Chapter 93: Heavenly Dao Celebrates
"Leona, it’s me."
The hammering stopped, and a few seconds later the workshop door opened.
Leona still held the hammer in one hand. She looked at Vincent, then Anastasia and the servants standing behind him with several wooden boxes.
"M’lord?"
"I need your help with something," Vincent was straight to the point.
Leona raised her eyebrows slightly and said, "M’lord, I am in the middle of crafting, and I’ll likely be done by tonight. Can it not wait?"
Vincent got the flashbacks of the last time he came here. Leona was quite cold to him then, and wanted him to not interfere with her work.
Right now, she still did not want him to bother her when she was working, but her tone was considerably polite.
If the situation wasn’t dire, Vincent wouldn’t have bothered her.
He went ahead and grasped her hand, then looked up at her.
"I’m sorry to be a bother, but it really cannot wait. The county is in great trouble and there’s something only you can do."
Hearing Vincent’s gentle words and looking at his innocent face, Leona felt a slight stir in her heart. She would not be fazed by some polite words, but Vincent was a different matter altogether.
She liked him just as much as she liked her craft.
"Come in," she finally gave in and stepped aside, letting them enter.
Vincent and Anastasia walked in. He made the servants place the four boxes on an empty work table before dismissing them.
Leona dismissed her own servants from the forge, and it was just her, Vincent and Anastasia inside the workshop.
Anastasia removed the lids and the smell of preservation powder immediately mixed with the coal smoke and heated metal within the workshop.
Leona approached the table to see what was up and saw the first corpse of a rat monster.
"Those are some large rats."
"Indeed. They were causing trouble in Copper Town and were killed by Vanessa yesterday."
Leona put her hammer aside and removed the long gloves covering her hands. She pressed against the rat’s back, checked its claws and teeth, then moved on to another corpse.
"So," she turned to Vincent. "What does M’lord want a blacksmith to do with monster corpses?"
Vincent pointed toward the hardened exterior.
"I know that you deal with metals and not monsters, but try cutting through the outside first. You’ll get an idea of why I am here. Here, take its help..."
Vincent handed her the Spirit Iron dagger. He knew from her report that even this had failed to leave a mark on the fountain snake’s scale, so it shouldn’t cut through the rat monsters easily either.
Leona took the knife and did as suggested.
She struggled to cut through the hide and was pleasantly surprised.
"Try cutting through its eyes and inside of the mouth."
Leona did as instructed once again. The knife cut through easily.
Without further instructions from Vincent, her hands moved skillfully and she finally understood the gist of the matter.
The outer tissue was unusually hard and there was a faint metallic sheen around several parts of it. Deeper inside, however, the flesh looked much closer to what one would expect from an ordinary animal of that size.
Leona turned to Vincent and asked, "What happened to them?"
Vincent spread out his hands. "I don’t know. That’s one of the things I’m trying to find out."
Vincent picked up one of the claws.
Vincent continued, "These things are spreading through the Northern Region, and some monsters are much worse than these rats. If soldiers run into something with an exterior like this, they would just be wasting their attacks trying to break through such tough bodies."
Leona roughly understood what Vincent wanted.
"So you need something that can pierce them."
"Yes. Since everything internally is normal, as long as something can pierce through such toughness and hit the insides, the monsters will die."
Leona nodded. She took the claw from him and brought it toward another worktable.
Vincent moved out of her way and waited.
Leona tested several parts of the corpse before she started bringing different metals over. She checked the hardness of the altered tissue, tried a few points against it and then used Forge Sight while examining the materials around her.
The first narrow spike she made bent.
The second entered farther before its tip snapped.
Leona tossed both aside and changed the shape again.
Vincent had seen something similar before.
The Leona from the previous iteration had spent a long time figuring out how to deal with the scales of that enormous snake, eventually creating a weapon meant to survive only a single strike.
Current Leona had none of those memories.
Yet less than half an hour later, she was already making something strangely similar.
She stopped trying to make the projectile durable.
Instead, nearly everything went into the point.
Vincent watched her remove unnecessary material, narrow the body and reinforce only the section that mattered for the impact.
The finished piece looked almost too thin.
Leona placed a section of hardened rat hide against a testing block and struck the back of the projectile with a hammer.
The point went through.
It shattered immediately afterward.
Leona inspected what remained of it.
"That should be enough if you only need it to pierce once. Making the entire thing strong enough to survive would cost much more material, and there’s no reason for it if the projectile is disposable."
Vincent smiled.
She had reached almost the same answer on her own.
"We’ll need a lot of them later, but there’s another problem."
Leona was already taking measurements from the broken projectile, so Vincent waited until she finished writing them down.
He touched the exposed interior of the rat.
"This change came from somewhere. The outside being more affected than the inside makes me think whatever caused it entered from the environment, or at least started affecting them from outside."
Leona looked at the corpse again.
"I need something that can find it," Vincent continued. "Not necessarily tell me what it is. Even something that tells us there’s more of it in one place than another would help."
This time Leona did not immediately answer.
She cut several samples from different depths and put them into separate trays, then took samples from the other rats as well.
Vincent sat nearby while she worked.
For a while, nothing happened beyond Leona ruining pieces of dead rat in increasingly complicated ways.
Some were heated. Some went into different liquids. Others were crushed, scraped or placed beside metals Vincent didn’t recognize.
One of the mixtures began producing an awful smell.
Vincent moved his chair farther away.
Anastasia quietly did the same.
Leona continued working as if she had lost her sense of smell years ago.
Eventually, the bottles were pushed aside and she returned to the forge with several hardened pieces of bone and tissue.
She heated one, struck it apart, then did the same with another.
Clang!
Clang!
Small impurities remained in the metal tray beneath them, but most were useless. Leona kept changing the temperature and pressure while comparing what remained from each sample.
After several attempts, she held one piece beneath Forge Sight for much longer than the others.
The furnace flame shifted slightly toward her.
Vincent noticed a hammer hanging nearby give a faint metallic ring.
Then another tool did the same.
Leona did not stop.
She heated the sample again and struck it several times, removing more of the original material until a tiny dark grain remained among the fragments.
[Your Fiancée Leona Voss has derived new meaning from the Forge Path of the Great Dao.]
[The Heavenly Dao is celebrating.]
The air inside the workshop became strangely pleasant. The fire burned cleaner, and several pieces of metal lying around Leona produced soft ringing sounds without being touched.
[Your Fiancée Leona Voss’s cultivation has increased.]
Vincent stared at the message.
That had happened around Leona before but he hadn’t paid it much attention. He was too busy saving Copper Town.
Though, now that he was looking at it clearly, he still had no idea why the notifications were as such.
What did the system mean by the Heavenly Dao celebrating?
[The Heavenly Dao is the highest Dao of the world, but your Fiancée Leona Voss derives meaning from the Dao beyond it.]
[The greater Dao strengthens the Heavenly Dao every time Your Fiancée Leona Voss makes it descend.]
[The resonance the Host is looking at is the Heavenly Dao’s celebration.]
For a good few seconds, Vincent was dumbfounded by what he just heard.
’Were things even supposed to work like that?’
[Everything is operating smoothly.]
Vincent stopped thinking of this matter.
Leona was too busy to care for the phenomenon around her.
She placed the dark grain beside another mutated sample.
It moved slightly.
She changed the sample.
The movement weakened.
Another piece from the most heavily altered rat produced a stronger reaction.
Leona repeated it enough times that Vincent stopped wondering whether it had been accidental.
"I can probably measure this," she said while already reaching for a thin metal strip. "I don’t know what the grain is reacting to yet, and it might only react to altered tissue rather than whatever originally caused the change. I’ll need more tests."
"That’s fine. Take your time."
A knock came from the door not long afterward.
A Voss servant accompanied a D’Arc servant to the workshop.
Anastasia went outside to see why he was here and came back shortly after. She handed Vincent a telegram and said, "this arrived from the Northern Region. They’ve marked it urgent."
Vincent took it and immediately recognized the Northern Commander’s seal.
The report was short.
The commander had gone deeper into the Highlands as ordered. Entire stretches of forest were almost empty, with predators and prey both moving away from the same general area. Scouts had also found damaged terrain farther inside and heard strange sounds during the night.
Vincent checked the time.
If he left for the north now, the train journey alone would take around eight hours.
What they discovered was likely a sign of the source of the monster troubles.
The monster ride would arrive tomorrow night, and if he left now, he’d have almost a day to find the source and remove it.
However, Leona was still in the midst of making the tool to detect it.
She was working and he could not leave her behind either as she was needed to make those scale piercers for tomorrow.
Vincent was slightly troubled. He looked around the workshop to think of some solution.
Forge.
Coal.
Tools.
’Hm?’
The workshop wasn’t too big, and nothing inside seemed like it couldn’t be transferred.
Vincent thought about it and then thought of the railways.
He stared at Leona for a moment.
"Leona."
She continued adjusting the thin strip in front of her.
"What is it, M’lord?"
She did wish to be disturbed but asked nonetheless.
Vincent framed his words carefully, then asked, "Can we put a forge inside a train?"