The Online Craftsmaster 95 Torturer of Wood

Days went by as Vito was teaching John how to work with wood, every day a strange routine could be seen in the Dungeon. Every morning a small female halfling logged into the game with a determined look on her face grabbing John by his collar and dragging into the workshop.

And soon after they entered the workshop Vito would come out carrying a strange disfigured wooden workpiece, laying it on a recently built altar that was already filled with other wooden pieces. He would then pray for several minutes with tears on his face while apologizing. After Vito finished his funeral memorial service he would go back into the workshop and you can hear a blunt object hitting a wall and a painful howl.

This routine would repeat itself dozens of times before both of them logged off in the evening, Vito always having a look of defeat on his face. This routine repeated itself so often that after the third day they had to hold a Viking funeral for all the ruined workpieces. and while the massive pile of wood was burning you could see Vito kneeling beside it helplessly crying and apologizing.

After the held a Viking funeral for the second time Vito couldn't take it anymore, he just couldn't comprehend how John fails when working with wood. Vito tried observing him and everything seemed to work nicely in the beginning but as soon as Vito would blink or turn away for a second the workpiece was suddenly ruined.

Vito even tried to completely concentrate and observing John but every time something happens that would distract him for a second leaving behind another ruined workpiece.

John told Vito about his bad luck but Vito didn't want to believe it until one time he observed how John sawed off a single wooden piece which landed on the ground, suddenly a small robot came to collect it but when the robot grabbed the piece it slipped out of the metal fingers and was flung through the workshop. The flying wooden piece traveled extremely fast and hit a wall from which it bounced off hitting a small piece of metal that was laying on a shelf. The small metal piece was a Lead sinker still connected to the fishing rod with a small durable metal thread.

The Sinker swung while gaining momentum and hit a metal pipe that was stored in a box next to John, it started moving while using the edge of the box as guidance and hitting the wooden workpiece that John was holding in his hands. The workpiece was blown out of Johns's hands just before it was finished and flew through the air like a baseball after a homerun swing.

Vito and John were following the flight trajectory of the workpiece only to get a look of despair when it landed right into the white-hot forge which burned it to ashes. But that was not the only time John´s bad luck kicked in but it was the most flashy time, he just had a knife or any other sharp tool stuck in his hand after his hand slipped but as it happened in the game it wasn't that bad.

But even though Vito saw tiny improvements in John's work with wood, Vito still felt pain when he saw John torturing poor pieces of wood. So one day Vito stopped with his lesson and told John to show him how he crafted something when he wasn't working with wood.

John complied and thought for a moment before grabbing some Ghost steel, some Mythril, a tiny amount of Adamantite and some Silver. John started with the Mythril which had a shining silver color, he took some mushroom off and ancient piece of wood one of his minions found and brewed up a dark nearly black solution in which he bathed Mythril sheets that were just 1-2mm thick. Next, he created more of those sheets out of Ghost steel but he didn't bath them in the solution.

After the Mythril pieces soaked some time in the solution he pulled them out and stacked these pieces and the Ghost Steel pieces in an alternating fashion. John then wrapped the formed billet with some metal thread to hold it together and put it into the forge. He heated up the Billet to critical temperature, pulled it out of the flamed and quickly forged it together with precise strikes with his hammer.

John then hammered his workpiece until it was about 0.5cm thick cut it in three pieces and stacked them once again. He continued folding and forging it out several times. He then forged a square bar out of it and cut it widthwise into squares which he then stacked up again after he turned every second piece by 90 degrees. He forged welded them back together and forge them into a flat bar. He then cut the bar lengthwise and folded it again, but this time he added the adamantite as a thin piece between both parts of the flat bar.

John forge-welded everything and forged out longer bar this time, he cut it into 7 pieces of the same size and started working on them individually. Every piece was forged into a different shape of knife with a thick tang on one side and a short blade in several different forms on the other side. After John finished with the rough form of the knife he took them to the grinding wheel to finish their form before heating the knife blades back up to a yellow hot state and quenching them in water after which he laid them back onto a tiny pile of burning coals to temper them.

While the blade was being tempered John grabbed the silver and some more Mythril and wanted to forge them together but something unexpected happened when he laid the Mythril onto the silver. Somehow the silver and the Mythril started to fuse together which left John speechless until he remembered that he once read in a novel that Mythril is sometimes also called magical Silver. John liked the look of the Silver-Mythril Alloy as it was mostly shiny but seemed to have some not so shiny nearly dull waves in it.

John took the Alloy pieces and made 7 handles out of them and added them to the tempered Knives. Next, to give a better grip to the handles John grabbed Silver and Mythril wire and wrapped the Handle in both of them while weaving both wires in a complex pattern and watched how the crossings of both wires magically fused together.

After he was finished wrapping the handles he brought the knives back to the grinding wheel and sharpened them until you felt a cutting sensation when just looked at them. And Just when he finished the set of knives and before Vito could wake up from the trance that he fell in watching John work something strange happened with the knives...

Chapter end