Reincarnated as an SSS-Ranked Blacksmith Who Refuses to Forge Weapons-Chapter 230. Home After Years Passed

Year 15... Home.

Around the fifth year, the island stopped being a settlement, but no one said so or gave a date. When you stood at the harbor and watched supply ships come in from four different kingdoms, or when you walked the main road in the morning and counted the faces you didn't know next to the ones you had known for ten years, the word "settlement" just didn't fit what you were seeing anymore.

Now, one thousand two hundred forty-seven people live in Home.

The three original buildings were still there, but they had been absorbed into bigger buildings nearby, like how younger trees grow around older ones.

The workshop had grown a courtyard and gotten bigger twice. The kitchen had turned into a full-fledged cooking school, with Thomas Chen's name above the door and a reputation that spread to kingdoms that weren't even close to the sea.

Seraphine had built a school in her third year, and it was now on its second expansion. This was because she had reached the Fifth Circle at the end of year seven and immediately started teaching theories that no one else in the world was qualified to teach yet.

People from all over the world had started coming to learn from her.

The whole eastern slope was now home to Marina's Combat Defense Academy. She had 230 students at last count, and she did their morning drills every day, no matter what the weather was like.

She thought that a teacher who stopped getting up early didn't care anymore.

The Enchantment Conservatory was Elwen's home. It was a group of studios that were connected to each other and smelled like woodsmoke, metal, and the special herbs she used when she was working on something delicate.

She had created a whole school for what she called Peaceful Enchantment, which was the art of making things beautiful while also making them useful. It had become one of the most popular subjects on the island.

Students came from the northern kingdoms just to learn from her.

Felix ran a busy trade port all the time. Over the years, his Luck System had become something that really worked, which he sometimes complained about because it made him much less fun at parties but much better at his job.

Donetta managed the supply chain with a serene efficiency that left everyone else feeling slightly uneasy.

Most afternoons, younger reincarnators gathered around Dorin's bench by the water, just like they had for the past fifteen years. He taught things that couldn't be put into a curriculum, and everyone who sat with him seemed to leave with something specific and useful that they couldn't quite explain to anyone else.

New Mira ran the settlement's administration with the cheerful precision of someone who had been born to organize things and had fifteen years of practice doing them. Her memories came back slowly over the first two years, not all at once, but in layers, like sediment settling.

Before she remembered her own name, she remembered the workshop in Ferndale. Before she recalled the transformation into golden light, she recalled the humming sound Greg made when he concentrated on a project.

She never really remembered the moment of the Sphere itself. The First Forgemaster had said that this was a mercy the universe sometimes gave to spirits who had experienced something too big to handle.

By the end of the second year, she was calling Greg "Master-forger-darling" again. He had quietly started crying in the workshop and told everyone who asked that he wasn't crying.

No one was more surprised than Greg that the four pantheons had kept their word.

...

For three years after they left the shore, Home lived in a state of holding his breath, which was hard to shake even when nothing happened.

Marina still made her students practice how to respond to threats. Seraphine had spent a whole research track looking into patterns of divine interference.

Greg made twelve defensive items in secret in the months that followed and sent them to important places around the island without telling anyone what he was doing.

In the sixth year, messengers came.

It wasn't Morteus himself, but two young divine beings who said they were students and stood at the harbor looking unsure in a way that was very strange for anything with divine authority. They wanted to watch.

They said that Morteus had sent them because he had been watching for three years and couldn't find a way to explain what he was seeing in terms that made sense in his own field.

Greg had made them tea. They didn't know what to do with tea.

Greg was uncomfortable because the first pair had stayed for six months, asking careful questions and taking notes that reminded him of Seraphine in her early research stages.

They took with them a three-page letter that Greg had written directly to Morteus. In it, he basically said that death had never been the problem and that people who understood mortality tended to build things more carefully than people who didn't.

Morteus had sent back two sentences via a third party.

"Your argument has merit... I'm thinking about it."

That was the most they had gotten from the God of Death in fifteen years. Greg thought it was a big diplomatic win, though, because the other option had been a divine intervention.

Greg thought that Lyssa's interactions had been stranger and, in his opinion, more interesting. The Goddess of Madness had not sent any messengers.

Instead, she showed up in person, without warning, twice in the first five years. She appeared randomly in the settlement and watched with the look of someone who had never seen anything like it before.

The first time, she showed up in Thomas's kitchen while he was serving dinner and stood in the corner for twenty minutes watching people eat before disappearing. The second time, she was standing at the edge of Marina's training ground during morning drills.

Marina saw her, held her students' forms, and kept running the drill as if an ancient god weren't watching from ten feet away.

Lyssa sent a message through the First Forgemaster after that second visit. It said, "Tell your soldier-wife that she is the most interesting thing I've seen in three hundred years."

"I have made the decision not to drive her crazy... It would be a waste."

Marina had gotten this news with the look of someone trying to decide whether to be flattered or worried. In the end, she chose "cautiously flattered."

Noxus had never come to the island in person, but in the ninth year, when river fever spread to three of the mainland kingdoms, it stopped at the water's edge and didn't cross to the island.

No one could explain how it worked.

Priya had been testing for weeks. Seraphine had written seventeen pages of analysis. The most logical explanation was that the God of Plague had chosen Home as a test case for his own reasons.

Greg wrote a thank-you note and threw it into the ocean. He didn't know if it got to anyone, but it felt right to try.

The Twins of Entropy had been the most quiet of all. Greg had woken up three times in the middle of the night over the course of fifteen years with the feeling that something was watching him from somewhere close to reality.

Each time, he had gone to the workshop and sat with Bork's clasp in his hand until the feeling went away.

He couldn't prove that the Twins were responsible, but the observers had never been hostile; they were only curious, much like how entropy might be intrigued by something that was lasting longer than expected.