Evren had been getting up early every morning, exercising and running around the wall inside the town. His body was incredibly resilient and healed quickly. Even if he went to sleep sore, tired and battered, he would always wakeup refreshed, which is why he was getting into the habit of exercising twice a day. His evening workouts were usually a little more exhaustive. As he ran, it would usually get dark before he finished, so he would cast the light spell ahead of him while running after he passed the previous one. When looked from afar, one would see a light following the wall inside the town.
His plan to work on blacksmithing through the winter had also begun. He would make a mold, cast it, and finish it to just be a long flat bar. He would then use that bar to work on engraving before melting it down again and repeating the process over and over. He also had a billet of iron he would practice folding and drawing with. He'd draw it out to length, fold it in half, forge weld the metal and then repeat. He would also practice making basic things like hooks, nails, crude tableware, scissors, farming tools, and in preparation for winter, a snow shovel.
It had been two weeks since he had the big hunt, and when Evren got up, he found it to be snowing. As he walked down the stairs from the apartment, he slipped, but caught himself before falling. He wanted to put salt down, but he didn't want to waste his salt. Shrugging he entered the shop and threw some coal into the forge. It would die down at night, but he used it so much that it would never really go out.
His exercise this morning would be to dig a path around the inside of the wall. As it continued to snow, he continued to shovel it. After doing two laps of the town, he took a break, got something to eat and began to practice his forging. He wasn't sure how long it was going to snow for, but it had passed getting boring and moved on to tedious. So instead, he was going to try something different. He would make knives. They would be simple, single edged knives with a twisted handle.
After he got the shape, he'd grind down a rough edge, engrave the blade, and repeat. When he reached ten blades, he would melt them down to start over. After three sets of practice runs, he checked the snow outside to find it had piled up considerably and was still accumulating. He used his solid iron snow shovel to clear the steps up to the apartment and called it a night after exercising without going for an evening run.
When morning came, the snow had stopped but even the shovel area was deep. He shoveled his way down the stairs to the forge and threw some coal into the embers. He shoveled the area around the shop, and then shoveled his lap around the town. It was a considerable amount of work for as deep as the snow was. Where he had shoveled previously was visible as a slight dip in the snow.
When he finished, he got himself some water to drink and wiped himself down of the sweat, followed by eating his morning meal. With a sudden bout of inspiration, he went outside the shop to the shoveled area, and using 'jet' melted all the remaining snow. Feeling satisfied that he didn't set anything on fire in the process he went back into the forge.
Evren went back inside and started practice with drawing and folding the billet he was using for that, then went on to making knives again. By the second set of knives, he felt confident to move on to double edged daggers that have a blade twenty-five cm long with a tang instead of a twisted metal handle. He would make one handle and try to make all the daggers' tangs fit that one handle, which not only included getting the size correct, but also having the rivet holes line up properly.
This proved to be a challenging task. He kept the first one he made and used it as a reference for the following daggers. Many times, the blade length was wrong, the thickness was off, or the width of the blade was inconsistent. The tang only fit one out of four blades, and then it was typically too loose a fitting. When it got dark, he would work for an hour or two longer, then exercise and do some laps of the town.
As the days wore on, he became consistent with forging blades with similar dimensions. He moved on to short swords, and now had to create a guard, which he was unused to making. As he continued this from day to day, his acceptable level of completion increased in quality considerably. Midway through winter, he could make consistent swords from start to finish within a day. One day while taking a break for a meal, Evren was reading through one of the books he hadn't touched yet when he came across something that answered a question that he had been wondering about for several months now.
The excerpt read as follows, "Holy silver, despite its name is a colorless metal, which can only be found deep within dormant volcanos. While found to be a bit softer than steel, the magical properties of this metal can augment the missing strength, producing a toughness that rivals that of orichalcum. Holy State Grandia has declared all holy silver to be property of the church, and any found will be seized immediately, and the owner susceptible to church laws. The largest amount ever found in a single instance is one gram. The Holy State Grandia maintains its entire supply of holy silver in the form of a sword named, "Decretum", which was used by Pope Amon the 15th during the crusades in the 18th century Seeclind."
Evren stared at the text for a while before saying, "Does that mean that clear ingot is holy silver? Why the hell is there so much just sitting around in a back alley shop? This is crazy." Evren swallowed and thought to the ingot sitting on the bench in the shop below him. "If I would have known that I would have used that instead of the celestial bronze for the runes."
Evren stood and walked back to the forge thinking, 'I should probably play with that ingot later, after I've gotten plenty of practice. For now, I'm going to go practice making swords from drawing iron rather than casting."
Evren first thought of using the billet of metal he had been drawing and folding but that had reduced in size, and he thought the metal might need to be melted down again before it would make a good sword. He had read in the journal that folding the metal was good for uniformity, but too much more than a dozen was too much, with around fifteen to sixteen being ideal.
To save time, and because it was still only practice, he had decided to fold the iron three times before shaping into a sword. He would then melt it down into an ingot and repeat. The additional thing he would now begin to create is the guard, which he wanted to be able to fit onto the sword properly before melting and repeating. He would also take the time to forge the fuller into the blade.
During his breaks he would read Von's journal, or one of his other books, and occasionally he would draw pictures of swords to try to find a design he liked. He still used the heavy practice swords once a day with his morning exercise, but he felt the quillons needed to be bent forward a bit instead of a straight design.
In one reading, he had read about incorporating something called a rain guard into the guard, or as a separate piece between the guard and the blade. The rain guard would be sized to fit over the end of the sheath to keep water out of it. That was another thing Evren had to think about, the sheath. He had only made one of those so far, and the quality was not something he was impressed with. The sheath for the dagger he has looks good, a silver metal tip and end piece he now knew was called a locket and was wrapped in a dark brown leather. The quiver was ornately decorated though, and he thought about decorating the sheath with a similar design. So, on days he would draw sword designs, he would also design for the decoration for the sheath, inspired by the quiver.
