Chapter 107: Refused

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Mount Etna was one of the most active volcanoes in the world, as well as the home of the Greek God of Blacksmiths, Hephaestus.

Edward's plan had been to head there and seek to be taught by the God of Blacksmiths, and even if he didn't want to show his techniques to him at least Edward would get to experience smithing in a god's forge.

However, what Edward did in hell finally backfired. Killing Phobos and Deimos wasn't that bad, actually Hephaestus was even glad as those were the bastard children of his wife, Aphrodite, and the God of War, Ares. Their death only amused him.

However, Edward hadn't just killed those two, he had also scarred Hades for eternity, both physically and psychologically. Edward's intentions at the time were simply to scare him enough to make sure he wouldn't attack him ever again, but he went slightly overboard…

According to Hephaestus, Hades had lost sanity, and was scared of every mortal. For the God of the Underworld where the souls of countless mortals resided, that was quite problematic.

The God had tried more than once to put an end to himself, but as a God he was quite hard to kill, and so for his own safety he had been imprisoned by force by the others Olympians.

Hephaestus didn't really care about Hades' fate, but Zeus was quite riled up. Not because his brother was harmed, but because the honour of the Olympians had been violated.

However, Zeus did not, very uncharacteristically, order for Edward to be hunted, but merely banned the Olympians from ever helping him.

Edward felt a little weirded out, he knew Zeus was technically his father in law but if the myths about the Greek Skyfather were true then Zeus was not that kind of father.

So Edward decided to remain careful. Each of his loved ones were protected, and he was always ready to teleport to them or teleport them to him.

Anyway, the gods were capricious and generally a pain in the ass, so Edward decided to ignore them for a while as he had more important mortal matters to attend.

As the General Assembly of the UN approached, Edward used most of his time to train his forging, which became his new hobby, while preparing for what was to come.

At first Edward trained under the time array, and allowed him quick progress. But like always, he hit a bottleneck.

Most blacksmiths used hammers because they lacked the strength and heat resistance to shape a sizzling hot metal, but Edward did not face this problem.

Still, he did not use his body to forge his artefacts. At first he simply used his Yin Chi to shape the metal, but he quickly let go of that technique because of how it ruined his materials. His Yin Chi was frigid in essence, and any metal would be nearly instantly quenched.

So he searched for another method, which he found rather quickly. Ever since his last breakthrough, Edward has been able to form shapes outside of his body with Yin Chi, and fill them with Yang Chi.

The first application he found for this was to make AOE attacks. Unfortunately, he already had his spells, which were much stronger and spent less energy, so he quickly stopped using this.

However, he found it to be perfect for forging. He would first create an extremely thin film of Yin Chi, and fill it with a ton of Yang Chi, and use this to manipulate a hot metal. The Yin Chi was frigid, but the Yang Chi was the exact opposite, and so with a much bigger quantity of Yang Chi he managed to keep the temperature of the metal the same, giving him enough time to shape the metal into the way he wanted, and thus having to heat it up only once.

Coupled with the various forging techniques he had learned, Edward managed to create some of the best pieces of smithing possible!

But then, one might wonder why Edward went through all that trouble, he could have simply coated his hands with Yang Chi and shaped the hot metal with his hands. Actually, he had thought about this, but he couldn't do it.

Another technique Edward wanted to incorporate into his technique was the creation of a spirit for a weapon. Actually, artefacts with actual spirits created inside them already exist, but those spirits all formed after their creation.

When someone used an object for a long period of time and experienced great emotions while holding it, a sliver of those emotions would spill out of the user, into the object, gradually forming a spirit.

What Edward wanted to do was to create a spirit while he was forging the object though, using the same technique, by infusing his emotions into the metal while he forged it. And to do so, his Yin Chi, which was his spirit's energy, was the best kind of energy to shape the metal as it infused his emotions into the metal with an unprecedented efficiency.

So with his current technique, Edward was able to forge objects that rivalled the dwarves of Nidavellir and Erebor in skill, and that possessed a spirit of their own. Of course, something else to consider was the materials used to create a weapon, so if Edward were to use some of his Mithril he could probably craft a mighty weapon with a spirit inside.

But there was still something lacking. Although his skill matched the dwarves, and he had materials of the same level, if not even greater, Edward knew he had no chance to create a weapon as powerful as Mjollnir or Aeglos, and that was because of magic.

The best artefacts in the Universe were magical artefacts, and that was because of the strong enchantments placed on them. Mjollnir held the God Storm inside, Gungnir could store and transform Odin's power, the Ebony Blade could cut through nearly anything…

All those weapons were strong because of their enchantments. Of course, the smithing quality of the artefact is very important too, as only a weapon forged with the greatest skill and materials could bear the might of the greatest enchantments.

Edward was capable of forging a weapon skilfully enough, had the right materials, could form a spirit and his magic was advanced enough to apply some of the strongest runes in existence, and yet… it always ended in failure.

For other artefacts, for example Mjollnir, the hammer was first forged by the dwarves, and then Odin enchanted it to hold the power of the God Storm in it.

Edward tried to do the same, and always managed to create the item itself. However, every time he tried to enchant it, a problem would come up, and the artefact would get destroyed.

The first problem he found was the modified time. Within the array, tome, and everything within, was accelerated more than a thousand time compared to outside. That included the fragments of creation, as well as Chi.

For Chi, it didn't matter much to Edward because even in the normal time stream he was facing a shortage of Chi, so he didn't care. However, for the fragments of creation, he could use those already inside the array normally, but once those were spent, the space around him would take more than a thousand time longer to replenish.

So enchanting was not possible in a time array, at least not in the one Edward had created. He had tried to alter the array, to form a swirl of both Chi and fragments of creation to reproduce what was happening inside his core, but that didn't work either.

For a reminder, the Chi inside Edward's Core used a whirlpool that sucked in the surrounding Yang Chi, and so multiplying the speed of time by a hundred also multiplied the speed of swirling by a hundred times, meaning his regeneration of Yang Chi became a hundred times faster too. A similar concept was taking place in his solid Core.

But in his time array, there was no whirlpool, and Chi and the fragments of creation acted in a different way than in his core. In the outside world, the Chi and the fragments of creation are omnipresent, and when some is used, the surrounding elements would try to fill that space.

But there is no sucking mechanic involved, and so the speed at which the fragments of creation and Chi replenished was slowed down.

Anyway, this first meant that Edward had to train outside of his array, meaning he would loose a lot of time. He couldn't forge in the time array and leave it for a second to enchant either as Edward intended to use every step of his forging to form a synergy to enhance everything together.

Unfortunately, even as he left the time zone, things were still not working, and unfortunately, it was a major problem. Even as he exited the time array, his artefact broke into pieces as he enchanted it.

This time, the problem came from the spirit, it was rejecting the enchantment. Actually, once he thought about the problem, Edward realized he should have expected it.

The spirit formed inside the weapon was rather similar to a living being, and adding an enchantment to a weapon was adding a function onto it. As comparison, it would be like adding another arms to a human, they would obviously reject the change instinctively.

And even if said human was capable of seeing the pros of this additional arm, it would be through a logical reasoning. A newborn spirit in a weapon wasn't capable of such a thing, and so it would naturally reject the enchant.

Usually, as a spirit would form after the use of an object over a long period of time, the object would have been enchanted for years by the time the spirit takes over, and this enchantment would become a natural part of the object for the spirit.

So Edward was stuck. A simple solution would be to simply forget about making a spirit for the artefact, but that didn't sit well with him, as he would simply replicate what everyone else was doing, and reaching perfection with such a method was impossible.

Also, changing the order of formation wasn't so easily done, he wished he could simply form the spirit after making the enchants, but to create the spirit he had to infuse it with Yin Chi during it's creation. Infusing his Yin Chi into the object after it's creation could possibly form a spirit, but then he would lose the synergy he sought, meaning this wasn't good either.

Faced with this conundrum, Edward wasn't frustrated in the slightest though, but instead was feeling excited. Recently, there wasn't much that really puzzled him, and if nothing happened he would be stuck with boring cultivation all day in the future, which would be quite tragic. Having found a problem to resolve filled Edward with excitement.

But the research would have to wait, for he had more important matters to attend now. Since he was forced to exit the time array, time passed much quicker than planed in the outside world, and it was now time for the General Assembly to take place.

The 15th of June 2011 was already thought by many in the world to be a turning point for the world, that this day would completely change the world of the future.

And Edward, on this important day, started the day at Pop's Barber Shop.