Wow, two skills at once, he thought, not able to keep a smile of relief growing on his face. After being stuck with just two skills for his class he had gotten slightly worried about never gaining any more. He had tried to keep that worry suppressed through reasoning that he wasn’t doing smithing adjacent stuff but the fear kept nagging. It had slowly become apparent how essential skills were. His race offered plenty of skill slots but almost every one of them was great - with the exception of Tracking. The same had to hold true for his class, especially since class skill slots were rarer.

[Lesser Heat Resistance] sounded great. It would be awesome for working at the forge - though he wasn’t sure if he actually wanted to continue doing the backbreaking stuff right now. It had also other applications, applications that far exceeded the scope of his class. If fire magic, lava magic, or even light magic existed he could have a reasonable defense against it. Maybe he could even explore the skill structure at a later point in time to derive different stuff like magic from it, though given how little he understood what [Running] was doing that was doubtful, it’s special advancement had pretty much been a stroke of luck, the same with [Stealthy Movement].

[Lesser Forged Domain] on the other hand was interesting. It seemed to be directly bound to a or his forge, he wasn’t entirely sure how it would work. [Lesser Hammer Strike] worked without a hammer as well, though it was painfully obvious that there were glaring inefficiencies, maybe Forged Domain would work as long as he had a forge, just with reduced effectiveness based on distance.

The skill offered Heat Resistance just like the other new possible skill and a few additional goodies. Increased stamina regen could be fun, though not necessary for him due to [Digestive Herbology]. Digestive Herbology also covered the exhaustion stuff to some degree, so maybe it was the origin of him qualifying for the skill. Eating an excess of stamina berries couldn’t overflow his pool; it just increased his wakefulness marginally.

All that was beside the point right now though. With the wooden tongs, he maneuvered the heavy bloom onto a mostly flat wooden stump, the remains of the trunk which had been transformed into the piston. He decided that at the end of the day he would learn one of the two skills, while he wanted both there was a nagging worry that they wouldn’t synergize or add to each other. Furthermore, he couldn’t just pick one. What if either of them ended up being weaker than the other, one would be more optimal. But if Forged Domain proved to be better at heat resistance than the corresponding skill having both might end up being redundant.

Having spent enough time contemplating, he refocused on his current agenda. Nik’s knowledge about forging was spotty at best, shoddy if one were to be realistic. Strike after strike, initially propelled by [Lesser Hammer Strike], he pounded the bloom on the stump. Initially he used a thick branch though that broke quickly so he switched to stones.

Each powered hit reduced the bloom in size and weight. Small pieces broke off easily and frequently, larger ones occasionally. He hoped that those were junk and Identify proved that he was mostly right.

The inital rock he used as a hammer broke, and was exchanged by Nik after depositing the bloom in the burning forge. He wished he had anticipated that but he hadn’t.

“No better time than the present,” he thought.

The replacements broke too, even though Nik had foregone the use of [Lesser Hammer Strike] after a few more explosive hits and burns. The sound of stone hitting stone reverberated through Niks skull, and the vibrations of the impact traveled through the bones, one of those issues or possibly the heat caused him to lose health points slowly, he wasn’t sure which. The unusual movements drained his stamina quickly.

The shoddy and grimy work continued for what felt like hours to Nik. With effort, attrition, and no further supply of stamina berries he switched the piston from supplying the bloomery to the forge. Twice he had to relight the forge and even more often did he start a long process of reheating and working the bloom. In an attempt to recreate perfection and the perfect ingot he tried to reincorporate the pieces of metal that had broken off and were of a high purity.

As the day waned Nik progressed, both in understanding the specific metal and in understanding how to work metal more efficiently. As the sun slowly dipped he hadn’t progressed as far as he wanted to but he had made substantial progress.

The piece of bloom had transformed from a brittle misshapen uneven rock of almost black coloring to a shinier though still dark gray rectangular cuboid of reduced weight. The chippings, that he hadn’t been able to reweld to the ingot, were to the side though they only work around three quarters of a kilogram. He hadn’t bothered gathering pieces with a purity rating of below 90%. The lack of knowledge about what exactly purity referred to was the main reason why.

Lesser Wrought Iron Ingot - 2.3 kg, 98% purity

unmarked, unaspected, unrefined

Durability - basic inferior Hardness - flawlessly poor Toughness - High poor Elasticity - high poor Brittleness - poor

You have created | Lesser Wrought Iron Ingot | - 25 exp. gained

Advanced Deed Unlocked - [Class Advancement Step One: Refining] Refine a base-material coinciding with your class’ specialization.

Nik Thems: {(Evolving) Extraterrestrial Human} Level up! You have accomplished the Advanced Deed [Forging]. 17 Stat points have been awarded. One General Skill Slot unlocked.

Class development. 250 exp gained for reaching a class milestone [Forging].

Nik Thems: {Smith} Level 9. Current Progress 283/900 XP

That night Nik slept like a baby - figuratively. He accredited the restful night afterwards to gaining new skill options for his class and finally getting somewhere.

In the morning, after still not having picked a skill thanks to his indecisiveness - and contrary to his previous vow - he got working on his sleeping arrangement. Previously he had planned on gathering more berries, though after seeing how his makeshift hammock hung through more everyday he decided to try and fix that quickly. Mana berries, of which he still had some, in toe he went back up to fix his bedding.

At first, he simply tried to activate the woodworking skill on the vines, hoping for them to tighten. It didn’t work. The skill didn’t trigger as far as he could tell and neither of his pools lowered during his basic testing. In retrospect that made sense. It was a woodworking skill and not a wood or fiber manipulation skill.

One other idea he had besides a complete reconstruction was to weave new vines into the structure. An idea he was very much in favor of. He wasn’t necessarily freezing at night, somehow his stats had taken care of that, but it still got cold sometimes. More fibrous structure would help by reducing the amount of heat that could escape downwards from his body.

The other idea he had considered but wasn’t much in favor of was to just try and re-knot the bindings on the vines, though that would have to wait. He was fairly confident that said idea fell more into the category of weaving instead of woodworking.

If neither of those plans were to work out in the end he would have to come to a different conclusion. That it plainly wasn’t possible to use woodworking on the vines. Implying that vines were too far removed from what the skill classified as wood.

Cluelessly, after some fiddling around with reknotting and tightening of the vines he wandered out into the forest to resupply his berry rations. It seemed likely that woodworking didn’t allow working with vines and if all went well he would have a hammer and axe available to him in the next few days.

While gathering berries he also tried to at least grab some more vines for his bedding. The excursion brought him through a few regions of the forest he had previously been in. Tracking actually started to do something - though it was difficult to discern what exactly it was doing. The only thing he really was sure of was a sense of being more secure in his orientation sense than he had ever been.

“Admittedly, taking [Tracking] was a stupid skill decision even back then, I could have saved the spot for something better. So stupid, just because I wanted to find what else was in this forest. Could have just stumbled upon a wolf den in my ignorance. This would be so much easier if I had a way of gathering information outside of what I am doing currently,” was just one of the small insights he gained over the trip. Letting his mind wander did wonders for his mental state and gave sufficient cooldown to consider his next steps once he got back to metalworking.

He did come across a small stream. Walking a bit upstream made him realize that it was the one which he frequently produced charcoal next to over the last couple of days - something he wanted to relocate at some point in the future. It also showed that the newfound sense of orientation Tracking seemingly provided wasn’t very good. The insight on his location cleared up why his search for berries had been rather unsuccessful so far. He had picked everything clean in this region beforehand.

Following the creek downstream he ended up a bit further away from the mountains around a small pond that had no apparent exhaust stream. He was curious about getting a general understanding of the layout of his area but didn’t want to deviate too far from his only major landmark, so he didn’t stride far away. Once he had managed to fill up his baskets, which had gone by surprisingly fast, he turned back. It had only taken half an hour to gather multiple kilograms.

The seasons and plant growth still eluded him, so he couldn’t say that the amount of plant matter was weird, it just felt very odd. To land in a place where most stuff was currently ripe was a huge boon, and also very weird. Admittedly, most of the nuts he ate weren’t ripe yet, though digestive herbology somehow took care of that. Still, on earth berries and nuts ripened in different seasons as far as Nik knew.

The path back was traversed quickly and with anticipation. He had done most of the preparations he could think of before restarting his craft. Upon reaching his forging area Nik stowed away the berries and got started with lighting the forge fire.

That inevitably brought him back to his skill selection. In the end he decided to learn [Lesser Forged Domain]

[Lesser Forged Domain], Passive - You are less exhausted in high heat, your body is more resistant to heat. Increases stamina regeneration, reduces the need for sleep when in the proximity of your Forge.

The skill would offer more benefits over the long run and the other option while potentially helpful in combat would offer nothing immediate. He did consider that one of the two skills could give a greater numbers advantage for something specific like heat resistance, maybe a more focused skill would accomplish more in that regard but musing about that, without any real numbers to compare didn’t accomplish anything.

As the fire temperature slowly rose Nik had a second breakfast, consisting purely of pool refilling berries. They were somewhat necessary as Nik had started keeping up most of his active spells at all times a few days ago, resulting in a half empty pool for both stamina and mana.

The obvious upsite to that was to hopefully get some training done with the skills, the other less obvious was to make himself familiar with the skills on a deeper level. He thought that just like with his [Running] and skill there could be some connection between skills or some could be improved through some interaction with [Internal Energy Control].

And the skill level growth was very nice. Averaging about 5 skill levels in total per day was great, especially since there was no real challenge involved. He had the resources to keep going at this pace so he would. He was slightly worried about growing too dependent on the skills but for now that was acceptable - as long as he was aware of that and he already had plans for a skill-less hour per day.

The forge was now glowing red hot and the formation of smoke had reduced enough to warrant Nik to be confident in the forge's heat. He deposited the previously forged ingot into the fire and waited while sustaining a constant flow of air through the piston.

After some time of waiting and toiling a glaring issue became apparent. He shouldn’t have let the ingot cooldown this much. The thermal mass being simply too vast to be quickly heated up in the fire. Making the issue worse, he would have to heat the entire metal thoroughly in order to create a hole for the handle to pass through.

Once the ingot seemed to be heated through properly Nik took it out of the forge and began the reforming process. He didn’t quite know which step to begin with first, prepare a hole or form both sides of the hammer. What he did know was that he couldn’t really be bothered with the rest of the hammer shape.

He had tried to keep the bloom in one piece the day before, trying to get an as large ingot as possible and only now realized that he would have to swing that weight in the form of a hammer. It didn’t matter, his strength attribute would have to do and his muscles kept growing too so it would do.

He began by using more tapered piece stone as a drift to punch the hole for the handle into the hammer. It didn’t go well. Not well at all. All of the five rocks he had laid out for the process shattered within millimeters. The structure not lending itself to propagate force efficiently.

Consideration brought acceptance and Nik went to the creek with the iron ingot in hand to cool it down. Just to be safe he deposited the ingot in the water for around ten minutes before taking it out and hurrying back.

He would need a metal drift, the ingot was too hard and thick to punch through with anything else. He took the largest chippings from the bloom and heated them up, reworking them. It took some time and once Nik was done he was saddened by the fact that he didn’t even gain experience.

Using his iron ingot as a base he reshaped both small metal pieces into approximately even round rods. Both ended up being only slightly longer than fifteen centimeters. To increase the ease of working with the drifts he tapered them towards the ends as well as possible.

You have create | Lesser Small Drift | - 10 exp. gained

It worked, and the system had accepted it as a valid tool. Nothing fancy but that was fine. It would only have to do a single simple job. The experience gained was laughable though, he would have expected at least twenty-five with how it aligned with his class and such. Though apparently that was not to be.

You have created | Lesser Medium Drift | - 10 exp. gained

Those two would have to suffice as he had already welded some of the larger pieces together and didn’t think he had enough good scraps to make an even larger drift. He would in the future though not now.

He went back to heating up the large iron ingot. After another long period of waiting and too much charcoal burned he continued with his holepunching efforts. Eventually he was rewarded with a hole through the ingot fairly centered, though he was certain that he didn’t manage to hit quite the center. He would later taper one side, the lighter one, in the hopes of achieving a more balanced end product.

The shaping of hard and hot metal continued to be difficult. Wood had stopped being useful for hammering the day before and he had been forced to switch to large pieces of stone. The usage of those had continuously drained his health points as his hands had gotten burns and slowly healed at the excess of health points.

Today those issues were a lot more prevalent. The ingot reforming process was still difficult due to the irregular shapes of the stones which he frequently switched due to shattering.

Using a large amount of charcoal in endless reheating cycles, vast amounts of berries,a plethora of different stones and an even larger passage of time he didn’t notice passing by he ended up creating a sufficient hammer head. One side flat with slightly rounded edges the other slightly tapered, as far as he could manage.

“I have actually done it,” he exclaimed. His voice rough and dry from continuous exposure to smoke and possibly due to a lack of speaking in the last almost two weeks.

You have created | Basic Lesser Blacksmith Sledge Hammerhead | - 47 exp. gained

In satisfaction he stared at his hammerhead. It was nothing fancy and would only work for the crudest of jobs but it would work. And with even more satisfaction he looked at the other notification in his head, detailing the new class skills he could choose.