Frostbound [LitRPG Apocalypse]-Chapter 174 - Paradoxical, but it Works

Nothing unexpected arose from the process and it seemed to be going smoothly based on what I was told, even if I wasn't there to watch. I checked in every once and a while but other than that, I kept myself busy.

Sitting around knowing what was happening was almost worse than listening to it. My mind kept bringing up the memories of what I went through and my prayers for it to end.

Instead, to keep my hands busy and mind occupied, I deferred my governing tasks for later and focused on something else.

While Vincent had a Spirit Fire for his craft, I had one of my own and it was past time to start forging with it. I had let construction pull me away from focusing on my profession.

It hadn't seen much love but it was now time to change that. My Profession had advanced in level because of Runes for the past few months and it was time to even things out with a bit of forging.

Get back into the heart of my profession and pick up the hammer again. The smithing hammer.

While all Spirit Fires were similar, their affinities could vary. All resembled a ball of fire but differed in color and gave off different feelings. Vinny's fire roared and emanated heat like it had a miniature sun contained inside.

Mine was the opposite. Not only in color but feeling as well.

It felt like it contained the heart of a glacier and the air coming off of it carried a chill as if it had blown over miles of ice. The Flame also matched my mana color and was a striking light blue.

It still looked and acted like a flame, flickering back and forth in various tongues that waved upward, but it wasn't the same as a flame.

Honestly, it was a touch weird to look at. It so closely resembled fire that my mind expected it to be fire. Like I would burn myself if I stuck my hand close enough.

Another oddity of the flame was the effect it had on materials. Not every Spirit Fire had uses beneficial to forging, as some were better for Alchemists or other professions, but Ice surprisingly could. Wood Affinity Spirit Flames were surprisingly well suited to Alchemy, however that flame worked.

When I originally searched for it in the Reward Store, I half expected my affinity to be incompatible with forging, but I was wrong.

The cold emanating out from the blue fire softened metal similarly to how heat did, which I thought was odd. Cold temperatures should make metal brittle, not ductile. The key word being should.

I had long forgone fire and turned to Cold forging in my craft but I had experimented with using the Spirit Flame before. Its effect made it even easier than normal as I didn't have to use as much force with the hammer.

The flame was cold to the touch and metal placed near it became cold to the touch as well, hell, one started to frost over when I left it in the flame long enough. By all the reasoning I knew, it shouldn't work the way it did. Cold did not affect metal the way the Spirit Fire was doing it.

My years of engineering taught me cold temperatures made metal brittle AND I had experience using my own powers to do the same to the Metal Ants in the tutorial. Both before and after the world changed did the Cold make metal brittle, but this seemed to stand proudly in defiance of normal convention.

It was a true paradox my mind couldn't comprehend.

At least not yet. Maybe it was a Law I was missing that worked behind the scenes or maybe it was something different entirely. Magic in high concentrations could have odd effects.

The perpetual storm over Chicago could attest to that.

Even without knowledge of the intricate details, my experiments using the Flame went swimmingly. It eased the process of forging by softening the metal and it boosted the grade I could forge with the mana it gave off.

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It constantly emitted a deluge of Ice mana similar to how a normal fire would radiate heat. The mana would flow into the material during the forging process and boost its grade by a small amount.

The slight hiccups I found when using the Flame was when I couldn't feed it enough. As a magical fire, it needed magical fuel. Wood and coal did little else except frost over when placed inside the Flame.

It fed on Mana, or more specifically, Ice Mana. It was little surprise that the Ice-attributed Spirit Flame preferred Ice-attributed Mana as fuel, but it was still nice to gain that little bit of confirmation.

After seeing the paradoxical effects it had, I didn't want to assume anything.

Neutral mana worked as well but wasn't as efficient, taking more mana to have the same effect, and so did other attributes close enough. Water and Wind seemed no worse than neutral mana when I had Abigail and my mother feed it with their mana pools.

Gabriel wanted to go around testing the effects everyone's mana pool had when used as fuel but I curbed his enthusiasm. It wasn't that I preferred to keep it hidden, but I also didn't wish to parade our treasures around.

Greed was an easy thing to induce.

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People knew of Vincent's already, as that one was hard to keep secret, but mine was lesser known. Only the people who had seen me pack it when we first left knew I had it, which was a small portion of our growing city.

I did not use it out in the open and that would remain the case going forward. The few experiments I had done with it were behind closed doors inside the castle.

Oddly enough, it was my mother who pushed for more secrecy regarding some of the things we had. I would eventually build myself a dedicated forge inside what I called the 'compound', but that would have to wait until the Inner Wall was constructed.

Besides the keep part of the castle, we had a few other structures planned for inside the Inner Wall. The area staked off inside the future wall was large enough to accommodate more structures than only the keep.

Dedicated craft buildings for some of my family, a forge specifically for me, and quality-of-life buildings.

Those weren't high on our list of priorities, obviously, but that didn't mean we didn't have plans for them. Abigail's City planning was nothing if not thorough.

Before my smithy was built, I had to make do with what I had. A room in the same wing of the castle as my bedroom was taken over with tools and materials and the few things I brought with me from the tutorial.

Building something to hold the Spirt Fire was surprisingly easy and made Vincent insanely jealous when he originally found out. There was no better material to contain Ice energies than Ice itself.

I had crafted a pedestal and forge around the flame made out of Ice made by my own hand and it worked to keep the Flame contained easily. The Ice mana coming off the Flame strengthened the Ice surrounding it far better than I ever could.

It was a never-ending feedback loop. When I pushed mana into the Flame, increasing its intensity, the mana coming off of it increased in turn, strengthening the Ice surrounding it further.

The reason Vinny was so jealous was because he couldn't do the same. You couldn't build from fire as it had no substance. It wasn't like Ice where I could make things with it.

He had to jump through a series of hoops to build something strong enough to contain his flame and allow him to work with it without burning everything down. It had taken him working for months with Brayden and Conner to build something that would accomplish the feat and that was where the ceramic coating originated.

It was also the main reason he was so attached to his anvil. It had taken a very expensive fire-resistant metal along with an intricate heat treatment to keep it from melting in high temperatures. It was one of the more expensive things we owned because of the material alone, not that I'd ever tell him that. To me, it was entirely unnecessary to haul it thousands of miles North with us.

Hey, I couldn't renege on the shit I gave him over it and I was sticking to what I said, even if it was said under duress of pulling the damn thing.

The Ice my forge was made of still wasn't strong enough for me to hammer on without shattering, much to my disappointment. While the Ice surrounding the fire was extremely strong, the anvil was too far away from the flame to receive the same treatment.

With Ice failing, I had to resort back to hard metals. I wasn't very attached to my anvil from the tutorial and chose to leave it behind. It wasn't made out of any expensive material or treated differently.

My forging didn't create much heat and any it did, my Ice whisked away.

The only thing it needed to do was resist force, and there were plenty of materials out there that could do that. Even mundane High-Carbon steel of sufficient grade could work.

The real part I missed from my previous setup was the base I had. The slab of metal I put under my anvil to keep the shockwaves from dissipating. That thing was entirely too heavy and unwieldy to bring on a cross-country trip, no matter how much I missed it now.

Without it, I had to make do with what I had, and that was enough for now. The hardened stone of the castle did the same, if to a lesser degree.

I would look into better materials later, but for now, I wanted to get back into forging.

One thing that I felt should be pointed out, was just because my Profession level was higher now, that didn't automatically make me a better smith. My skill rarities were still only Common and Uncommon, a far cry away from what I wanted them.

Reaching level 58 didn't give me any knowledge or techniques on how to forge better and I was still on the level I was back before I evolved, which was frustrating.

I was even a touch worse as it had been a while since I had last forged.

My daily routine stayed the same going forward, as I wasn't going to deviate from it, but I now slipped some forging time in there to keep my skills sharp. It made it so that I couldn't spend as much time helping with construction, but that was fine with me. It wasn't yet time for the Runes and the only thing I would be doing was manual labor, which I could leave to others.

It didn't take long to see results and it was extremely gratifying to see my skills increase.

While building the castle, [Mana Engraving] had upgraded to Rare as well as [Basic Runecrafting], but now it was time for my other skills to receive that treatment.

Both [Create Weapon] and [Create Armor] reached Uncommon with a bit of effort and I felt my other skills improving as well.

It wasn't a coincidence that those two had upgraded first. They were tied to the equipment I made and once I was able to make better things, they had upgraded.

It was only natural that using better materials would see those two skills upgraded quickly, even if it was a tad unearned. Well, not so much unearned as it was throwing money at the problem.

I didn't let that get me down, though, and continued to hone my skills. Even going back to the basics to some degree.

My focus was on the first skill my Profession gave me as [Sense Metal] was well past due for an upgrade.

The first skill almost every Blacksmith learned could be upgraded into a variety of different things. At the skill's base, it was an information-sensing skill. A smith used it to feel the material he was working with and know how it was reacting to his manipulation.

The skill wasn't pigeonholed into only sensing metal as the name implied.

It would always be able to, as upgrading the skill didn't get rid of its base function, but there were ways to influence what the skill could interpret.

Vinny went with [Sense Temperature]. He worked with a much more detailed flame control than I and he needed to know exactly what temperature different parts of the material were.

The fact that skill now helped him during his procedure was hard to banish from my head.

I, on the other hand, didn't need to know that. Cold forging didn't use heat and sensing the temperature would be useless.

Instead, I pushed for [Sense Frequency]. It was a bit pushing it for a single upgrade to go all the way from [Sense Metal] into [Sense Frequency], but I felt it would work best for my style.

My style, [Rhythm Forging], was all about creating a resonance frequency with the material I was working with and I felt [Sense Frequency] would aid in that process the most.

It was a work in progress, but I felt confident in being able to do so. Even if it took a while to make it happen.

If I could fix [Sweeping Slash], I could manage to do what I envisioned.