Off we went into the workshop. I owed Kaijin one for letting me rest in his spare apprentice’s chamber anyway, so I wanted to hold up my end of the bargain.
When we entered, we found the three brothers staring at the hunk of magisteel on the table, sighing to themselves as they turned it over in their hands, scrutinizing every surface. The chunk I’d spat out was about the size of a fist. Was it that rare? They sure acted that way.
“What are you talking about?” Kaijin exclaimed when I asked about it.
And according to his explanation—
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Magic ore was a raw material that was refined to make magisteel. Even the base ore could rival gold in value, for a simple reason: It was both rare and useful for a variety of applications.
It all came down to the magicules that seemed to form nearly everything in this world—something that Earth seemed to do just fine without but that played a huge role over here.
On rare occasions, when a monster was defeated, it would drop an entire chunk of magicules, referred to as “magic stone.” This was a sort of portable energy source, and it served as the fuel for something called “spirit engineering,” an invention exclusive to this world. Magic stones came in levels of purity, and the purer ones were used as cores inside assorted products. Even ornaments could harness this energy for special effects. The resulting clothing and accessories could boost the wearer’s abilities, grant them additional effects, and do any number of other things.
Now, the main difference between plain old ore and magical ore was that the latter could be obtained only in areas where higher-level monsters lurked. It required the combination of regular ore, a large concentration of magicules, and eons of time for the ore to absorb the magic and make the transformation—a sort of geological mutation.
Of course, any place with a lot of magic also tended to have a lot of monsters. Not the run-of-the-mill kind adventurers could kill for pocket change—you wouldn’t find any magic ore around them. You’d have to travel to places with at least B-ranked monsters in them.
As a tangent, Kaijin finally gave me a full description of how the ranking system worked for monsters.
“Ohhh!” I said. “So I’d be, like, a B or so, maybe?”
“““……”””
I imagined everyone was thinking the same thing. Except for Gobta, who was a little slow. Let’s leave him alone for now.
Regardless, the point was that magic ore didn’t just pop up out of nowhere. What’s more, the magisteel extracted from it took up 3, maybe 5 percent of its total mass. Even a fist-sized chunk of that steel was worth at least twenty times its weight in gold.
It also appeared that prices, in general, averaged out to near the same as they did in my old world. Gold was used as currency because it was worth a lot, just like back home. As a result, all the countries had adopted gold as a currency standard.
I kept the fact that I had a huge store of these magisteel hunks in my stomach a secret. Honestly, it was getting a little frightening. No way they could’ve known, but…what if they had? Or was that just my paranoid, lower-middle-class upbringing coming out?
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Now, on to the real issue.
Magisteel was rare, certainly, but that wasn’t what made it so valuable. That lay in how readily adaptable it was to serving as a conduit for magical force.
One could control magicules through the power of imagination, to some extent. My Magic Sense skill worked that way, but even Control Water worked by manipulating the ambient magic around me. Most monster skills harnessed it one way or another as well. I didn’t know that much about magic spells, really, but I figured they worked on the same premise.
So what happened if a weapon was made of material infused with vast amounts of magic? Amazingly, it became a weapon that could mature!
How classic! Aw, man, now I want one! I almost said so out loud before stopping myself just in time. I mean, think about it—a sword that gradually molded itself to your ideal shape based on what you wanted from it. Depending on your own magical force, you might even be able to transform it midbattle! And since it was so compatible with magic, it’d help boost your skills, too.
Basically, unless you were really handy with a weapon, you were always going to be better off with a magically infused one. But what if—although this would take a lot of skill and money—you made a blade of pure magisteel and inserted a magic stone into it? Could you make, like, flame swords and blizzard swords and stuff?
My creative juices started flowing. My heart sang, demanding Kaijin make one right this minute. But I would have to be patient. The next magic stone I get my hand on, though… For sure.
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After that quick lesson, Kaijin buckled down and went to work. I watched him as his would-be young apprentice. Gobta was probably sleeping somewhere, besides…
Swords, of course, came in a wide array of shapes and sizes. I, of course, pictured a Japanese-style katana as the strongest one out there—but even katanas came in all kinds of shapes. That was what made me so curious about the kind of sword he’d make.
Ten hours later, he was finished.
It looked, to me, like a plain old longsword. And—whoa, that was a lot of magisteel left. And here I was worried whether a fist-sized lump would be enough for even one. Turned out Kaijin couldn’t even guess how much it’d cost to use 100 percent magisteel on everything. I suppose not. No wonder nobody’s come up with a flame sword or a blizzard sword or even a thunder sword. It’d cost too much. Makes sense.
Instead, magisteel formed only the core of the weapon, and the rest of the blade was crafted from regular steel instead. That core was all it needed for its magic to work its way into the steel, eventually merging itself with the whole sword. That, he said, was why a weapon grew stronger as it was used over time. The blade would never rust or lose its shape—it could just use ambient magicules to regenerate itself.
Oddly enough, though, even these magic swords had their life spans. If they were bent too far or otherwise warped beyond recognition, the magic would leak out, leading to rapid weathering.
Kaijin showed me his freshly forged sword as he spoke. It was all so interesting to me. I took the weapon in hand as I marveled over it—all right, not in hand, but close enough. It was simple in make, straight as an arrow. No bells or whistles. It wasn’t meant strictly for slicing like a katana, but the blade seemed suited to slashing.
But this was just a base. Over time, I supposed, the sword would adapt itself to whatever its user wanted from it. No wonder the forger kept things simple.