"Heh-heh-heh… Ha-ha-ha-ha! Haaaaaaah-hah-hah-hah!! What a trivial issue! Old man… You think you could use this?"
Then, with a small thud, Rimuru hand-delivered a quantity of extracted ore on top of the work desk in front of us. Then he hopped on the sofa, lay back, and put my legs up (or I felt like he did).
"…Wait. Whoaaa! That's magic ore!! And, my God, look at how pure it is!!"
"C'mon, old man, your eyes giving out on you?" Rimuru asked. Looks like rimuru already processed this pieces of ore.
"What…? No… It can't be! This entire piece is magisteel?!"
The blacksmith was quite shocked, maybe what rimuru did to the ore is not an easy feat.
"You… You'll let me have this? I mean, I'll pay the going price for it, of course!"
Nice one, he got the old man hooked.
"Oooh, about that…"
"Nggh, what do you want? I'll do anything I can for this!"
"Now that's what I wanted to hear! You heard what me and my team are up to, right? We need your help making a special sword and finding someone who'll travel to the village and give us some technical guidance."
"What? Is that all you need?"
"Pfft. I need some connections to clothing and weapon suppliers, too. And armor."
"If that's all it is, then of course!"
And We forged a verbal contract with old man Kaijin for the hunk of magisteel. We agreed to iron out the details after his work was done. At least we got a blacksmith on board, All what is left is ascertain whether a blade made with pure magisteel can be a suitable for Shingetsu.
Kaido took his leave after we all finished with dinner, Unfortunately for me I couldn't eat anything, there is no food made of spiritual energy here.
During that time the three brothers were invited to the village to settle there after rimuru heard of thier plight.
The next day...
Even though he had all the materials he needed, that deadline still looked impossible to me. But rimuru came up with a solution.
"You've got four days left, Kaijin. You think you can finish it up?"
"…No, to be honest. But I gotta!" .
"Well, I think I've got an idea. For starters, could you make just one sword for me? The best quality you can manage."
"What? But you're a complete amateur. What could you do?"
"I can't tell you. But you gotta believe me! If you don't, then go ahead. Keep going. You'll probably lose your license, but…"
"…So I can trust you? Because if I can't, you better not expect payment for that magisteel. I won't be able to take care of myself, much less cover you… You keep your promise, though, I swear I'll keep mine. I'll give you the best swordsmith this kingdom has!"
We went to the workshop, as we were borrowing his spare apprentice's chamber to rest yesterday.
When we entered, We found the three brothers staring at the hunk of magisteel on the table, sighing to themselves as they turned it over in their hands, scrutinizing every surface. The chunk rimuru had spat out was about the size of a fist, looks like it was quite rare so I asked kaijin about it.
"What are you talking about?" Kaijin exclaimed.
And according to his explanation—
Magic ore was a raw material that was refined to make magisteel. Even the base ore could rival gold in value, for a simple reason: It was both rare and useful for a variety of applications.
It all came down to the magicules that seemed to form nearly everything in this world—something that is similar to reishi in my previous world but acts differently.
On rare occasions, when a monster was defeated, it would drop an entire chunk of magicules, referred to as "magic stone." This was a sort of portable energy source, and it served as the fuel for something called "spirit engineering," an invention exclusive to this world. Magic stones came in levels of purity, and the purer ones were used as cores inside assorted products. Even ornaments could harness this energy for special effects. The resulting clothing and accessories could boost the wearer's abilities, grant them additional effects, and do any number of other things.
Now, the main difference between plain old ore and magical ore was that the latter could be obtained only in areas where higher-level monsters lurked. It required the combination of regular ore, a large concentration of magicules, and eons of time for the ore to absorb the magic and make the transformation—a sort of geological mutation.
Of course, any place with a lot of magic also tended to have a lot of monsters. Not the run-of-the-mill kind adventurers could kill for pocket change—you wouldn't find any magic ore around them. You'd have to travel to places with at least B-ranked monsters in them.
As a tangent, Kaijin finally gave us a full description of how the ranking system worked for monsters.
"Ohhh!" rimuru said. "So I'd be, like, a B or so, maybe?"
"""..."""
I'd think that everyone agrees that you are more than that.
Regardless, the point was that magic ore didn't just pop up out of nowhere. What's more, the magisteel extracted from it took up 3, maybe 5 percent of its total mass. Even a fist-sized chunk of that steel was worth at least twenty times its weight in gold.
Now, on to the real issue.
Magisteel was rare, certainly, but that wasn't what made it so valuable. That lay in how readily adaptable it was to serving as a conduit for magical force.
One could control magicules through the power of imagination or spiritually as I would like to call it, to some extent. My Magic Sense skill worked that way, but even Dark Thunder worked by manipulating the refined magic for different purposes. Most monster skills harnessed it one way or another as well. I didn't know that much about magic spells, really, but I figured they worked on the same premise, if my previous attempt was any indicator.
So what happened if a weapon was made of material infused with vast amounts of magic? Amazingly, it became a weapon that could mature! and that to me was a good sign that this weapon will be suitable to house a spirit.
I was tempted to ask Kaijin make my sword now but I have to be patient until I see the properties of a normal sword that he makes first.
After the explanation, Kaijin buckled down and went to work as we watched the process.
Ten hours later, he was finished.
It looked, to me, like a plain old longsword. And he didn't use that much magisteel, there was still a lot left from the blob that rimuru spat out apparently it will be to costly otherwise.
Only the core of the weapon he made was formed of magisteel and the rest of the blade was crafted from normal steel instead. That core was all it needed for its magic to work its way into the steel, eventually merging itself with the whole sword. That, he said, was why a weapon grew stronger as it was used over time. The blade would never rust or lose its shape—it could just use ambient magicules to regenerate itself.
Kaijin showed us his freshly forged sword as he spoke. As I inspected the weapon I tried Infusing some spiritual power, and while it worked, The process was slow and I sensed that the capacity is not enough, This sword won't be able to house shingetsu, may be if a bigger blade made purely out of magisteel it could work.
I handed the sword to rimuru who sent the others out to copy the blade with his skill.
With that, Kaijin and his men left. Gobta, too, for some stupid reason, I stayed to watch the show.
So our recipe today's for a longsword. Couldn't be simpler! First, take this completed sample…and swallow it up! Next, take the rest of the ingredients lined up here…and swallow them up, too! Munch, munch…gulp! Mix well in your stomach, and…
Notice. Analysis target: "longsword." Successful. Creating copy… Successful.
Repeat nineteen times. Bon appétit!
Easy, wasn't it?
"Easy for you, you even have an AI Assistant, Good thing you sent the blacksmith out or he will be crushed to see how the work he made in 10 hours was copied in 3 minutes."
"So now what? I told them not to open the door for three days. Am I supposed to just hole up in here until then? "
I told him just to come clean with it and with that we went out.