1.
Several days passed like that.
During the day... I heated and quenched things; at night, I passed out on Dolores's special refrigerated bread.
The translucent, supple red silk piled up day by day.
And the benefits kept getting better, too.
Meals were delivered morning, noon, and night.
And rather than just sleeping at night, Dolores forcibly put me to bed, so I even took naps.
She said she only came when she was tired... but she showed up whenever she felt like it and hugged me, honestly.
Then one day, when I gave Dolores an unhappy look because she had come too early, she panicked and pulled out a piece of paper she had kept tucked away in her arms.
"I came to show you the response to Lionel's gloves."
It seemed she had saved it in her arms for when I got sulky.
The final winning bid was 170,000 gold.
1.7 billion won.
"For equipment meant for guilds, knight orders, climbing parties, and families with beginner climbers, they could be called the finest humanity has to offer... I suppose that is why the price went so high."
"Wow."
When I exclaimed in admiration, Dolores covered her mouth and asked,
"Hehe, do you want to sell them?"
"Hmm..."
I rubbed my chin and thought about it.
"No."
There would be a better use for them. I had unintentionally become one of those people bragging about auction prices, but I did not want to sell them yet.
Anyway, time passed like that.
Before I knew it—
"Yuna, do you know what a mast is? A mast?"
With the corners of my lips curling upward, I peeled away the ore's final layer.
Hardly anything was coming off anymore.
The fist-sized flame ore had now dwindled into a tiny red glass bead, no bigger than an ant, containing its condensed inner mana.
This was going to be the topping now.
The final gem topping to be scattered over the oversocks.
"Let's do this."
It was time to return to being a Sun Dwarf.
The precious translucent red silk had piled up in heaps.
Now I had to turn it into warming oversocks.
But there was something bothering me about following the recipe for the existing Apprentice Blacksmith's Warming Oversocks exactly as it was.
"They're ugly..."
Maybe because they had been designed to be worn inside large shoes.
They had absolutely no sense of aesthetics. They felt crude and clunky. It was like they had only cared about function.
Of course, merely changing the materials would improve them in many ways, but asking Dolores to wear something like this?
That was just wrong.
"Isn't there something better...?"
The textbook I was reading now... was a beginner's textbook for apprentice blacksmiths.
Sticking faithfully to the basics would be enough, but I wanted to look higher.
[I've been looking, but... I can't find anything like an advanced course.]
"Really?"
That was a little strange.
Just as I was frantically flipping through the textbook—
"...?"
On the final page of the apprentice textbook, a brief passage was written in the corner.
『You cannot advance by merely learning.』
『If you have walked the path someone else made until now, then now carve out your own path.』
"...This."
The instant I saw it, I felt as though I knew exactly what it meant.
If I had absorbed the theory into my mind and trained the fundamentals until they had become part of my body...
In other words, the details and principles of the Sun Dwarves.
If I could put all of it into practice throughout the entire process...
Was there any reason I had to stand atop a recipe that someone had made for apprentice blacksmiths?
"..."
Shhk.
I spread the red silk I had drawn out over the past several days across the workbench.
Keep the details intact.
Keep the fundamentals and the principles. Engrave them into your body.
But I would forge my own path.
The truth was, I knew nothing about aesthetics.
Especially when it came to clothing. It was not like I was some female character in a subculture gacha game, either.
But I was not worried.
"Yuna, what do you think are the prettiest stockings?"
[Huh?! My taste?]
Her energy instantly shot through the roof.
Strictly speaking, I was not asking about Yuna's personal taste. I just meant what was aesthetically superior.
Still, it was probably similar.
If you lacked aesthetic sense, you asked someone who had it.
And Yuna's sense of aesthetics could practically be called the greatest in humanity.
She had learned every fashion trend in the world and possessed all the information.
You could call her an ocean of data.
[Hmm... for me, you mean?]
I waited for a moment.
[I think there are three things all pretty stockings have in common.]
[First, transparency. Second, the ankle line. Third—whether men like them.]
"Wh-what are you suddenly talking about?"
[I'm telling you, it's true! I didn't make it up. People really say that.]
Was that actually true?
I flinched for a moment.
Then I pulled up the production process for stockings that Yuna had sent me.
How exactly was I supposed to make them without machinery?
And I was left speechless.
"...I have to do this by hand."
An endless repetition of needle and cloth.
Thinking back on it, it was ridiculous. When I thought of a blacksmith, I had only imagined heating and hammering iron.
You know, huge bulging forearms and all that.
But a blacksmith had to be capable of taking responsibility for things a little deeper than I had thought.
Counting stitches the size of needle holes all night long.
"Do it. I just have to do it."
Yeah, fuck. Nothing is impossible.
And so... my first hell began.
I do not want to describe every part of the process in detail.
Even I grew lightheaded just thinking about it.
One stitch. Then another. I unraveled the translucent silk into thread and looped it over the needle's tip.
Then I knitted up a tube. The one saving grace was that the fabric tore cleanly along the grain and unraveled easily into thread.
"Ah, damn it."
Whenever I thought I had made some progress, the grain would misalign, and I had to unravel it all again.
I kept pulling it apart to reproduce the angle of Dolores's perfect heel.
My vision blurred... and the feeling in my fingertips began to fail.
Tap.
Tap.
I stopped counting how many nights had passed.
It was harder than any work I had ever done before.
And because it was such an honest process, I could not even bring myself to think of skipping it.
"Isn't there a knitting machine?!"
[No....]
Unfortunately, there was no machine that could knit the stitches for me.
"I'm going to focus like fucking crazy, so no matter what happens, don't talk to me. Got it, Yuna?"
[Okay....]
"Am I being a little sensitive?"
[A little....]
"Yeah, I love you too."
And so,
two weeks passed.
2.
"Hehe."
The devious mage, Isabella.
"She dared to fling me all the way to the borderlands?"
Dolores's forced deportation spell had sent her truly, unbelievably far away.
After stewing in anger for quite some time, she had finally succeeded in returning.
But because she was not cruel enough to take her anger out on anyone, she could not vent it on somebody else.
She had even succeeded in discreetly sneaking into the estate.
Truthfully, she had gotten in, but...
She was honestly rather scared.
"..."
From her perspective, Dolores was still terrifying whenever she got angry.
She had waited nearby, seen Dolores leave the house, and slipped inside in an instant.
The warding magic was around twenty times stronger than it had been before.
Breaking through it had cost her quite a bit of mental energy.
"Goodness, what a frightening woman."
She just wanted to take a quick peek at Lionel's face.
While she was calming down, she had also refined the opening a little.
What sort of evaluation would he give her? It felt like showing a newly created spell to her old master and waiting for his assessment.
The first thing she saw when she entered the estate was—
[If you take Lionel away, you'll die.]
[You really might die.]
- Your longtime companion and dear friend, Elysia von Dolores -
"Eek...."
It was magical embroidery inscribed into the empty air throughout the estate.
Letters placed everywhere in the manor so that only a mage of Isabella's caliber could perceive them.
Dolores had prepared them in case Isabella broke through the warding magic and entered.
"She's really so scary... but at least she still calls me a dear friend."
Clicking her tongue and trembling as she crossed the estate, Isabella suddenly heard—
Aaaahhh!
"...?"
A scream had come from a tree cabin far off in the garden.
It was male, but quite youthful.
Anyone could tell that was...
"Lionel!"
Isabella immediately ran toward it.
Normally, she would have hated getting even a single blade of grass on her skirt.
But at this very moment, she gathered her skirts high in both hands.
Tap tap tap tap.
Then she threw open the workshop door.
"...?"
The sight inside.
She had expected an ordinary storage shed, but what greeted her eyes was...
A furnace, ore, hammers, and a cooling tank.
And at a side table, a rather pretty—no, incredibly pretty—pair of stockings...
Stitch by stitch, being painstakingly sewn by...
"Lionel?!"
At that moment, Isabella's thoughts accelerated.
The scattered pieces connected into a single line.
"You... really... made those gloves...?"
The corners of Isabella's mouth slowly lifted.
She released the skirts she had been clutching in both hands.
Hop hop hop!
She bounced around the workshop.
This changed the entire story.
A chess set alone had been worth that much. If those gloves really were Lionel's...
Smack!
Isabella thrust a finger forcefully toward Lionel.
"Lionel, you will become my disciple!"
Dolores's threats to kill her were worth braving.
But before her confident declaration,
Lionel...
"...I want to die."
"...?"
...expressed his will to live.
"Shit... ah, I said I wouldn't swear... fuck...."
"...Huh? Me...?"
Without so much as looking in her direction, he was pouring all his attention into knitting the stocking stitches.
"Lionel...?"
"..."
"Um, Lionel... disciple...."
She called to him several more times, but Lionel did not answer.
About ten minutes passed.
Countless people had asked her to take them on as disciples.
She had been endlessly pursued by people begging her to impart even a little of her knowledge.
Yet Isabella herself had never once extended her hand to anyone.
And her precious first offer...
"Waaah...."
The finger she had extended lost its destination and fell.
"That's so mean...."
In the end, Isabella lowered her head and trudged out of the workshop.
Then—
"Lady Isabella?!"
Sebas, who had been crossing the garden, spotted her and rushed over in alarm.
"W-what brings you all the way here...?! When did you..."
"...I wanna go home."
"Pardon...?"
"I'm just leaving...."
Isabella did not answer the head butler's questions.
Sniff.
Whimpering to herself... she left the estate alone.
3.
Two weeks passed.
My body was screaming.
But today, I was not sensitive.
"Yuna? Good morning."
Only the very last stitch remained.
[...I really have a lot to say to you.]
"Yeah, after I finish making this."
I knitted the final stitch.
And then—
"Finished!!!!"
At last, I had used every scrap of cloth to knit a single oversock—rather, a stocking.
From the tips of the toes to the ankles.
The brilliant red grain ran like flowing water, and a faint heat shimmered over the thinly woven surface.
When light shone through it, the interior was translucent, yet shifting the angle brought out its sheen.
It really should not have taken this long.
But I had added one feature.
Folded up, it became socks. Unfolded, it became stockings.
Adding such an insane function inevitably made it take longer.
Of course, I had pulled the entire recipe from Yuna's head.
And on the side table, the core of the last remaining flame ore—a vivid red bead—waited for the final process.
"...It's pretty."
The flame ore had shrunk to its limit.
All I had to do was set this onto the stocking.
My hands trembled.
Of course they did. I had pushed myself to the absolute limit for two straight weeks.
Tap.
With trembling fingertips, I placed the bead onto the tip of the stocking.
As if the fabric layers stripped away through thermal shock exfoliation had found their proper home,
they began to slowly draw into the glass bead.
Each red strand softly wrapped around the gem and wove itself in.
Shrrrrk....
And before long, the fabric and bead fit together seamlessly, as though they had been that way from the start.
"...Hah."
Now for the real final process.
I took the completed stockings and stepped outside the workshop.
"..."
I could barely breathe.
This time, for the first time, I had not referred to a dwarf recipe.
I had only taken the details I learned from them into my hands as I cut and knitted.
In my own way alone, I had put detail, detail, and nothing but detail into them.
With the spirit of the dwarves, I had walked my own path.
Which raised one question.
Could I truly be called a Sun Dwarf?
Would they acknowledge this equipment?
"..."
In the center of the garden, where the sunlight fell strongest, I placed the stockings in both hands and raised them toward the sky.
I squeezed my eyes shut.
One minute.
Two minutes.
Time passed.
Normally, the crest would have been engraved before long.
But even after waiting several minutes...
I heard nothing at all.
"...It won't work."
I nodded.
Yeah. I could just try again.
Steeling myself, I opened my eyes.
And then—
"..."
A square plaque blazing with golden light floated before my eyes.
And at its center—
There was a familiar crest engraved on it.
The apprentice blacksmith's crest of an Heir of Fire.
A sun with eight tongues of flame radiating outward.
According to its description, it was the mark first inscribed by one who forges the sun.
"..."
As if entranced,
I extended a finger.
Then—
Ssssss....
Golden thread began to trace a path through the air from the tip of my index finger.
Light flowed exactly along my fingertip.
‘...No way.’
A name naturally came to mind.
Lionel.
I crossed over the sun crest on the plaque.
And beneath it, I slowly drew a stroke.
L.
The first letter of my name.
Bzzzzzt—!
At that moment, golden light burst from the toes of the completed stockings.
The very mark I had just drawn.
The sun, and the L engraved beneath it.
It was vividly engraved upon the red silk, suffused with gold.
─────────────────
[Frostless Spring] [★★☆☆☆]
[Unique Equipment] [Compatibility] [-/60]
─────────────────
Fold it, and it becomes the warmth of midwinter.
Unfold it, and it becomes the heat haze of midsummer.
It holds two seasons in a single garment.
─────────────────
『Do not doubt the path you walk, but do not become intoxicated by the path you have walked.
── That is the first pride of one who handles fire.』
- Praise sent by the sun to Formal Blacksmith L -
─────────────────
The first two-star equipment I had ever made. And beneath it were the words, Formal Blacksmith L.
I stared at those words floating in the air for a long while.
Along with the joy of being acknowledged as an Heir of Fire,
I raised both hands and clenched my fists.
Then, without thinking, my hands entered my field of vision.
"What a mess."
They were scraped up everywhere, marked all over by needle pricks.
Calluses had formed atop old calluses.
It did not feel bad at all.
Because I had nothing to be ashamed of.
Smiling, I gripped the stockings.
Dolores.
For two weeks, she had gone back and forth through the estate with frozen feet.
For two weeks, she had lost sleep because of someone, and had teared up again and again while trying to put someone to sleep.
For that person—
I...
intended to give her spring as a gift.
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