WeTried Translations
Translator: [IncomeElastic]
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Became a Blacksmith the Rankers Are Obsessed With ◈
Chapter 042
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My Eyes Have Opened
* * *
A wake-up like a thunder strike.
A mountain of work was waiting for me.
With that much piled up, my eyes just snapped open on their own.
Normally, if it were work I hated, some miserable chore, my whole body would’ve felt like lead and I’d have burrowed right back under the covers.
But not this time.
If anything, this was work I wanted to get to fast, so my body felt light.
As always, I washed my face, and, to Ruby’s forehead, who stood brushing her teeth beside me,
“Ow.”
I gave a flick,
and headed for the kitchen.
Dolores had apparently rushed off that morning, saying she had business inside the Tower.
Not that it was strange. Maman’s main workplace was the Tower to begin with.
Knowing I grabbed ciabatta every morning, there was freshly baked bread waiting on the table.
Beside it, sliced tomatoes, ham, even romaine lettuce, so I could dress it however I liked.
Honestly, this world’s food culture wasn’t much, so a sandwich like this put it in the top 0.1 percent rating.
“By my standards, anyway.”
I piled everything into a basket-looking bowl and headed for the garden.
At the workshop, I opened the door, stepped in, and shut it behind me.
No small talk, straight to work, that’s a blacksmith for you.
Times like this, it was actually a plus being a kid too young to smoke.
The accessory I had to make… earrings.
An Heir of Flame’s core specialty, at the end of the day, is metallurgy and building big, heavy-duty gear.
We’re great with iron, good at pretty much everything, honestly.
“But delicate little accessories like this…”
aren’t exactly our specialty. That’s Elf territory, small-handed work.
Even so, the metal frame part of the earrings, the material itself, that I could absolutely handle with confidence.
I’d gotten a small taste of that feeling once before.
The Child of the Forest’s material-handling and gem-cutting techniques, picked up while making Spring Without Frost.
If that had just been a taste-test spoonful of a collaboration…
“This time, I’m doing it right.”
Fusing the Elves’ passionate gem-cutting craft with an Heir of Flame’s metallurgy into one.
I meant to make these earrings as a genuine collaboration between the two races.
My goal: an accessory that shouldn’t exist anywhere in history.
First, I had to pick the materials.
I carefully lifted the pouch of ores and spread them out across the table.
- Clatter…
All kinds of ores caught my eye.
There were plenty of factors that mattered when crafting a divine implement, but if I had to name the single most important one…
『A divine implement must be forged from the metal, mineral, and gemstone that touch upon the very nature and grain of the god it’s made for.』
Since it was a divine implement after all, going with minerals tied to the god made sense.
Or ones the god simply liked.
“Yunaaa.”
As always, I asked my cyber-informant Yuna to crawl for me.
“Pull together everything related to Gaia and summarize it for me.”
[Got it~]
…Of course, it wasn’t like I put Yuna to work while I sat around doing nothing.
I had my own damn work to do too.
Sorting the ores.
Just a month ago, forget ores, I’d have been sorting through hot-deal boards comparing chicken breast prices per gram.
Now here I was, sorting ores instead.
Iron ore with iron ore, gems with gems.
I’d set my criteria and was sorting through them briskly, when-
[Big brother, I’ve got a rough draft]
“Oh, already?”
Faster than I expected.
[But since she’s a god]
[…well, it wasn’t easy finding solid information]
[I mostly pulled from what’s leaked in the community, oracles and stuff like that… focused on the wiki]
“Okay.”
My ore-sorting had just wrapped up too, good timing.
I skimmed through the posts Yuna had gathered.
The first thing that came up was a community post.
[Anyone ever run into a god while climbing?]
“This board’s…”
the Climbers’ Board, huh.
Looked like a place where people climbing the Tower traded information-
─────────────────
Passed in 2nd place so I got a floor-manager god’s blessing, got stuck with Gaia
She gave me an earth blessing, but that’s not really the point
Gaia… Mother… I haven’t been sleeping right since I saw her in person…
─────────────────
Anon: Damn, so jealous. I ran into some fucking fire goddess or whatever and got burned, she just torched me with fire
└ OP: ?? Wasn’t it supposed to be a blessing?
└ Anon: I dunno either, fuck, it’s so damn hot
└ Anon: She kept saying getting burned WAS the blessing, going on about it like a lunatic
└ OP: Yikes… scary
└ Anon1: Gaia doesn’t normally summon men. The OP’s probably a woman
What was with this insane temperature gap.
Same category of god, and one keeps you up at night while the other lights you on fire.
Choosing Gaia might’ve been a stroke of genius on my part.
I clicked my tongue in disbelief and moved on to the wiki.
[Gaia, the Goddess of Earth]
Scrolling down, I looked over every divine implement ever offered to her so far.
Divine implements weren’t common to begin with, so it seemed like every single one that got offered ended up logged on the wiki.
“…Huh.”
But-
“This passes for a divine implement?”
All of it was garbage.
The craftsmanship was so bad it was embarrassing to even call these “divine implements.”
Give me two hours and a hammer right now, I could make something better than this.
To begin with, the races even capable of forging divine implements could be counted on one hand.
Set the Elves’ jewelry aside, and everything left over was junk like this.
Looked like people with no real talent had offered this stuff up and called it a divine implement anyway.
“…So you offer garbage like this, get it recognized as a divine implement, and you still get a blessing.”
It felt like déjà vu.
Back in my past life, back in grad school.
The type who’d scribble out some half-assed proposal just to snag research funding, then skim off every last cent of the grant.
Offering something with not a shred of sincerity in it… just to walk away with kind, gentle Gaia’s blessing.
She’d probably recognized every one of these as a genuine divine implement and blessed them anyway.
Every source I dug up, community threads, the wiki, said the same thing about Gaia.
Extremely kind, extremely gentle.
Apparently she wouldn’t even get angry at most kinds of rudeness.
So that’s why everyone took her for a pushover.
I shook my head.
I hate this type of person most of all, the kind who, when someone’s kind to them, doesn’t feel grateful but just starts scheming how to take advantage.
I closed the wiki tab.
My mind was made up.
Putting in real effort had always been a given, but this time, even more so.
“I’ll make this properly, and bring back a proper blessing.”
Still shaking my head, I sat down in front of the ores I’d sorted.
“Yuna, take notes.”
[Mm-hm]
“The frame goes with White Iron… reason being.”
She’s the Goddess of Earth, so rather than flashy, I wanted heavy, luminous.
That, and it nodded to her spotless, flawless temperament too.
Second ore…
“Loess Essence[1].”
This one was a lock. Literally an ore where the earth’s own essence had condensed.
No material suited her better.
And last.
- Tap, tap.
I tapped my fingers on the table, deep in thought.
“Green Jade.”
The color that symbolizes all living things sprouting to life.
I couldn’t leave green out.
─────────────────
[Materials: White Iron / Loess Essence / Green Jade]
─────────────────
Materials decided, next was the design.
If I had to name the current constraint,
fully melting the metal into liquid and pouring it into a mold to set wasn’t an option.
My forge just couldn’t function as a smelting furnace.
So the method I’d go with was wirework.
Twisting or coiling thin strands of metal wire,
shaping them into petal-like patterns and fitting them inside an outer frame, then fusing it all together.
In other words, building a single earring out of nothing but one strand of metal wire, twisted this way and that.
And inside that frame… I’d set the Green Jade and Loess Essence.
Wirework was normally something done with softer metals, gold or silver.
But according to the Dwarven encyclopedia, White Iron’s hardness rated pretty low.
Which meant it was a good fit.
How many should I make?
“Two.”
Earrings basically come as a pair, after all.
The structure would go like this.
The White Iron frame would form the socket for the Green Jade, and Loess Essence would bond with the frame to reinforce that seat.
And… once the Green Jade went in,
you’d get a picture of the earth cradling its ochre-colored essence, and that essence in turn cradling a green sprout.
“The concept’s perfect, isn’t it.”
For the design itself, I’d drawn on Yuna’s big data, by the way.
Extremely famous, extremely expensive jewelry brands.
Basically, future design work built on thousands of years of accumulated aesthetic sense.
The era I’d lived in was one where stomachs were full and food was plentiful.
People staked their lives on looks and aesthetics.
I meant to show off a sense of style this measly medieval era couldn’t hope to match.
“If I need to draw out wire,”
guess I had to do the usual.
“Thermal Shock Delamination.”
Brutal work, but there was no way around it.
At least two weeks, probably.
Last time it was just Ember Ore…
but this time I had to do both White Iron and Loess Essence.
- Thud.
Grinning, I dropped an Ignition Stone into the forge,
- Whoosh!
and the forge burst into flame.
Grind-fest time.
* * *
Thermal Shock Delamination was brutal, miserable work,
but watching the results pile up neatly did ease my mind a little.
Also, whenever I started a round of it,
Dolores would hug me like she’d been waiting for the chance.
You know, like that cool-mat sleeping trick.
With benefits like that… all that was left was to work.
I hadn’t given the Princess any set deadline.
In this world, basically nobody asks a blacksmith how long a piece will take.
“…That’s nobles for you. Nobles.”
You won’t find nobles like this anywhere else.
So worried about upsetting the esteemed blacksmith that they just don’t ask the question at all.
Which meant I could drag things out as long as I liked without a shred of guilt.
“I mean, she’s probably expecting something like three months, right?”
Not that I actually knew for sure.
So, time passed.
Two weeks, before I knew it.
“Insane.”
The last of the Loess Essence had run dry,
and beside me, sheets of metal fabric had piled up in neat little mounds.
If there was one difference from last time,
it was that now I had to roll those sheets up into thread and stitch with them.
This was where the real disaster, the real hell, began.
“Once this job’s done, I’m getting a smelting furnace, no matter…”
even if it means selling off the +20 grind-fest chore glove to afford it.
Honestly, asking Dolores for one felt like pushing my luck.
Sure, she asked me practically every day if there was anything I needed,
but how could I just keep mooching off her? I had some shame left.
“Yuna, pull up the blueprint.”
[Yep yep]
Yuna and I had already hashed out the perfect design for the earrings.
We’d clashed at first, but once I realized there was no beating Yuna’s philosophy and knowledge on the subject,
I just conceded on everything.
- Flash.
The blueprint sketched itself into the air…
lines interweaving like petals in a design that filled my view.
“It really is pretty.”
Looking at it again, yeah, it was pretty,
the problem being that now I had to actually make the thing.
“Alright, then.”
I rolled up my sleeves and grabbed a pile of White Iron fabric.
From here on, I’d roll these up and draw out thread.
Keep at it long enough, it’ll end eventually.
Grad school was the same way. So was this.
- Whirr…
And so,
- Whirr…
another miserable two weeks crawled by.
If I’d made one fatal miscalculation,
it was overestimating myself.
Twisting wire into something was, by itself, a seriously difficult skill.
But I’d been so good at everything lately that I just assumed I’d be good at this too.
Not that the results were bad, exactly.
[Big brother, the match rate with the blueprint’s 95.5%… please stop…]
“What are you talking about.”
But-
“No, that’s not gonna cut it.”
Might as well just kill me.
If there was a problem, it was that somewhere mid-task, I’d tripped my own rage trigger.
Who the hell do you think you are, looking down on me.
The first attempt.
When the finished piece came back at an 85 percent match rate with the blueprint, I nearly passed out on the spot.
I genuinely thought it was telling me to go die.
Like my first rhythm game.
The feeling of staring blankly at 134 GOOD judgments, maybe.
I did get better the more I did it, but I couldn’t break past the cursed 96 percent wall.
[96 percent was a stat for the machines in the factory, big brother!! Please!!! Can I take back what I said back then?]
There was one more reason things had ended up this way.
According to Yuna, even earring factories shipped a piece as a finished product once its match rate cleared roughly 96 percent.
So obviously, I was aiming for 96 percent.
Then, not long after, I found out that number was for machines.
Yuna had probably said it hoping to make me stop. Instead, it just lit a fire under me.
Sorry, but I’m pretty confident when it comes to competing with machines.
I wasn’t about to get steamrolled by a machine and lose my job all over again.
The Luddite movement, smashing every machine in sight.
If there was nothing left to smash, then all I had to do was raise my own skill to match.
Competitiveness on par with a machine, that was always what humans lacked.
That was the belief I’d held onto.
Remember that spirit.
[Are you seriously trying to become a machine…?]
“No?”
A man’s romance: the mecha.
The true essence of the Luddite movement was surpassing the machine myself.
“Higher.”
I’d be the one putting machines out of a job instead. Steal their jobs right back.
That’s the argument I was making, anyway…
but I could feel that something needed to change.
Alright, let’s think about the difference.
What was different from back when I made Spring Without Frost, that only unsatisfying results kept coming out this time?
“…Wait.”
In that instant,
a fundamental question surfaced.
Back then, when I made those stockings, what had I been thinking as my hands moved?
…Oh?
Only then did I realize it.
“I haven’t been thinking about the person who’s going to wear this.”
That was it.
All I’d been looking at this whole time was the match rate with the blueprint.
I’d been obsessing over nothing but a number…
This wasn’t some mass-produced product stamped out at a factory.
The person who’d wear these earrings, in the realm of gods, that was Gaia.
In the human world, the Princess.
“Then obviously I need to make them with the Princess in mind.”
When I’d stitched Dolores’s stockings, every single moment, I’d moved my hands picturing nothing but Maman’s face.
What texture would feel comfortable against this foot… which spots absolutely couldn’t chafe.
How smooth her legs were, how full her thighs were, how gorgeous Dolores would look wearing it…
[…]
Sitting the person who’d wear it right there in front of me,
stitch by stitch, tailored to that one person, that’s what I’d been doing.
But this time, I’d forgotten the single most important thing.
“Okay, Yuna.”
[Mm…]
Now, finally, I could see the way forward.
“Pull up a picture of the Princess in front of me.”
Pick a pretty one.
[ㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠ]
At last, I opened my eyes.
Footnotes
[1] Loess is a fine-grained, yellowish-brown sediment formed by the accumulation of wind-blown dust, mostly made of silt. It covers about 10% of the Earth's land and develops into very fertile agricultural soil.
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