Chapter 7: Forging Techniques

One month passed in the blink of an eye. In this short period, I improved tremendously in all aspects. In accordance to the chief’s teachings, I had mastered all the basics of the ‘Dwarven Axe Style’. Following this, I just had to experience using it in combat!

The chief was greatly surprised at my learning capabilities. In his long life, he had never seen before someone as talented as me!

As always, I only smiled humbly when the chief praised me. My greatest talent was my ability to learn! How else would I be able to achieve two doctorates at the age of ten?!

Now, I had started to look at how the top smiths of the Dwarven race went about doing their work; how they managed to apply the techniques of the ‘Dwarven Axe Style’ in their craft!

After a period of observation, I found out that smithing wasn’t just about swinging the hammer. It included many different steps such as the choosing of materials, smelting, combining of metals to form alloys, hardening of the metal, and… Learning is a process that will never end. However, I was born with photographic memory! As long as I saw and experienced it, nothing can stop me from making that skill my own!

Now… I’ve stopped practicing together with the other kids in the village. Out of the eighteen styles of the ‘Dwarven Axe Style’, they’ve just started on the second style, a long way from mastering the basics. Every dawn and dusk, I would join them for general physical training. The rest of the time I had in the afternoon, I would accompany the chief to learn from the different smiths, and experience it!

On the other hand, my cultivation in the ‘Art of the Nine Suns’ had also increased by leaps and bounds. Even though I’ve yet to reach the stage of being able to feel the Qi in my body as stated in the manual, my body had become much fitter, especially my strength! With the daily midnight cultivation grind, my strength had reached a point where the chief said that it was enough for some adventuring outside the village, albeit with him overlooking!

Lastly, the ‘Dwarven Axe Style’. In the past two fortnights, I let go of all thoughts related to the ‘Hundred Slashing Knives’, and focused wholeheartedly on the former. As the saying went: “An appendix doesn’t harm the body, and neither does studying!” Also, the fact that the ‘Dwarven Axe Style’ was related to smithing, only increased my hunger for learning!

With a month of training, I’ve mastered the ‘Dwarven Axe Style’. According to the chief, I’ve reached a point where only by experiencing real combat would my techniques improve! As for the other kids in the tribe, at least a year would be needed before they reach my current state!

Moreover, my outer appearance had changed tremendously over the past month too! My muscles started bulging all over, and I felt extremely energized! Even though adolescence was still some ways off, my muscles had surpassed the Dwarven children in the tribe by a significant margin!

I felt very excited at the fact that I could experience the outside world soon, and looked forward to it daily… After studying and practicing for so long, I could finally leave the village to engage in mining and the transportation of minerals!

In the beginning, I was only allowed to traverse outside the village to a maximum of one kilometer. However, I firmly believed that I would improve very quickly as I had set myself a goal – being a passable smith as soon as possible and craft the sword that I had always wanted! To achieve that, I would try as hard as I possibly could!

For the next few days, I continuously honed my skill in the ‘Dwarven Axe Style’, improving my personal strength. At night, I would sit on my bed and cultivate, driving away all the fatigue accumulated in the day and slowly increasing my power as well!

Finally… It was the day for the test to leave the village. However, before I attempted the test, I had one more important thing to do, and that was to find a master!

As mentioned previously, the Dwarven Race had a rule, and that was to never craft any equipment for another being in the same race. That meant that… I had to first craft a weapon myself before heading for the examination! In order to learn smithing, I had to find a Dwarven smith as my master and learn from him.

Generally, Dwarves would take their own fathers as their masters, obviously, as all Dwarves were master smiths! There was absolutely no need to take someone else as their master! Usually, most dwarves had their own ideals while pursuing the craft, and for their ideals, who else would be better to hand them down to than their own offsprings?

However, I’m different from the rest of the tribe as I had no relatives in this world. Everyone was a stranger to me. Thus, I had to choose my own master, and had to obtain his approval before doing so.

Luckily, fate was on my side as the chief always had always rated me highly, and decided to take me under his wing. One had to know that the chief was the greatest smith the Dwarven race had seen for the past few thousand years! He had once crafted eight heaven-shaking armors and weapons, thus becoming the chief of the race!

After spending an entire morning, the chief passed down to me all the basics of the art of smithing, and showed me how to create an axe used by the Dwarven race for combat!

All of the axes that the Dwarves wielded were short axes. Only the beast race used axes that had long handles. Due to their short stature, the short axes brought out their innate strength, something that long axes could not achieve!

Early in the morning, I practiced the ‘Dwarven Axe Style’ for four hours, then headed to the back of the village upon my new master’s command.

The village was built on a small depression in the land beside the volcano. Only the gates were facing the wilderness outside. On normal days, the Dwarves would head to this mountain range and collect the ores and minerals for their daily crafts.

On the left of the village laid a small port, built on an unending lake! The only differences between the lake and an ocean would be the fact that the lake had more moderate waves, and it was green as compared to the deep blue of the ocean!

The chief directed me on how to collect ores and differentiate between them for the entire afternoon. In actual fact… it was very easy as I just had to look at their colour! Rocks containing minerals would be darker in colour and heavier. To make my job easier, the chief gave me a lodestone, which would be attracted to rocks that had minerals in them!

I ended up spending the rest of the afternoon collecting ores. Upon looking at my results, the chief said that these ores would be enough for an axe weighing roughly twenty kilograms!

After eating some papaya porridge to ease my hunger, the chief brought me to the forge and personally demonstrated how I should go about smelting the rocks and retrieving the minerals from within. After his demonstration, he allowed me to experience smelting first hand! As he always said, only with hands-on experience can one engrave whatever he had learnt in his head!

The furnace used was a kiln made out of clay. Firstly, I had to put in flammable materials made specially for smelting, like coal. After the fire starts raging, I would then insert the ores and close the lid.

In charge of fanning the flames for the furnace were ten wind-attributed squirrel like beasts! On top of fanning the furnace, they could also make use of wind to injure their enemies.

Of course, these squirrels were ones that had gone through training! General beasts of their kind would only be able to release devastating hurricane-like winds. With training, they could control the speed of the winds to one suited for fanning flames!

Blowing wind into numerous pipes, the squirrels didn’t even stop for a moment, allowing the flames in the furnace to burn crazily, rapidly increasing the temperature within!

Once the temperature reached a certain point, the ores in the furnace would start to melt into a magma-like liquid. With that, the first stage of smelting would be completed.

Once all the ores in the furnace liquefied, one would have to prepare a glob of sticky clay, and proceed to the furnace. Then, they would have to open the hatch below, and allow all of the liquid to flow out into the clay.

Due to the fact that metal possessed a higher density than normal rocks, all of the metal would gather at the bottom! Thus, what flowed out from the bottom of the furnace would be 90% liquified metal, the real core material for smithing!

Using the amount of ores as an estimate, one would be able to know how much metal to retrieve from the bottom. If one retrieved too much, slag would be mixed together with the metal, causing the metal to decrease in its purity. Vice versa, if one retrieved too little, metal would be wasted, and dumped together with the rest of the slag.

After retrieving the liquified metal, the first step of smelting would be complete! After the metal hardens, one would have to get rid of impurities in the metal as good weapons required highly purified metal! The purer the metal was, the tougher the weapon would be, and thus resulting in a better grade.

After getting rid of the slag in the furnace, one would place the hardened metal inside it once again, repeating the process multiple times until they achieved metal that had a high degree of purity!

Generally, with nine purifying cycles, the metal would reach a purity of over 99%. With this metal, one can embark on the next step of smithing!

Bringing out a mold, carefully pour the liquid metal into it. Once the mold was filled up, the remaining metal would not amount to much anymore.

After the metal hardened inside the mold, break apart the mold and take out the shaped metal; in this case it would be in the form of an axe used by the dwarven race! With this step completed, the only action that remained would be – hammering!