(The Backyard Of Soron’s Castle, Supreme Master Argo’s POV)
By sunrise the next day, the castle’s quiet backyard had transformed into a temporary forge zone, with Argo’s apprentices erecting worktables, securing mana furnaces, and assembling an array of hammers, tongs, crucibles, and runic stabilizers with practiced efficiency.
Smoke curled from the furnace vents as the first flames were lit, the air filling with the familiar scent of burning coals and heated metal—a scent Argo had lived his entire life in.
At the center of it all sat the block of Origin Metal, resting on a stone slab like an ancient relic waiting to be awakened.
"Crucible ready, Supreme Master," one apprentice reported, lifting the reinforced container that had been layered with heat runes for extreme-temperature forging.
Argo nodded once.
"Place it inside. Begin with a high-boil mana flame. Let us see how it reacts."
He instructed, as two apprentices lifted the Origin Metal with enchanted tongs and lowered it into the crucible, while another adjusted the furnace levels.
Soon, mana flames began to swell in a bright blue hue as the temperature surged past the melting point of diamond, then tungsten, then celestial alloys, as the air around them shimmered violently from the heat.
A couple minutes passed, then a dozen, then an hour.
Sweat dripped from brows.
Mana flames roared red-hot, as the temperature climbed higher and higher until even the air felt like liquid fire.
However, as they finally pulled the crucible out, the Origin Metal Block came back out completely unchanged, as if unaffected by heat entirely.
*Clang*
Argo stepped forward... inhaled... and touched the block, as to his surprise, the surface temperature did not seem to have changed a single degree.
"...Cold," he whispered. "Exactly as when it went in."
He observed, as the apprentices exchanged uneasy glances.
"Master... this metal does not seem to absorb heat."
"There is no surface expansion... no color shift... nothing."
One leaned closer, voice trembling.
"There is no way to reform this metal through melting..."
He said, as another tested it with his hammer.
*CLANG*
The apprentice hit it with all the force he could muster, however, the hammer simply bounced off harmlessly.
*CRACK*
The head of the hammer split clean in half, as the apprentice recoiled in shock.
"Master, it is not naturally malleable either! Our tools will shatter before we even scratch it!"
He noted, as the others gasped collectively in disbelief.
"It has no thermal reaction, no elemental resonance, no mana conduction... it behaves like no known material."
One said, as Argo rubbed his forehead slowly, before breathing out through his nose.
"So it seems..." he muttered, as he placed a hand on the Origin Metal once more, closing his eyes as if listening to it.
"Just as I suspected. It obeys no rule of conventional forging. It does not melt. It does not soften. It does not resonate. It does not bend..... "
He opened his eyes, resolve sharpening.
"We cannot reform it through heat. And brute force will only destroy our tools. Which means..."
He trailed off, staring at Soron’s sketches attached beside the work station.
"Crafting it into a blade will come with challenges unlike anything we have ever faced."
The apprentices looked at him anxiously.
Argo straightened his spine.
"Prepare the soul forge," he said quietly.
"We are dealing with a metal older than mana itself. We cannot treat it as mere metal. We must treat it... as a living material."
"If conventional methods can’t forge it, then the only way to mold it might be through using the soul forge....."
He said, as the gathered apprentices gasped in shock.
A soul forge drained the strength of one’s soul to operate, and for a blacksmith as advanced in age as Argo to operate it, usually meant certain death.
"Master please, reconsider. It’s too soon to give up hope in all conventional methods and jump to a soul forge.
Please, let’s use other metallurgy tricks first."
One of the apprentices pleaded, however, Argo simply chuckled at his words and shook his head.
"Silly Boy, this is not the time to worry about my health.
The first priority for a blacksmith when accepting a project is to see it to its conclusion.
Everything else becomes an after thought.
If even after entering the forge, your fickle mind wanders towards worldly matters, then you’ll never become a blacksmith worthy of carrying forward the Argo Forge’s name."
He admonished, as the younglings all held their heads down in shame.
The Soul Forge was truly unique in the sense that unlike every other forging mechanism ever conceived, it did not rely on external stimuli to shape its metal.
For ordinary forging, heat softened the structure, hammers altered the form, and mana refined the internal lattice, but the Soul Forge ignored all of these principles completely.
It operated on an entirely different plane of craftsmanship, one that existed between reality and the inner world of the craftsman.
Its core function was simple in theory yet impossibly complex in execution. The forge absorbed the blacksmith’s spirit, siphoning willpower and emotion in steady streams, converting them into a metaphysical force that could bypass the fundamental rigidity of indestructible materials.
Strength, resolve, fear, guilt, ambition, pride, longing, love, hatred, memories, triumphs, regrets, the entirety of the blacksmith’s emotional spectrum became strands of invisible energy that wrapped around the metal like molten hands.
The Soul Forge used these strands to penetrate the structure of a material on a level far deeper than mana ever could, touching the essence rather than the surface.
Where normal flames tried to melt the shell, the Soul Forge burned through the very identity of the substance, rewriting its nature molecule by molecule, or in the case of divine materials, concept by concept.
It could bend what could not be bent, soften what could not be softened, and mold what existed beyond all mundane physics, because it did not attempt to change the material through force, but by imposing the blacksmith’s will directly onto it.
This was the reason only a handful of forgers in history ever survived prolonged use of the Soul Forge.
Each strike of the Soul Hammer took a toll. Each shaping of the metal demanded a fragment of the soul itself.
A weaker craftsman would collapse. A stronger one would age decades in moments.
As only those with an unwavering sense of purpose could hope to wield it without losing themselves.
Which was precisely why it stood as the only tool capable of handling a substance that existed before mana, before laws, before creation itself.
As in Argo’s understanding, Origin Metal was unlikely to bend to heat, pressure or enchantment, and the only way to forge it reliably was using the soul force.