Northern yielded and allowed Ultron to stay, not because he was suddenly convinced the man posed no danger, but because Northern himself was in too good a place to give it a thorough thought. He wanted to leave as soon as possible, and at the same time, he was not going to leave Ultron unsupervised, so he asked Corpse Eater to watch him.

Corpse Eater was well suited for the task. There were a lot of Corpse Eaters amongst Northern’s Echoes, and even now, each looked very different from what they had been when he slayed them on the streets of Lotheliwan. That particular one he had fought in the mansion had grown to be both a bosom friend of Mr Fluffy and a very dependable Commander. It remained a secret how the Echo always managed to put things in place for Northern without even having to speak.

Northern retreated from the cave and found his way to the pit of the forge.

The remnants of Jeci’s armor lay in ruins around him. He had said he wanted to recreate the malicious armor, and maybe even create something that would surpass the original while he was at it.

All around him the pit bubbled. Clones of himself moved about, creating swords, the same kind one after the other. The ringing of metal did not stop, yet the sound was being contained by the pit of the Forge itself.

He was mass producing, majorly swords, and bows and arrows. As many resources as he could get his hands on, he was using them all.

His Myriad of Echoes had not only marched into the northern forest to harvest talent fragments for him, they had also come back with every carcass of the monsters they slaughtered. Northern was not losing on any front. In soul, they were being added to his army. In body, they were serving as raw material to create weapons. If this wasn’t a very prudent manner of spending, Northern didn’t know what was.

He admired the work his clones were doing. He had shared his train of thoughts into hundreds of trains and each one was being managed by each clone. It meant that there were roughly three hundred individuals here today hammering the steel, melting it and cooling it, each of them unaware of their united progress and isolated from each other, until Northern retrieved all trains and merged them together again.

Both the successes and the failures, the lessons learnt from mistake, everything would pour into his mind and reinforce his knowledge about blacksmithing.

Experience was the greatest teacher of skill. It took time for one’s proficiency to reach the class of a professional, and Northern knew he was still far lacking in that regard. So instead of having to depend on doing the same thing for a long time to sharpen his skill, he simply did it an impossible amount of times in a very short period.

Of course, all of this he had decided and kicked into motion without expecting to actually find a gem such as Ultron’s talent.

’This is truly amazing...’

Northern sat on an anvil, looking down at the panel. Another Northern stood behind him, looking at him with complete and utter shock. He was actually looking at Northern’s butt, which was sizzling from heat that was rapidly melting his clothes and skin, but Northern was too absorbed in what he was reading to notice.

Ultron’s talent was like a live forger. It had the ability to identify impurities and purge them away. Although Northern could achieve quite the same thing with his Demon Eyes, the results varied greatly. His ability was to study the component of something in relation to its form. When he understood the component, he would be able to copy the form.

But he couldn’t affect them as much as Ultron’s talent could. Granted, the man’s talent also had its limitations, and most importantly, it was first a utility type talent. There was no doubt about that. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

[Eye of the Architect] allowed Northern to see the blueprint of any physical object. When looking at ores, metals, weapons, or armor, he could see a holographic overlay of its atomic structure, identifying structural weaknesses, magical conductivity, and accumulated wear and tear.

’An X-ray for materials. No... better than that. This sees what even the Demon Eyes would miss in materials.’

While with [Purging Touch], by making physical contact with a material, he could channel a vibrating, heatless white energy through it. This forcefully expelled slag, rust, and chemical impurities. A standard iron sword refined this way became lighter, sharper, and completely immune to shattering under normal conditions.

[Damascus Flesh] refined Northern’s own body into the optimum body for a forger. His biological makeup was permanently refined, his muscle fibers woven together like folded steel, and his bone density skyrocketed, making him incredibly heavy and highly resistant to kinetic impacts and slashing damage, acting as a living weapon blank.

There were also other unique abilities, such as the one that allowed him to truly understand the weightlessness of energy, but nothing beat the sixth ability: [Instantaneous Forging].

Its description read:

[You no longer need a forge or hours of time. By slamming your hands into the earth or a pile of scrap, you can violently pull the refined elements together, instantly creating any work. The level of equipment you craft still heavily depends on your knowledge about forging.]

Now this one here was the true reason Northern was so lost in what he was doing.

Northern wanted to use this method to create the armor for first trial. Of course, he knew that this was a work for someone who was very imaginative, but having been an architect in his past life, Northern did not lack imagination at all.

He knew exactly what he wanted... and knew how to go about it.

So Northern simply picked the scraps together, merged them together and began to heat them with his bare hands.

He was using [purging Touch] to channel a level of heat that was making the air of the pit bend in very uncanny ways.