Still, he suppressed his excitement and decided to feed himself first.
Yesterday's lesson had made one thing clear: the human body had its limits. Without enough energy, he would never manage this.
He went back to make breakfast. After eating his fill, he returned to the anvil, adjusted the Fireman Mask on his face, and lit the forge.
The gauge above the iron ingot looked no different from yesterday, but the iron, now completely cooled, felt somehow extraordinary.
As the forge heated up, the ingot gradually glowed red and softened.
Watching the gauge, Tetsu no Sosuke took out the ingot and placed it on the anvil.
"Working out impurities isn't the same as shaping iron. Now I need to give it the form of a blade. Its length, thickness, and overall shape will change with every strike of the Forging Hammer. This is when I'll determine how tough the weapon will be, too. This is the crucial part!"
He gripped the iron with tongs and brought the hammer down without hesitation. Clang!
Sparks flew, and he heard a voice beside his ear.
[Toughness +1]
"Just as I thought!"
He considered what that meant, but the Forging Hammer kept falling.
The prompt sounded again and again beside his ear: [Toughness +1].
As he hammered, the square piece of iron gradually stretched and lengthened, taking on the faint outline of a blade.
But then the prompts changed.
[Toughness -1] [Hardness +1]
"...Huh?"
Tetsu no Sosuke paused at the prompts. "So the first stage removes impurities, and the second builds toughness? In the third stage, I add other attributes, but doing that keeps wearing down its toughness?"
He had a theory now. Ignoring the prompts, he kept hammering and working the iron the way he remembered.
This step went faster than the last.
By late morning, the blade had largely taken shape.
He had also identified several attributes.
Toughness, hardness, impact resistance, and wear resistance.
His initial conclusion had been mostly right: after removing impurities in the first step, the second step built toughness. Every hammer blow during that stage increased it.
But as the blade neared completion, its toughness began to drop.
The other three attributes rose in its place.
After a morning of forging, Tetsu no Sosuke found that different ways of striking the iron produced different results.
In short, using only one particular striking technique would keep raising a specific attribute—hardness, for example—but the loss of toughness remained the same.
Quenching also raised several attributes and could even increase toughness.
Before you continue