Chương 476: B7—Chapter 52: Metal Control and Mood Control

I woke up, cast a healing spell to get rid of the hangover from last night's singing and drinking downstairs, took a shower for fun, cooked breakfast, and fed the kids. Rue slipped out first, tail swishing as he hurried off to find his little rider friends. Mahya leaned against the counter, sipping her drink.

"Any progress with the potions?" Al made a half-tilted, uncertain hand motion, his face tight. Mahya arched an eyebrow.

"What's the issue?"

"I do not have the appropriate recipes," he said, straightening as if delivering a report.

"So I must experiment. I am also limited by the herbs and other materials I possess." I glanced up while collecting the dishes.

"Other materials?"

"Yes. I am experimenting with the minerals I bought in Canada, and with those we collected from the cultivator alchemist."

"So why herbs?" I asked.

"To enhance the minerals' properties," he said, taping the bar nervously.

"And to strengthen the bonds between various materials." Mahya crossed her arms.

"What's the problem, then?"

"I have a good enough understanding of how to make the metal more resistant to cold or heat." He paused and pressed his lips together.

"Not both. That is the issue I am working on." Yeah, that made sense with my very limited understanding of alchemy. Al excused himself with a stiff nod and headed toward his lab. Mahya grabbed her jacket from the hook by the door.

"Coming?" she asked, tilting her head toward the door.

"Later. I need to do some things." She waved and stepped out. Once the door clicked shut, I got to baking cookies. Al still pretended he wasn't eating them, despite admitting it once, but a large amount kept disappearing every day. I didn't mind. He hated this world and didn't get the gnomes at all. Every time he stepped outside, he seesawed between shock, bewilderment, and pure horror at the chaos beyond the door, so baking a few cookies felt like the least I could do to help him deal with it.

Baking done, I headed to Mahya's workshop and to the endless metal sheets I still had to engrave. Lis originally designed the Dead Zone rune lattice for an entire room, but our experiments while building Al's house showed that we could engrave each wall separately, join them, and only then engrave the connecting lines and symbols. Even so, working on metal sheets instead of a whole room was still a drag. I'd finished over twenty sheets already, and the end of the mission wasn't anywhere in sight.

The only good part was that with all the metal lying around and the numbing repetition, I could split my mind and use part of it to practice controlling metal. It was a subdivision of the earth affinity, so I had some ability with it, but it was still very limited. So far, I'd only learned to sense every piece of metal scattered on the workshop floor. Anything sitting on a workbench was out of reach, since I couldn't feel it through the earth affinity. Today, I had a new training plan.

I wanted to move the metal across the floor using the affinity itself rather than telekinesis. Once Mahya handed me the new sheet I needed to engrave, I split my mind and connected to the floor, and through it, sensed all the metal pieces scattered around. A cogwheel sat a few meters from me, so I focused on it and tried to move it toward me. Nothing. I pushed a little harder. Still nothing. After a few minutes of trial and error, it became clear that brute force wasn't going to work. I needed a gentler approach.

I breathed out, focused on the metal the same way I sensed the grains of stone under my feet, and tried again. Not as a wave of force, but more like coaxing. Not exactly communication. More like I tried to make the metal want to come to me, for lack of a better description. This time, the metal gave the faintest twitch. Barely noticeable, but it was something. That tiny movement kept repeating, each attempt a little better. The cogwheel shook a bit. Then an actual shift. Then a clear slide across the dusty floor.

Slowly, I got the hang of it. The metal had to stay in contact with the ground, and the movement had to be steady, almost like calling a skittish cat. A few hours later, I could scoot a piece of metal from one side of the workshop to the other with a smooth glide. I practiced on a steel pipe when Mahya walked over and reached toward it. Perfect timing. The moment her fingers brushed the edge, I yanked it away. The metal screeched lightly across the floor. She froze, eyes narrowing. She tried again.

I pulled it again. Mahya let out a low growl. I laughed and tugged the pipe a third time. She jumped forward in one clean movement, landed on the metal with both feet, pinned it to the ground, scooped it up, and carried it off without a word. Her back radiated pure threat. I grinned like an idiot. Later, when she reached for another piece, I couldn't resist. The metal slid away from her fingertips before she could close her hand around it. This time, she didn't go for the sheet. She came after me.

One second, I was kneeling on the floor, engraving a rune; the next, I was flat on my back with a very annoyed engineer sitting on my stomach. She waved a metal pipe over my face with the clear promise of pain if I pushed my luck any further. I lifted both hands in surrender.

"Alright. I won't do it again. Promise." She held the pipe in front of my face for another long second before she got off me and stalked away. After that, every time she bent to pick up a metal piece, she gave me a sideways look through squinted eyes, ready to pounce if I tried anything. A couple of times, I felt the urge to yank one more piece, just for fun, but I valued my bones too much. No point in waking up the beast.

Three days later, once I had the moving metal around totally under control, I switched to attempts to shape it. This part didn't go as well. For an entire week, I tried everything I could think of, from gentle nudges to brute-force attempts, doing my best to make the metal bend, extend, or change shape in any way, but without success. The metal stayed stubborn and rigid, as if laughing at me in its own metallic way. I was bent over a piece of pipe, trying to bend it, sweat running down my face from the effort.

My arms trembled from how long I had been pushing my affinity into the metal. The pipe didn't care. It just sat there, cold and unmoved, like it was mocking me. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator. Mahya walked over from her workbench and wiped her hands on a rag.

"Maybe you should heat it first." I took her advice, and for the next two days, between engraving, I used one of her forges to heat the same pipe until it glowed a dull red. With the heat roaring in my ears and the metal warm enough to feel through my gloves, I tried again to bend it with the affinity. Sadly, that was also a bust. No matter what I tried, the metal refused to bend, and that was that. After some thought, I decided to use the same method I used to create the stone balls way back on Earth.

Meaning, to fill the metal with my mana and, through it, shape the metal. This part went better. The pipe hummed faintly when my mana seeped into it, and the resistance shifted from impossible to barely manageable. It took an ungodly amount of mana to fill a relatively short pipe, and even more concentration to bend it, but it worked. The pipe creaked and finally curved under the pressure of my will.

It wasn't a practical solution yet, since a half-meter length of pipe took over five thousand units of mana, and the actual bending gave me a killer headache, but I treated it as progress in the right direction. Sadly, I was mistaken. Mahya took the pipe, weighed it in her hand, and in one motion broke it cleanly right at the bend. The sound echoed through the workshop like a slap. I stared at it, perplexed.

"Why did you do that?"

"To see if it's a viable solution." She didn't even look apologetic, just thoughtful. I sighed. She was right, despite my annoyance. The bent part had clearly weakened the metal rather than properly shaping it. Well, as Mahya liked to say, back to the drawing board. After a few more days of failing to shape metal through my affinity, I gave up on the practice for a while. It was obvious I was lacking something.

Whether it was better control over the affinity or a deeper understanding of metal, I didn't know yet, but something was blocking the progress. And truth be told, I was simply tired of banging my head against that invisible wall. The headaches didn't help either. They hit every time the metal refused to bend, like the universe was tapping me on the skull and telling me to cut it out.

Mahya finished making the metal sheets we needed for the engraving and switched to taking apart the ship skeleton we had built on the island. Initially, she planned for it to be shaped like a triangular arrowhead. But after the work we did with the dead zones and the new elongated egg design she settled on, she had to break the old one apart. Watching her do it was heartbreaking.

Every piece she broke away echoed through the workshop, and every time the metal snapped, she let out a defeated sigh and looked like she was about to cry. I could understand it in a way. We had invested a lot of time and effort in building the skeleton, and seeing it dismantled felt wrong, like destroying something that had potential. But her reaction seemed excessive even by that standard.

I kept asking her if she was okay, and the third time I did, she set the metal aside, wrapped her arms around me, and burst out crying. Not light sniffle, but a full-on sobbing with body shakes. That was definitely over the top.

"What's going on?" I asked, holding her steady. She kept crying, her shoulders shaking against my chest. I rubbed her back in slow circles and channeled Emotional Healing for a second. I didn't want to overwhelm her; only to give her enough to get it out faster. She cried even harder, as if the healing spell had cracked open something she had been holding back. It took a few minutes for her to calm down, her breaths finally slowing.

"What's going on?" I asked again.

"Your reaction is way over the top." She stared at me for a few seconds, eyes unfocused. Then she shook her head and blinked, like she was waking up from a deep dream.

"I don't know."

"So why the crying?" She shook her head again, wiping her face with her sleeve.

"I don't know. It killed me to break apart what we built, like I was breaking an actual ship. I don't know why."

"We should take a break," I said.

"We've been working on this thing for months now. Maybe a change of atmosphere will help." She sniffed and wiped her cheeks.

"Yeah, you're right." We spent the rest of the day sightseeing, wandering through the streets, and looking for the craziest contraptions we could find. The place never disappointed. Within minutes, Mahya's mood started to lift. One shop had a machine that trimmed candle wicks. At least, that was the theory. The moment you lit the candle, a tiny metal bird popped out of a box, flapped its wings, pecked a lever, which shot a marble into a spinning funnel.

The marble rolled down a track, hit a bell, bounced off a spring, and finally dropped onto a pressure plate that poked the wick with a needle. The whole thing took twenty seconds and barely shortened anything. The gnome who built it stood proudly beside it, absolutely convinced it was a masterpiece. Another stall showed off a device meant to crack nuts. You placed the nut on a platform, wound a crank, and a chain of wooden arms started swinging one after another. The last arm pushed a metal boot forward.

The boot kicked the nut, sending it skittering across the street, completely uncracked. The gnome running the stall insisted the boot was calibrated for only "premium nuts," whatever that meant. Mahya laughed at both of those, but her favorite was the self-stirring soup pot. A mechanical ladle dipped into the pot, lifted out soup, poured it into a tiny bucket, which tipped onto a seesaw that flipped a spoon into the air. The spoon spun three times before landing back in the pot with a splash.

It stirred absolutely nothing, but it made every single gnome in the shop cheer. By the time we reached the central plaza, Mahya was smiling again, shaking her head every few steps at the sheer madness around us. The tension from earlier faded, replaced by the kind of amusement only gnomes could inspire. On our way back to the inn, Mahya walked quietly beside me, lost in thought. She kept her hands tucked into her jacket pockets, eyes fixed on the cobblestones.

The streetlights flickered, throwing jittery shadows across the road.

"You okay?" I asked.

"Yeah, I'm fine, just thinking."

"Dangerous." She laughed and lightly kicked my leg.

"What were you thinking about?"

"My breakdown." She nudged a loose bolt on the ground with the toe of her boot.

"It's irrational and illogical. I'm not an emotional person, so I have no idea what happened."

"We did work a lot." She shook her head.

"It's not that. We worked for longer stretches of time in Lumis when we converted the bikes to Magitech, on your and Al's houses, and when we retrofitted everything with cores. It's not it." I had nothing useful to add, so I slid an arm around her waist. She leaned in for a moment, let out a breath, then straightened and kept walking.

"I should check with Al about it," she suddenly said, glancing toward the glowing windows of the workshop district.

"Why?"

"Maybe it's a side effect from the calming potion he's making for me." She rubbed her temples as if expecting a headache. I hadn't thought about that angle.

"Yeah, you should. I also think we should move on. This place is fun, but we've been here long enough. All of us need a change of scenery, especially Al."

"I don't want to leave this world yet." She kicked a pebble ahead of us, watching it bounce down the street.

"I have an idea that would cheer you up." She turned her head slightly, eyebrows raised in a silent question.

"A group of stretchings in the inn told me about an area with some dungeons. They cleared two of them, but the rest were too dangerous for them." Mahya snorted softly.

"I thought they guarded dungeon locations in secret from other groups."

"Yeah, but if it's too dangerous for a group, they sell the location." I shoved my hands into my pockets as a gust of cool air rolled down the street.

"One of them offered to sell it to me a few days ago, and I'm pretty sure they didn't find a buyer yet. They wanted too much."

"How much?"

"Five thousand gold." She whistled under her breath.

"It is too much."

"Yeah, but I have the money, and you need to let out some steam." She chewed the inside of her cheek as she walked, thinking it over. Then she nodded.

"Yeah, you're right. I'll pay you back." I waved her off with a flick of my hand.

"Don't mention it. That's what friends are for." When we got back, Mahya went to talk with Al. She came into the kitchen twenty minutes later, looking relieved, her shoulders looser and her expression calmer.

"What did he say?" I asked, stirring the pot on the stove.

"I was right, it might be the potion. For now, we decided that I'll stop taking it for a few days, and he'll look in the books for a solution."

"Good," I said and went back to cooking. She leaned against the counter, finally looking more like herself again. Over dinner, I mentioned the idea of the dungeons to Al. His face lit up like a thousand suns, and if he wasn't an uptight prince, I was pretty sure he would have jumped at me with hugs and kisses. Instead, he sat straighter than usual, hands neatly folded, but the excitement practically buzzed off him. Rue was also all in.

He did three full turns in place like he was chasing his tail, then woofed in pure delight, his tail thumping against the floor hard enough to rattle a chair leg. Yeah, we all needed a change of pace.