Going Back To The Base

Ciemnosc's right hand was in the middle of the flames, the seemingly ordinary but bountiful flames that were trying to make his hand collapse onto them by cutting it off from his wrist, but always failing. Failing to not only in burning it down but also in harming his hair. Even the smallest strands of hair around his right wrist were simply moving like flowing in the middle of being bathed in water by the intensely burning flames.

The belly of the furnace was, however, combusting intensely which Ciemnosc could only see with his Spirit Sense for his eyes were too busy looking at seemingly the emptiness o the world despite it being just to the right of his face.

In it, the materials were beginning to… move! They began levitating as if also suddenly finding themselves in water, with a current shoving them upwards, before letting them fall only to float right up in the next seconds. As the materials floated and seemingly flowed in the midst of ordinary flames or orange with yellow, they burned. And as they burned, a lot of the melted material was being left on the floor of the furnace’s belly, mixing without any problem.

From time to time, an ever so smallish strand of dark energy could be seen suddenly making its way out of the bottom center of the furnace’s belly, trailing off each material melting down and ‘touching’ it. Every time that a material was newly touched by such a strand of dark energy, the furnace would in turn become hotter, and the material that was touched would move more quickly and disorderly with the other materials still untouched by it.

They would change their speed and trajectory so suddenly, from anywhere up and down, to diagonally up and down all around the furnace, either in its lower, middle, or upper sections. And by the time every material was touched, most of their structures were melted off, while Ciemnosc was still holding on to the Powerful Stone and the flames burning below the melted liquid.

Yet, as the melted liquid was becoming more and more in volume, almost taking the entire lower section of the furnace’s belly on its own, the melted liquid itself began to bubble… All of the materials seemed to be melting down not at a similar pace but they were at least seemingly ‘trying’ to finish melting down at the same time. And when only about 10% of their structure was left, the melted liquid below was beginning to also have a change of its own… to move.

Blup, plop, bububub… splash, gurgle, splash splash…

The melted liquid began to grow crazy, its body inside the furnace’s belly began to take a bit of the disorder from the materials previously as it even began rising into the air. Not by suddenly increasing in volume but by simply being as if lifted into the air!

Ciemnosc’s eyes at this moment closed with calmness, both his arms slowly retracted, bringing his hands out of the compartments while his bare torso stood back up. Facing the furnace, he uncaringly opened up its lid and immediately saw what was going on inside.

The melted liquid was already not just liquid, for it started moving around and making laps around the furnace’s belly, its flames mostly gone and the materials which still needed quite some minutes before finishing melting down were nowhere to be seen. Naturally, they were all gobbled into the melted liquid before it began moving on its own with pure energy oozing off of it in Ciemnosc’s eyes, which were amazed as they looked at the melted liquid.

The melted liquid was simply of a lava-orange color with some traces of strong yellow just about everywhere. It surged and rotated around the center of the air at the upper section of the furnace’s belly but without touching either the sides or the top. The materials were by now fully melted down, identified by Ciemnosc’s eyes without the use of his Spirit Sense, and almost right away.

Plunge, plunge - splash, splash.

As such, without any hesitation, Ciemnosc sunk both his palms into the lava-looking melted liquid, but he didn’t use any dark Power Energy to cover them or to ‘control’ the melted liquid. Instead, the melted liquid continued to rotate nonstop, making laps and gushing about from time to time. But this time, its contents began to form up at the center as if being called on by something and becoming so attracted to it that the melted liquid could not deny it.

Whether this was because of the way that Ciemnosc ended up melting these materials that already had enough amount of pure energy and became bathed in tons more of the pure energy; or because it was him, Ciemnosc already knew that these materials’ melted liquid would obey his conveying orders anyways.

A couple of minutes later, when the bright yellow was already disappearing after a lot of mixing and some sort of centrifugation, the melted liquid began to lose power, and quickly at that. But with Ciemnosc holding onto it with his hands, which couldn’t be any colder and refreshing as they always are, completely fine and unharmed, the melted liquid fell only at the pace at which Ciemnosc lowered his arms himself.

Slowly, very, damnably slowly, Ciemnosc lowered his arms to a very diminutive pace. The melted liquid followed like a mirthful baby, naughty and wolfish that had finally had enough playing for today. And now, as the melted liquid seemed subdued and out of pure energy as well as just energy, it came to lie down on the flat bottom of the furnace’s belly.

Tad! Beep, gurgle gurlge gurgle~~.

Suddenly closing the lid, Ciemnosc’s arms were without any remnants of the melted liquid, as if it had avoided getting stuck to him or just wasn’t able to. After closing the lid with a sonorous noise, he pressed a button that was to the left of the furnace and lowered a lever on its bottom right at the side. Directly after doing that, he grabbed a very large container the height of a child and the thickness of an ordinary fully grown tree trunk.

Splash splashy splashes… gurgle~~~...

When the button was pressed, followed by the lever being downed, sounds came from the furnace signaling that some sort of mechanism was working. Naturally, no array formation was in the working of this furnace, it was all machinery and… technology… Technology that not even the major organizations are capable of achieving at this time, more than anything because of their long-lasting disdain for Craftsmaking.

Thereafter, just as Ciemnosc placed the container right below the furnace’s belly, a small but not too small a hole appeared with its cover sliding away so futuristically. From it, pure orange colored liquid came out, it was so pure that it looked like nothing that the melted liquid form before had ever looked like even when Ciemnosc lay it down on the bottom of the belly.

But what was the most attentive thing to notice was that the melted liquid, which was fine and even filled the entire room with endless vapor that increased the room’s temperature by a few tens of meters slowly, was the seemingly unending amount of liquid that kept on coming out of the furnace’s little hole.

When Ciemnosc was just handling it, it could at most fill up several bowls. But now, even the container below the furnace was being slowly filled up to the brim, and if Ciemnosc wasn’t Ciemnosc, he would’ve grown worried sick in case the container wasn’t enough.

Not a single bit of yellow was seen in the liquid, just the pure orange that it began and ended with, down to the last milliliter.

“Aagh~,” Ciemnosc sighed at last when the furnace no longer gave any more melted liquid. Looking down at the container, it was so full that it made Ciemnosc marvel at the wonders of making a single Mortal grade weapon. All of this melted liquid, from just a few materials that had an okay amount of pure energy, were the main body and the most essential part of the elaboration— creation —of such.

Screech~.

The container was dragged around. At first, in the very initial movement that it was dragged around, the bottom of the container lighted up, a figuratively hot-like color emerged from it and spread to the rest of the container. With this sef-heating feature, Ciemnosc leisurely walked around the room while some unprotected materials began to show signs of melting, mostly due to the vapor than the heat of the room, but still because of both.

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It was fine though, he could just send those materials melting down to one of the containers that could hold such melted liquid to the back of some other floors to not waste them.

Taking over a minute, carrying the container with the extremely large amount of melted liquid from pure energy-based and bathed materials, Ciemnosc finally finished making rounds around the floor collecting some of the brand new tools he made just for this moment and carried the container back to the furnace. Once there, he left the container and brought a special, not-so-large but still somewhat large table out, specialized for dealing with what was about to come.

It was somewhat short, and square shaped, but had a size of 2.3 meters. It had thick legs and its surface wasn’t flat, but rather bulky and was all made out of gray rock with specks of white and bright, shining dark gray.

On its surface, there was an already pre-designed mold, which didn’t seem to be anything for a weapon. It had several ‘limbs’ of very thin proportions, some long, some not so long, and some even longer. Different shapes, as most looked like blades but not completed, as if they were lacking 90% to be completed. But that was so for each and every single limb. Some had blade-like bodies until their extreme showed a completely different thing than the tip of a sword or saber.

On the other hand, their lower structures were all attached to the same thing, by an even thinner ‘limb’ connecting each of the limbs to the ‘main base’ of whatever Ciemnosc had designed.

Squelch, squelch. Splash- sizzzlee~~.

Without further ado, Ciemnosc picked up the container effortlessly and began pouring it into the pre-designed mold. At a regular speed; with patience.

Once the whole melted liquid filled the mold to almost surpass the limits of each design of the mold, Ciemnosc quickly began moving his body around. His body still not looking sweaty and his hands looked as slightly pale as always without the tiniest dot or scratch from previous steps. While every single part of his being slightly pale as well, he began to grab a multitude of tools and grabbed some herbs, plants as well as organs, and even skin and bones from Creatures.

While his Covert Space bags were being at hard work now, each material that Ciemnosc took out was carved in some way and scrapped off of its contents. Whenever a new material came out, depending on its origin, Ciemnosc would choose differently onto where to throw its scraps to. Never did he once throw the entire thing into any of the limbs, it was always only some scraps and not even that many to begin with; just a little of each.

From the beginning to the end, Ciemnosc ‘filled’ each limb from top to bottom, not failing and not doing so clumsily, it was all done as if he has made such work before and for ages at that!

‘... Phew, here we go.’ The one step that was always present in the methods of those ‘grandmasters’ was one where they all ‘cradled’ the mold with the melted liquid. Which, their Power Energy would be giving the melted liquid some kind of guidance, but other than that, it was to be extra molded by their Poer Energy in whichever way they wanted the weapon-in-process to be made of.

This was one of the most difficult steps of every Mortal grade weapon process, but it was not the final one. Simply, this was one of the most differing steps that made even the most idiotic people alive realize that from here on, anything that is beyond these skills is incredibly different from blacksmithing as it is known.

But Ciemnosc, however, was going to make this step his final one. The previous one was something completely different from those methods, and only the addition of tiny pieces of Powerful Stones of the Inferior grade had ever been tested and successful in the incorporation of ‘extra things’ when already in the mold stage.

Yet, Ciemnosc made it one of the most important steps, taking his sweet time as the mold let the lava-like burning liquid keep its heat within the enclosed floor. As for the step that was always present, and hence the one to be the most exaggerated and one of the most ‘interesting’ and defining parts of their methods; Ciemnosc made that his way’s final step.

This step was for the ‘grandmasters’ one of the most difficult due to the insane need for cooperation between one’s Spirit Sense and Power Energy. But, such a thing has always been the easiest for Ciemnosc, was it not? Instead, if anything posed a difficulty for the current Ciemnosc, it was that he couldn’t use his Power Energy like the Conflagrate realm cultivators could unless he made use of his Vocón Link; his whip.

Splash splash.

As such, while others had difficulty employing their Power Energy through techniques or ‘arts’ and using their Spirit Sense to move all that with preciseness, Ciemnosc only had trouble exerting his dark Power Energy outside of his body in any way. His only solution… is to once again get his hands dirty.

His dark Power Energy, not devouring the pure energy within the mold’s melted liquid, made contact with the mold and its design. It traveled all around while Ciemnosc’s hands were on the base of the entire pre-designed mold, dipped into the middle where all the limbs are connected by those thinner limbs to the main base.

Once again, he felt no damage to his body, not even to his hair, as he worked his extensive dark Power Energy to traverse all around the pre-designed mold, slowly ‘attracting’ every limb closer and solidifying its connection with the main base.

A long time went by, it was so long that Ciemnosc actually began to feel his dark Power Energy begins to drain. All he was doing was the same thing over and over again, having every millimeter of the pre-designed mold ‘become’ connected with the pure energy following the example, slowly resupplying itself of the channels that his dark Power Energy created and working on its own…

At some point in the already night sky, flashes from within the forging building’s first floor could be seen. Sometimes it was a very crooked but defining axe. Other times it was a spear, a halberd, a staff, an arrow-like lance, a sword, a saber, and even hammers with a small blunt part or a couple of sides.

And sometime else deeper in the night, if Tini or even Older Brother had to have gone for a midnight snack, they would’ve been able to see a flying thing course through the air outwards from the mountain. Thankfully, due to the strength of Ciemnosc, it was sent flying so far away that when it blasted, despite it becoming tiny little shards of itself after the implosion, the furnace only emitted a light ‘pupu-puff’ before it all went back to normal.

It was too much for a single furnace to endure it… Ciemnosc had to play hard and difficult ‘to get’ as he had to put in and back every single little limb without disconnecting it from the main base that was still in its melted liquid stage. The furnace had already gone over its limits when the melted liquid of orange and yellow purified itself to only orange. But as that melted liquid returned and had to be worked with extremely cold water that could even get a cultivator completely frozen of any of their body parts that was touched by such water - it was just too much.

Ciemnosc was even crueler when he decided to use the water from the Little Lake that he had stored, and with the midnight time coming into the equation, it was so cold that even one of his Covert Space bags became frozen yet again. With his dark Power Energy, he could devour that ice forming up around his huge Covert Space bag, whichever was being affected, and get a snack in the meantime.

But without him doing so, for more than an hour during the nights, a freezing of one of his Covert Space bags would begin, and that was something terrific as the Rocaloi Academy id have many Covert Space bags, but not as many as the major organizations. Only, they gave them more rewardingly to their students than the 4 major organizations added up together.

Now that he used it for forging, no effects were given to the Mortal weapon he was making, but the process was furthermore sped up, and that was a lot coming from the fact that Mortal grade weapons’ creation has always been a matter of taking days to be forged at the very least. And that was for the smallest kind of weapons…

‘Fwuoah…’ Ciemnosc was standing on one of the sides of the floor, its door to the back and pathway to the other floors now opened and finally letting fresh air seep into the forging building. In his hands, a handle that was ordinary looking but had some design similar to plated yet with thin and almost fully flat lines from the bottom to the top horizontally.

Right now, the handle was showing the base for holding a sword whose blade was completely orange! Its color was metallic but purely orange, it was as if a brand new type of metal was discovered and it was so strange due to its body simply being the incarnation of the word ‘orange’ with its definition of a color; but as a weapon.

It didn’t look like it was made of metal but had that luster and sensation of metallic properties, especially the way its edges threatened to cut through air so easily and by simply standing still.

Looking down at it, Ciemnosc could be any more proud, but he was too silent and expressionless to let it be known. The edges were extra thin, thinner than even his Mortal swords, but the middle of the sword’s blade was rather girthy, going over twice as thick as his hands extended out.

‘Hm…’ Thinking that if a certain man named ‘Father Lyono’ was to know of his achievements, then he would be shocked to see a work that was clearly inspired by his works, but that also had an incredible property he hadn’t seen anywhere else! Ciemnosc smiled a little, just a little, but that little managed to fully show his teeth and half of those several canine-like teeth hiding at the back by his cheeks that have tasted so much flesh of so many living beings.

‘Now, agh… Gotta work before going back, yaaawn… No time to rest, hmn.’ Even humming in his mind, Ciemnosc threw the incredible Mortal grade weapon he made for the first time and in his first attempt to the air. It spun twice, its tip ended up aiming at the floor, but with the command that it was given right before starting to ‘fly through the air’ with that strong Spirit Sense and familiar dark Power Energy, the Mortal weapon began changing.

Tricki, tricki, trck.

Quiet but not noiseless sounds came from it as it visibly began changing, bulges and deformations began to occur all around it, all before crashing on the floor. Its shape began changing, from thin edges and girthy in the middle; to not so thin anymore and equal all around. While 2 different blunt sides appeared at the top where the tip once was; the blade became a shaft, and the tip a pair of hammers’ sides.

THUD~! WHOOSH~.

It landed head on against the floor, with its shaft’s flatness facing the ceiling as the entire floor seemed to jump up and down just once. Ciemnosc was unfazed as he began reorganizing ordinary materials left and right, also collecting the melted liquid of different materials around this floor and separating them with several different containers of varying sizes.

‘Hmm, I need better furnaces now…’

…