Blacksmith of the Apocalypse

Seth also silently celebrated his 26th birthday with just the two of them. His vacation was only possible because he was abusing an important loophole in his forced quest. Although he had no possibility to refuse the quest, the quest had no time limit, he could leave it on the backburner for as long as he wanted.

Since they left Y-City, Seth also ignored all businesses concerning Ypsilon. The blacksmith happily left the issues of Y-City to Mark Baker to deal with. With his sister and niece at his side, the man seemed especially motivated to take the reins of what was left of the district.

Having spent two weeks recuperating from the fatigue that racked up from preparing for the fight with the Scene, he slowly developed a yearning to return to the workshop. He had sealed it for the past weeks, but he did feel a little urge to go back now.

What was tugging to his curiosity was the <Divine Arpegium>. The materials the System God had given him to use when “creating a saint.” He had just become a Legendary Forger and it would be his first legendary material since treading on the Path to Legend.

What he could not refrain from was doing a little research on the new material. He had never heard about <Arpegium> before, and the appraisal result was not very helpful.

<Divine Arpegium, Special

A material especially blessed by the System god as part of a quest. >

Fortunately, he was able to find out more during a meal with Samuel, when Seth, Mina, and Fin visited the church in Delta. The old priest explained that most of the items specific to the System church were made from ordinary <Arpegium>.

It was the key to harnessing the power of the System for things like their teleport formation. It had a metaphysical power that could make a connection to the fabric of the system. This allowed for the creation of items that could take influence on the functionalities of the system.

When Seth listened to Samel trying to explain it, he had to think of the practice of APIs. In theory, <Arpegium> allowed the craftsman to install options from the system onto an item. A simple example Simon mentioned was items that could expand the inventory or improve stat multiplicators.

Among the divine armaments, Simon mentioned were things like a ring that could grant another 100 slots to the inventory and a necklace that could allow one to have more spots for pets or mounts. Even things like a helmet that gave double experience seemed to have existed at some point in the past.

Of course, when he heard that, Seth’s eyes had been shining. As a legendary forger, he had a chance to copy the legendary effects of materials and use them in the shape of enchantments. Didn’t that mean that, when he became a legend, he would be able to make these kinds of meta items, without the rare <Arpegium>

Although <Arpegium> was not the most impressive special material, it had a wide range of interesting possibilities. If he played his cards right, it could even simplify the creation of teleport formations for them.

Using the teleport option of the Pathworks itself was out of the question for Ori humas because of the randomization, but the true teleport functions like the one of Minas Talar could still use them as beacons to set up a stable teleport connection.

Seth was looking forward to the chances his skills would give him because he didn’t dare to have any design on keeping some of the five bars that were given for the quest. They were even marked as quest items, so he doubted he was allowed to use them for anything else.

As for the quest objective itself, Seth already had a rough plan outlined. Living in this rough and brutal world for almost 3 years now, he still didn’t like working with squishy stuff. He had an aversion for the undead, corpses, and such things.

This was why his first step in creating a saint was throwing Samuel’s body into the golem forge, together with three bars of <Divine Arpegium>. The overall plan was the same as the creation process of Asterion.

First, the Golem Forge would strengthen and refine the squishy corpse to something Seth dared to touch. The next step was that he had to reassemble the broken mess that was Samuel’s soul, which proved a lot harder than expected.

Seth had sat down for hours, trying to make sense of the hundreds of shards that were technically only held together by some spit and a band-aid. They were too small for him to repair and reforge by hand.

“Why don’t you use the Soul Refinery as a preliminary step?”

It was Sivri who suggested this to him, after watching him ponder over the fractured soul for almost an hour, while the golem forge was working in the background. Sivri’s words led him to the breakthrough he needed.

Of course, he couldn’t just dump the broken soul into the refinery and expect to get a healed one out but he could use it as a preparatory step before continuing by hand. He came up with the idea that he would sort the fragments first, into the parts of the soul he knew, before using the Soul Refinery to turn these fragments into at least cohesive parts with the same function.

It was a risk, after all. This was like taking an exploded human, collecting all the parts of his heart, liver, lungs, and brain, and telling those parts to magically grow back together. There was no guarantee that those pieces would work again as intended.

Even if they worked, one could hardly say that he was actually reviving Samuel. The resulting creation may have some of the traits and memories of the old man, it was really closer to creating just some kind of saint. It would take a wonder for it not to become messed up., but that was not Seth’s problem.

The golem forge had long finished by the time Seth was ready to use the Soul Refinery. The hardest part of this work was still coming. If the refinery succeeded, he had to reforge the souls, using the parts the crafting station glued back together.

Afterward, he would have to finish the saint’s new body. After all, he still had kept two bars of <Divine Apegium>. He intended to create armaments for the saint, he would integrate with his body and soul. Similar to Asterion’s Labrys which was connected to his very soul.

That said, it took hours for the refinery to run through the fragments on a fine pass-through, which was why he decided to start on the body. The special material itself was silver in color, but with a yellow tinge, like it was oxidized.

It was a relatively soft material, like ordinary iron or copper. Soft when compared to the magical metals he had worked with so far. What this meant was that normal armaments were out of the question.

Jewelry? That also didn’t feel quite right. It was then that he thought that, since he was forced to do this quest, he could also play a little prank on the System God. But maybe, the god would even appreciate his bold and daring design choices?