Chapter 62 — Magic Net No. 1 and the Blacksmith Shop

The old blacksmith grew nervous. "My... my lord..."

"How many years have you been a blacksmith?" Gao Yang asked suddenly.

"Th... nearly thirty years," Hammel answered quickly. "Though folk like us don't keep close track of the years..."

"A blacksmith of thirty years, and I didn't expect you to have so many innovative ideas," Gao Yang said, somewhat puzzled. "By rights, such ideas usually come most easily to young people whose thinking isn't bound by convention. How did you come up with so many?"

Hammel opened his mouth, and only after a few seconds found words. "...My lord, if you won't laugh at me—these ideas of mine didn't just come to me now. I've been saving them up for many years..."

Gao Yang looked interested. "Go on."

"I've been a blacksmith for decades, and I couldn't know furnaces and steel better if I tried. As for habit, I've long since grown used to the old ways," Hammel said, the deep furrows of his face creasing into a smile. "But I still remember when I was an apprentice—my father was the village blacksmith then, and I learned the trade from him. One year, the lord had us smelt a batch of fine iron, and I volunteered to tend the furnace myself. My father thought I'd studied for several years and was due to stand on my own, so he let me try—but that try went wrong."

Hammel paused, then went on: "I was too impatient. When the furnace cooled, I didn't wait long enough before raising the heat again—and the runes shattered.

"Once the runes shattered, the furnace was ruined beyond repair. It was the most valuable and most essential thing in the blacksmith shop. My father flew into a rage, strung me up at the shop door and flogged me for half a day, nearly beating me to death. He said the only reason he hadn't killed me outright was that if he really did, there'd be no one to help with the family's work, and no one to inherit the blacksmith shop...

"That year, we failed to complete the lord's order, and my father took several dozen lashes in the castle..."

Clearly, this episode from his apprentice days had left a deep brand on Hammel's heart.

And it was when he was punished by his father, and then saw his father go to the castle to receive punishment, that many of his ideas about the blacksmith's furnace began to sprout in his mind.

Thankfully, after thirty years those sprouts had not entirely withered in Hammer's heart—perhaps they had wilted, but Rebecca's plan to "draw the magic circle directly on the forge in place of runes" brought hope surging up once more from the depths of the old blacksmith's heart.

To be able to summon hope again—that in itself was already quite a breakthrough.

Since this old blacksmith was not, as he had feared, a man incapable of compromise, a man who could not accept anything new, then it seemed some things could be set in motion ahead of time.