Age of Gods - A VRMMO Story

When Thomas woke up the next morning he made a decision. Today would be his last day of crafting. He'd made all of his armor and his new rifle. He didn't have nearly enough ammunition but at the same time, he didn't want to spend the next few days just making bullets for a rifle he couldn't even use yet. He could always make more bullets for it later. Hell, he might even be able to make them much faster once he got his attributes to a higher point. After all, he planned to nearly double all of his attributes so wouldn't it make sense for his work speed to nearly double once he had? Today he would make his new sword and tomorrow he would head into the dungeon.

He sat in his bed and tried to think of what to do about his sword. He knew the form the sword was going to take but with recent purchases, he had to decide on what material he was going to make the sword out of. Originally he had planned to make it from Mithril and he still could. However, he also had two new materials he could use to make the weapon. Truesteel and Orichalcum.

After thinking for a bit he dismissed the thought of making the sword from the exceptionally rare Orichalcum. The single ingot he had cost him a million gold. He was not about to risk wasting it so soon. The material itself was already legendary grade and if it was the primary material of the sword it just might push the weapon itself to become legendary. In his opinion, that was a bad thing. First, it would upgrade his title Epic Crafter to Legendary Crafter. That might not seem like a bad thing, but odds were that he would be stuck crafting within the Epic tier for quite some time. He would lose out on all the experience points he could gain from crafting Epic items. Compared to monster killing it wasn't much experience but it was still some.

Another reason he decided not to go for making a legendary weapon right away was his lack of knowledge. He'd never seen even an Epic item created within AoG by someone else. It made him a little uncomfortable. There was also the lack of global notifications about him doing so. There had been no global notices about anything crafted above Magic rarity yet and that had him concerned. He found it highly unlikely that someone had crafted Epic rarity items before him and even if they had there should have been global notices of their achievement. Why hadn't there been any? With no real evidence, his best guess is that it was because he, and likely other players, were 'cheating'. Not breaking game rules but he'd been using artificially purified materials for a long time now. Perhaps that somehow didn't count?

It was all speculation, of course, it was possible he'd just happened to be logged out when someone else happened to reach the next tier of rarity. Though, he found that to be nearly impossible. Something was up with the crafting he was doing and his best guess was that it was his Transmutation preventing the announcements. If so, then his items weren't 'true' Epic rarity or whatever rarity he made them. If that was the case he couldn't risk wasting the precious Orichalcum. So in short, all the thinking he had been doing was just to talk himself out of using a rare material and postulating about things he could never really know for sure.

That left him with the Truesteel and Mithril for his main choices. Mithril was still his first choice. It was harder than regular and Origin Steel, had better mana conduction and was easily available at the moment so he wouldn't be too upset if he 'wasted' a bit of it. However, there was also the Truesteel. It was more expensive than Mithril, at least at auction. Since he didn't know much about it, he retrieved one of the pieces of ore from his inventory and looked it over. It really didn't look all that different from other metal ores. Most metals tended to have a silver look to them making them rather hard to differentiate from each other just by sight. Usually, iron ore would be red due to oxidization or rust but the Truesteel showed small chunks of silver sticking out of it.

Thomas ran his fingers over the rough surface of the protrusions on the ore before channeling some of his mana through it. He was surprised to find that the Truesteel had better mana conduction than Origin Steel, even though it was still not smelted or purified. If he smelted it the mana conduction could go up, let alone if he could purify it. The problem was, could he purify it and it still be steel? Or would it be reduced to iron? He looked at the small amount of ore he had. He was forced to fight back and forth over the decision inside of his mind. Finally, he came to a conclusion. The Truesteel was natural steel and not something manmade. Hopefully, that fact would prevent it from becoming iron when purified.

He stored the ore back into his inventory, he would purify it in the workshop later. With his decisions all made, he climbed out of bed and stroked Snowlily's head before getting dressed for the day and heading downstairs to get some breakfast. He met up with the girls and even received a not-so-subtle glare from Aria. It seemed she was still upset about the previous evening. He chose to ignore her and have an otherwise pleasant breakfast with the others. Once it was over he made his way to the Adventurer's Guild, unaware of two shadows following behind him.

Once he was inside of his assigned workshop he retrieved several pieces of Truesteel ore, "I really hope this works." He looked over at Snowlily as she walked in a couple of circles before laying down and getting comfortable, "Wish me luck."

Snowlily glanced at him and gave a soft woof to encourage him. He smiled at that and returned to his work. He loaded one of the forges with some coal and ignited it with a bit of Fire magic. While the coals got warmed up, he loaded the crucible with half of the ore he purchased. He roughly estimated it would be enough for two ingots. After swinging the crucible over into the forge he installed and manned his blower. He waited a bit for the ore to heat up and melt. Due to the fact that the Truesteel was not just steel but also a magical metal it took a lot of extra heat to melt the ore to the point he could start removing the impurities from the melted metal.

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It took some time but he managed to completely melt down the ore and remove as much slag from the top layer as he could. The rest would sink to the bottom of the crucible. Once he was certain no more would float to the top, he set out an ingot mold and began pouring the molten steel into it. Once it was full he gathered another mold and poured the remaining molten steel into it. The remaining metal only filled three-quarters of the mold. If his math was right then that meant he had enough Truesteel ore for a total of three and a half ingots worth of the metal. He left the rest of his ore inside of his inventory for the time being. Once the ingots cooled, helped by a gentle breeze of Wind magic from his hand, he examined the final result.