Conjuration was a strange kind of magic. Not that other types of magic were not strange, but at least they were rather intuitive. Fire magic controls fire, steel magic controls steel, and kinetic magic controls force. Enchantment and conjuration both seemed simple at first glance as well. One made a thing better through extra magic, the other made something entirely new through magic. But both were incredibly complicated in how they did it.

Enchanting was an entire language. Not as complex as or as varied as a language, it was a language. According to the books he had skimmed while waiting for his mana to recover, runes were just an incredibly old and powerful script that implored the forces of magic themselves to follow instructions. Basic mana control forced your will on the world, runes asked the world to conform to your will. A small difference, but it still made enchanting pull ahead in terms of power. A blast of fire mana would always be weaker than a spell cast through a flame blast rune.

Conjuration could be accomplished one of two ways, and both were expensive. The first was to draw on your own knowledge and experience with the substance you were summoning and use that as a diagram for mana to coalesce into physical form. This was why Cole could summon steel, but not Arctic iron. He had years of experience with the former but only encountered the latter earlier today. It was still conjuration, and thus incredibly mana-hungry, but the knowledge helped the process along.

The second method was to just dump a mountain of mana into the spell. You still needed some knowledge in order to know what you were actually summoning, but the details could be filled in with intent and brute force. This method had quite a few limitations though. First off, it was obviously more expensive. The spell drank mana so fast that Cole's entire supply would be gone in seconds. Second, even with mana filling in the blank spots, purity would often suffer. Impurities and contaminates could be summoned as filler, and dilute the actual material. Last, even with pretty good regeneration Cole's supply was small, and the spell had to be cast all at once.

Obviously, the smith preferred the first method. Conjuration was also complex in how it assigned cost. His steel marbles, with his practice now getting closer to the size of bottle caps, cost quite a bit. Summoning a piece of simple bread, as he had done after the first few hours of practice and reading, was relatively cheap. The bread was bland, stale, and cold, but it was still edible. Cole thought that the cost difference was based on the composition and rarity of materials.

A marble of pure steel, completely devoid of any impurities or flaws and ready to be used in the forge, was obviously worth a bit more than a chunk of bread. And even with the fact that bread was a mixture of several different ingredients prepared in a specific way and baked, he had eaten a lot of bread in his lifetime. The knowledge just from consuming it and knowing how it was made plummeted the price, and he could likely summon an entire loaf of his bland bread without even taking a break for regeneration. This meant he could stay in the pocket forge and keep working even longer!

But aside from the bread experiment and skimming the beginner's books, he had spent all of his time conjuring the steel marbles. Once he had a few dozen, he deemed it enough to begin and strode over to the forge. It had been flickering cheerfully with forcefire this whole time, but Cole strangely wasn't too hot. He could tell the interior of the forge was blazing with heat, but the rest of the room was just toasty. Magical bullshit was awfully convenient, and he would be sorely disappointed if it turned out that the world ending had been a dream.

The forcefire in the forge was supplied by the runes around the room instead of Cole himself, but he could still control it like his own mana. The forcefire twisted in on itself as it formed a divot, the edges of the flame rising higher as the center dropped and flattened out. Forcefire was solid, and he could use it as a real-time mold for broad reshaping. He could do the same with his steel magic, which was how he planned to combine the marbles after the heat softened them up. Both were less precise than actual forging, but they worked to get the process started.

The marbles were dropped one by one into the depression in the flames, and the smith focused on calling his steel magic as they began to heat. It felt like a massive telekinetic hand that could only touch steel. It was unwieldy and controlling it with just his mind made it clumsy, but he gradually gained a bit of control. Once the marbles were glowing with heat, he slowly applied pressure across the top of the forcefire. Smushed between the magical force and the solid flame, the collection of spheres slowly transformed into one large ingot.

It was ten pounds of pure, solid steel. Five feet long in total, but that was before he even got started. It was glowing an orange bordering on white, ready to begin the smithing process. He grabbed a pair of Arctic iron tongs and grabbed the nascent claymore. It was withdrawn from the forcefire and placed on the anvil with a sense of certainty, much like how many of his creations began. He could feel it, in his bones, blood, and soul, that this weapon would be a masterpiece.

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He raised the hammer and brought it down with all the strength he could muster. The glowing hot steel was forced down a quarter of an inch where he struck, but the imbalance didn't last for long. He raised the hammer again and again, slamming it down along the length of the ingot until it was level again. Then, he flipped it onto its side and did the same thing. Once that was level, he flipped it and did the same thing. Over and over he brought the hammer down on the steel, slowly but surely lengthening the blade.

It was back-breaking labor, and even the runes in the room couldn't stop the stifling heat from the weapon. Every two or three flips the blade went back into the forge to be softened up again before the process repeated. It was slow, and his muscles burned, but the blade was getting to an acceptable length.

Some indeterminable time after he began, Cole knew that the proper shape was there. So he began the next step, twisting and folding the metal in on itself along the length of the blade. This would layer the steel, strengthening it and increasing its resilience. This continued all the way down the blade, folding the whole blade. After that, he went back to hammering, restoring the shape and length. Then, he focused his efforts on the bottom foot or so of the blade, slimming it down and rounding it out for a handle. The handle ended up being elliptical, and once he put a proper wrap on it it would be a perfect grip.

He grabbed the next Arctic iron tool, a pair of forging shears. After another session of reheating in the forge, he began to form to tip of the massive weapon. A small V was cut out of the top, the chunk of metal removed, and the edges hammered together to form the point of the weapon. Then, with the shape of the weapon finally ready, he took it over to the grindstone and began refining an edge. Once again, he spent hours at work, ensuring the perfect amount of sharpness to be lethal but not brittle.

The edge came together slowly, but it was straight with no nicks or divots. Once the flat of the blade was smoothed out, he only had a few steps left. The scraps from earlier forging were placed into the forge. The forcefire within changed shape until it was two separate bars, each almost a foot in length and thin but sturdy. Once those were ready, he took them to the anvil and refined their shape just like he had the blade's.

After that, he conjured his largest marble yet to be used as a pommel and brought all three pieces together. With a combination of forging and metal magic to combine them the blade, crossguard, and pommel were soon all one piece, and just the decorations were left before the final step. Cole curved the last inch or so of the crossguards down into a shape not unlike the scroll of a violin. Once his mana recovered, he conjured several strips of leather and wrapped them around the handle. Now that they actually had a purpose in mana storage, he wanted to have a gem for the pommel. But, his mana supply was nowhere near high enough to conjure something he had that little experience in.

With an engraving knife, the smallest of the Arctic steel tools, he carved his new logo into the flat of the blade right above the crossguard. He had to have branding, even if he wasn't planning on ever interacting with a customer again. The crossed hammer and bastard sword looked pretty nice anyway.

Now for the part he had the least experience in. Enchanting. Once the blade had been quenched and cooled, he polished the the steel until it shone. A level and clean surface was ideal for runes, and he had no intentions of being careless with his first attempt. Once everything was ready, he walked over to the enchantment table with the claymore and prepared himself to go to work.

The rune he had decided to use on the blade was rather simple. Reinforcement. It would just let him put mana, of any affinity, into the blade to make it stronger. It wouldn't have any extravagant properties or make the weapon sharper, but Cole wanted to start simple with something as complex as a magic language. The reinforcement rune was composed of a series of bold and straight lines surrounding a delicate swooping center. There were about a dozen separate shapes, half playing the role of defending barrier and half whimsical thing being protected.

The smith would have to carve the rune into both sides of the blade about every foot or so along its height. With the final length of the blade being six feet and a foot of that being handle, he would have to carve the small rune a total of ten times. Not too many, but he had to take utmost care, because channeling mana into a poorly drawn rune was a good way to make something explode. The runes also had to be small, so that scratches on the edge of the blade wouldn't dig into them. Each would be about an inch in diameter, but that space would be crowded.

For an hour, plus a small conjured bread break halfway through, he sat at the table with a hunched back. The chisel was actually what the books called deep iron, not Arctic iron, which made sense if it wasn't used in the actual forging process. Deep iron was just iron with a lot of unaffinitied mana saturated inside, and Cole looked forward to being able to conjure it. With a steady hand gained through years of practice, the runes slowly took shape on the blade.

He didn't think his work was perfect. He was proud, not arrogant, and knew he wouldn't get it all in the first try. But the smith was confident that the symbols were good enough that they would function instead of exploding. Thus, his first magic blade had been formed. It was a beautiful claymore, simplistic but elegant. A tasteful leather grip and solid steel for everything else. Likely the highest purity material he had ever worked with, and enhanced by magic. Yep, he was loving whatever the world had become.

His wrist buzzed.

God damn customers- It wasn't a customer. It wasn't something new at all, but something old that had changed.

[Name: Cole Vance]

[Class: The Chosen Creator(May not be changed)]

[Rank: Mortal-2]

[Sponsor: None]

[Affinity: Fire, Metal, Kinetic, Conjuration, Enchantment]

[Signiture Ability: Pocket Forge]

Then the mana in his body lurched, and everything inside him changed.