Smithing has never been easier. There were two methods to get the same job done, and Rino picked the lazier alternative.

Fashioning the waterwheel into an automated hammer, Rino abused all the magic he could abuse and transformed the baby bars into different tool heads. Smithing was ten times easier than smelting because Rino only had to smelt the baby bars and pour them into clay moulds prepared by Ubel. Any fine-tuning could be hammered out manually on an anvil or by using the automated hammer.

Needless to say, Rino's choice was instant.

The only thing Rino had to note when using the automated hammer for smithing was the speed and intensity of each hammer. Rino could not exactly control them, and he made the costly mistake of trying to let the automated hammer flatten a jutted edge that only required a little pat.

The shovel head was shoved back into the magical furnace for resmelting and casting because that hard smack from the automated hammer bent everything out of shape. Haste made waste, and the phrase never rang truer. Thankfully, Rino wasn't short on baby bars for the mini set of tools. He eventually settled on using copper because there was plenty of that. He could use bronze, but the thought of smelting tin into copper made his brain hurt. For now, copper was good enough to test the smithing process.

Ting! Ting! Ting!

After learning how to judge if a metal required minor attunements on the anvil or could be left to the automated hammer for major hammering, Rino figured out that smithing was a game of patience. It was as if he was playing a patience game, timing the strikes when the metal turned from yellow to red hot before it whitened and cold into the regular copper he knew. Maybe this was why people often said to strike while the iron was hot.

Metals that were too hot were not easy to work with because they changed shapes too easily. It was good for flattening and curving them into shape. However, if Rino only wanted to make small changes, he needed to wait for them to cool slightly more to a red zone when the metal was still hot enough to change shape but not be utterly bent. When the metal cooled, it formed a greater resistance, making it impossible for Rino to alter its form without creating ugly cracks or dents in the flat surface.

The smithing process was full of trials and errors even after Rino read the basics.

Smithing was very much like cooking, and both skills shared similarities with heat control, precision and timing. Rino started clumsily, but by the end of the day, he was a proud smith who made five different sets of basic tools.

Wait, after recounting, Rino realised he made more than five sets. In addition to the basic baby bars that the gods wanted, Rino also threw in the other ores like copper, tin and electrum. Heck, there were even different types of steel that Rino explored with. Iron was a very easy going metal that would form bonds with almost any other metal, including silver and gold. It was most receptive to forming an alliance with copper, and the combination proved more interesting than the fusion with charcoal.

Ping!

===

Daily Quest #30 (complete)

Objective: Smith Some Metal Tools

Time Limit: 5 Days

7/1 Pickaxe

7/1 Axe

7/1 Shovel

7/1 Hoe

Tutorial here.

Reward: Blacksmithing Mastery

Claim your reward here.

Penalty: Deduct 24 hours of sleep upon failure and [Curse of Overtime] until quest is forcefully completed.

===

Methodologically enchanting his newly made tools with the same overpowered magic, Rino wondered if carrying a hoe around would truly be bad. Looking at these basic tools, he wondered if his people would be unhappy by the level of discrimination when distributing tools to them based on their jobs. 

He remembered giving a speech about how everyone had their strengths. It wasn't a lie. However, not everyone had the same strengths to do more complicated and glorious jobs. Not everyone was intellectually advanced enough to assist Rino with the high-level planning he required. At the same time, even if everyone could do that, Rino still needed hands and legs to keep the routine chores going. The farmers were as important as the courier runners to keep operations smooth. Miners were as important as millers, and even if there could only be one town manager, Rino did not treasure anyone less.

How could he explain this to his subordinates without making them feel discouraged or underappreciated? Becoming a ruler was hard, and Rino never really bothered about these things, even as the master of the magicians' tower. Magicians weren't people who looked at riches and status too much. If anything, they were content with sharing knowledge and spreading it to those willing to listen.

Looking at the tools he made, Rino wondered if adding accessories to these tools would be a good thing. Sure, every tool had a specific purpose, and there was a stigma surrounding the hoe. He could not change that perspective overnight. Yet, glorifying it did not feel appropriate either.

There had to be an educated understanding and acceptance among his people for this plan to work. Although he still thought that the hoe was a multi-purpose tool, it could not replace everything else. A tool was created for a specific purpose.

Rino might have jokingly brushed Erika and Zerg's concerns about getting everyone to wield a hoe as a symbol of his undead empire, but a hoe could never mine as cleanly as a pickaxe or fall a tree as effectively as an axe. It could not dig the ground as quickly as a shovel and was definitely a poor choice as a weapon.

What Rino wanted was a tool that could suit multiple purposes at the same time. Hence, Rino thought about how to redesign his new tool's head. He had a few days to spare after completing this daily quest assignment earlier than expected. 

In his previous world, multi-purpose tools existed. For instance, someone smart invented an eating utensil for the poor labourers who could not afford to buy silverware or copperware. The chopsticks that they used quickly became popular, although it took some skills to grasp objects firmly with only two sticks. The chopsticks were made from wood, and people decided to make wooden eating utensils that served many purposes. 

A fascinating design had to be the spork. Rino remembered how his butler fainted in shock when he caught his master eating with a spork. His protests about a tool for every use, and Rino proved him wrong by drinking soup with a spork and shovelling pasta with it. The only thing he couldn't do with the mighty spork was cut a steak, but everything else was done with ease, including eating desserts. Rino wanted to eliminate the noble dining etiquette and unnecessary silverware like butter knives, sugar tongs, soup spoons, teaspoons and dessert forks. Why spend so much money and time maintaining them when almost everything could be eaten with a spork?

Like that spork, Rino wanted to make a tool that could chop, till, mine and maybe dig. Problems were aplenty, but finding a way would not be difficult for a magician like Rino, who enjoyed creating solutions.

First, he studied the existing designs of these tools and understood several principles. Much like the spork, certain tool heads could be combined for common use with some minor alterations. The key point of the design lay in the details. For instance, the spork was mostly a spoon with teeth at the end that fell within its circular shape, indented a little to hold small amounts of liquid as a real spoon would. Similarly, Rino could see that the hoe for tilling could be modified into a shovel-like structure by bending the metals at an angle to meet the groove in the centre while retaining its flat edges to plough the soil.

Unfortunately, that design meant that Rino could no longer make further adjustments to that new tool head to add a chopping and mining function. However, thanks to the design of a pickaxe that consisted of two sides, Rino gathered some inspiration to create a new tool head on the other side of this multi-purpose tool. Pickles were unique because of the small but sharped surface used to land a great impact on a small area to crack into rocks. Rino retained that design but removed the other side of the pickaxe closer to a hammer surface. He could install that at the top of the new tool's handle if pounding action was required. At the same time, Rino wondered if he could somehow install the axe into this tool.

The axe head was actually a solid wedge that could be sharpened. It had to be fixed in a vertical direction to the tool handle for easy swinging action. Rino thought about it for a long time and decided that if a tool could have two sides, why couldn't it have three or more?

With that, two new tool heads were added to the tool handle. Rino looked at the flat hammer, and sharpened axe mounted temporarily on a wooden stick with the hoe-shovel design and pointed pickaxe at opposite sides. Satisfied with his solution, it was time to make a prototype.