System Architect - Ch 119

The tools came a little over a week later. To get quality tools took time. I would much rather wait to have quality than have shitty tools right away. If it worked like I hoped, I would be using those tools for a long, long time. Sebastian had me making nails for hours during the intervening week. While I wasn’t ready for making a knife yet, I felt a lot closer than I had just one week earlier. When I walked into the workshop for the third time, I showed Sebastian the tools.

“Good,” he said. “They came. Today, we’ll work on your technique with the nails and then Chris can help you with engraving.”

“Sure,” I said.

I wanted to learn both things. Even if playing around with the system was my main interest, it would be good to know how to make things by hand if I ever needed to. Those nails wouldn’t make themselves. I put my full focus into that for the next hour before Chris came to get me.

“You’re improving,” he told me. “Maybe another week or two before you can start working on other things.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Now, let’s go somewhere quieter for the engraving. Wouldn’t want you to jump every time a hammer hits metal!”

I laughed and followed Chris to a separate room in the back of the workshop. It was a small room with a furnace and a workbench. Tools that looked like they were used to work on small objects were neatly arranged where they could be easily accessed.

“This is where I’ll work with precious metals,” he told me.

“Like rings and stuff?”

“Yeah. The furnace allows me to melt the metal and cast thing. Then I’ve got files and other tools to shape the rings, pendants, and stuff like that.”

“Ah, cool.”

“Since this is your first time, I think it’s best if you try to engrave something I can reforge easily enough. Brass is soft enough that engraving won’t be too difficult.”

“Brass is soft?” I asked. “It’s a metal.”

“Well, it’s relatively soft. Your tools are able to cut anything softer than them—which is anything like non-hardened steel or softer. The softer the metal is, the easier the cutting is. To a point. Something as soft as lead can be a bit tricky to make sure the cut is consistent since it deforms easily.”

“Ahh, I see. That makes a lot of sense.”

“Right. You said you’ve done inlaying before, right?”

“Mmhm.”

“Engraving’s similar to the process of cutting into the wood. Only the metal is harder and usually there’s nothing put into the cut you make.”

Chris showed me how to hold the tools and how to cut into the brass. Like with wood, I started simple. I cut lines into the brass to get a feel for the tools. When I felt comfortable, I traced out the fractal for Create Water.

I wanted to see if I could replicate the results in metal as I had seen with wood. Would cutting the fractal be enough or did it need some kind of filler to work correctly? Did the filler need to be a different metal or could it be the same? Those questions—and a hundred others—were on my mind as I worked.

“What are you making?” Chris asked when he saw the lines on the metal.

“It’s an experiment,” I told him. “I’m not sure if it’ll work as I hope, but I’m going to try. If it does work, it’ll be magical!”

I smiled at the word magical before returning my focus to the work in front of me.

“Call me when you’ve finished. I’d like to see the results.”

Engraving metal was more difficult than cutting grooves into wood had been—but for different reasons. Metal was hard, so it took more passes to make the grooves as deep as I wanted. I also had to use a hammer the entire time. Even with my enhances strength, I could not freehand any of it. On the other hand, the metal wouldn’t tear out if I hit it the wrong way. It was more consistent than wood, even if the process took more skill.

It took me two weeks of working on the engraving in the workshop to completely engrave the fractal into the brass. Pushing mana into it did basically nothing. It ate my mana quickly while creating barely a single drop of water. So while it worked on a technical level, the efficiency was complete garbage. I didn’t know if this was because I’d messed up the engraving somehow or because it was missing something. I didn’t know enough about how it worked yet, and I wanted so badly to know!

“Interesting,” Chris said when I showed him.

“It kinda works,” I said. “But I think it might work better when the engraving is filled in. At least, that seemed to work when I tried it with wood.”

“I’ve got some silver. Let’s try that.”

Chris fired up the furnace to melt the silver. When it was molten, he heated a black-colored mold. The silver was then poured into the mold and dumped into a bucket of water once it was solid. The bar he’d made was long and thin.

“I need to turn the silver into wire,” he told me. “Since it’s thin, I can draw it out a little at a time with this rolling mill.”

He used the rolling mill—with wire dies—to form the silver bar into thinner and thinner wire. Once it was the right thickness, he cut it into pieces I could work with. As with the wood, I hammered each piece into place so that it filled out the groove I had cut. This took about half a long as cutting the grooves had. When I was done, I sanded the top flat and showed Chris the completed piece.

“It looks interesting,” he said. “Does it work any better?”

“I dunno,” I said. “Let’s find out.”

I pushed mana into the brass and silver object. With much more efficiency, a ball of water began to form above the metal. It had worked!

“Whoa!” he exclaimed.

“Looks like inlaying the metal after engraving makes a huge difference.”

“I’ll say!”

Chris called Sebastian over to show him what I had made. I repeated the demonstration. His eyes went wide when he saw the water form out of thin air.

“Holy shit!”

“Magic,” I said. “It’s not just healing but it can be pretty much anything.”

“So you could make a sword that shoots lightning?”

“Presumably. If I knew the design for it.”

“Awesome!”

“Keep your pants on,” Chris laughed. “This does change things. Maybe I should take up engraving again.”

“I have a lot to test,” I said. “Whatever you make now, only I can use it. In a few years, you will be able to as well.”

“Maybe you can make some weapons for all of us?” Sebastian asked.

“I’m not quite good at smithing,” I reminded him.

“You don’t have to make the weapons. Chris and I can. But you can do the magic that makes it all work.”

“It’s like enchanting from those stories,” Chris added.

“What about armor?” I asked.

Weapons were good and all, but armor saved lives. I knew just how quickly a fight could go from start to finish. With armor, I could last a lot longer to deal out the punishment needed to kill monsters.

“Neither of us know how to do that,” Sebastian said. “Plus, you’d really want armor that is easy to modify since you’re still growing, yeah?”

“I wonder if what I’m doing will work with leather or cloth,” I mused. “Probably worth a shot.”

“You said it worked with wood, right?”

“Mmhm.”

“It worked with metal as well. So I would try it if you know how.”

“I don’t,” I said. “But I have a few ideas. Might be better to test with metal first so I can figure out how this all works. Then doing it with something soft might be an easier thing to do, you know?”

“Sure. So what now?”

“I’m going home for the day, I think. But next time? More testing!”

--------

Each test took a significant amount of time. Thankfully, it was something I could work on in my own workshop when I had time. That left Sebastian and Chris free to teach me other aspects of metalworking or help me with the final parts of the tests.

My first two attempts—the engraved and the inlaid—had led me to believe there was something needed to fill the engraving for it to work. Just to be sure, I tried filling the engraving with air. While that might sound like it was the same thing as leaving the engraving unfilled, it wasn’t. To keep the air in place, I had Chris help me secure a covering to the top of the metal.

When I ran my mana through the covered engraving, there was a marked improvement over the initial open engraving. While not as good as the one I’d filled with silver wire, it was significantly better than the disaster that was leaving it open. I surmised that the filling of the engraving was guiding the mana somehow. If that was the case, maybe having the filling material be unbroken was important, too.

The next test was filling the channels of the engraving with solder. As the solder was a soft metal, Chris melted it and poured it into the channels. I had to clean it up afterwards, but it was much faster than inlaying the silver had been. The results were good—about the same as that of the silver inlay.

Aside from trying to improve the efficiency of the inlaid engravings—or enchantments, as Chris insisted they be called—I wanted to test if the same metal used as an inlay would work. If I made these enchantments, it would be easy for someone to reverse-engineer what I had created. All they’d have to do would be to see the enchantment’s structure and copy it. From there, it was only a small leap to see that it was the same structure as skills. Although I’d locked away that ability, it would raise questions that I would much rather avoid. So if I filled in the engraving with the same metal, it would be hidden in plain sight. The problem was that doing so was about as efficient as leaving it out in the open!

The testing I’d done confirmed—in my mind at least—that the filling material acted like a guide for mana. It was like creating a fiber-optic cable in the shape of a skill’s fractal—except out of metal since the stuff I was guiding was mana and not light. I guessed there was a whole bunch of science that had to be done to figure out the best combinations of materials. As it was, I didn’t have the time—nor the patience—to sit down and do that for decades. I knew it worked, and that was the important thing.

After my testing of metal was complete, my mind wandered to what Chris and Sebastian had said about enchanting things in preparation for the monsters. Especially the question about whether I could enchant cloth or leather the same way I had done so for metal and wood. I had a feeling that I could—I’d learned a lot about how it worked from the metal tests—but I also knew it would take a lot of time to get right.

Before I did any of that, I had a few more tests I wanted to do around the size and shape of enchantments. If I engraved and inlaid a bowl, would the enchantment still work? How small could I make the enchantment… and would that have an impact on how it worked? What about if I made it huge? Until I knew the answers to those things, I didn’t feel confident in trying to enchant anything that easily bent in the wind.