Forging Talent

The Edge of Creation

The moonfang daggers were still warm, purring along his palms like animals that remembered the hunt. Ren turned them so that forgefire slid across their edges, kissed the silver-blue curve, and ran along the hollowed groove Ferrin had called a songline. Satisfaction hummed in his bones, a bright note that wanted to sing.

Then the note collapsed into something sterner.

"If I'm going to survive what's coming," he said, the words dousing his pride like a plunge into quenching oil, "I'll need more than these." He slid the daggers into the leather cross-sheath across his back. The wolf pelt over his shoulders—Varyth's skull resting like a crown of a vow—suddenly felt like a trophy and not armor. "Chest, arms, greaves. Something sturdy."

Ferrin didn't look up. He was a shape in smoke and emberlight, the thick span of his shoulders thrown into relief by the furnace. Coal spat. The dwarf nudged it with a rake as if speaking to an old friend who never argued. "Then find a proper smith," he said, voice low, roughened by a forge's eternity. "I've got three commissions waiting, a noble's orders backed up, and a student who still hasn't returned with my black-steel shipment. I'm not making a full set of gear for some pup with fancy knives and fire in his eyes."

Ren smiled without humor. "I'll pay. I've got—"

"You could wave gold in my face and I'd still say no." The rake clanged against the grate. Ferrin turned then, cigar ember an angry star at the corner of his mouth. "Coin doesn't buy me time. And it sure as hell doesn't inspire me."

The forge breathed. Heat rolled over Ren's face, carrying notes of slag and ash and a metallic sweetness that lived inside molten iron. For a second he felt twelve again, standing behind a fence and watching a traveling smith draw sparks out of steel as if pulling light from the sky. The fence boards had been rough beneath his hands. The smith had hummed. Creation had looked like magic even before he knew magic existed.

He could have let the moment close, could have bowed and left and bought something standard in the market. Instead, his gaze caught on the back corner of the smithy—on a squat, iron-rimmed barrel half-swallowed by shadow. It bulged with ruin: bent plates, dulled rivets, buckles snapped like brittle bones, chain links scabbed with rust, pauldrons split along their seam. A grave. Or a field. It depended on the angle of your heart.

Potential, he thought, and felt the click of a gear somewhere behind his sternum.

"I don't need new material," he murmured, more to the forge than to Ferrin. "I need to reshape what's been forgotten." He turned. "What about the scrap?"

Ferrin blinked, then snorted. "What about it?"

"I want to buy it. The whole barrel." Ren drew in breath: leap or don't. "And I want to use your forge."

Ferrin's brows climbed under their soot. "You're serious."

"I'll pay. For the scraps, for forge time. Let me try."

"Boy, you're either mad or desperate."

"Both," Ren said, a grin splitting the heat-dry of his lips. "But I'm also serious. Those daggers? You said they were alive. I helped bring them into being. I learned from you. Let me see what I can make."

The dwarf's silence dragged, heavy as an anvil. Maybe Ferrin was measuring him against the barrel. Maybe against the night. He crossed his arms. "You want to melt down twisted plate and broken guard rings and turn it into battle-ready gear? That's not forging, boy. That's praying for miracles."

"I'm not praying," Ren said, and the wolf-skull shadowed his eyes like a vow. "I'm experimenting."

The forge hissed. Outside, night shifted the city's breath. Ferrin looked at the barrel, at Ren, at the waiting fire that had never learned to be patient. He grunted. "Ten gold. For the whole pile. You warp my hearth, burn down the shop, or crack one of my rune anvils, I'll throw you into the cooling pit myself."

"Deal."

Ren counted coins in the furnace glow, each clink swallowed by the room as if the forge were eating them for breakfast. Ferrin's hand closed over the last piece. He jerked his chin at the banked embers. "The forge is yours until dawn." A pause. A sideways grudgingness. "Let's see if the fire teaches you something… or eats you alive."

Ren stood alone when Ferrin left through the rear door, the smith's silhouette swallowed by the orange breath. Alone with a barrel of failure and a hunger that had stopped being about food a long time ago. He set his hands on the rim and peered down at the wreckage—old blades with edges chewed blunt, scorched mail stiff with memory, half-rings like moons caught in eclipse.

He smiled.

"This is my grind now."

He rolled his sleeves. The air prickled across his forearms, hot with promise. He called up the skill like a word he'd learned to love.

"Mana Imprint," he whispered.

Light lifted in his palm—the pale silver thread of a mark, the ghost of a future diagram—and he reached into the barrel to start.

Night stretched its canvas over Newvale; in Ferrin's smithy, it wore the color of embers. Ren sorted, chose, rejected, chose again. Pauldron plates with unbroken centers. Bracer bands warped but not cracked. A breastplate whose heart hadn't split, only remembered too many blows.

The first hour was fumbling. He heated pieces too fast and watched them blister, then cursed, then slowed, learning the patience in the way metal breathed. He separated alloys—copper edge into salvage bins, iron bone into the melting crucible, steel back to the heat. He sang to himself under his breath, a rhythm to pace his hammer, and when he forgot the words, the hammer sang for him.

Elemental Thread came like a second breath. He coaxed it, long and fine as spider silk, into channels along a piece still glowing like a sunset's bruise. Runic whispers fell out of his mouth clumsy and off-key, then truer, then almost right. He missed the cadence and the metal protested, wrinkling like an offended brow. He tried again, and the glow smoothed.

The forge kept score.

[Skill Rank Up: Mana Imprint – Lv2 → Lv3]

[Skill Rank Up: Forge-Lore – Lv1 → Lv2]

A laugh bubbled up at the first chime. He swung the hammer with new greed and hit too hard; the bracer shivered a wrong note under the blow. He adjusted. The hammer's head met steel like two old enemies who had decided to be cousins. Sparks shot up, struck his forearms, nipped.

He breathed smoke. He breathed effort. Time started losing its shape.

When his shoulders trembled, when the ache in his back ripened from complaint to sermon, when the edges of things fuzzed and the world narrowed to the hammer, the heat, the wet glow of iron wanting to be something else—

[New Skill Acquired: Scrap Tempering – Lv1]

You've learned to refine damaged or discarded equipment into usable gear. Forged armor made this way retains unpredictable traits but gains resilience through creative reinforcement.

He whooped. The sound bounced off rafters black as old tongue and came back smaller but real. He quenched a strip, watched steam billow, felt the little shock of the metal relaxing into shape. It wasn't pretty. It was honest.

He chased honesty through the night.

By the time dawn prodded the shutters and made a meager silver of the smoke, Ren stood before the anvil, sweat lacquered to his skin, hands buzzing from a thousand small wars. He looked down at what the night had given him.

A chest plate that could hold a punch and maybe a prayer. Bracers that fit like a compromise. Shoulder guards that were nearly a mirror of each other if you squinted and were kind. He lifted one greave, flexed it, and a seam split with a sound like a breath breaking.

He stared at the crack as if it might apologize. Then he laughed, helpless, a tired sound turned fond against his will. "Fair enough."

[Skill Rank Up: Mana Imprint – Lv3 → Lv4]

[Skill Rank Up: Forge-Lore – Lv2 → Lv3]

[Scrap Tempering – Lv1 → Lv2]

The system had seen him. It wasn't much, but it was north; it was a compass; it was a path.

He was packing the best of it—the chest plate that wouldn't embarrass him in daylight—when boots scuffed the threshold. Ferrin stepped into the forge's quiet, eyes taking in ruin and result with equal appetite.

"Disaster," the smith muttered. Then his beard twitched. "But educational."

Ren wiped his face with the back of his wrist, leaving a black smear that turned his cheek into war paint. "Worth the ten gold."

Ferrin grunted, walked to the chest plate, thumped it with a knuckle. The sound held. He didn't say "good." He let the silence say it for him. "You learned something, which is more than most." He hooked a thumb at the barrel. "You want more scrap, you pay the same way."

"I'll be back," Ren said. "I want to keep leveling. Take anything you'd toss."

"Don't clog my hearth when I've real orders." The dwarf turned toward his tools and paused. "And sleep, boy. You look like a bell that's been rung all night."

Ren slung his satchel, the wolf pelt settling around his shoulders as if to say you did not come this far to be gentle. He stepped into the morning: chill air, a sky pale as hammered tin, roofs smoking like thoughts.

He found an inn that smelled of bread and kindness. He remembered to eat only because the innkeeper insisted with a plate between her hands. The soup tasted like someone had boiled patience down into comfort. He slept like an anvil dropped into a lake.

When moonlight woke him—a hand of silver laid lightly across the floorboards—he lay and watched it breathe. Seraphina's voice came soft and close as a blanket.

"I'm here."

"That armor," he said to the ceiling. "I failed."

"Both true and false," she said gently. "Your skills are young. And forging is more than technique. You lack rune harmonization, alloy theory, magical stabilization—fields taught in schools, guarded in books."

"Books," he said, and sat up. The fatigue in his bones had weight, but the idea had wings. "There's more."

"There's always more."

He dressed. He went hunting—not for beasts, but for words.

The bell above the bookstore door chimed a polite note, as if asking permission of the dust before it dared disturb it. Inside, the air was a cathedral of paper. Lanternlight made a gold of motes; they drifted like slow-caught snow in a warm wind. The shelves reached high and deep, each crowded with spines that had outlived the hands that bought them.

"You're new," said a voice soft as vellum.

Ren turned. Behind the counter stood a woman with emerald eyes framed by silver-rimmed glasses. Her hair—dark, braided, practical—fell over one shoulder like a line drawn with thought. The robe she wore was the blue of deep water stitched with a thread that caught light and kept it.

"Looking for anything in particular?" she asked.

"Forging," Ren said, pulling back his hood. "Mana flow traces. Runesmithing. Anything not written for children or the bored."

Something in her gaze tightened and warmed at the same time. She considered him, then nodded as if making a choice. "Section thirteen." She gestured. "Restricted studies. Old forging arts and warcraft manuals. Much of it is nonsense. But one isn't. No one's made sense of it in… years." She tilted her head. "Maybe you'll be the exception."

They walked through aisles that narrowed like decisions. The deeper stacks smelled older, and the lanterns burned closer to orange, as if the light had grown tired over time but refused to sit. At a glass case locked with an iron clasp, the librarian whispered a spell. The metal yielded like a sigh.

She lifted a book bound in blackened leather whose cover bore an anvil cracked wide, flames spilling out of the wound. It had the gravity of an object that had seen emperors blink and monsters die and had tried to teach both how to make a hinge. She laid it on the counter. The runes on the spine looked like burn scars that spelled something important.

"The Tome of Broken Flame," she said. "Handle with respect."

He reached for it. The moment his fingers touched the leather, the world clicked.

[New Skill Acquired: Mana Trace Purge Lv1]Allows complete erasure of residual mana flow from salvaged materials during reforging. Enables clean foundation for re-imprinting.

[New Skill Acquired: Imprint Weave Lv1]Permits infusion of new mana flow traces using a runic powder blend into molten metal. Requires balance of element, intent, and force.

[New Skill Acquired: Rhythm Hammer Lv1]An advanced forging technique that utilizes rhythmic strikes to bind new mana traces in geometric harmony. Reduces mana turbulence in final equipment.

Ren exhaled a laugh—a stunned sound, low and grateful. "This is… encoded. It talks to the system."

"Some books remember," the librarian said, lips curving. "Most books refuse."

He took a seat at a table that bore the scars of a hundred elbows and a thousand decisions. He opened the tome. Diagrams unfurled like maps to places you could only reach by patience. Forging circles. Stabilization arrays. Binding patterns drawn like constellations. The language was dense in places and strangely simple in others, as if the writer had trusted the reader's hunger more than their skill.

He read. He lost the room. He found himself in the space between a rune and the metal that learned it. The book offered recipes for runic powder in handfuls measured by weight and intent both: red dust for heat, gold for conduction, blue for channeling, ground into such a precise balance that a sneeze would throw off a day's work. There were footnotes written in a different hand—wry, tired, wise—arguing with the body of the text like an old couple.

When he lifted his head, the world was slightly different.

He didn't stop there. He asked the librarian—whose name he learned was Lyris—if the shelves held more. They did. He took "Runic Powder Recipes of the Western Peaks," whose pages smelled faintly of iron filings; "Basic Leatherworking for Nomads," as pragmatic as dry bread; "Introduction to Tailoring: Stitch, Weave, Bind," whose diagrams looked like fighting stances for cloth; "Ironflow Martial Theory: Open-Fist and Blade Harmony," which made his hands itch to try.

Every so often, the air pealed gently.

[New Skill Acquired: Basic Leatherworking Lv1][New Skill Acquired: Improvised Tailoring Lv1][New Skill Acquired: Martial Stance – Counter Edge Lv1][Material Analysis Lv2 → Lv3][New Skill Acquired: Precision Grip Lv1]

Time collapsed into ink and understanding. The lantern beside him dimmed from warm afternoon to thoughtful dusk to the midnight blue that meant the shop's magic was telling the shelves to sleep.

A hand tapped lightly at his table. Lyris stood there with a lamp like a small captured star. "Sorry to interrupt your enlightenment," she said, amusement thinned by kindness, "but I need to close. It's well past midnight."

Ren rubbed his eyes and smiled. "I didn't notice."

"Clearly." She didn't move to hurry him. She only held the lamp steady while he stacked the books with care that made them look new. "You'll be back."

"I'll be back," he promised.

She nodded. "Then I'll keep the good ones unlocked."

He stepped into night, the sky a dark anvil pinned with nail-head stars. His hands flexed as if a hammer hung invisible in them. The forge in his head was already lit.

Dawn did not so much break as pry open the lid of night and throw in a handful of embers. Ren was in Ferrin's smithy before the birds had decided which song to rehearse. He laid out the failures like a surgeon preparing for a second chance.

"Seraphina," he breathed, fingertips on the battered chest plate's scarred surface. "Ready the new skill."

[Skill: Mana Trace Purge — Active]Initiating…

The forge's sounds hushed a fraction, as if listening. A cool silver light pooled from Ren's palm, not heat but purity given shape. He passed it slowly above the plate. Mana strands bloomed into sight—tangled, snarled, little lightning strikes trapped in dead iron. He pressed his will. The silver brightened.

Snap.

The first knot came loose, then the next, then a cascade like a harp that had forgotten how to be angry. Glowing motes rose and dissipated with the softest hiss, the way summer rain leaves stone.

[Mana Trace Purge — Success.]Residual Flow: 0%Material Purity: 97%Bonus: Slight increase in forging compatibility.

He laughed, giddy. "It works."

He moved down the line—bracers, greaves, shoulder plates—erasing ghosts, unthreading old spells that had died badly and clung like cobwebs. Purity pooled on the table in the shape of possibility.

He fed the clean metal to the furnace. The crucible took it with a pleased tremor. He drew the pouch from his pocket—runic powder he'd bought from the alchemist shop for a week's worth of breakfasts. The grains shimmered red-blue-gold like tiny sunsets. He tipped a careful measure into the molten pool. The metal answered with a deepening glow.

[Skill: Imprint Weave — Active]Runic Integration Protocol Initiated…

"Form from flame," he whispered, the chant language unfamiliar but eager in his mouth, "bind from breath—let my mark etch true through death."

Glyphs spread through the liquid like frost racing over glass, elegant and precise. He held patterns in his head—endurance curls, agility arcs, a quiet channel for mana trickle. The weave took shape where intention met method.

He poured. The mold received. He lifted the hammer.

[Skill: Rhythm Hammer — Active]Pattern: Tri-Phase Pulse (Balanced Flow – Tier I)

He struck. Tap—strike—pulse. The hammer sang a three-beat prayer, not loud but stubborn. Each blow stitched turbulence flat, married geometry to heat, persuaded glyphs that they were wanted. The metal hissed, argued, then agreed, turning its face to him in small surrender. The sweat ran down his spine. It stung his eyes and tasted like iron.

He worked as if the world would end if he stopped, which—if he told the truth—was not far wrong.

Two hours later he lifted the chest piece from the quench and the steam rose like a benediction. He held it up. It wasn't beautiful. It was better than beautiful.

It was honest and new.

[Forged Item: Emberweave Chestplate]Type: Light ArmorDefense: +16Bonus: +3 Agility, +1 Mana Regeneration, +4% Fire ResistanceDurability: 90/90Forge Grade: C+Trace Alignment: Balanced (78%)

Ren's throat tightened. He set the chest plate down the way you set down something that might turn and run if you frightened it. He leaned back against the stone and let the exhaustion claim him like a tide.

[Forging Skill: Imprint Weave Lv1 → Lv2][Forging Skill: Rhythm Hammer Lv1 → Lv2][General Forging Lv7 → Lv8]

Boots again. Ferrin stood there, one brow lifting as if a pulley had hoisted it. He stepped close, thumbed the edge, pressed the center with a practiced palm. The plate did not yield.

"…Didn't think you'd get anything decent from that junk," he said.

Ren, grinning without permission, shook his head. "Neither did I."

Ferrin's mouth tried on a smile and wore it uncomfortably for a second before discarding it. "Still ugly," he decreed. "But functional. Better than most apprentices in their first year." He grunted. "If you're serious, I'll set scraps aside. But you pay."

"I'll pay," Ren said, already counting the coin as muscle memory. "I'm learning with every strike."

"Good. Rest. The next batch'll be worse."

"Worse is a promise," Ren said, and meant thank you.

When Ferrin turned away, Ren slipped the chest plate against his torso. It hugged him like a question that wanted to be desired. He fitted the straps, cinched them, felt the slight lift of agility the stat promised, the trickle of mana like a spring found beneath stone. He stood taller without deciding to.

He had made something that would help him live. He had turned failure into a shield.

That was a kind of magic even before the runes.

The bookstore felt like a temple to a god who valued ink over offerings. Ren entered with the reverence that comes after the first miracle.

Lyris looked up. The corner of her mouth tipped—not surprise, not quite pride. Recognition. "Starved for answers again?"

"Ravenous," he admitted.

"Good." She led him deeper, through an archway carved with letters he couldn't quite read but somehow trusted. "There's more than craft and kill. If you mean to live, you learn the things that catch you when craft and kill fail."

He took "Barrier Theory: Foundations of Protective Magic." It began with lines like fences around a garden, then built them into walls and domes and shimmering skins. The diagrams described mana not as a river but as a net.

[New Skill Acquired: Mana Barrier (Active)]Creates a static barrier that absorbs up to 50 points of damage. Duration scales with Magic.

He set his palm on the page, spoke the cantrip the book suggested. A thin film whispered into being around his fingers, a bubble that made the air taste like ozone. He pressed. It held for a second longer than he thought it would. He smiled like a boy with a secret marble.

Next: "Blood and Flow: The Art of Regenerative Threads." The treatise had been written by a healer who swore like a cavalry captain in the footnotes. It described the body as a field that learned how to be a forest again with the right encouragement.

[New Skill Acquired: Lesser Regeneration (Active)]Gradually restores HP over time. Amount scales with Magic and Endurance.

He murmured the binding phrase. A warmth slid along his forearms, not heat but knitting. Cuts he hadn't noticed from the forge's small cruelties tingled and quieted.

He found "Seeing the Invisible: A Study on Mana Vision." The first chapter was a lecture from a mage so old his quill must have been a cane; it nevertheless made the world feel young.

[New Skill Acquired: Mana Vision (Toggle)]Reveals mana signatures in creatures, objects, and the environment. Costs 2 MP per second.

Ren blinked the world sideways. The bookstore breathed in threads and motes he hadn't known to see. The shelves wore the faint glows of minor wards—dust settling charms, a thief-deterring shiver on the front door. Lyris glowed like a carefully banked fire: steady, deep, amused.

"Careful," she said, as if she knew the way his pupils had changed. "Keep it on too long and the world looks like teeth."

He chuckled and blinked the gift off. The afterimage of weaves lingered like stars when you shut your eyes.

He wandered to a shelf marked by alchemical sigils, the spines there cracked by hands that had labored in steam and patience. "Foundations of Reactive Mixtures." "Catalysts for the Commoner: A Practical Guide." "On the Seven Essences and Why They Hate You." He read, swam between recipes and ratios and the stories of people who had blown up sheds willingly.

[Basic Alchemy Lv1 → Lv3][New Recipe Learned: Basic Mana Potion][New Recipe Learned: Salve of Resistance (Fire)][New Recipe Learned: Coagulation Draught]

He felt the shape of a brew in his mind, the way you feel how to tie a knot: pinch, twist, pull through. He could see the steps, the way heat wanted to be coaxed rather than commanded, the moment before a boil when a potion became itself.

Hours bled. Lanterns deepened to a color the shop called "time to go home." Lyris appeared again with the lamp, her expression somewhere between shepherd and co-conspirator.

"It's late."

Ren stretched, joints discovering they were human and not simply characters in a diagram. "Every time I think I'm full, there's room for more."

"That is how hunger stays holy," she said, and the phrase felt borrowed from a book older than either of them. "Go. Sleep. Tomorrow the words will still be here. Or they won't. But you will, if you are wise."

He bowed his head slightly. "Thank you."

She inclined hers back. "Bring the wolf head less often. The regulars complain it stares."

He laughed all the way to the door. Outside, the moon had climbed and pinned the night like a brooch. The air was crisp. He walked through it with the new softness of someone who had given themselves permission to be more than one thing.

Morning came in brass and coal. Ren stood again before Ferrin's hearth, the heat laying hands on him as if in greeting. He set out the failures of the night-before-last without shame. He laid the Emberweave Chestplate beside them to remind the room what the day owed him.

He purged metal with the silver skill until the old mana hissed and died, until the iron lay docile, ready. He measured runic powder into the crucible in pinches that felt like prayers measured in salt. He whispered the weave, struck the rhythm. He failed, once, twice, and changed the cadence on the third try: tap—tap—strike, pulse held for a longer breath. The glyphs settled like dust in a house finally allowed to be quiet.

He moved past the chest plate to bracers. He chose a broader band for forearm stamina, set a weave that encouraged blood to move without shouting about it. He tried a flex on the guard and it cracked. He sighed, swore, learned, softened the quench with oil, tried again.

By noon, his shoulders burned in lines that mirrored his hammer strokes. He drank water that tasted like a forge floor and apples. He reset, resumed. The wolf skull kept vigil on a hook, the pelt folded over a bench like a sleeping animal.

He thought of Lyris's lamp. He thought of Ferrin's almost-smile. He thought of the way the Emberweave had lifted his breath by the faintest margin and called that margin life.

The day bent toward him.

By late afternoon, two pieces lay on the bench that did not embarrass the chest plate: bracers that held and would hold again, with small channels etched inside that would carry heat away and luck toward. He tried them on. They felt like a handshake with a future.

He cleaned the forge as Ferrin taught him—because the fire remembered how you treated its bed—and left just as the dwarf returned with a tray of tools and a glance that counted pieces without asking questions.

"Keep at it," Ferrin said, which was more blessing than command.

Ren ate, washed, shouldered the ache he'd earned, and returned to the bookstore when the first stars bullied the sky into honesty.

Lyris met him with that lamp again, its light turning her hair to ink gloss. "Back to the well?"

"Until it runs dry."

"It won't. But you might." She set the lamp between them. "So learn to pour."

He took "Intermediate Barrier Theory," which taught him that protection, like a good lie, had layers. He took "Bindings and Bands," a treatise on straps and buckles that fit like runes and runes that fit like straps. He skimmed "On the Naming of Things," a slim book that argued that a name stitched tighter than a rivet.

He found himself formulating a set. Not a mismatched survival kit scavenged from midnight. A set with a philosophy.

Light, to move. Channels, to breathe. Weaves, to trickle mana instead of drowning in it. Leather beneath plate that hugged and did not pinch. Stitch lines that made highways for heat.

He fell asleep over "The Grammar of Glyphs," forehead denting a paragraph about why circles hate squares. Lyris woke him with a cough and a look that said I will let you be young for a little while longer.

He walked to the inn under a moon that watched like a teacher who believed. He dreamed of hammers and the way they could be gentle if you asked nicely.

Morning. Forge. Repeat.

He purged, wove, struck, quenched. He swore, laughed, learned. He made a pauldron that wanted to be a pauldron and a second that wanted to be a bowl. He talked it out of it. He fitted straps with the new tailoring skill, fingers clumsy at first, then clever. He stitched leather to plate in a pattern that would hold even if the plate forgot how.

He took the bracers, chest, pauldrons to the alley and ran, jumped, rolled, listened for pinch or clatter. The set moved with him like a partner learning the dance. He could feel the small bonuses—agility a ripple under his skin, mana like a quiet stream at his core, a coolness when he stood close to the hearth that did not exist the week before.

When Ferrin tested the fit with a craftsman's rude tenderness, he grunted. "Name it," he said.

Ren blinked. "What?"

"Trash into tool, sweat into song. It's a set now. Name it. Names make things hold."

Ren looked down at the leather, the plate, the faint traceries of glyph carved like a modest boast. He thought of the chest quenching into steam like breath, of the bracers insisting on second tries, of the pauldrons learning not to be bowls.

"Emberweave," he said. "The Emberweave Set."

Ferrin folded his arms. The cigar's ember brightened. "Hnh. Not awful."

The system, which loved the drama of a declaration, agreed.

[Signature Equipment Path Unlocked]Blueprints: Emberweave Chest (C+), Emberweave Bracers (C), Emberweave Pauldrons (C-)Naming Rights: Arclight Forge – Emberweave Series

[Crafting Fusion System: Preview Unlocked]Combine disciplines (Tailoring + Forging + Alchemy) to create hybrid gear. Requires recipes or original schematics. Success chances scale with theory, practice, and hubris.

Ren laughed, a bright sound tossed up at the rafters. Ferrin hid a smile in a cough and went back to tormenting a blade that had displeased him.

Ren gathered his tools. He donned the set. He stepped into the street where Newvale's din played the day like a drum. The armor hugged him without holding him back. Kids watched, one whispering that the wolf-head had learned to wear a man. The market smelled of spice and iron and the beginning of rain.

He had a plan now, not a wish. Forge by day. Study by night. Fail faster, learn slower—take time where it mattered, rush where it didn't. Hunt when he must. Build so he might not have to.

Seraphina stirred, her voice the smile in a dark room. "Creation suits you."

"Survival suits me," he said, but the grin in his mouth gave him away.

"Creation is survival," she said. "If you do it right."

He walked. The bookshop lantern would burn for him. The forge would open its mouth and ask for stories. Lyris would unlock cases. Ferrin would grumble. The daggers on his back hummed like wolves dreaming of the run.

Ahead lay guild postings and contracts, ore veins and bounties, horrors with names, and horrors that would earn them. But here, now, under a sky threaded with the bright veins of morning, Ren Arclight wore something he had made out of brokenness and intent.

He carried the weight easily.

He felt, for the first time since waking in this strange, edged world, that his future did not merely happen to him.

He would forge it. One piece. One page. One strike at a time.