Today Penny was going to experiment with her crafting magic a little. Yesterday after coming home she watched a little YouTube videos to relax and at one point found herself watching videos about ancient armors and their comparisons to armors from fiction and then somehow ended up watching videos about Japanese swords and the way they were made. That in turn inspired her to try her hand at making a sword with her own hands, well with magic in her hands, instead of just programing the micro bots to assume the form of one. The question was where to begin?

Penny downloaded a copy of the movie The Last Samurai and fast forwarded to the samurai village. If she wanted to get her hands on authentic tamahagane in this day and age, she had to know people and wait for it to be made and shipped to her, which would take weeks or months. Penny was impatient, so she decided to steal some from ancient Japan. That way was easier and faster. She cast selective invisibility on herself and dimension traveled to the movie.

Penny didn’t plan on spending a lot of time here. She looked around to find the smithy, by the amount of smoke it released and when she did entered it without a care in the world. She looked around at all the tools and materials used for the crafting of katanas and was impressed with the skills of the ancient craftsmen of the Japanese swords. They could achieve so much with the poor quality of steel available at the time and with such simple tools. No wonder the swords were seen as a kind of art instead of weapons by some people today. Penny quickly located the tamahagane she needed and put it in her pocket dimension, but instead of leaving immediately, she took out 2 steel ingots she got from Skyrim for some of her experiments and with the help of her crafting magic turned it into a 1095 and 1045 steel, then broke them up to look like tamahagane pieces and covered them with a thin layer of metals from the tamahagane itself. Even with the slight increase of impurities, the steel would be better than anything available today. After making the exchange, she dimension traveled back to her lab.

Penny put the pieces of tamahagane on a table, then found a steel file and began testing the Japanese steel to see which pieces were harder and should be used for the edge and which were softer and should be used for the core. She knew their names were kawagane, high carbon steel and shingane low carbon steel, but she preferred to think of them as edge and core steel, because even though she knew Japanese perfectly, she wasn’t submerged into their traditions and samurai sword history.

After testing to see which pieces produced more sparks when filed, she then tested them by having Aica bend the pieces of steel. The ones that broke instead of bending were the harder steel and the ones that bend were the soft ones. When they were separated, she staked the hard steel pieces like with a traditional forging of a samurai sword and covered them with a soaked newspaper and then charcoal she took from Minecraft and a little clay from the same game, then she used crafting magic to heat the metal until it turned white hot and started using magic to consolidate them. She could use a hammer and anvil if she wanted to, but that way would take hours or even days of repeated hammering and make her tired and she was already achy from yesterday, but with magic she could extract the impurities in the metal in seconds while also folding the steel to achieve the beautiful lines of a traditional samurai sword.

Penny spent the next few minutes extracting the impurities at a slow rate, then forming the metal, folding it and then repeating the process, while carefully scanning it and measuring the carbon levels, impurities and oxygen content. She didn’t use additives like flux, brushes to remove the slag, because she could extract or add elements to the steel while she was folding and forming it, so there was no need for them. By the time the metal cooled down from the first heating, she had folded it 28 times and extracted all the impurities that could negatively impact the metal. She put the steel aside and started working on the core, heating it up, consolidating the pieces, folding and shaping it, extracting impurities and regulating the carbon content to keep the metal flexible. When it cooled from the first heating, she had completely removed the unneeded impurities and again folded the metal 28 times.

Taking the two pieces of steel, Penny heated them again and formed the hard steel into a wedge, then inserted the soft steel core and started forming the blade. She consolidated the bond between the core and the jacket, while gradually drawing the hot metal and forming the blade, tip, body and handle of the Japanese sword. She was careful with the process, coaxing the metal in its new form, trying not to force it and in the process crack or otherwise damage the blade. When she achieved the desired form, Penny left the blade to cool and took out some water, clay and turned a piece of wood into ash. What she would do next was the most artistic part of the forging process for all traditional samurai swords.

Penny prepared a long and narrow vat made from stone, again taken from Minecraft and filled it with heated water. Then she filled a bowl with water and mixed the clay and ash until it was with the needed consistency and with a brush started carefully applying it to the part that would become the blade. She had to draw the part that was going to distinguish this sword from every other, that which made it unique in all the world, but she also had to be careful about the thickness of the layer of clay. If she put too much, during heat treatment the blade would not receive enough heat and turn softer than needed for a cutting edge. If she put too little, during the quenching process the blade would curve too much and could possibly lead to the blade distorting or even braking. That is why, Penny took her time.

When she was finished with this part of the process, she made the clay mixture denser and applied it to the rest of the sword, covering every part that was bare, with clay. When she was finished with that too, she heated the blade to 800 degree C and then quenched the blade into the vat with water. The following column of water vapor was not something she wanted in a lab full of sensitive equipment, so she teleported the water molecules away and then took the sword out of the water. She inspected the blade for any sign of warping, cracking or other deformities, but was happy to find none, even after inspecting it with magic. Her first katana blade was a great success. Now she just needed to sharpen and polish it, then make the rest of the parts and assemble the sword.

Making a quick jump to Japan, buying all necessities locally and from renowned professional shops took less than an hour and when she came back, Penny started the finishing touches to the sword. She formed a menuki from copper, tsuka or handle from a piece of wood she bought in japan, a shakudo or alloy of copper and gold she used to create an ornate a fuchi and kashira, a hilt collar and a butt cap or pommel for the handle, and ornate round tsuba, habaki and finally seppa. She used careful application of magic to polish the blade to the degree of a professional and then assembled the katana, applied ray skin samegawa to the handle and wrapped the ito and finishing the samurai sword with two wooden pins. She didn’t engrave the sword with her name or make a horimono, because it wasn’t meant as a sword to be shown, but used in battle and these additions were unnecessary.

To make comparisons and because the making of the first sword took her less than 3 hours, the most time consuming being the shopping trip and the assembly itself and the complicated wrapping of the handle, Penny decided to make a modern Japanese sword by using T10 machine tool steel for the blade and 9260 spring steel as the core. The problem was she didn’t have any, so she had to combine some metals and alloy them. Looking on the internet, she found their chemical compositions and started combining elements and alloying them until she read that there was Phosphorus and Sulfur. Weren’t these elements detrimental to the finished alloy? It was written there was less or even content of 0.035% for one and 0.040 for the other, so she assumed they were unavoidable contaminations, so she simply excluded them from the alloys and extracted them if any found their way inside, then repeated the process of heating, folding and shaping the new sword.

When she was done, another 2 hours were spent, but she was getting faster with the assembly of the sword and wrapping of the handle. Now, since the day was still young, Penny put all the stops and pulled out a bunch of magic conductive or magical in themselves materials from her pocket dimension and started working on enchanted magic conductive sword.

-Now, what should I choose to use? Tolkien mithril was one for sure, maybe alchemical silver for the core, since it is softer than other metals but magic conductive. A little adamantite alloy for strength and weight, a dash of powdered magic stones for additional conductivity. Oh, maybe a little dragon horn, claw and tooth added to the mix, then from dragon scales I will make the tsuba and other components. For the handle maybe heart wood from Ent or Treant, maybe dragon horn or bone. And instead of ray skin I will use dragon skin and then finish it off with whiskers or some magic hair or fur braided into strings and then wrapped around the handle. I must also test how magic conductive is the superconductor. Better start testing.-

For the rest of the day Penny dimension traveled to different places to steal, bargain for and otherwise acquire all the materials she needed, then tested different combinations of materials and percentages for her alloys with the help of M.A.L.A. her Magic AI Laboratory Assistant. She tested which wood was most conductive and then compared them to dragon horn and bone, different types of monster skin hair and fur. At the end of the day she finished her third sword, but she could do so much better. It was indeed magic conductive and very durable, could become impossibly sharp when pumped with magic power, but she didn’t know any spells to make it a true magic sword. She could easily engrave magic spells into the core or embed magic channels like a motherboard and then just fuse the hard blade part, without disturbing the engravings, but she didn’t know what to engrave or program or do anything else to improve the blade at this time, so she simply finished the magic katana and put it beside the other two.

Next Penny enchanted a return trigger and put a market in the DTR, then market Aica and Mala, after which she gave them the three katanas, ordered them to test the swords in a labyrinth and then dimension traveled with them to the world of diablo 2, after which she left them there and went to sleep. She had ordered them if they were in any danger to use the return trigger and it would bring them to the marker in the DTR, safe and sound.