Blacksmith vs. the System 25 (Patreon)

“You look tired,” was Eleanor’s first words when she visited me the next morning, pushing a huge cart that was taller than her with ease. It weighed at least three tons, but stats were useful for more than just fighting.

“I want to make sure I don’t disappoint you,” I said, which was once again not exactly the truth. However, keeping the supervisor unaware of the intricacies of the experiment budget was never a bad idea.

I was simply lost in the excitement of experimentation. The man from the solitary shell only allowed me to make two more attempts, and only with smaller pieces. Both had been abject failures, but they provided enough data for me to gather some clues.

I had enough of the first blue crystal and the herb to start experimenting. It wasn’t enough to even get close to success. For now, anything that managed to stabilize was roughly as strong as a sandcastle, but I wasn’t after the end result.

No, I needed to understand the process of crystallization and the shape of macrostructures. That was only the first step before I could start the real experimentation. Too bad I lacked the necessary background, and relied on a knowledge base that was cobbled together.

“Good. I hope they will be useful,” she said as she pulled the cover of the cart, and showed that it had not only contained all types of metals but also piles and piles of broken shells. “Would that be enough?”

“Not even close, but it will be good enough to start,” I said, not willing to turn down my only mana source. She looked surprised. “I can try to ration them, but using them excessively would allow me to process them faster. Since they are garbage, what’s the harm.”

She frowned. “Bringing them here might be suspicious,” she admitted.

“You’re the commander. I’m sure you can find a good reason,” I said, already touching them to test their mana content. A slight frown appeared on my face as I noticed some of them had much less mana than the others. The smaller they were, or the dirtier they looked, the more mana they had lost.

I realized why the System shop only bought the undamaged ones. The moment they shattered, they started to leak mana.

“Something wrong?” she asked.

“No, it’s just that the older ones look like they have decayed somewhat. The fresh ones would work better,” I replied.

“Should I not bother with the old ones?”

“No, the more, the better,” I said. “Maybe there’s some benefit to using decayed ones.” It might even be the truth. Using organic materials for alloy making was not exactly a topic that science had covered. Even if someone explored it, it was probably nothing more than a niche field.

How I wished I still had the internet.

Once she was done with the delivery, I expected her to leave, but I noticed that she was still waiting with a smirk on her face. “What’s going on?” I asked.

“I have another delivery,” she said as she threw me a backpack. I opened it, only for my eyes to widen. It was filled with papers. Mostly magazines, with several journals mixed in. I pulled out the first journal, flicking it with excitement that I had never shown before the Cataclysm.

Most scientific articles were boring, derivative articles that merely introduced a fraction of new knowledge while they pandered pointlessly, only minutely different from a hundred other articles I could find with a quick query.

But, with that option gone, every article represented the crystallization of human ingenuity, with ideas I could never come up with on my own.

I flipped the first article, reading the abstract out loud. “A two-dimensional mathematical model for a process of solidification of a binary alloy in the presence of an electric field as a free boundary problem.”

“So, useless?” Eleanor asked. I turned to look at her, and she flinched and took a step back. I took a deep breath, realizing that I might have got … a tad angry. “Not useless?”

“Of course not,” I said.

“But, there’s no electricity anymore. It doesn’t work with mana, even in the dead zones.”

What she had said was true. During the first year of the Cataclysm, there had been a lot of attempts to restart technology. Three main targets were steam, gunpowder, and electricity.

Among the three, electricity had been the one that had been abandoned first, for a very simple reason: Mana didn’t get along well with electricity. Once they mixed in, the results were unpredictable. Sometimes, it fizzled and melted, sometimes it exploded. I didn’t know if anyone properly completed those experiments in mana dead zones, but considering monsters let out mana when they died, I didn’t know how much it would have mattered.

The gunpowder and steam had been abandoned for simpler, logistical reasons.

Ironically, the reason gunpowder had been ignored was the reverse of the process it had led to its adaptation. During the fifteenth century, gunpowder weapons were less powerful and less accurate than the bow and arrow, yet it had been adapted because training an archer took years, it required immense strength, and making arrows was much slower than making small metal balls.

The exact opposite was true for our circumstances. With the System, a decent archer required mere days to turn into a marksman that could comfortably compete in the Olympics, the physical strength came from leveling up, and ammunition could be simply purchased from System shops, and reused for a long time.

That had been true the first few days, and it was even truer now. At this point, where people could heal from a lot of wounds, gunpowder weapons simply lacked the necessary stopping power.

The steam engine, on the other hand, could have been technically useful, but a simpler fact stopped it. While steam and fire weren’t as volatile as electricity when interacting with mana, it was still enough to make the idea of a steam engine made of ordinary metal useless.

The alloys that the blacksmiths could forge could be useful, but that meant a radical increase in cost. A steam engine had to be large to be useful, which meant at least five tons of metal. A ridiculous amount, considering a sword required less than four pounds, and the ingots the System sold were usually between one and two pounds.

A steam engine took enough metal to arm a whole town. Hardly an acceptable tradeoff, particularly since anyone with high strength could match the power of a steam engine.

It was for a reason our old technology had been abandoned, which I was more than alright with. It was how technology worked.

What truly rankled me was abandoning the process of science with it.

I took a deep breath, suppressing my desire to deliver a long explanation. “It doesn’t matter if electricity doesn’t work. We can’t use the process described in the articles in any case. They are not exactly manufacturing plans. I need them to give me ideas to try.”

“And, it’ll work?”

“It worked to drop the repair time to eight minutes,” I said, ignoring the temptation to inform her that I had already reduced it even more. No, that part could wait. I needed it in case my other experiments failed. “But, as I said, I can’t promise results, not until I can find a proper direction.”

She looked unconvinced, but after a while, she shrugged. “You’re, the expert, professor,” she said before turning and walking away.

I could see that she was trying to annoy me by tackling that last part, but I didn’t care. I was more interested in going through all the books. Not all of them were about material sciences, but related topics. Mechanics, control systems, thermodynamics… None of them were particularly useful for a blacksmith, but I was still happy about their presence.

More information was not something I would turn my nose to. Just because they weren’t immediately needed didn’t make them useless.

My first real disappointment was about the condition of the material. Not all books were intact. Some of them were half-burned, while the others were missing pages, moldy, or dirty enough to make reading a chore.

It was clear that whoever had them treated them as garbage. “What a disappointing loss,” I muttered even as I carefully went through every book and journal, categorizing the information they contained.

Once that was done, I started reading the first article, a summary of the performance of two different industrial casting processes of aluminum with regard to their final tensile strength.

The actual conclusion part of the article was useless. First, I didn’t work with aluminum, and even if I did, I was hardly at a point of caring which of the two methods would be more useful, when both processes were optimized to create several tons of metal for every batch, for plants that probably created a thousand tons each day.

The sense of scale between our old and new world was worlds apart.

I read it carefully, because the article went quite a bit in detail about the merits of various types of water cooling, and, in the process, went into a lot of detail on how hydrogen bubbles could damage the integrity of the metal, and how a certain combination of iron salts could be used as a solution. The process was roughly similar to the impact of the second crystal.

By comparing the information provided in the article with what was provided by the System, my mind was churning a lot of new ideas.

Before even finishing the article, I had six experimental setups I wanted to try, and that was merely the first article.

“We’re going to have a lot of fun,” I said as I looked at the rest of the books. Mathematical sociology might be my one true love … but sometimes, there was no harm in straying.

Not when I could feel another revolutionary development ahead of me.