1.
Today, too, I was a god of hard work.
Other master craftsmen... Though I didn’t know whether there even were any other human master craftsmen.
Anyway, while other master craftsmen forged swords and armor, I...
"Hehehe."
Forged underwear.
Could someone making underwear really call himself a blacksmith?
Personally, I thought so.
I thought a blacksmith was someone who made good equipment for the people who needed it.
And it wasn’t as if I wasn’t doing metallurgy.
More importantly, her life was on the line with this equipment, wasn’t it?
It sounded a little grandiose, but I had to save Dolores.
Just as Operation Save Dolores and the making of her underwear were about to begin.
I would start by crushing the spirit stone I had taken from Ruby.
Of course, I had asked Dolores first.
"Mama, can I use this?"
Naturally, there was no way Ruby could have acquired and kept an ore like this on her own, so I had thought it belonged to Dolores...
"...A spirit stone."
Dolores blinked for a moment.
"Ah, it belongs to Ruby. Yes, I don’t mind. Use as much as you like."
Permission granted.
But somehow...
"...Lionel, um."
"Yes?"
"...Never mind. Keep up the good work today, too..."
She trailed off in the middle of speaking.
...Putting aside the matter of the spirit stone, there was something unusual about the way Dolores looked at me.
How should I put it? It was like a gaze wondering whether she should say something or not... and maybe a little sticky, too.
Thinking back on it.
"...No way, right?"
There was no way she had seen it or figured it out, right??
Morning Lionel, all damp.
Please let that not be it.
If it was, I no longer had the confidence to look Dolores in the eye. No way. Impossible.
"Haa... Let’s work."
I was suddenly terribly unsettled, but I pushed the thought aside for now.
I could preserve my dignity later.
Rustle.
I laid leather over the anvil.
I poured almost all the spirit stones onto it, then covered them with another piece of leather.
Then...
Thud! Thud! Thud!
I brought the hammer down.
If I just pounded them directly, the precious powder—well, honestly, I didn’t know whether it was precious—would obviously scatter everywhere.
This ended up being Dawn Bringer’s first real test.
"...Wow."
Apparently, its compatibility rating of 80 wasn’t something it had won from a game of slap-match.
From the feel of the grip to its weight—everything about it felt perfectly suited to me.
...If a hammer felt this good, I almost felt sorry for the rankers who would later come down with a whole different kind of illness after wearing my equipment.
With compatibility like this, once they got a taste, they wouldn’t be able to get away...
"Hehe."
As I imagined that happy future, I could feel the stones inside the leather had been crushed, and the feedback traveling through the hammer grew faint.
Swish.
I opened the cover to check.
Most of them had been pulverized... Hmm, but a few large grains still remained.
"Let’s do a little more."
Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud!
Until stones became pebbles, and pebbles became sand.
I swung the hammer for quite a long time.
Crunch...
Lastly, I used the broad front face of Dawn Bringer to thoroughly crush the remaining grains in every corner.
Sssrrr...
When I removed the cover, a heap of finely ground rainbow-colored powder lay inside.
Spirit stone powder, complete.
I had no time to admire it, so I carefully gathered the powder together.
Then I immediately headed for the cooling tank of cold water I had prepared in advance.
Shhhh...
There was no need to hesitate.
I poured it straight in.
According to the textbook, the ratio of spirit stone to water was one to one and a half.
I had set everything up beforehand, so all I had to do was pour it in.
The colorful powder piled up in the water, and I immediately picked up a rod.
Stir, stir.
I stirred the cooling tank.
At first, the powder merely swirled around on top of the water.
But why wasn’t anything happening?
Just as I started to feel a little anxious...
Sticky...
I gradually began to feel resistance from the tip of the rod.
Thick...
"Ooh..."
The water in the cooling tank thickened up a little, like Greek yogurt.
Rainbow Greek yogurt... Hmm...
At least it looked like it could work as a diet supplement.
It killed my appetite instantly.
Putting the pointless thoughts aside, I brought over the spinning canister I had prepared in advance.
I had thrown this together that morning. A spinneret plate riddled with holes thinner than hair was fitted into the bottom of the cylinder.
I transferred the liquid from the cooling tank into the spinning canister.
Click.
I closed the lid and turned the handle.
Creak... creak...
The more I turned it, the more an internal press plate descended and forced the contents out.
To put it simply, it was just like a machine for pressing out naengmyeon noodles.
You put dough in, push down from the top, and noodles come out. That was the idea.
I had taken the design from that, too.
Squeeeze...
Before long, the thick liquid was pressed downward, and then...
Sharararak...
Rainbow noodles—no.
Threads emerged through the countless holes in the spinneret plate.
I carefully gathered and held the threads dangling beneath the spinneret.
I was wearing gloves, but perhaps because they had not fully hardened yet, they felt slightly sticky.
If I left them like this, they would stick to one another like crazy.
"Slowly..."
I fixed the ends of the threads to one side of the anvil... then slowly turned the handle while gradually moving the spinning canister toward the other side.
Sssrrr...
I lightly shook out the strands and kept them spaced apart so they would not overlap.
Did I just call them noodles? Fuck, I felt like my brain was being contaminated.
Rustle...
Once I secured the other ends, several hundred rainbow-colored threads lay spread across the anvil.
Now came the real part.
I readjusted my grip on Dawn Bringer, which sat beside the anvil.
The threads for the upper portion of the bra, lightly.
Clang!
The threads to support the underside of the breasts, hard.
Clang!
I hammered the threads, carefully controlling my strength.
Every time, the threads touched by the hammer turned pure white.
Clang! Clang!
When the hammering was finished, only white threads remained on the anvil.
Now they really did look like noodles.
I had heard that Spirit Thread was graded according to the owner of the spirit stone used as its material.
So just what kind of Spirit Thread would these spirit stones Ruby had possessed make...?
I stared at the threads with a trembling heart.
─────────────────
[Spirit Thread: Ryeo][★★★★☆]
─────────────────
『Spirit Thread made from a crystal bestowed by a high-ranking wind spirit upon a beloved companion.』
『When pulled slowly, it stretches softly. The moment it receives a powerful impact, it hardens rigidly.』
『Equipment made from this material increases the wearer’s Agility in proportion to the amount used.』
─────────────────
"Fuck."
A jackpot did not get any more jackpot than this.
Nice. This was absolutely amazing.
I didn’t know exactly how strong a high-ranking wind spirit was, but the important part was that.
‘Increases Agility.’
It was almost unheard of for a material itself to have an expected bonus effect written like that.
For an obvious example, Hundred Flowers Crystal Ore was also four-star, but it did not have wording like that at all.
This was seriously insane, wasn’t it?
"Ruby..."
Where on earth did she find stones like these...?
What a filial daughter.
After all, this Spirit Thread would become Dolores’s underwear, so it was a filial act.
It definitely seemed incredibly good...
Still, the fastest way to truly get a sense of it would be to ask an elf directly.
"Open my DMs, Yuna."
I took a picture of the completed Spirit Thread and the remaining bit of spirit stone beside it, then sent it to Erien.
【Me】: I tried making Spirit Thread. Is this good?
【Me】: Ah, I also have the spirit stone. Is this good too?
Hmm, that was a really irritating message.
I had wanted to try sending one like that.
Now I could finish the remaining work while waiting for a reply.
"Turn off the DM notifications."
[Mm-hm]
I slowly turned my head.
"Haa..."
I had managed to spin out some threads, but more than half the liquid still remained in the cooling tank.
And the Spirit Thread on the anvil was only about one bundle so far.
Shit the fuck.
"...Let’s begin."
It was time to begin the goddamn grind.
At least two days.
"Ugh."
That was my estimate.
2.
Meanwhile, in an antique manor.
"Uuuughhhh..."
A woman with long violet hair cascading down her back.
Isabella was clutching her head as she lay facedown across a desk.
Books were piled like towers on either side of her.
『The Basics of Conversation』
『How to Respect Someone Else’s Rejection』
『One Hundred Ways to Apologize Sincerely』
The amusing thing was that not one of them had anything to do with magic.
"Aaaang..."
Isabella groaned as she turned the pages.
The reason she was studying manners entirely, utterly unsuited to her personality and disposition...
Was because of what had happened several months ago.
As usual, she had gone to Dolores’s home without any notice.
And she had played with the interesting child, Lionel.
But Dolores had been more furiously angry than ever before, spewing harsh words at her.
‘...I...’
Dolores was the one woman who treated Isabella with some degree of kindness.
If even she had gotten that angry, Isabella thought there must truly have been good reason for it.
She had not intended it, but it had amounted to a kind of shock therapy.
In short, Isabella had trespassed into the duchy, bullied Lionel, the interesting little child Dolores was raising...
Of course, at the time she had thought she was not bullying him but playing with him. Later, she came to understand that it had been bullying.
After months spent reading countless books...
"...Aaaang..."
Isabella had realized she had been doing quite a lot of things wrong.
She opened another book.
『You must not touch another person’s body without their permission.』
"Why...?"
She reflexively asked, but the very next page read:
『You must also correct the habit of asking why before anything else.』
"..."
It always countered Isabella like that, without delay.
In the end, she finally completed the handwritten letter of apology she had spent so long preparing.
"...So I’m sorry, Dolores. I want to apologize to Lionel too."
Scratch, scratch.
A letter, not a DM.
This was the result of approximately thirty-eight attempts.
"Miraju."
Caw!
A raven answering her call flew in through the window.
"Take this... to Dolores’s manor."
After hesitating for a moment, she added one more instruction.
"Um... Don’t just break through the barrier and fly in... Keep circling in the sky."
Once Dolores recognized Miraju, she would signal it to come down.
If she saw it and pretended not to...
"I should wait until she isn’t angry anymore..."
Asking for another person’s permission, respecting it when they said no...
And waiting until their anger subsided...
They were truly difficult things for her.
Caw! Caw!
Miraju cawed as though it disliked that plan.
"Who do you think you take after...?"
She supposed even this was karmic retribution for her own actions.
Isabella sighed.
3.
Dolores’s weekly routine was relatively simple.
On the days when she needed to inspect her territory, she toured the territory.
If she had business to handle in the Tower, she headed there.
And if work had piled up, she sometimes shut herself in her office all day...
But today.
Today was a day when she was doing absolutely nothing.
"Hmm-hmm..."
On days like this, Dolores brewed herself a cup of tea and sat by the window.
Then she watched Ruby and Lionel.
Ruby exercising in the drawing room, Lionel entering the workshop and hammering away at something.
Her surveillance network covered the entire manor, so she could tell what they were doing.
It had not been there originally, but she had installed it because of two incidents.
One was Isabella, while the other was... Lionel overworking himself.
She could not let Lionel collapse while working...
Both were serious matters, so it could not be helped.
"Hehe..."
It was her favorite time of the week.
Today, Dolores’s gaze was directed toward the workshop.
Lionel was diligently turning the handle of some cylinder.
Then threads began pouring out of it in great quantities.
When he struck them with a hammer, they even turned pure white.
"That’s so fascinating..."
Dolores watched, resting her chin on her hand.
How did that child know how to do things like that?
What on earth was inside that tiny head of his?
"...Cute."
Well, perhaps it did not matter what was in there, as long as he was healthy.
Just as she was about to take a sip of tea...
Lionel stopped hammering.
Ugh.
He suddenly let out a deep sigh, alternating his gaze between the remaining liquid and the threads before making a thoroughly sickened expression.
Then...
Flop.
He sprawled on the workshop floor.
"My..."
He must be very tired.
Should she go get him and put him to bed now?
Just as Dolores was about to rise from her seat...
Lionel, still lying down, pulled a paper bag beside him closer.
He rummaged through the bag...
Then took out a piece of black fabric... with lace on it...
Plop.
And draped it over his face.
Then...
Zzz...
He fell asleep.
"..."
Dolores’s cheeks reddened.
For the child’s privacy, it would probably be better to stop watching.
He was a boy, after all...
"I understand, Lionel..."
After yesterday’s incident, she understood that this was an area he would naturally be curious about.
Just as Dolores hurriedly withdrew the magic that was showing her the workshop...
Caw!
A cry rang out beyond the window—or rather, from the sky above.
"..."
She narrowed her eyes and looked up at the sky.
‘Yes, it was about time she came.’
At least not hiding her presence was worthy of praise.
Feeling that Isabella had improved quite a bit in her own way...
Snap.
She snapped her fingers, opening a gap in the barrier.
As though it had been waiting for that, a purple raven swiftly descended.
Flap!
The raven landed on the windowsill and held out the letter tied to its leg.
"Did your master tell you to deliver this?"
Caw!
"..."
She took the letter in hand.
Just from the writing on the envelope, it was obvious who had sent it.
"Haa..."
Isabella.
What was she going to say this time...?
It was obvious.
She would say she had not meant it that way, that she had become interested, that Lionel had been so... fascinating that she could not contain herself.
It would be nothing but a long list of pathetic excuses.
The number-one most exhausting letter before she had even read it.
Dolores wanted to go back to healing herself by watching Organic Lionel’s cute and alluring antics.
...Still, Isabella had sent a letter, so she should read it.
Rustle.
Dolores tore open the envelope and unfolded the letter.
Then she read its first sentence.
『To begin with, this is entirely my fault. There is no excuse.』
"...Huh?"
Dolores made a strange sound without meaning to.
She leaned out to check the direction in which the sun was setting, just in case it had started setting in the east.
『I’m truly sorry, Dolores—and Lionel as well.』
"...What?"
Dolores...
For the first time, saw Isabella apologize.
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