Half an hour later, I was looking at a dozen prototypes, each able to launch a thirty-pound mass by a mile. That distance was far from enough, but that was just a part of it.
At the same time, I finished the design of not only the ammunition, but also a mechanism that they could use to imbue them with mana using the crushers. It wasn't as effective as me doing it directly, but considering I couldn't be everywhere at once, efficiency tradeoffs were more than acceptable.
However, the ammunition that the prototypes had been using wasn't forged by me, but by the other blacksmiths. They were essentially chunks of iron, and nothing more. Having live ammunition that would fragment violently seemed like a bad idea for tests.
Those I would forge separately. I tightened my grip on the hammer, suddenly excited. I was curious whether I could use Wisdom on forging.
"Terry, you're in charge. Continue testing the variants. I want one that could launch thirty-pound ammo at least three miles without reducing the rate of fire below six a minute, but if it can't be solved, prioritize range."
"You're leaving, sir?" he asked.
"Just for an hour or so. I have something urgent that needs to be addressed," I replied as I opened a gate and returned to the fourth floor.
I wanted privacy for my next experiment. It would be my first attempt at using Wisdom for forging. Not only did I not want to reveal I could do it unless it was necessary, but I was also not sure if it would be entirely safe. With my Health and armor, I could handle most physical accidents.
"Let's start with something simple," I muttered while I started creating a dagger, a weapon that I had lacked the skill to use, which was a good comparison point. As I forged it, I made sure to focus on my Wisdom, trying to immerse myself into the same ephemeral mode I had achieved while using it to empower the avalanche attack.
I wasn't sure if it would work. The attack was one explosive push, laced with my mana. Meanwhile, I was creating the dagger through ordinary forging techniques, not even sure I was using Wisdom properly.
The result was … interesting. It wasn't a failure, but I wasn't sure if it was a success either.
"What a fascinating weapon," I muttered as I held the dagger, which radiated a sense of … dagger. It was a subtle feeling, but not an unfamiliar one. I had already felt it before, but only while launching the attacks. It might be weak, but the fact that I could feel it during its passive state was promising.
The test with a few attacks showed that it actually worked as intended. The improvement was significant.
Then, I repeated the same with a sword. Once again, in its passive state, there was a sense of radiating energy. However, unlike the dagger, there was little difference between the attack, negligible compared to the energy that could be imbued by the skill itself.
"Now, to the real test," I muttered as I forged twenty daggers, but this time, I used mana to hasten the process. Previously, it had been enough to completely ruin any conceptual weight that the weapons had carried.
This time, by trying to concentrate on Wisdom, the results were better. Not as good as I had hoped. There was no distinct presence I could feel while the dagger was resting, and even when attacking, the presence of the attack was weaker than a handcrafted one.
"Excellent," I started as I forged a mortar shell rapidly, strictly by hand to test its presence before I could mass produce it.
Unfortunately, once I finished it, I was met with an unpleasant surprise. Even handcrafted, there was no hint of presence in mortar shells. I tried to make them smaller, stronger, made of pure metals, with various alloys… None worked.
I sighed. While I was glad that I had made some progress when it came to using Wisdom, I still had no idea about the core process.
It started from the core of the principle. What was an individual object in the first place? Was it some kind of philosophical entity like metaphysics philosophers, going as far back as Plato — maybe even more — theorized about, akin to Forms and Ideas.
Forms refer to the non-physical, timeless, absolute, and unchangeable essences of all things. The physical objects in the real world were supposed to be just mere imitations of those ideas.
Up until I received Wisdom and started to feel some kind of conceptual weight behind certain items, I would have never even considered such an idea. Even after the Cataclysm, I continued to believe they weren't real. Yes, mana and magic might have come into existence, but those were just another physical phenomenon that we were yet to define.
What I was feeling from Wisdom, and the results of my own experimentation, challenged that.
"Take a deep breath," I ordered myself as I felt my breathing quicken in a way I only experienced when I faced an existential crisis like imagining death … or facing the prospect of an upcoming flight. For a moment, I just focused on my breathing, trying to attain some kind of calm.
One that I attained far easier than I had expected. Paradoxically, it pulled me out of that calm, as I realized Wisdom made it easier to attain that mental space.
"No need to panic," I repeated. Yes, it might be true that everything I believed about the sheer existence might be wrong … or I might be just extrapolating something simpler, like the act of forging and interacting with the System. It might be just a restricted version of the Form theory, where my actions were simply being fed by some kind of System library.
The fact that there was no presence of the cannonballs supported the second idea.
Too bad it was all I could do at the moment. I prepared to leave. Without a skill to give me some ideas on how to apply Wisdom, it was difficult to get an immediate solution. And, I lacked that skill —
"Or, do I?" I muttered. I had always acted like I had no Wisdom-based skills, but that wasn't true. I had one.
I had ignored it, mostly because of my multiple near-death experiences while trying to use it. That, and what had been going on was too complicated for me to understand.
But, that changed after several experiments gave me a better idea of what Wisdom had been doing. Maybe I could combine it with my class skills…
I took another deep breath, temptation battling with prudence. I still had no idea when the beast wave would arrive, but we had some critical research to be completed. And, I was afraid that leveling up would change my forging skill fundamentally.
After all, that was what had happened to my Meditation.
I didn't have Intelligence back then, but it didn't change the fact that my Meditation operated based on the same general principles as Maria's meditation, which was the direct, modular manipulation of mana based on flow and movement, almost like an arcane mana flow. And, the same was true for my Mana Forge and Mana Repair.
Looking back, maybe it was about the fact that I upgraded those skills with Maria's assistance … Yet another interesting question I wasn't able to answer immediately.
I paused, wondering if this was the best time to test it. While I had hundreds of assistants, currently, none of them were capable enough to mass produce the shells required for the new cannons. And, there was a risk that the transformed skill would lose some of its earlier features.
"Maybe I could start with Repair," I muttered even as I grabbed one of the Epic spearheads I had created, considering damaging it before trying to repair it by using Decay. Maybe it would trigger the development. Between Forge and Repair, the latter was the one I could sacrifice more easily.
But, it carried the risk of changing how Observe worked, which I relied on for a lot of things.
It was a tough call. On one hand, having a Wisdom-based skill — one that I could poke around with without potentially killing myself — might prove very beneficial. On the other hand, the change might temporarily render my production skills useless.
"A compromise," I decided. First, I went to the first floor, where Harold was training our new army, and forged a hundred of each type of weapon to improve uncommon skills, and ten each to maximize the Rare skills.
Then, I picked all the available claws and turned them into the alloy that other smiths could shape into shells if necessary. I even set up a dedicated production line and visited the prototypes for the steam cannons.
Then, I visited the team working on the cannons. "More than enough for the mass production," I said as I watched the show, where they used the steam-cannon to launch shells almost five miles away on plains. Considering we would be launching them from on top of a mountain, seven miles was not out of the question.
"How many do we need, sir?" Terry asked.
I paused, thinking for a moment. "How about a hundred?" I asked.
"A … a hundred? Wouldn't that be a little excessive?" he asked, shocked.
I shrugged. "When fighting against a beast wave of unknown size, there's no such thing as overkill," I replied. "Just make sure to produce enough shells to sustain a long bombardment."
With that, I returned to the fourth floor, feeling confident to focus on my next task.