The Occult World’s Coveted Blacksmith - Chapter 11

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Chen

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ The Occult World’s Coveted Blacksmith ◈

Chapter 11: Did I Find a Secret Manual?

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Fwaaaash!

My vision turned completely white.

Dust.

An enormous cloud of old dust burst up in every direction.

The books that had been precariously piled high lost their balance and came crashing down.

"Cough, cough!"

I instinctively covered my face.

Books slid down through the hazy cloud of dust and scattered around my feet.

"...Ah."

For a moment, I felt like I’d been under some kind of spell.

Or had I?

Maybe it was just my imagination.

For a second, I wondered if I’d been hit by some kind of curse, but I felt completely fine.

I opened my palm and flexed my fingers.

Nothing was wrong.

"...What? Was it all in my head?"

Guess it wasn’t a big deal.

I dusted myself off and lifted the book in my hand.

It had a leather cover.

Its corners were rounded with wear, as if it had passed through countless hands over the years.

Letters had been engraved in the center of the cover.

I wiped away the dust with my sleeve.

[Apprentice’s Diary]

Was this... an apprentice’s journal? A diary?

My mom had forced practice sheets on me when I was little, saying I needed to study Chinese characters, so I could slowly sound them out.

I’d forgotten almost all of it by now, though.

Apprentice’s Diary.

There was nothing else on the cover besides those four characters. No author, no publisher, not even a paper band. Just deeply engraved letters in old leather.

It sounded like a diary someone had written while learning something.

'Hmm. A diary.'

Now that I knew it was someone else’s diary, I suddenly wanted to read it.

I carefully turned to the first page.

"...?"

It was blank.

I turned the next page.

Blank too.

I turned another.

"..."

Flip, flip, flip.

I caught the edge of the pages with my thumb and flipped through the whole book.

There wasn’t a single word from beginning to end. It was filled with yellowed pages, but there wasn’t even a dot of ink.

'What? Did they start writing it and quit?'

The worn leather corners made it look like someone had carried it around often.

Yet the inside was completely empty.

Or maybe the book itself had some use.

'Hmm. Maybe I should ask the old owner.'

As I was tucking the book under my arm with that pointless thought in mind, I decided it was about time to pay.

I turned my head.

"...!"

My heart dropped.

He was right in front of me.

I had no idea when he’d approached, but the skinny old man I thought had been dozing off was standing inches from my face.

'You scared the hell out of me...'

I hadn’t sensed him at all.

His expression was strange, too.

His eyes were wide behind his reading glasses.

His mouth hung wide open around his pipe, like his jaw was about to dislocate.

Frozen in that expression, he stared at me without moving a muscle.

"..."

What was that about? Why was he acting like that?

Ah.

Something occurred to me.

The pile of books that had just collapsed.

I hurriedly apologized.

"Ah, I’m sorry. I was pulling out a book, and... I kicked up some dust."

They had already been piled up in a complete mess, but I’d still rummaged through someone else’s shop and knocked them over.

"..."

The old man only looked back and forth between me and the pile of books, his mouth still hanging open.

What was he looking at? The books, or me?

After glancing at the book in my hand, he slowly looked me over from head to toe.

Come to think of it.

I considered what I looked like. My face was half-wrapped in black cloth, and I was crouching in the corner of a used-book store in an oversized black T-shirt, digging through a pile of bargain books.

Of course I looked suspicious. I couldn’t say anything if he thought I was a thief.

Maybe he thought I’d come to steal a book without even having money.

"Um, I do have money."

"H-how did you...?"

The old man’s voice came out cracked.

Huh?

"...You mean this?"

I tapped the book tucked beneath my arm.

The old man flinched and took a step back, as if I were waving a bomb at him.

"Sir! Th-that is a cursed object...!"

A curse?

Hmm? I didn’t know about that.

The old man pulled the pipe from his mouth and launched into an explanation, pointing at the book with a trembling hand.

According to him, the book carried an enormous curse.

Long ago, some deranged sorcerer had visited the used-book store, secretly slipped that book into the pile, and left.

Not only that, the sorcerer had placed a powerful Barrier and a vicious curse on it.

After that, nobody had been able to touch that book, or even the books around it.

"...You weren’t the first kid to try pulling it out."

The old man swallowed hard.

"One guy’s perfectly fine shop went completely bankrupt that very day, leaving him out on the street. Another started wasting away within three days, caught a serious illness, and ended up bedridden. Someone else got into a freak traffic accident while walking down the street... Anyway, not one person who touched that thing had a good ending. That’s what I’m saying."

'...No.'

If it was that dangerous, put up a fence or at least a warning sign.

Were you trying to get everyone in the neighborhood killed?

The tension suddenly drained from the old man’s face, and he burst into hearty laughter.

"Ha ha ha! So I left it there. I thought maybe one day, some fearless fellow like you would show up, pull it out, and take it away."

Ah.

So that was why the bookstore was especially messy.

He couldn’t touch the pile, so he couldn’t clean it.

'Ah... So that spot too?'

I pointed without thinking at the opposite corner of the store. Books were piled there in a mess too, without even room to set a foot down.

"Ah... Then were the books in that corner scattered everywhere because of a curse too...?"

"Huh? Not that corner."

"..."

"I just didn’t clean there."

"..."

Ah.

...He was just lazy.

For all I knew, he might have left this book alone not because of some grand curse, but because he couldn’t be bothered to clean up.

Well, whatever.

A cursed book.

According to the old man, just touching it should have left my whole body painfully tingling, to the point I couldn’t even pull it out.

But I was completely fine.

If anything, I strangely didn’t want to let it go.

Cursed or not.

The leather cover was sturdy and high-quality, so if nothing else, I could use it as a notebook later. That was how I decided to see it.

More importantly, it was time to pay.

I set the book on top of the ones I’d picked out earlier and placed them on the counter.

"How much for all of these?"

The old man stared down at the books on the counter for a long while.

Then he slowly opened his mouth.

"...Fifty million won."

...What?

Fuck.

Were books in the Occult World that expensive too?

A bell cost five million won, but five flimsy theory books cost fifty million?

My face stiffened for a moment.

"Ah, pfft hahahahaha! Just kidding, kidding! You should’ve seen your face!"

The old man suddenly laughed like a maniac.

He slapped his knee with the hand holding his pipe, tears gathering at the corners of his eyes.

"I’m not taking a cent, not a cent. Feels like ten years of pent-up frustration just melted away. Thanks to you, I can finally do a proper deep clean for the first time in ages."

"Then what about the prices of these other books...?"

"Didn’t I say I’m not taking anything? Take those too! Go on, get out of here!"

As I awkwardly gathered the stack of books into my arms, I spotted a price tag on the back cover of the introductory talisman book at the top.

[₩3,800,000]

'...Three million eight hundred thousand won?'

For this? This cheap-magazine-looking thing?

I discreetly flipped through the theory books beneath it. Every one of them had strings of zeroes attached to the price. The thinnest one cost over two million won.

'...Together, these would easily go over ten million won.'

Even if fifty million had been a joke, these definitely weren’t things I could casually take for free.

"Shoo, shoo! I’ve got cleaning to do!"

Waving his hands, the old man herded me toward the door.

He was so excited that he’d already pulled out a broom from somewhere and started humming to himself.

I left the used-book store with a stack of books worth millions of won in my arms, practically pushed out the door.

* * *

The moment I got back to the forge, I collapsed onto my bed.

"Haa..."

I’d wandered through the alleys for ages on the way back.

I was sure I’d taken the same route, but I had to go around the same alley three times before I finally found the main road.

There had to be some kind of sorcery in this neighborhood that made it hard to find your way around. Then again, maybe there really was. This was a place where people talked about sorcery and Barriers, so it wasn’t like that was impossible.

...I seriously thought that for a moment.

Probably not, though. I was just terrible with directions.

Anyway.

Lying on the bed, I held up the Suppression Talisman hanging around my neck.

'...I think this thing might be part of the problem.'

Maybe it was because it blocked Spiritual Power, but wearing it made me feel strangely drained.

I pulled the pouch off over my head.

Whoosh.

At once, my body felt as light as a feather.

Something warm seemed to rise from my lower abdomen and circulate through my body.

The fatigue I’d built up while getting lost in the alleys vanished in an instant.

It felt like something that was supposed to be there had returned to its rightful place.

"...Huh."

I opened and closed my hand.

The sensation in my fingertips was sharp and vivid. There was no way to explain this lightness with the lousy stamina I’d developed after spending ten years playing games in my room.

'So this is it.'

This was Spiritual Power.

I stared blankly at the ceiling before sitting up.

This wasn’t the time to lie around.

* * *

"Hmm... So that’s roughly how it works."

I spread the books I’d gotten from the used-book store across my desk and quickly skimmed the parts I needed.

I was translating concepts from the game into terms used in the real-world Occult World.

What I called mana here was Spiritual Power.

What I called Mana Circuits were Spell Formulas.

Sorcery attributes followed Yin-Yang and the Five Elements, and the Five Elements were divided into Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water.

The broad framework was similar to the game. Only the names were different.

Lastly, there was [You Can Make Them Too! Starting Today, I’m a Talisman King], a book that didn’t look reliable from the title alone.

Sure enough, it was full of exaggerated pictures like some cheap magazine.

Still.

'...This one’s at least a little better.'

The other books were packed with text, so none of it would stick in my head. At least this one had illustrations.

The shapes and flow of the Spell Formulas inscribed on Talismans were laid out in rough diagrams.

As expected, Talismans in this world weren’t made by carving circuits.

According to the book, you drew Chinese characters and patterns onto Yellow Talisman Paper using Mirror Cinnabar or blood.

'...How does it work without circuits?'

That part did strike me as odd.

Well, I’d find out once I tried it.

At least I had a clear picture of the setting now.

* * *

"Should I give it a try?"

Once I had a basic grasp of the theory, it was time for practice.

You had to try things with your own hands for them to really stick.

I brought a stack of Yellow Talisman Paper, Mirror Cinnabar, and a fine brush from the materials room.

With everything spread across the desk, it looked quite a bit like a talisman maker’s workspace.

"Ahem."

I loosened up my wrist.

Today, I was going to make the most basic Exam-Pass Talisman.

I opened to the beginner’s diagram printed boldly on the first page of Chapter One in [You Can Make Them Too! Starting Today, I’m a Talisman King].

[All Right, You Can Pass Exams Too! The Exam-Pass Talisman.]

There was nothing complicated about it.

One circle. A few short patterns inside it. Finally, a Chinese character in the center.

It looked like a structure that sealed Spiritual Power inside a circle and made it flow along the patterns.

I lightly dipped the tip of the brush into the Mirror Cinnabar.

Then I concentrated Spiritual Power at my fingertips.

I could feel the red liquid flow along the tip of the brush.

There was something strangely satisfying about sending Spiritual Power along with that flow.

Swish.

I drew a circle on the paper.

Then came the patterns inside.

Finally, a large Chinese character in the center.

[Pass]

The moment I lifted the brush from the paper.

Hum.

The Talisman trembled faintly. Just a little.

"Oh."

Would you look at that.

It really did react.

I could feel a little dopamine rising somewhere in my chest.

It was a different kind of thrill from carving circuits into metal.

This was easier than I thought, wasn’t it?

"...Huh?"

But then.

Something was strange.

I’d filled it in exactly as the diagram showed, and the Talisman had reacted. Yet something felt incomplete.

Like I’d made a perfectly nice container, but it was empty inside.

I tried pouring Spiritual Power into it.

It seemed to seep into the circle, but then it slipped from my fingertips and scattered into the air. The energy wouldn’t stay contained.

"...Did I actually make this right?"

I held the Talisman to the light. The red characters were intact, but I couldn’t feel anything from it. It looked like nothing more than a dead drawing.

At this point, it was no different from writing Chinese characters on a piece of paper.

I went back through the Talisman King book.

The instructions for drawing it were remarkably detailed. How to make the circle, what order to draw the patterns in, where to put the Chinese character.

But that was all.

There wasn’t a single line explaining the underlying principles, like why Spiritual Power leaked out or how to keep it inside.

The other theory books were the same.

Maybe because they were old books, their explanations weren’t especially clear. More than that, half of their contents were written in Chinese characters, making them hard to read.

Why write every word in Chinese characters for no reason?

I set down my brush and leaned back in my chair with a sigh.

Then my eyes drifted to the old leather book I’d pushed aside on one corner of the desk.

Apprentice’s Diary.

"...Huh?"

My gaze froze.

"..."

It had definitely been blank when I flipped through it at the bookstore.

But now, in the center of the yellowed first page.

There were neatly written words in black ink.

[Day One]

Day One.