Gray Chronicle

Chapter 7 The Veins of Ash

Old Tok was still sitting by the fire pit.

His posture was no different from the day before—back straight, shoulders relaxed, two short, thick hands resting on his knees. But the firewood in the hearth was freshly added, the water in the iron pot was steaming, and three earthenware cups sat beside it. Three cups. It was as if he had known all along that two people would return this morning from the direction of the tributary.

Lynn scraped a patch of skin off his left shoulder as he emerged from the crevice of the tributary. Ellie followed behind him, her halfling heritage allowing her to slip almost silently through the equally narrow crevice.

"Hammer." Old Tok stretched out his hand.

Lynn took the rune hammer from his pouch and handed it to him. The dwarf took it without checking the hammerhead for dents or the handle for cracks—he simply touched the runestone at the end of the handle with his thumb and then set the hammer aside.

"Did you knock?"

"It was hammered. Seven iron nails and one iron bar."

"Did you hear a few low hums from the iron bars?"

"Two places. There's another one that's broken—the etched crystals have eaten away at the iron."

Old Tok was silent for a while. Then he picked up a new piece of iron from the fire pit—not an iron nail, not an iron bar, but a piece of iron about the size of a palm, about half a finger thick, with gray-green corrosion marks all over its surface.

"Today we're hammering this. Hammering it flat. Not hammering it straight—hammering it flat. When the iron sheet is forged, it will deform in multiple directions, and you need to control its trajectory in three dimensions: length, width, and thickness."

He placed the iron sheet on the flat stone that served as an anvil.

"The final step before quenching. The iron sheet is flattened; tonight I'll teach you how to quench your first knife."

Lynn picked up the hammer.

The first hammer blow landed. The spot where the iron sheet was struck dented, with the edge slightly raised. He adjusted the tension in his hand and struck again at the raised edge—the raised edge was pushed back down, but a new slight bulge appeared next to the dent.

He understood why old Tok had said that sheet metal was more difficult to work with than nails. Nails only have one dimension to control: their bending. Sheet metal has three dimensions, and these three dimensions are interconnected—adjusting the length affects the width, and correcting the thickness changes the length. It's like survival in the lower city—solving hunger requires copper coins, earning copper coins requires stamina, and restoring stamina requires food. The three dimensions are interlocked.

As the seventh hammer fell, he heard a low hum. There was a very thin, gray-etched channel near the edge of the iron sheet.

Metal material recognition jumped to 2.4%.

The eighteenth strike. A low hum was accompanied by a slight tremor in the runestone at the end of the hammer handle—not the light tremor of last night, but a vibration that lasted a full beat. Lynn felt a tingling sensation in his hand, not from the reaction force of the hammer blow—but from the trembling of the runestone.

The twenty-third strike. The low hum turned into a deep buzz—lasting for a full two beats. The vibration of the runestone traveled from the hammer handle to Lynn's palm, then up his forearm to his shoulder.

The thirty-first hammer blow. The iron sheet had been hammered into a neat, uniform shape. The thickness was uniform, the edges were clean, and the ash crystals had redistributed within the iron—he could see with the naked eye that the gray-green veins were no longer chaotic clumps, but rather presented directional flowing patterns.

There was one last bulge. It was only the size of a grain of rice, located in the upper left corner of the metal sheet. He raised the hammer—

"stop."

Old Tok's voice sounded like iron ingots clashing.

"You can't strike it again." The dwarf stood up. "If you use the same force, the iron sheet will crack—what's buried under this protrusion isn't ash crystals, it's a rust core. You've already cleared all the ash channels with those dozen or so strikes, and the ash crystals bypassed this rust core as they flowed inside the iron sheet. If you strike it again, the rust core will be crushed, and the debris will mix into the ash channels, ruining the entire iron sheet."

He pointed to the bump with a short, stubby finger: "This can only be sanded down. Sand it down little by little with a file."

Lynn looked down at the piece of iron. The piece of iron that he had hammered thirty-one times, each blow with a different force and each landing point calculated, was ultimately stopped not by his technique, but by a defect in the material itself—a rust core hidden inside the iron, invisible to the naked eye, which would only be exposed during repeated forging.

This feeling suddenly overlapped with something else: the half-elf boy the clerk had mentioned. He trained for two years, stood on the Judgment Stone, and was judged a "Wanderer"—then the temple gave him free training, and three months later his pupils disappeared. It wasn't that he wasn't strong enough. It was that something was buried within him, something he himself didn't know, but the temple did. Like the rust core hidden in this piece of iron—exposed during forging, old Tork told him it couldn't be hammered, only ground. But no one told that half-elf where the rust core was; by the time he discovered it, it was already shattered.

"A good blacksmith can see where the rust is. Most people aren't good blacksmiths—they're just people on the blueprint."

Lynn looked up. Old Tok didn't continue explaining what "the person on the drawing board" meant.

The quenching process used sulfur-containing water from an underground river, mixed with three parts ash-etching powder.

Old Tok tested the water temperature with his hand, the one missing half a little finger: "It's here. Put it in."

Lynn used tongs to hold the dagger, blade down, and immersed it vertically into the water.

laugh--

Grayish-green steam exploded. The dagger trembled violently in the quenching liquid, and a layer of extremely fine lines appeared on the surface of the blade—the channels of gray corrosion crystallization in the iron, which were "fixing" at a speed visible to the naked eye. It wasn't solidification; it was more like those channels were alive and flowing when they were heated and hammered, and now the quenching had settled them down, like river water freezing into ice in winter.

He drew his dagger. The blade was still a dark, iron-gray, but now it had several extremely fine lines on its surface, emitting a faint grayish-green fluorescent glow. They weren't painted on; they grew from within the iron—like veins under the skin.

"Quenching doesn't fix the surface crystals. It fixes the flow channels you create during forging. The clearer the flow channels, the more complete the texture will be after quenching. If you break the flow channels—the texture will be broken after quenching, and the cutting edge will chip from that break."

Old Tok ran his thumb along the edge of the blade. The grayish-green lines rose slightly beneath his rough skin, like scars.

"The patterns on this dagger are intact. This means that you didn't break any of the flow channels in your thirty-one hammer blows—except for that rusted core."

On the crystal slice, metal material recognition jumped to 3.1%. Scrap sorting jumped to 1.2%. Weapon handling jumped to 2.2%.

There is also a new entry: Ash Forging (Basic) 0.3%.

"The core of rune forging isn't the runes themselves," Old Tork suddenly said. "It's 'life-giving.' Runes are merely an aid—allowing the blacksmith to feel the flow of ash crystals more clearly while forging. But if you can't feel the pulse in your own hands, even the best runestone can't bring anything to life."

He handed the dagger to Lynn.

"Keep this dagger. It's worthless—made of scrap metal, unsharpened, unweighted. But the etched patterns on it were carved out by you. This 'signature' of those patterns will be the same as every weapon you forge from now on."

Lynn took the dagger. The gray etched patterns on the blade glowed faintly in his hand, the same color as the crystalline light in the gray fog outside the window.

"A signature means that every runic weapon can be traced back to the blacksmith who forged it. The direction, depth, and density of the patterns—every blacksmith is different, like fingerprints." Old Tok's voice was flat. "That's the price of runic forging—your work will always bear your name. Whatever they're used for, you can't escape responsibility."

Quiet.

"But you still have to teach me."

"Because you haven't learned to be afraid yet." Old Tok looked at Lynn. "Wait until you learn to be afraid, then you can decide whether to continue."

"We'll start forging swords tomorrow," the dwarf said. "Not from scrap metal—we'll start with raw iron, smelting, forging, quenching, and sharpening—the whole process. We'll forge one sword every three days. Once it's finished, I'll tell you if I can call myself a rune blacksmith."

He paused.

"That bronze-rank warrior. Rice is bringing him to search this area in three days. If you don't go to him, he'll come to you."

Lynn tucked the tempered dagger into the cloth belt at his waist.

"I'm not leaving."

"Bronze Rank - attributes of at least 12 Strength, 10 Constitution, and 8 Agility. Your strength is less than a third of his." The dwarf's tone was simply stating a fact.

"We can't fight head-on. But we have three days. Three days is enough to get a lot done."

He didn't say "what is it?" But he was thinking about what the clerk had said—the distribution of tributaries of the underground river, the three routes leading to the surface, and the abandoned buildings that could be used to set traps. More iron nails were needed. Not just one, but many.

Old Tok sat back down by the fire pit, leaning against the brick wall, and closed his eyes.

"I'll prepare the iron tomorrow morning. Tonight, rewrap the hilt of the dagger—a knife in your hand is useless if the hilt doesn't fit properly."

Lynn found several sturdy strips of coarse linen in the pile of scraps and began to wrap them around the knife handle. Ellie watched for a while, then tore a strip of cloth from the hem of her coat and handed it to him.

"This absorbs sweat better than linen."

Lynn took it, wrapped the strip of cloth around the outermost layer of the knife handle, and tied a tight knot.

Outside the window, gray mist seeped from cracks in the ground. Further away, the midnight bells of the Temple of Nox tolled faintly, like shadows themselves.

On the crystal slice, two gray, unlockable entries flashed simultaneously. Not activated. Just a fleeting glimpse of light projected back from the distant future.