WeTried Translations

Translator: [IncomeElastic]

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◈ I Became a Blacksmith the Rankers Are Obsessed With ◈

Chapter 038

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The Life of a Well-Treated Professional

* * *

I opened my eyes to a ceiling that had become familiar by now.

And a familiar face, too.

"Good morning."

"You too, Lionel."

Dolores was looking down at me with a soft smile.

"Take your time coming out once you're properly awake."

She brushed my forehead once, then walked slowly out of the room.

I watched her retreating back and got ready to sit up.

So much had happened yesterday.

More than I could even put into words.

I'd taken a commission from the Princess for a new piece of jewelry.

From the Emperor, I'd secured a Triple-Lion Plate made of platinum.

And through Richard, I'd gotten my hands on every mineral I wanted.

The Empire really was the Empire, there wasn't a single mineral it didn't have.

Whatever I asked for, it came out, and I just took all of it.

Since Yuna and I had been up until dawn going through the list and hauling minerals back,

I should have slept the whole day away, by rights.

"A lightning-quick wake-up."

When there's something exciting waiting for you, you naturally wake up fast.

I bolted upright.

Then I headed straight for the kitchen, grabbed a piece of ciabatta, and shoved it in my mouth, chewing away.

House Dolores's bread was seriously good.

On the way across the garden to the workshop,

"...Huh?"

I rubbed my eyes again.

Follow the garden path away from the main gate, and my workshop comes into view.

Not too big, just the right size.

But off to one side of the garden, something large was being hammered together, some kind of building.

"...What is that?"

I had no idea what it was for, but it was pretty sizable.

Well, not that it mattered.

I tilted my head and kept walking toward the workshop.

- Creak.

The moment I opened the workshop door, a satisfied smile crept onto my face.

The minerals I'd brought back from the imperial palace yesterday were stacked neatly along the wall.

I'd meant to just dump them and go straight to bed, but it looked like some fairy-tale snail bride, some devoted household spirit, had crept in and tidied everything up while I was out cold.

The most important thing is knowing how to be grateful when someone's done something for you while you were off sleeping.

"Thank you."

I bowed my head, and, still smiling, walked toward the table in the middle of the workshop.

Sitting there was a single piece of jewelry: the Sun Rising Pendant.

For the record, I'd left the Moonlight Essence Necklace back at the mansion. It kept seeming to listen in on everything I said. A little unsettling, honestly. That thing.

Starting now, I...

...had to craft the piece of jewelry that would pull the two of them apart.

"Yuna."

[Mm]

"Want to talk something through?"

From what I'd looked into,

this world had originally had its own folk religion.

Same as how my old world had all sorts of myths and religions, this one apparently worked the same way.

Even before the Tower appeared,

there had apparently been saintesses who drew power from divine energy, so people must already have known something out there was real.

But then the Tower appeared,

and when people actually went inside,

"...Huh, they're real?"

The names people had prayed to and believed in for centuries turned out to genuinely exist.

Normally faith is faith precisely because you can't confirm it for certain, but this world went and confirmed it, through the Tower.

So of course devotion only climbed from there.

That's the background on this world's gods, more or less.

Anyway, setting that aside,

I looked down at the Sun Rising Pendant on the table.

The important part was something else entirely.

First, the hypothesis I'd landed on:

who was the mother goddess of Solau and Selea?

Just look at Greek and Roman mythology, every god has a family tree.

Who gave birth to whom, who fought whom, who ate whom.

Who cheated on whom with whom.

I was sure this world wouldn't be any different.

"Who's the mother goddess of Selea and Solau?"

[Hold on]

While I waited for Yuna's crawl to finish, I picked up the Sun Rising Pendant.

Even though we were some distance from the mansion, it was still linked in.

Nothing complicated, I just wanted to see what level of craftsmanship a piece of jewelry meant to hold a god's power was actually built to.

Honestly speaking,

my standards had gotten ridiculously high.

Maybe it was from seeing nothing but the Children of the Forest's masterful gem-work and the Heirs of Flame's masterful smithing,

but by now, even slightly sloppy craftsmanship nearly made me want to gag.

Looked at with that in mind, the Sun Rising Pendant was...

"...actually not bad?"

It genuinely looked workable.

Solid enough that I wondered whether the craftsmanship itself was even the hard part. Not all that difficult, really.

Of course, being a 4-star item, it wasn't total garbage, so there wasn't anything glaringly rough about it, but,

that didn't mean it was on some untouchable level either.

[Crawl complete]

"Oh."

I set the pendant down and focused on Yuna's words.

[Selea is the goddess of the moon, Solau is the god who governs the sun]

[The mother of those two gods is the earth goddess Gaia, the father is the sky god Kaelu.]

"Gaia...?"

That name sounded oddly familiar.

I guess the whole sky-father, earth-mother idea shows up in pretty much every world in some form.

[Gaia is apparently also known as the god of harmony and abundance]

There it is.

Please, stop the fighting between these two siblings.

Though it looked like one of them was being one-sidedly bullied, honestly.

All right, then.

Now the problem was the method.

I opened the Heir of Flame's manual for the first time in a while.

I hadn't really needed to since making the stockings.

Honestly, I'd already read it more than ten times, so it was all in my head anyway, and besides, it was just the apprentice blacksmith's manual.

I was a Certified Blacksmith now.

How dare it...

Still, before making the piece, I opened it to go over the basics again, since I was still a total beginner at iron-smelting metallurgy.

- Slide.

What I'd originally been reading was the Apprentice Blacksmith's Manual.

I'd gotten by on just this one book the whole time.

But,

as I scrolled down the document list, I spotted something below it that I'd never seen before.

[🔑][A Manual for the Heir of Flame Who Has Become a Certified Blacksmith]

"What?!"

I shot up out of my chair, eyes wide.

This existed?

Wait a second.

This could be another one of those Abyss phishing things again.

I might fall for it three times, but not a fourth.

But this time something was different.

Unlike last time, when it was locked shut behind a padlock icon, this one showed a key icon from the start, already open?

"Yuna, did you unlock this one yourself?"

[Nope, wasn't me?]

[Also, the document's linked directly off the apprentice blacksmith document]

Then the source was legit, right?

"Heh heh heh."

I rubbed my hands together and licked my lips.

I'd already been thirsting for new knowledge to sink my teeth into.

I opened the manual right away,

and the words written on the first page caught my eye.

─────────────────

『Remember, heir. Bear this in mind, heir. Take pride in yourself.

Before your forge, even the gods shall stand in line.』

─────────────────

"......."

My eyes went wide from the very first line.

Starting off by pounding straight on the heart.

An Heir of Flame, a blacksmith even the gods came seeking out.

- Slide.

Next, the table of contents unfolded.

─────────────────

[Prologue. To the One Who Carries the Flame]

[Chapter 1. True Names, How to Name Your Iron]

─────────────────

As titles that set my heart racing kept coming one after another, right then,

─────────────────

[Chapter 5. Divine Implements, Divine Seats, How to Enshrine a God's Power]

─────────────────

Found it.

Holy shit, it's actually here.

"Yuna, I'm going to go read this."

[Sure, take your time.]

With a send-off like she was seeing me off on some trip, I opened Chapter 5.

The Apprentice Blacksmith's Manual had always spoken to me in a lecturing tone.

For instance,

『Bear this in mind. Without effort, there is no result, meaning: do not act as though you've become something merely for passing a single trial.』

『Do not grow arrogant over your own talent. Keep honing yourself always, and spend more time in the forge than in your bed....』

Every single chapter of the apprentice manual was packed with lines like this, jolting me awake and whipping me into shape.

Like getting smacked around constantly even when I hadn't done anything wrong.

Honestly, I agreed with most of it, so I took it to heart in my own rough way every time I read it.

But,

once I moved on to the certified manual,

─────────────────

『Before crafting a divine implement, there is one thing you must bear in mind.』

『You who have crossed trial after trial and wall after wall across a long span of time can accomplish anything now. Your body is itself the dwarves' treasure, hope, and future, so please, look after your body's well-being.』

『Even if a god sends an oracle straight to your doorstep, what good is it if your body won't move? Make the safety of your body your very first priority.』

─────────────────

Huh.

Our old professor's tone had gotten awfully sweet.

『If anyone rushes you, hand them a piece of iron and tell them to try forging it themselves. More often than not, they'll fall silent on the spot. Gods will be no different.』

It was worrying about my well-being before it had even gotten to the actual content.

Wait a second.

Did I just become... a skilled specialist?

An apprentice can always be replaced, but an expert can't.

That held true even back in my world, where AI was everywhere.

Whoever you could grind down, you ground down, whoever you couldn't replace, you courted and kept happy.

That's just how the world works.

So from the Sun Dwarves' perspective, I was...

...a specialist whose body needed to be looked after.

The dream life of a valued professional.

I'd never once been treated like this in my past life,

so I smiled and read through each and every line.

- Slide, click.

- Slide, click.

Having had my fill of head-pats from my shaggy-bearded Heir of Flame dwarf professor,

I scrolled on, and the actual subject finally began.

First, it said that a divine implement, jewelry or gear meant to hold a god's power, couldn't just be made however you pleased.

『In order for a god to dwell within it, you must first communicate with them.』

In other words,

for beings on the level of gods, rather than just slapping something together and handing it over,

you needed to look into what they actually wanted and craft it to order.

『So, heir, before you begin forging, there is something you must first make.』

『A Divine Bell.』

A bell?

There was a picture attached beside the text.

It really was a bell, exactly the kind that rings when you strike it.

『This is a tool of communication between the Heir of Flame and the gods,』

『a one-way channel that lets them know you are open to receiving requests.』

Ah.

So basically, it's a mailbox.

If I made the bell and rang it, the gods would know.

That the Heir of Flame's forge had lit its fire.

Then the gods would each send in requests for what they wanted, and the Heir of Flame would pick one to accept.

So it wasn't a figure of speech, gods really were customers too.

Filing an order and waiting their turn in line.

Though there was one thing that bothered me.

"This is outside the Tower, though."

The space where the gods supposedly existed was inside the Tower.

I had no idea if ringing the bell out here would even reach them.

'Nothing to lose by trying.'

I'd figured making jewelry for a god would take a lot of research and legwork to begin with.

But with the manual laying down a paved road this smooth for me,

- Click.

why wouldn't I go for it?

If it's doable, I'll do it.

I curled up the corner of my mouth and picked up the tongs.

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