Limitless Path

She withdrew the stock from the fire a final time when it was nearly white-hot and moved it above the anvil, picking up the nail header with her left hand. While the stock was still glowing, she put the end into the nail header and twisted the bar, separating the small section that was left between the nail and the bar. She then put the stock down quickly and picked up the hammer with her right hand before moving the nail header over a hole in the anvil into which she inserted the nail. She then hammered the top of the nail sticking up above the nail header, flattening it into a regular nail head. Beth noticed how quickly the nail lost the fiery white color while it was hammered, and how quickly Elana finished flattening the top.

Elana picked the nail header up and moved it a little before twisting it, dumping the finished nail on the anvil. She then set the hammer and nail header down on the workbench before grabbing the nail and tossing it into a nearby bucket with a *hiss*. "Don't try that before at least Silver level fire or heat resist of some kind," Elana warned Beth. "Now it's your turn."

Beth stepped forward and grabbed the hammer in her right hand, stepping to the side and grabbing one of the other bars in her left hand. She then turned to the anvil and copied Elana's actions from earlier, holding the bar against the anvil and starting to hit it with the hammer. A frown rather quickly formed on her face as she found the seemingly simple action of hammering out the end of the bar into a narrower shape was more difficult than she had first assumed.

"Take time to feel how it feels when you hit the metal," Elana instructed. "You should try to get a sense for what it feels like when you hit different metals; how they respond to the hammer. Work on trying to feel the difference between just changing the shape of the metal a little and stretching the metal out with a hit."

Beth tried to listen to Elana's advice, feeling the sensation as the hammer struck the metal, and what kind of change appeared in the metal from that strike. She worked at the end of the bar, reshaping it as she hammered it on the anvil. She returned it to the fire after hammering for a while, definitely not having shaped it as much as Elana had before her first time returning the bar to the fire.

"You make the same mistake a lot of apprentices make," Elana said from the side. "You're hitting it too hard."

"What do you mean by that? I need to hit it to change its shape, right?" Beth asked with a frown.

"Right, but you should be letting the weight of the hammer falling, with the assistance of gravity, do more of the work. You should focus more on the shaping of what you're hitting," she replied. "What's your STR at?"

"Eighty-four," Beth replied calmly.

A rather surprised look flashed over Elana's face for a second. "Eighty-four? At your level, even starting with ten, that means you put on average almost three points a level into STR. If Baelvyr hasn't told you, let me; don't lop-side your stats like that. You need points in DEX and END, and even in INT and WIS."

"I have decent points all around right now, though my INT and WIS are a little low. I did a silver level Endless Trial with Blood a handful of days ago, and-" Beth started to reply before Elana cut in.

"And you got stat fruits or elixirs as a reward. I see. Best to take advantage of them now," Elana nodded.

"What do you mean by that? I won't be able to use them later, or they don't work after my first rebirth or something?" Beth asked with a frown.

"No, no. They still work, but eventually they won't do as much. Either because you'll have rebirthed so much that you have a large quantity and density of mana throughout your body, making their jobs of changing your physique harder. Or, the other thing to consider; they're pretty rare and difficult to produce, either naturally or through alchemy. Right now, even those somewhat rare ones that give five or ten stat points can make a big difference. But what about when you have five thousand of every stat. To actually have a noticeable change, you'll need to find ones that adjust your stats by one or two hundred. Those are insanely rare; almost impossible to find fruits that do it, and alchemists that can make elixirs at that level have so much better things to be doing with their time," Elana patiently explained.

"I see what you're saying. Right now, when my stats are pretty low, they're a major boost. But later, when my stats are high, I won't really notice ten stat points that much, and any boosting item stronger I just won't be able to find anywhere," Beth replied, tapping at her chin as she thought about the unique items Blood and she had received.

"Right, and as for your smithing, we'll take it one step at a time. You don't need to pound the metal with every point of STR you have, there is room for finesse in the craft. A lot of finesse, in point of fact. Let's get back to that first nail," Elana said, gesturing at the piece of stock Beth had been working with that was now heating in the forge.

Beth withdrew the bar stock and started hammering at it again, her movements a little more even now that she wasn't trying to pound the tar out of the nail. She continued to shape it, getting it into a roughly square shape that tapered to a decent point, Elana commenting as she was hammering, "Use your wrist a little more to control the swing of the hammer and to actually perform the strike. Using the whole strength of your arm and back will have you exhausted by twenty minutes in; a good use of the wrist and elbow will let you skillfully hammer for a few hours while only getting a little tired."

Beth nodded as Elana coached, adjusting her swings a little to make better use of her wrist as instructed. It felt weird at very first to swing a hammer like that, but once she had a handful of swings in and had returned the nail to the fire, she felt herself adapting. She removed the nail again after a minute and hammered a little more before returning it to the fire after only a few swings.

The next time she pulled it out of the fire, she attempted to copy Elana's step in setting the nail up for finishing, using the hardy to crimp in the metal above where she had hammered the nail shape. It took her a little to get the idea, making a somewhat long and uneven crimp before giving the nail a tap to bend the crimped area. She then placed the stock back in the fire with the crimped area in the most direct heat and the nail facing upward.

When the metal was glowing almost white-hot, she withdrew the bar and copied Elana's final action, putting the nail in the nail header and twisting off the crimp. It took her more force than she would have liked, immediately taking a mental note on how her bad crimp job had made that step much harder. She put the body of the unfinished nail in one of the hardy holes in the anvil and proceeded to hammer the head of the nail thin and mostly flat. Finally, she lifted the nail header and moved it to the side, turning it over with a twist of her wrist and dumping her nail on the anvil. Elana grabbed it with her bare hand and threw it in the same water bucket as earlier and, after a few moments, pulled both it and her nail out and set them on the anvil.

"So, tell me, what do you see?" she asked Beth with a small smile, a slight gleam in her eyes.

"Well, your nail looks like a professional made it, obviously. Mine looks like you let a little kid loose in a smithy and they happened to make something that's some kind of best guess at a nail," Beth replied with a frown.

"Nonsense. You still need a ton of practice, of course, but it's a perfectly serviceable nail, if not exactly a good looking one. Congratulations on taking the first step on the endless journey of smithing." Elana said with a bright smile blossoming on her face, giving Beth a slap on the back that nearly sent her into the forge.

"Uh, thanks, instructor," Beth replied sheepishly, scratching at the back of her neck with her right hand.

"None of that, you just call me Elana, that's fine. Now, let's look at these nails a little closer," she replied, motioning Beth to step over and look closely. "You can see here that you did a good job in making the nail fairly straight, if not entirely even. It would have been a dud as a nail if you had let it twist while you were shaping it, or if it had gotten crooked. But I want you to look at mine now and look at the hammer pattern. It's a little hard to see with this little metal, but you can see there's a faint pattern of hammer marks on the surfaces that are almost perfectly even. This shows I had great control and precision with the hammer when I was working on the product.

"In comparison, let's look at your nail. You can see that part of the reason it's a little lopsided is your hammer strokes weren't even. You were using too much power here where the nail is just slightly squashed side-on at this point, and below that it bulges a little bit. The first blow that flattened it too much pushed the metal downwards, and your following strike was too light to even the material out," Elana explained, pointing at specific areas on Beth's nail. Beth was rather surprised at the level of detail that Elana could notice and comment on. The nail wasn't much material, as Elana had said, and was a somewhat small piece, but it felt like Elana had a thorough grasp of every single millimeter of it, and how each millimeter turned out like it did.

Once they were done going over the nails, Elana put them both on the workbench before turning to Beth and saying, "Good. Now, just ninety-nine more for the day."

"You want me to make another ninety-nine today?" Beth asked a little incredulously, both of her eyebrows crawling up her forehead.

"Well, they don't have to all be today," Elana replied. "But you should start with a hundred nails before we move on to anything else. I know it will be tedious, but it will be invaluable training for you. Making simple items like nails, buckles, small leaf adornments, and so on will help you really learn how to swing the hammer, what each strike does, and so forth. Don't rush through to try to get them done as fast as possible; it's not a race, it's about learning."

"Right, I'll do my best," Beth nodded in reply before asking, "how long can I use the forge?"

"There's no time limit, you paid for two weeks, and that's how long you have access to my teaching and the forge before you have to pay again. Just know that you will need my permission for what you work with. You can't come in here when I'm not around and just start grabbing mana steel by the bar and trying to work it," Elana replied with a stern look.

"Right, OK, I understand," Beth said. "I'll work with the copper rods making nails until I've done a hundred before doing anything else."

"I'll supervise you for a few hours this afternoon. Even if you're taking your time, it shouldn't take more than until tomorrow evening or the morning after that to get through that many nails," Elana replied. "I'll help you tomorrow as well. The thing I want you to focus on, whether I'm here or not, is inspecting your work when you're done. Look at each nail when you're done with it, compare it to mine if you must, and figure out what you did both right and wrong."

"Review each nail after finishing it. Got it," Beth replied with another nod before turning to the forge and pulling a piece of copper out.

Beth spent the entire rest of the day focused on the task of making copper nails. From what Elana mentioned to her, nails made of mana copper were about thirty percent stronger than a nail made of traditional steel, showing just how much difference the mana infusion into the metals made. It also made her think of how much of a difference the mana copper made for her at first, but how the monsters above level twenty-five were getting fairly resistant to her current weapons. She decided it might be a good idea to spend some time trying to find something that could make some money like the last trial they did so she could upgrade to mana steel. That, or spend enough time smithing until she could work mana steel herself and make her own equipment.