WeTried Translations
Translator: [IncomeElastic]
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Became a Blacksmith the Rankers Are Obsessed With ◈
Chapter 041
──────
Hey guys, quick announcement before the chapter! We're hosting an original webnovel contest with a $1000 prize pool, a chance to publish your novel on WeTried, and lifetime free reading access for the top two winners!
There's also a participation prize of 500 coins for everyone participating.
If you've got a story sitting in a folder somewhere, or have been wanting to try writing one, we'd love to read it. You only need your first 10 chapters, and you have until 1st January 2027 to submit. New writers are welcome too!
Full details, rules, and how to enter here! https://wetriedtls.com/announcements/webnovel-contest
Feel free to send this to anyone you know who writes. Enjoy the chapter!
If you have any questions, please join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried
──────
Arriving Like Fate
* * *
Deep in the night.
- Thud-thud-thud-thud!
A racket erupted just outside the door of Dolores’s study.
“T-Teacher!”
It was Ruby who came bursting in, panting, her face taut with urgency.
A child who almost never ran.
Her face had gone white as a sheet as she clutched the doorknob, gasping for breath.
“Ruby? What’s wrong?”
“It’s… the garden…!”
Ruby pointed a trembling hand toward the window.
“The bell Lionel made, it’s ringing all on its own… and spirits… no, no.”
“…”
“Something strange keeps gathering around the bell…”
Dolores’s eyes narrowed.
She’d known Lionel was doing something for the Princess, but.
“Ruby, stay in your room.”
If it was something the child couldn’t handle, it had to be stopped.
- Slide.
Dolores cinched the robe she had on and rose from her seat at once.
Then, with quick strides, she headed for the garden.
Around the time Dolores reached the garden,
Lionel had accepted the commission from Gaia, Maman of the Earth, and was about to dive straight into work, but,
“… huh?”
- Flop.
He just sat down hard in the grass.
‘…my legs just gave out.’
Made sense, he supposed, after a full day of stomping on that creaky old treadle.
His mind and will hadn’t dimmed, not yet, whether from the exhilaration or the adrenaline, he couldn’t say.
His head was still spinning at full speed. But his body had gone on strike.
“Ah, to hell with it.”
Lionel just sprawled flat out on the field, figuring he might as well recover while he was at it.
- Whoosh…
The night air cooled his overheated body.
Lying there like that, he stared blankly up at the full moon.
It was right around then that Dolores arrived at his side.
Beside him lay the wreckage of something broken. The child lay next to it, gazing blankly up at the full moon.
Whatever had happened, thankfully… he didn’t seem hurt.
- Pop.
“Oh.”
Dolores’s face suddenly filled Lionel’s view.
“Ruby was scared out of her wits, insisting I hurry and check on you.”
“Guess Ruby’s got some loyalty in her after all.”
For all her prim little act, she’d apparently gotten scared and gone running for Maman.
“Whew…”
Dolores let out a slow breath.
“So Lionel’s just lying here nice and comfortable, isn’t he?”
Her hair spilled down softly, her warm breath brushing right against his face.
But instead of startling him, it somehow put Lionel instantly at ease.
His body and mind, worked to the bone all day, seemed to loosen the moment he saw Dolores.
‘Here we go again.’
In Lionel’s opinion, this was a learned effect, learned helplessness, to be precise.
Back when he’d been making Spring Without Frost.
Worn out and pulling all-nighters, Dolores would show up at just the right moment and pull him into her arms.
And that would be the end of the day’s work, forced against her chest, that natural cool mat, face buried in it, and carted off to the estate.
After enough time had passed like that, now his body reacted first.
No matter how clear-headed he was, if he saw Dolores’s face in a hard moment,
‘Time to sleep.’
His body just felt it, like a conditioned reflex.
Right when he was thinking this might be a little dangerous,
“Sleepy, Lionel?”
Dolores laughed quietly to herself.
Strangely enough, this child would relax the instant he saw her face and drift right off to sleep.
Well, maybe… maybe she was the one who’d made him that way.
“I guess so…”
“Then let’s go to bed.”
Dolores pulled Lionel snugly into her arms, then carefully set the shattered bell’s remains down on the ground.
“I’ll have the staff move it to the workshop.”
“Okay…”
In the end, he was carried straight back to the estate like that.
‘Usually I’d be out cold by now, but tonight I can hold on a bit longer…’
As Lionel lay buried in her cool mat, quietly being carried along,
how long had they been walking?
The estate’s front door came into view.
“…you worked hard again today.”
Dolores murmured something, offering her usual end-of-day words, as always.
A daily greeting for the sleeping Lionel.
- Slide…
Something warm and damp settled onto Lionel’s forehead.
Dolores pressed her lips gently to his forehead.
- Smooch.
But Lionel’s eyes were still half open.
“Hm? You’re still awake, Lionel?”
“Yeah…”
Dolores’s eyes went wide for a moment when their gazes met, but…
she just smiled, as if it didn’t matter either way, and pushed open the estate door.
“You’re always asleep by now, so I’ve never gotten to ask, but what did you make today?”
The child in her arms answered in a drowsy voice.
“I was trying to make an accessory for a god…”
“A divine implement…”
“Yeah…”
She shook her head slowly and let out a small laugh.
“That’s so impressive I don’t know what to say…”
Inside the Tower, the value of a divine implement was beyond imagining.
There were barely any races even capable of making one.
Whether anyone alive right now could even craft a so-called “divine implement” was itself an open question.
And here he was, saying he’d make one.
Dolores climbed the stairs slowly, the child still in her arms.
So then, those fragments from before,
‘…must have been something like a carrier pigeon, a way to reach the gods.’
She didn’t know the details,
but she knew that whether inside the Tower or out, contacting a god required some kind of medium.
But then, a sudden curiosity welled up in her.
“What kind of god is it?”
The child in her arms, voice heavy with sleep, gently took hold of her forearm,
and answered, docile, his voice already sinking into sleep.
“…Gaia…”
- Flinch.
Dolores’s steps stopped short.
That name.
She’d never once imagined it would come out of the child’s mouth.
- Snore…
The child in her arms, with no chance to notice the change in her,
had already drifted off to sleep.
Dolores gazed down at Lionel’s sleeping face for a long moment.
“…Mother?”
Then she murmured it quietly.
* * *
After gently laying Lionel down on the bed,
she carefully tucked a blanket over Ruby too, who had fallen asleep after coming to fetch her.
- Smooch, smooch.
Only after kissing each child’s forehead in turn
did she rise to her feet.
She went to her study, sat down, and quietly opened something she rarely bothered with.
It wasn’t somewhere she truly, truly liked. It was a place her hand never much reached for.
The Inner Tower Community.
But it was also a window she had no choice but to open whenever she urgently needed information.
Part of it was just people chatting away, trading talk,
but one side held the auction house, where every kind of gear changed hands,
and another held the storefronts of the so-called “businesses” operating inside the Tower.
And of all of them, the most useful by far was.
- Tap.
the Information Guild.
Digging up something on her own two feet would ordinarily take more nerve and effort than she had to spare,
but if she left the job to this place, all she had to do was pay and wait.
And as for Dolores herself…
she was something of a regular here, actually.
- Buzz…
The instant she pressed the button,
one of the always-on-standby staff responded right away.
─────────────────
[Information Guild Team Lead]: Ranker. What information do you need?
─────────────────
Dolores had a great many things she wanted to ask.
A mountain of questions wouldn’t have been enough to describe it.
But for now, she calmed herself and spoke evenly.
“Is there any rumor going around lately about a divine implement being made by an Heir of Flame?”
The answer didn’t take long.
[Information Guild Team Lead]: …As it happens, we just received a piece of news moments ago.
Dolores’s eyes narrowed.
[Information Guild Team Lead]: We hear the Heir of Flame chose Gaia, not the fire goddess.
[Information Guild Team Lead]: It’s unprecedented in the history of the Sun Dwarves, so word’s spreading fast both inside and out.
“…”
Dolores stopped reading the screen.
She simply paid the fee and closed the window.
‘So it was true…’
Lionel hadn’t been half-asleep and misspoken.
“He really… that child really…”
Lionel’s face, only just fallen asleep, rose in her mind.
Dolores quietly rested a hand over her own forehead.
She was not someone who believed in fate.
Because fate had always, not once in her life, ever been on Dolores’s side.
To her, fate had only ever meant the curse hanging over a house doomed to die out within a handful of years.
That was all it had ever meant.
But.
Not long ago, only very recently, she had started to take an interest in fate.
Started to let it into her heart.
The reason for that hardly needed asking.
“Lionel…”
- Rustle…
The moment Dolores placed her hand on her forehead,
an intangible tail rose slowly into being behind her back.
A scorpion’s tail.
Dolores stared at the tail blankly.
Where does a scorpion make its home?
Parched earth… scorching soil and sand.
‘…The land.’
Even if it was barren, it was unmistakably earth.
The Earth Goddess…
was never one to look down on even land this barren.
Dolores.
Ruler of the Tower’s 5th Floor, and.
Apostle of Gaia, the Earth Goddess.
Gaia’s daughter.
The god she had served for so long was none other than Gaia.
This place, the Duchy, was territory outside the Tower,
but her true domain lay inside the Tower.
That domain was the 5th Floor itself.
The 5th Floor flourished because the earth watched kindly over the rule of its Apostle, Dolores.
The same held true even now, this very moment.
To her own mother, of all people,
‘you went and found her, Lionel…’
Dolores’s eyes trembled faintly.
‘…But how, exactly?’
There was no way he could have known.
An Apostle’s identity, by nature, was never revealed to the world at large, even if the occasional person quietly guessed it.
Much less could that little child have had any way of realizing she was Gaia’s Apostle.
For that to even be possible, one would at least need to be a climber.
And yet, out of the countless gods there were, that child had chosen her mother, of all of them.
Dolores lost her words for a moment,
and a thought she had long since folded away and given up on rose back to the surface.
When a god came to possess a divine implement, their divinity rose,
and that risen divinity naturally flowed down to her, its Apostle.
“Then I too…”
Gaia, the mother she served, had long ago settled at a rank that no longer climbed any higher.
And so Dolores, too, had given up on it long ago.
But if her Apostle’s rank rose.
If the thing she’d never even dared to hope for actually rose.
“Maybe…”
it might reach even her curse, if only by the barest speck.
Because it was the power of a god.
And would that be all?
As the god’s and the Apostle’s rank rose together, the land of the 5th Floor would grow richer still than it already was.
Dolores slowly closed her eyes.
All her life, the word “fate” had been synonymous with curse to her.
But now,
that wretched, sickening fate had come to her from an entirely different direction.
“Lionel…”
Once again,
you’ve come to me like fate.
Beneath her closed eyelids, something hot slowly welled up and slid down.
- Trickle.
She couldn’t even bring herself to think of wiping it away.
How, of all things, could this be happening?
Dolores was someone who had resigned herself to everything.
‘Once I’m dead.’
She’d believed the 5th Floor’s abundance would slowly fade and lose its light.
She’d believed the Duchy’s line would end, that never, never again would it hold the Triple-Lion Plate in its hand from the Emperor.
- Trickle…
She’d believed there would never again be anything to smile about.
The thought of Ruby, left all alone, had haunted her so that she couldn’t sleep easy for even a single day.
- Trickle.
She’d believed she would never again be able to dream of tomorrow.
Once the tears broke loose, they showed no sign of stopping.
The child’s face kept flickering before her eyes.
“How can you possibly…”
- Trickling…
“…keep giving me nothing but hope?”
The Duchess’s cheeks, always cold and chilled through,
just for tonight,
were burning hot, soaked through for a long, long while.
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried
