Free Web NovelChapter 193: Chapter 180: A Bridge of Communication Between Elves and Dwarves
Unlike the other contestants, who chose to use more advanced tools, Simon didn’t use a Pneumatic Enchantment Hammer to shape the blade. Instead, he hammered it by hand.
"I’m starting to like this kid."
Bane had to admit that, even considering the animosity between Dwarves and Elves, he really liked this young Elf’s craftsmanship.
A manual hammer is vastly less efficient than a pneumatic one. When the latter was first invented, there were even competitions pitting "mechanical teams" against "manual teams."
But after a while, no one bothered to bring it up anymore.
The manual teams stood no chance.
These days, the only artisans who still used a hand hammer were either too poor to afford the machinery or supremely confident in their own abilities.
The feedback from a hand hammer allows an experienced artisan to make much finer adjustments.
Simon was clearly in the confident category.
’I hope this kid puts some pressure on the younger Dwarf Artisans in the future.’
The more Bane watched him, the more he liked what he saw.
The younger Dwarves in his clan had no patience for honing their fundamentals.
They often just bought finished steel from the mills and cut it directly into the required shape.
It wasn’t that improving efficiency this way was bad. Judging by the Zog Group’s business model, selling in volume was more profitable than focusing on quality.
But Bane had always believed that an artisan should still learn and understand traditional forging methods. That way, they could gain a more comprehensive understanding of the craft before using finished materials once their skills had matured.
Simon finished the forging fastest, his progress far ahead of the others. With a fluid, stylish motion, he plunged the red-hot Blade Embryo into a bucket of water to quench it.
"Quenching is a vital heat treatment process. The steel is heated to a critical temperature and held there for a period, then rapidly cooled in a medium—commonly water or oil—to make the final product harder and more wear-resistant."
Bane explained, acting more like a commentator than a judge.
Meanwhile, Simon stared at the quenched Blade Embryo for a few seconds before placing it back into the Melting Furnace to heat it again.
"Oh? What’s he doing?" Bane, surprised, planted his hands on the table and leaned forward, trying to get a better look at what Simon was doing.
"Is he going for a second quench?" Bane realized.
"That’s a risky move. While you can increase strength through repeated quenching, the process is unpredictable. Plus, they’re using a water quench here, and one wrong move could make the blade body much more prone to shattering."
However, to Bane’s astonishment, Simon completed the second quench and then heated the Blade Embryo yet again.
A third time, a fourth...
Bane was speechless. He covered his cheeks with his thick palms, unable to comprehend what this kid was doing.
Six times. He performed a total of six quenches.
Each quench alters the internal structure of the blade body and affects its stress distribution.
Who could guarantee whether the internal stress was being adjusted to a state of balance or one on the verge of collapse?
Bane was worried that during the strength test later, a single strike from a War Axe would shatter Simon’s blade into dozens of pieces, sending shards flying into his face. Imagine coming out to participate in a show only to get your face messed up. He might be an old Dwarf, but he had an image to maintain.
Simon stared at his six-times-quenched creation for a good few dozen seconds. Just as the last grains of sand in the hourglass were about to fall, he finally nodded, satisfied.
Of course, he hadn’t done this on a whim.
Ever since he was a child, he’d found that he could hear strange sounds when he worked the forge.
It was as if his brain automatically assessed the material, using an auditory illusion of a melody to indicate its degree of completion.
A soothing melody represented a high degree of completion, while a turbulent one indicated hidden flaws within the material.
It’s similar to how some people see colors and are triggered by feelings of heat, cold, or even taste. People like this possess an instinctive talent for mixing and matching colors and are said to have synesthesia.
Many famous painters possessed such a gift.
Who would have thought that a young Elf, who hadn’t left the Silver-White City State in 56 years and had started in a workshop at the age of 8, would possess a Skill as absurd as auditory synesthesia for forging?
Thanks to this talent, Simon always opted for more aggressive techniques when forging.
The melody in his mind was like a progress bar, constantly informing him of the material’s status.
It sounded a lot like a cheat ability from one of those kingdom-building novels, the kind that helps the protagonist achieve material breakthroughs and develop technology far beyond their era.
His was a downgraded version, though. The cheats in modern kingdom-building novels were usually much more direct.
The Blade Embryo now in his hands sounded soothing and serene to Simon, having reached a state of perfect balance.
’If only I could hear a sound like that from an Oli Crystal.’
But hope was just hope. The reality was that those translucent black crystals, filled with flocculent matter, were dead silent to his ears.
To him, this material had no soul.
He could hear a faint sound from even a random handful of dirt scooped up from the roadside.
But the Oli Crystal? It was worse than dirt.
Yet he remained determined to unlock its secrets, not for the challenge, but to fulfill his father’s dying wish.
His father, the finest artisan of the previous generation in the Silver-White City State, had claimed to receive a revelation from the Holy Tree. The Holy Tree told him that the Oli Crystal was the key to the future.
From then on, he became obsessed with researching this useless crystal, an obsession that lasted for hundreds of years, right up until the moment of his death.
Because he hadn’t produced any new works in a century, his father was gradually forgotten by the Craftsmen Guild.
This only made his research into the Oli Crystal grow more and more fanatical.
In the end, during a failed experiment that caused a massive explosion, he and Simon’s mother returned to the Holy Tree together.
