“You two built this?” Alda gushed at their little bloomery currently smelting asmite.

The facets were losing their light. In the dark, the bloomery looked like a cute little clay chimney, sizzling and shining with white misty ether. Clay was a conductive material, but it wasn’t very good at containing ether, making it leak. Back home, Grandpa always covered his bloomeries in a layer of steel to direct the leaks inside the bloom. For extra strong bloomeries, he also added ether roots inside, as if inside-carving clay.

Out in the wild, Vivi only added dozens upon dozens of runes all around the clay, with no conductive paste or ether roots and no metal to keep ether in. Clay, being conductive, spread ether well enough even without paste or ether roots. It leaked rapidly, however, and the runes lining the clay had to be constantly refilled, costing over a hundred ether an hour.

“Vivi is the one who made it pretty,” Cael said. “Without her runes, it’s just a clump of clay.”

She sighed. “It’s just ether. Anything looks good if it’s surrounded by a shiny aura. Leaking ether just shows that it’s an inefficient design.”

“I’d say you two did a damn good job, though,” Alda said, patting Vivi on the shoulder.

Vivi just smiled awkwardly and added more ether to the runes, hoping that nothing went wrong. Their bloomery had a few more differences compared to the one Grandpa used at home. Namely, their bloomery operated with emberstones instead of charcoal, meaning that they didn’t need a blowpipe to add air. Rather, they’d built a little opening to fill the emberstones with ether. The temperature was much higher as a result.

Thankfully the dungeon had no shortage of ether to collect.

For the smelt itself, Vivi had cut pieces of asmite from the mountains with Dawnpour. Despite swords being far from ideal for mining, a seven-runed sword cut into stone as easily as a knife into butter. Vivi didn’t even need to swing hard; she just had to cut pieces off of the mountain and toss them into the bloomery, filling it up with chunks of impure asmite.

“Appearances aside, this is incredible progress,” Cael was saying. “Emberstones and runes let us skip all the hurdles of creating iron tools first. We can smelt asmite right away. And most importantly, Vivi has tongs in spatial storage. We’ve skipped the hurdle of casting crappy tongs to make better tongs.”

“I don’t have crucibles in spatial storage, though,” Vivi said with a sigh. “I can’t think of anything that will be strong enough to survive molten asmite.”

“Can’t we use clay again?” Cael asked. “With runes, clay seems like a miracle material to me, does it not?”

“It would withstand the heat, sure,” Vivi said. “We can smelt asmite in clay containers for sure. But for inside-carving, clay has the problem of being too conductive to the point that the crucible absorbs ether away from the bond with the ether root and the cooling metal. An inside-carved steel crucible could work, but it’s suboptimal for the same reason. The best crucibles don’t require any ether at all.”

“Do we need ‘the best?’” Alda asked. “Isn’t just ‘good enough’ good enough?”

“The missile I shot at the levelstone was already made with the best equipment,” Vivi said. “I don’t think we can afford compromises.”

And I’ll also need to invent a more destructive launch method… Vivi thought. She kept thinking of ideas, and she figured she’d probably need more time.

Cael leaned against a tree, thinking. “Emberstones are pretty heat resistant, aren’t they?”

Vivi gave him a look. “They’ll ignite if they touch ether.”

“The pores can be sanded out,” Cael said. “If the surface has no spots where ether can get in, emberstones are very strong. Brittle, but strong. Emberstones won’t withstand impacts, but if we can shape them into crucibles, I think it could work.”

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Really? Vivi thought. Is that true?

“I don’t know,” Lucius said. “You’re the blacksmith here.”

She didn’t know if she felt like one. Would Grandpa have known how to make a crucible out in the wild? He always said that crucibles weren’t worth the hassle, and always bought them from professionals.

“Let’s try it out,” Vivi said. “If the emberstone crucibles work, I’ll only need an anvil. We can probably place a heavy plate of iron on top of a tree stump or something like that. Making that plate will be a pain, though.”

Cael nodded. “I’ll get started on sanding the emberstones, then. How’s the farm progressing?”

“We’ll have veggies in a few weeks,” Alda said. “The soil is rich enough that root potatoes shouldn’t take long if all goes well.”

“Is Aolinn doing well?” Vivi asked.

Alda’s grin fell slightly. “She’s troubled by a lot of things. But she’s slowly opening up.”

“Take care of her, please,” Vivi said.

Alda nodded, seemingly knowing what Vivi was referring to, and everyone got back to work.

***

An arduous week of labor followed as Vivi continued working with Cael, and occasionally Drean and the spirits. Most of her time was spent on creating a makeshift anvil. That turned out to be the most annoying project she’d yet completed.

She started by building another bloomery more suitable for forging metals as opposed to smelting. It needed a wider mouth to fit larger pieces of metal, making it more annoying to construct, but chatting with Cael while building it made it fun. Again, she used runes to make sure the clay wouldn’t self-destruct.

For the forging process, she hired one of the spirits, named Jeanna, to constantly fill the runes on the forge, so that she could focus fully on work. The annoying part started from there.

Vivi’s first goal was to forge a simple and sturdy plate of iron. And since she hadn’t an anvil, she had to figure out what other surface she could use. Her first idea was to cut a large and flat cube of stone from the mountain. That worked for a short while, until the stone chipped, parts flying off by the force of her hammer. The stone eventually cracked into two. Stone was far too brittle to use for forging.

Still, iron was a softer metal in the end. Vivi managed to hammer it into a small, flat plate after a few days of just hitting it against the ground itself. It was far from her proudest project, but it worked.

She then enhanced the plate with a few mass runes and placed it on top of a tree stump. The iron plate worked as a makeshift surface of an anvil. Iron would still be too soft, though. Vivi used the iron plate to hammer an asmite plate instead, upgrading her anvil. That took another full day. The asmite plate, enhanced with mass runes, would hopefully allow serious forging.

Vivi also spared three hours every day for channeling ether. Or more precisely, she worked on improving her protective layer for ascension skills. Her progress slowed down a lot now that she couldn’t practice in Paradise, and she couldn’t burn ether with Lucius, as that would have been too expensive. So for practice, she filled herself with ten thousand ether, using her ascension skill, and tried to use it as safely as possible.

She still wasn’t a hundred percent comfortable with the skill. The ascension skill was like a powerful tide constantly attacking her protective layer. If the layer fell, her body would bear the damage of the attacking tide. Ten thousand ether wasn’t catastrophic for her body even if her protective layer wavered, but she worked toward the goal of wielding a full exalted ascension skill entirely safely.

The last project before she could start creating missiles was to create the crucible. Except, she didn’t even know how large the crucible needed to be…

“Vivi?” Cael asked. “Everything alright?”

She lifted her head. She sat on her log-seat beside her forge, which had now cooled down, with the facets getting dark. “I’m just thinking,” she said.

He sat next to her. “Would you like to share?”

“It’s nothing like that,” she said. “I just kind of need to invent a destructive weapon over here. I’m still not sure how.”

“Hm,” Cael said. “The enhancement string just enhances momentum, right?”

“Yes,” Vivi said. She’d talked briefly about how the slingshot launcher worked with him earlier. “It quite literally enhances momentum, and only that.”

“And the missiles use stretch ropes and a barrel, since those offer a stable flight,” Cael said. “But stretch ropes aren’t actually the most forceful method to launch a projectile. What about the projectiles themselves? Can they be improved?”

“I created them with inside-carving,” Vivi said. “The missiles are good. They’re small, though. They could be bulkier. I’m also wondering if we could use Grandpa’s sword. It’s the most powerful weapon that exists right now. It just wasn’t really designed to be launched at walls at high speed. If something happens to it, I’ll never forgive myself.”

Cael looked thoughtful. “So essentially, you’ll need a large inside-carved projectile, and we’ll need to figure out a method to hit it really hard with enough precision to at least hit the levelstone wall.”

“Yeah…” Vivi said, thinking, until her head perked up. “Hold on. You just said ‘hit it?’”

“Yes?”

Hit it… Vivi thought. A grin took over her face. “I might have gotten an idea for an absolutely genius launching method.”

The grin spread to Cael, though he didn’t seem to understand. “And that is?”

Vivi summoned Dawnpour. “We’re going to hit our missile really hard.”

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