"And, that's the last piece," she said as she placed the forge. Thanks to its nature, it had been easy to carry, though how she excused its extraction from the forge building, I didn't know … or care. All I needed was to connect the fire to the building chimney, and that would be enough.

"I'll start working immediately," I said, looking at the pile of dungeon materials. A lot of crystals, and some herbs, but the most attention-grabbing thing was the pieces of a large shell. "Is this from the dungeon creature?" I said.

"Yes. That's the most common enemy. Some kind of distorted bug with a few weak points, that releases some kind of acid spell when dying. It destroys the weapons."

"And, I'm guessing using hammers is not an option."

"No," she replied. "If the shell is broken, the System Store doesn't take the purchase," she said.

"Do you mind if I quickly check something," I said. She nodded, and I touched the object. Thanks to the meditation, I could feel that the shells contained quite a bit of mana in them.

"Good," I said, smiling as I examined it.

"What do you mean, good?" she asked.

"It's good material. High tensile strength, probably stress resistant as well," I said. "Promising for experimentation."

That was patently not true. I was excited because I could use those shells to practice my skills. I didn't feel guilty or felt like I was really cheating them. I could always pay them back by reducing the repair time even further. To their knowledge, it was still around eight minutes.

"Don't expect to have a lot of them," she said. "They are the greatest income source of the dungeon. The System store purchases them without a limit."

"For how much?" I asked.

"Twenty silver coins for now," she said. My eyes widened. That was good money. "Hopefully, it won't drop too much once the number of shells increases."

"The shops do that?" I asked.

"Sometimes," she replied. "They can be difficult to predict. Sometimes, the price drop is permanent, and sometimes it just fluctuates."

"Do you mind if I try something?" I said, curious how the mana would react. I broke a corner, only for a small plume of mana to burst out. However, the pieces still maintained their mana content, That was good news.

"Excellent," I said.

"What do you mean?"

"I have to break them for my experiments," I said. "So, you don't have to bring me the intact ones. Just bring me the damaged ones. The more, the better."

"Do you really need that many samples?" she asked.

"Edison had run more than ten thousand tests before inventing the lightbulb," I replied. It was a gross misrepresentation of the real process, but fibbing the history of technology wasn't the worst thing I had done today.

"Alright, the broken shells should still be near the dungeon. I'll make sure to arrange their delivery. Same with the metals."

"Excellent," I said, not bothering to hide my happiness. Once she disappeared at the end of the stairs, I was alone in the basement. My smile was even bigger as I destroyed a small corner of the shell. Its mana content was far denser … but I noticed something interesting.

The mana from the monsters was a little cloudy. I only noticed that while meditating. Absorbing took almost four times longer, the meditation skill separating some kind of chaff from it. I had no doubt that it would be very inconvenient for a mage, who'd spend a lot of mana fighting.

For me, it was a benefit, as that cloudy effect made the mana stick together longer. When I destroyed a bronze ingot, I was barely able to absorb a tenth. With the shell, I was able to absorb more than half before it dispersed.

[+1 Mana]

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Excellent efficiency. "Maybe I'll be able to improve the process even further," I muttered. However, as tempting as it was to start playing around, I decided to delay it until the broken pieces had arrived. I needed to look like I was working.

A tidy workspace was a good first step … a good step that had paid off in an unexpected way. A familiar surge from Mana Forge skill gave me a recipe for a new alloy, which used two of the crystals, the shell, and one of the herbs to be mixed in for some reason.

It also required a lot of mana for every ingot, which meant it couldn't be done in the dead zone efficiently.

"What an interesting coincidence," I muttered. Along with the recipe, came a lot of information. Information that included some kind of anti-corrosion property. It would have helped the profitability of the dungeon immensely.

Too bad I had no plans of revealing my mana forging to them as it touched my secrets.

"But, that doesn't mean I can't try to replicate a weaker version of the effect," I replied. After all, they didn't need a perfect solution, just a workable one. If I could come up with an alloy that didn't require mana, the other blacksmiths could replicate it easily.

It shouldn't be impossible. The System didn't include any such recipe, but it didn't matter. It was just like repairing the edge. The System didn't include any direction that couldn't be defined as perfect.

But, even an imperfect copy wouldn't be easy. I would probably need to start with creating a few ingots to understand the nature of the alloy, not just its final properties, but also the in-between steps.

Then, I need to turn that into a dagger and test it on the dungeon beasts, as well as the other weapons to understand exactly how the corrosion effect impacts the metal, and see if that could be achieved without mana.

Which would be followed by hundreds of attempts as I tried to come up with a stable alloy that didn't shatter immediately and resisted corrosion.

Still, I was hopeful, mostly because I didn't need anything that was close to usable in any other context. It can be brittle enough to shatter after a dozen blows, which would have been unacceptable for any other condition.

But, not here. As long as they could kill four to five beasts without shattering the weapon, it would be profitable.

"Excellent," I muttered even as I continued to tidy the workshop. The best thing, even if their bronze supply was not cut, it would make sense for them to continue funding my experiments. The money I would consume would be nothing compared to their potential benefit.

Even better, once I found a method, I could release multiple versions of the same metal, slightly improving its performance every time.

That trick had been good enough for the academic papers. It would be good enough for this as well.

"If all goes well, I should be able to make enough money to get a position in the research institute."

Bribery was not something I wanted to resort to, but it was better than the alternative. However, I didn't want to hurry up. My previous failure had taught me a good lesson about the importance of emergency funds.

As much as it rankled me to delay my return to the scientific community, I had learned my lesson. "And, it doesn't mean I have to delay my research. I can always pay Rosie to collect some data for me, and focus on exploring the System in the process."

I smiled happily as I got the fire going while I systematically destroyed half of the shell, carefully absorbing the mana that was let out.

[Mana 14/160]

For anyone else, that was not a notable amount of mana. For me, it represented my first opportunity to forge a mana alloy. Not even a full ingot, but barely a piece as big as my thumb.

It was a copper alloy, which was a happy occasion. Copper was one of the easiest metals to process, which was why it had been the first metal humans had used en masse.

Of course, it was also soft and brittle enough to incentivize the first primitive attempts at metallurgy, forcing the ancient people to actually experiment until they discovered bronze, which fueled our first real civilization, an ancient bronze civilization that sprawled across the Mediterranean sea, with the first global web of trade between Egypt, Hittite, Greece, as well as other European and Asian civilizations, all to ensure a steady supply of tin and copper.

Unfortunately, once international trade collapsed, so did those civilizations… The Bronze Age collapse was one of my favorite periods to study as I tried to map the impact of a similar collapse on our civilization.

Three years after the Cataclysm, I was ready to acknowledge the irony…

"Less pondering, more working," I spoke to myself even as I started working on forging a copper mana alloy, following the suggestions from the skill as I melted the copper. The process had been relatively simple. The recipe included two different crystals, both finely ground, one herb, and a coarsely ground shell of the dungeon monster.

Mix the first crystal to molten copper, then burn the herb right underneath and let the crystal absorb the energy it radiated. Let it cool down to a red-hot state before starting to temper the metal and fold a few times, then start to add the coarsely ground monster shells while folding the metal, using the mana to keep the process stable and grow the crystals, keeping the metal merely red hot at the process.

The second crystal was to be mixed with the water, and used to quench the metal once the forging was complete.

A simple process that failed spectacularly, which was not a surprise. Not only did using the recipes from the system not always guarantee success — the level of the user, in particular, impacted the results quite a bit due to benefit from the stats, and skill level played an even bigger role — but also I wasn't following the recipe completely.

The full recipe required me to make one standard-sized ingot, and I didn't have the mana to do it. Adapting it to a smaller piece was not a trivial process, as it changed many important details, from the speed the metal cooled to the folding patterns.

But, that failure meant nothing as I started taking notes, incomprehensible to anyone but me.

I was already in love with my new working space.