Blacksmith of the Apocalypse

First came building up a good stock of medium to high-grade products.

For this Seth used his last bits of rare <Bones of Seth> he had made all the way back in Y-City. There were still over 50 metal bars, even after giving most of what he had to Hoen for the certificate tokens. Each bar was big enough for maybe 10 rings.

Since the material alone would guarantee a rare item, Seth decided to simplify the production process. The improvements an item got from something like his production skills, was also dependent on the way they were made. A good example was his carefully planned crafted Sanguine Silver Weapons.

Diligence was mirrored in the stats of an item. On the other hand, it was tedious and time-consuming to handcraft each and every single ring. Taking into account that the <Bones of Seth> made a careful planning useless thanks to their randomness, Seth also threw diligence overboard.

The blacksmith forged the bars into pipes. With each pipe, he used another forging ballad. One pipe would be imbued with damage reflection or a conditional improvement of stats, another with random curse damage. One thing that he knew beforehand was, that the demonic ballads meshed well with the attributes of the material.

What he didn't expect was that the random effects of the divine iron played along very well. Only very few had the negative second effect that had always made it seem like a trade-off. They were simple effects like elemental affinities, attribute buffs, skill improvements, and crowd control effects.

The pipes themselves counted as weapons and in this way, things like this were created.

<Seth's brutish Pipe of Petrification

Rare

Phys. Damage: 400

Mag. Damage: 400

Durability: 5000

1. 5% Chance to cause Petrification on attack

2. 35% Chance to add a random curse to an attack

A pipe from the hand of Craftsman Smith. A weapon so crude, people might be stunned when they see someone wield it, and might turn into stone if they are actually hit by it. >

The enchantment for Petrification existed, but it was very complicated and costed a lot of mana, but here it was. A chance for Petrification as a permanent effect thanks to the randomness of <Bones of Seth>.

Petrification was a status ailment, that was very hard to cure and almost irreversible once it took complete effect. Even if the chance seemed low. 5% for this kind of effect was very high. Seth's only explanations for the improved effects were his higher luck attribute and Al'Zalsar's enchantment, Little Laplace.

After turning the bars into 50 pipes, he started sawing them apart. Because of some material losses here and there, Seth ended up with roughly 9 blank rings per pipe. Meaning he now had a whopping 450+ blank rings to finish up. Just enough to maybe reach lv.4.

Deburring and polishing ring by ring was a monotonous but relaxing task that helped him in refining his basic skills. For enchantments, Seth went with the effects of Size Adjustment and another effect fitting the abilities of the individual blanks.

Since his <Enchantment> reached the craftsman level he was able to imbue three enchantments to an item and use synthesized enchantments. Technically this meant, Seth was now able to fuse more than two and even up to four different effects into an enchantment.

However, he had neglected it. Or to be clear, it took a lot of time and brainpower to synthesize these improved enchantments. This work still took the player's dedication and the system only aided without automatically taking over this step. He didn't have the time to do some of his own and instead decided to work on his foundation first.

This did not mean that he didn't have some. Seth had managed to copy some synthesized enchantments for his enchantment catalog from the items he had seen in Chrona's treasury and the dragon hoard, but few of those were fit for rings and he had no confidence in using them without practice.

They also lacked the touch of ingenuity Seth would have liked. This could only be blamed on the fact, that he was only able to copy the easier ones without disassembling the items. Most of the simpler ones were the fusion of complex attribute improvements, like a single enchantment improving strength and agility for example.

To a listener, this might seemed like a huge thing. Even just using these simple enchantments, Seth could layer these and get items with incredible power-ups, right? Unfortunately, not.

Of course, there was a catch. Something professional enchanters deserved to be admired for. Just like with items, the more complex the enchantment became, the more careful the crafter had to be when balancing and choosing the effects in relation to the item he was enchanting.

Without the due diligence and research, there could be all kinds of things going wrong, with the smallest being terrible mana costs. Worse things could entail the magic of the enchantments malfunctioning, canceling each other out, or having unforeseen, sometimes even negative, side effects depending on the item, processing, or material they were used on.

This was why Seth stayed with the tried and true for now. Polish the basics. And how to better polish the basics than by making over 450 rings with complex enchantments by hand?

As he finished the enchantments, some would stay rare, but others would even upgrade to epic when he chose the right enchantments. Starting with the first, every time it happened he would smile brightly.

It was a testament to his skill really improving, he still remembered when he could barely make an epic item using rare materials by layering all enchantments and his <Soul Infusion> on top of each other.

...

"Seth, are you in here?" Mary came in with a clipboard. "What the?!" she exclaimed, seeing him sit surrounded by a pile of rings.

"Oh, hey Mary, what's up?"

"...I came because I need you to sign some documents. What's with all those rings?" she asked a little tired. She had seen too much to be surprised by Seth sitting in a pile of rings like a dragon n his hoard.

Mentioning weird sights, the giant apparatus that was busily spitting out golems, which were then put aside by other golems, could easily surpass this lord of the rings in weirdness.

"Ah, sure. Let me see." the blacksmith put down the ring he was working on and lifted the magnifying spectacles to read the documents.

These were various forms that legitimated Minas Mar as the owners and manager of the trade route they were currently developing. Although everything was already dealt with on the side of Chrona, it still had to be officiated by Delta.

Which obviously meant that the district was insisting on their share of this business adventure. Seth already started to miss the time right after they came to Delta when the authorities were still practically powerless.

As times became more peaceful, the government body recovered and pesky stuff like taxes and trade permissions and stuff like that kept cropping up. They were even planning for a new election in the not-so-far future.

The blacksmith was glad he could leave most of these things to Mary and Jane. Every time he saw these kinds of documents, he was glad that he had saved those two back then.

"Oh right, can you ask Jane to come by later?"

"Is it about those rings?" Mary asked with a sigh and glanced and the heap of accessories.

"Yup!"

"...I will tell her."

With that, she left the blacksmith to his own devices once again.

Past noon, Fin and Mina came strolling in. Mina approached him from behind and asked him with her hands massaging his shoulders.

"Aren't you hungry?"

"Let's go and have lunch!" the fairy joined in to get him away from his work.

"Alright, let's go. Let's ask Hoen and Wedan to come along, too." the blacksmith said and put down the 23rd ring he had managed to finish. They didn't have to ask for long, for Seth to quickly drop his work for food.

…

Jane entered the empty workshop. Well, not completely empty. There were Cerberus working in the smithy and other golems walking around a giant machine.

Mary had told her that Seth has asked her to come by. It seemed like he was making a bunch of accessories. Seth wasn't here, but the accessories were.

The woman's knees went weak, seeing the mountain of rings flooding the jeweler's table.

What was this madman trying to do this time? Crash the accessory market?