent little heap.

Though something had probably drained out of my body in an equally decent heap.

I'd bet on it. Like sarira, those crystallized relics monks leave behind when they're cremated.

Messages kept coming in, but I didn't check them.

- Creak.

That's when the workshop door opened.

It was Dolores.

Looking outside, the moon had already risen at some point.

"... Dolores."

"... Lionel."

"I need some bread...."

I'm hungry....

But once again, before I could even finish speaking.

Dolores pulled me into her arms.

"Ah...?"

My head sank straight into her chest.

Bread...? Wait, no, this isn't the bread I meant.

Bread... mmph....

"Your body's burning up, Lionel...."

"I still have work to do...."

There's no way I can refuse this....

The moment I was pulled into her arms, the strength drained right out of my body.

Coolness and softness are feelings I really shouldn't be indulging in right now.

"Lionel? Even now, I respect you, truly, so much."

"Ah......."

"I didn't want to interrupt you while you're absorbed in something. That's why I've just been watching, as much as I can bear, even when you skip sleep, even when you skip meals."

Dolores's voice trembled, little by little.

"And still, the reason I came to find you like this...."

"......."

Dolores's arms pulled me in a little deeper.

"is because I'm afraid your body's going to break down."

"......."

"Whenever it feels like you're about to cross that line, I'll come to you like this, no matter how many times it takes."

Looking down at me, Dolores's eyes trembled faintly.

It almost looked like tears had welled up in them.

Watching me glued to the forge all day long,

she seemed to have held herself back and watched, for quite a while.

"Don't push yourself too hard, all right, Lionel? Your health matters more than... me."

"...... Okay."

Her face broke into a soft smile.

- Stroke, stroke.

Along with the cool sensation of her hand smoothing back my bangs.

I sank into the softness of her embrace.

Through eyes slowly closing... I took in the sight of Dolores's face,

and drifted off to sleep.

* * *

A single photo, right there in front of her.

Just how was she supposed to make sense of this?

"Wha- what is this?"

Grand Chieftain Erien's mouth hung open, unable to tear her eyes from the photo.

With trembling fingertips, she zoomed in on the screen.

Red fabric.

Mana Knitting.

Thermal Shock Delamination.

She understood it all. Every bit of it made sense.

It was a technique the past Children of the Forest had spent their entire lives refining, after all.

But what left Erien stunned wasn't the technique itself.

"... How is the yield coming out like this?"

How could a piece of fabric this big, this wide, even come out of it?

Thermal Shock Delamination.

The membrane you could pull from a single piece of ore was, at best, about the size of a pinky finger.

You had to take a massive piece of ore. Heat it and cool it. Over and over, countless times.

Strike it, and strike it again, just to end up with a single scrap of fabric.

But the fabric in the photo was almost the size of a palm.

There's no way to explain that unless he'd been working with a chunk of ore the size of a house.

Sure, crafting skill affects yield, that much was known.

But a gap this enormous, in all her XXX years alive, she'd never once seen anything like it.

Was this the same kind of shock the Dwarves must have felt the first time they encountered the Company?

What was it called again, the Industrial Revolution... that thing.

"...... Does this even make sense?"

- Clack clack.

Erien hurriedly began typing.

[Chi... ld of the Forest,,, I'm utterly astonished,,, ^^, might you honor me,,, with a lesson…^^?]

- Tap.

The young elf standing beside her quietly took over the keyboard.

- Clack clack.

[Wait, Child of the Forest!! How in the world did you do this?! Could you tell us how?]

A properly appropriate reply, corrected.

- Clack clack...

[Th.is.too.is.fate~~~^^ Chi,,,ld of the Forest,,, gift.giving.time~~~!!!!!]

Erien, who kept typing away regardless, let out a sigh and shook her head.

"Ugh... this messaging thing is exhausting. Just, just ask for the address already."

[We'd love to send a gift to the Child of the Forest for this miraculous result!! Please, tell us where you live!!]

And she hadn't forgotten to try tracking down his address, either.

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