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“That’s just the first step. We still have to know if it’s possible to corrupt metals the same way you do with wooden weapons. Wood was part of a living being at least while metal is totally inorganic after all.” Treevor spoke, but still excitedly hoped that Athos would succeed.

Athos didn’t dare use a precious material like mithril in an experiment, so he mentally ordered a skeleton to bring some iron ingots from the forges. A skeleton arrived a few minutes later with and brought the iron ingots before leaving.

“Cheaper and with less power. Hopefully, it should be easier to test.” Athos spoke and the two agreed with him. Athos took an iron ingot in each hand, flowing his own corrupted mana into the first and flowing corrupted world energy into the second.

He watched closely with the vision of death as both metals were corrupted. The first ingot almost immediately started to deteriorate, while the second one lasted a few seconds longer, but deteriorated all the same. Interestingly, the second ingot darkened slightly for a few seconds, but it was not able to withstand the corrupted element.

“Two failures, but the second one was a little better. Any suggestions?” Athos asked after clapping his hands a few times to dust off his hands.

“I think the problem is with you and not the metal. You try to corrupt metal as quickly as possible. But metal decays faster than you can corrupt it.” Treevor pointed out the problem in the Athos method.

“What should I try to do then?” Athos asked intrigued.

“Try to control the corruption as much as possible and instead of corrupting the energy present in the metal, try to replace it by absorbing the energy present in it. The metal will try to extract external energy to replace the energy it has lost and that’s where you work your magic.” Treevor proposed his theory and Athos agreed with him, having no better idea.

.....

Athos took a third ingot and used vampiric touch, an energy drain ability he had recently developed. The metal’s energy was devoured starting from where his hand was touching and he conjured a layer of corrupted mana around the metal, making sure the world energy didn’t enter by accident and injecting the corrupted world energy.

As there was no energy present in the metal, Athos didn’t have to worry about supplying the natural impulse of the corrupted world energy to corrupt everything it touches. The metal began to visibly darken, until it almost reached the hue of charcoal. Athos raised his fist in the air in victory and broke the barrier, but the metal began to clear again, absorbing pure world energy and even correcting its balance.

“Shit!” Athos swore as he remade the corrupted mana layer and drained the pure world energy, returning the metal to its dark color. “I managed to transform the metal, but it’s only temporary. I need something else to do the trick.”

“Hum...” Now it was Treevor’s turn to look thoughtful. He was not at all used to working in metals, so his knowledge in the area was scarce. Treevor thought of a few theories, but dismissed them a second later, realizing they wouldn’t work.

“Maybe put on a spark of life force? You know, like I did to you?” Athos asked after the three of them stood looking at their feet after a while.

“It’s worth the try.” Treevor nodded his head.

Athos used a single spark of corrupted life force in an attempt to stabilize the corrupted energy in the metal, but it was a futile effort. The life force tried to gather the corrupted world energy at the center, but a single spark was unable to gather all the energy from the ingot and dispersed.

“Interesting. It didn’t serve the purpose I intended, but it seems that with enough life force, the metal would gather the energy in one spot, as if it were a mana core. Perhaps we can create artificial beings-” Athos began to ramble on in his theories, but Treevor snapped him out of his reverie.

“Yeah, too bad if we don’t figure out a way to stabilize the corruption in the iron ingot, we won’t know how to do the same with mithril and we’ll be too dead to try something else.” Treevor said, bursting his bubble.

“Perhaps the nature of the metal has remained the same, only the energy that flows has changed?” Emilia asked suddenly, making them both turn to her.

“What do you mean?” Both asked at the same time.

“Master, you just injected corrupted energy into the metal, but it didn’t change its nature. The corruption changed the nature of a corpse or plants by transforming them, but the metal remained the same. I believe that if we change the nature of iron, the energy it absorbs will change too.” Emilia spoke her theory.

“The problem is how to change the nature of iron. I’ve never done this before and Treevor has no experience working with metals.” Athos began to frown as he thought of a solution.

“How about we try runesmithing? If we turn the energy into runes, we can prevent the world’s energy from correcting its balance and forcefully adapt the metal. We can learn a proper way to corrupt metals later, we’re in a race against time after all.” Treevor agreed with Emilia’s theory and offered a temporary solution.

“I don’t think a single ingot can withstand a proper enchantment, so try to use the weakest enchantment you know.” Athos handed the ingot to Treevor, but still kept the layer of corruption around it, just expanded enough for Treevor to be able to work.

Treevor took less than 5 minutes to do a simple enchantment on the iron ingot, it would only slightly improve the ingot’s toughness when activated. Athos undid the layer of protection as he crossed his fingers for the best.

The iron ingot failed to correct its balance this time, the corrupted runes did not move and forcibly absorbed the corrupted world’s energy. Like a spell, an enchantment used the user’s mana as fuel and world energy to activate, but enchantments absorbed the world’s energy in advance and only needed the user’s mana to activate.

It was the reason why regular enchantments didn’t have a cast time and enchantments mage slayer boots had a cooldown, as they used up all their accumulated energy in a burst of speed.

It also explained why Treevor’s aura blades were so powerful. Despite being abilities, they also used world energy as if they were spells, taking their potency to another level.

“It’s a success, Treevor. Your idea really worked, congratulations. Now we just have to do the same with all the thousands of mithril slabs the skeletons are bringing.” Athos held up both thumbs at him and grinned from ear to ear, nearly causing Treevor to convulse.

“Are we going to have to work in that much metal? That’s impossible! I’m going to die again if I have to runesmithing that much!” Treevor cried out in alarm, taking a step back as if afraid of Athos.

“Don’t worry, the skeletons of court mages will work on this, we’ll both be corrupting the metal plates while the mages runesmithing the large-scale spells. Your plant arm can also conjure corrupted world energy, so you’ll work with me to corrupt them.” Athos spoke, trying and failing to reassure Treevor.

Corrupting mithril plates was easier than enchanting them, but with just two of them it was a lot of work.

“Master, what should we call this new metal? You can’t call everything corrupted this, corrupted that.” Emilia asked.

“Just add a Death or black to the name. Black iron and death mithril sound good, don’t they?” Athos replied without giving it much thought. “Now, if we’re done playing, we’ve got a lot, a lot of work to do and not a lot of time. Let’s take one of the meeting rooms on the first floor and order the skeletons to bring the mithril slabs there.”

“What about this room? We need to seal off the place to corrupt the metal long enough for the Skeleton Wizards to enchant everything, so it’s going to take quite a while.” Treevor asked resigned to having to work nonstop for the next few days.

‘I should have demanded a vacation when we were negotiating.’ he thought sadly.

“Let’s leave the control room for last and focus on the mithril plates first. We already have enough work for one day.” Athos said and left the room, descending the floors to the place where the skeletons were stacking the plates on the first floor.

“There’s one thing we’re forgetting. How are we going to power a large-scale spell? We don’t have magic stones and even if we did, we’d have to figure out a way to corrupt them before using them.” Treevor returned to the corrupted willow and spoke as he followed.

“We can feed the spell with our own mana. After all, we have many soldiers willing to cooperate.” Acts replied.

“I see. Normally, a large scale spell couldn’t be powered by a mage, no matter how strong he is and different mages would have conflicting energy signatures, but thousands of skeletons would solve this problem.” Treevor agreed with his idea.

*********