Age of Gods - A VRMMO Story

Thomas took off the armor and set it over by the weapon rack to be picked up by whoever it was going to. He didn't pay attention to the names of the people ordering the gear, just what they wanted. With the armor taken care of, he checked the time and decided to call it a night. As he made his way to his sleeping spot he stopped and looked at the wall in front of him while smiling. His eyes started to glow blue as he activated his 'All Seeing Eyes'. His vision was flooded with mana particles in various colors. He looked along the wall until he spotted what he was looking for, a fluctuation of metal mana within the earth mana.

After focusing on metal mana, all the other mana particles vanished leaving just the clump of metal mana showing through the wall. He conjured a pickaxe with his metal magic and started going to town on the wall. It was impossible to tell what the metal in the wall would be just from looking at it. Though he expected it to be another clump of Icebound Platinum. He wanted to spend some time every now and then to mine some of the materials out of the walls of the cave. Once he had a solid plan for his escape he would take as much of it as he could. The Icebound Platinum was an excellent material for making items for Snowlily.

After digging a little over a meter into the wall he started to break up and pull out chunks of the metal ore that was buried there. He collected each chunk of ore and dropped it into his inventory for smelting later. The guards made no move to stop him or claim the ore as theirs which he found odd. Still, he wasn't going to complain about it. As he finished pulling out the ore he saw another clump of metal mana particles a little further in. He stopped swinging the pickaxe and stepped back. As he did the particles slowly faded away and disappeared from his sight. It looked like there was a limit to the distance he could see the particles. It seemed like he could only see the particles at a range of about five meters or so.

He stepped closer to the wall and saw the clump of mana once more. Looking closely at it, it seemed like it was a bit more densely packed than the one he'd just excavated. He dug a little deeper into the wall and got closer to the ore so he could see what the difference in particle density might mean. A common theme in games was for there to be two kinds of ore deposits. Common and rich. If the previous ones were common then perhaps the next one he was looking at was a rich one. He easily dug through the solid stone wall carving out large chunks of rock until he got to the next lump of ore.

It took him a while to dig a man-sized tunnel to get to the second ore node. Once he dug the first chunk out he snapped it in half and ran some of his mana through it. Using his Metallurgy ability was heavily reliant on his own personal experience, regardless of the rank of the ability. As his mana ran through the ore he paid close attention to the sensation returning to him within his mana. The feeling he got back actually surprised him. He'd been expecting a cold feeling such as Icebound Platinum would have given. Instead, he felt a slight tingling sensation. Lighting? Odd, this didn't seem like a place where that sort of energy would gather.

He was confused about the properties of the ore. Since it seemed interesting, he took the time to mine the entire area clean of the ore and stored all of it inside of his inventory. Tomorrow he would melt it down and form it into ingots and find out for sure what it was.

The next morning, Thomas enjoyed a delicious breakfast cooked for him by Mr. Pancake personally. He had to admit, he wanted to steal Mr. Pancake and have him all to himself. The man could cook and was good at bookkeeping. That was something Thomas had never really been good at himself, bookkeeping. He tended to just buy anything that caught his attention and sometimes completely forgot he even had it. Every time he opened a shop somewhere he hired someone to be his accountant or manager to help keep himself in check. If said manager could also cook delicious food it would just be an excellent bonus.

Once breakfast was finished he went over to the forge and lit it up. He set up the crucible next and tossed in a few chunks of the newly dug out ore he found last night, the one that tingled. He used his Metallurgy to make sure he was tossing in the right pieces since the Icebound Platinum ore and the ore that gave him the tingling feeling looked pretty much identical when covered in stone and dirt. He did take some time to clean as much of the waste material off of the raw ore as he could but without excellent machines, there was still plenty of it left.

The crucible was filled to the brim with ore and Clad went about his job of powering the blower like a professional. While the ore was slowly heating up and melting, Thomas pulled out the list to check for something that caught his attention. For the time being, he was restricted on what he could make by the materials he had at hand. He was really looking forward to getting his hands on some truly exotic materials that would allow him to make weapons designed to complement their inherent magic.

After looking at the list for a while he let out a sigh of disappointment. The pirates weren't exactly creative types. A lot of the requests were for common things like flaming longswords or cutlasses. It took a bit of digging but he did find an interesting request that he decided to work on. Someone wanted a taser baton. The idea was simple, it was essentially just a metal stick that could shock and paralyze whoever was hit with it. If he did it the simplest and easiest way possible then it would just be a metal rod with an enchantment. That didn't seem like too much fun though so he decided to make it more like a collapsible baton made of lightning attributed steel with a proper enchantment.

After deciding what to do next, he checked on the crucible and found that the ore had already started to melt a bit. This meant it definitely wasn't Icebound Platinum. The Icebound Platinum ore had taken a lot of heat and effort to melt down and refine into ingots but this new metal wasn't nearly so hard to melt. Still, it had only just begun to melt so he didn't need to do anything yet. Instead of just standing around and waiting, he grabbed an iron ingot and a clump of coal to throw together a quick steel ingot. Doing such things with his Transmutation made life so much simpler to him.

The steel ingot got tossed into the flames of the forge to heat up while he collected a pair of tongs and a hammer to work with. Once he escaped he would make a proper set of tools for imbuing mana into ingots that were more efficient. He was holding himself back from making improvements to keep from accidentally over-arming the pirates with top quality gear. If he allowed himself to go all out the pirates would end up with Origin Steel swords and armor while terrorizing the seas.

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Before taking the steel ingot out of the forge, he scooped some of the slag floating on top of the melting metal in the crucible and disposed of it. Truth be told, he was relatively certain he could purify the ore directly with Transmutation and get purified metal nearly instantly without all this extra work. He didn't do so for the same reason he didn't make new tools or work too hard on items for the pirates. The more they knew about what he could do the more they would demand.

With the still melting mystery ore partially cleaned out, he plucked the glowing steel ingot from the flames and set it on the anvil. He silently wished there was an easier way to do this part as he lifted the hammer and began to channel his mana. He shifted his mana to the lightning attribute and started to hammer mercilessly on the ingot to pound the mana into it. With his 'All Seeing Eyes' active he could see so much mana being wasted as it dissipated from the tongs, hammer, and the ingot itself. If he had to roughly estimate, somewhere between eighty to ninety percent of the mana he emitted was simply wasted as it evaporated into the air. Creating the elemental 'embryos' inside of ingots was a truly wasteful process.

His only hope is that with better tools and materials the process would become more efficient. While thinking these things his hammer rose and fell repeatedly to bash the mana and force it to stay inside of the ingot. This part he actually enjoyed because he got to see the different ways that the various kinds of mana would reside within the ingots. It gave him insight into how the various elements behaved when contained within the metal and allowed him to create better enchantments to compliment the elements. As he observed the lightning element being contained inside of the metal he saw it moving closer together and forming strings and chains like tiny lightning bolts frozen in time.

After hammering on the ingot for a few minutes it flashed with yellow light and emitted an electrical crackling sound. Inside of the ingot, the small strings and chains merged together and formed multiple thick lightning bolt-like lines throughout the ingot. The lightning mana inside of the ingot moved and danced reminding Thomas of the bolts of electricity coming off of a tesla coil. He observed the mana for a bit before deactivating his eyes and tossing the metal back into the forge to heat back up.

While the lightning steel heated up, he scooped some more slag from the melting mystery metal and checked its progress. With more impurities removed there was more space within the crucible for him to toss in a few more chunks of ore. If this metal was lightning attributed, like he suspected it was, then he wanted to get some of it ready so he could merge it with the lightning steel he'd just created. While the new chunks of ore melted and mixed with the older ones, he plucked the reheated lightning steel from the forge and started to hammer it back into an ingot shape. Adding an element to a regular piece of metal always turned it from an ingot into an unsightly lump covered in hammer marks.

He worked on the lump of metal to beat it back into the shape of an ingot. He could have just reshaped it with Transmutation, but he was essentially wasting time doing it the hard way. Slow walking the job as it were. As the lightning steel was reshaped back into an ingot, he continued to scoop slag off of the melting ore and checked its progress. When it appeared to be melted enough with the slag removed from the top, he decided it was time to turn it into an ingot. He collected the same mold he used to make the Icebound Platinum ingots and slowly poured the liquid metal into it.

Once the mold was filled with the molten metal, he summoned up a light breeze that gently blew over the mold to cool it down faster. He was really curious about the new metal and its properties. As the ingot cooled its color changed from bright orange to a shining silver that glittered in the light of the forge.