Blacksmithing Is Child’s Play for a Dark Mage - Chapter 114

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————

Chapter 114
To Ars’s clipped question from the shadows, Tay answered with a flat drawl.
Loud, sure—but what of it? Against the lightness of knowing everything was finished, even this noise became cheerful background music for the journey home.
War was over. The ceremony was over. The orchestration was over.
Now all that remained was to go home and expand his own holdings.
* * *
The Age of Grand Domain Management!
What awaited Tay upon his return home was not the romantic vision the name promised, but a bureaucratic hellscape.
Tay spent a full half-year receiving and transferring the domain—handing over and taking on in equal measure.
Which was inevitable. After all, they were exchanging entire territories at once.
On the receiving end alone: a fifth of the marquessate. On the giving end: nine domains’ worth of land.
Land registers, tax ledgers, population rolls, warehouse inventories—the documents to be transferred formed a literal mountain range.
Moving a single house left him exhausted; a full territorial exchange was something else entirely.
The largest mutual trade in continental history. He found himself wishing to prostrate before his past self for having pre-hired two hundred administrators.
Besides, in exchange for handing over the Gehenna Earldom wholesale, he’d squeezed out substantial customs privileges as sweetener—so in the end, he’d sold dear.
Tay wasn’t the sort to give away the crown jewels for nothing.
Moreover, the domains he received came with quasi-noble administrators who simply remained in place.
Usually bureaucrats.
Those rooted in the land, doing the actual work—they had no reason to pack up just because the lord changed.
Yesterday they filed reports to the marquis; today they’d file them to Tay instead. The paymaster’s name changed; that was all.
The knights, by contrast, followed their old lord entirely.
They’d apparently arranged to carve estates out of his new holdings.
Knights are creatures bound to their liege and to honor.
With new manors promised as spoils of war, they had no reason to remain under a strange Black Mage.
So Tay was able to fill the vacant knight positions with his own people—a favorable arrangement all around.
So between wrestling with documents, shuffling personnel in and out, and counting warehouses over and over,
the season shifted into winter before he knew it.
In this world’s reckoning, it was the time when almost all external activity was formally forbidden.
Roads vanished under snow, wars ceased, and lords huddled before their hearths.
The entire continent had officially entered the season when everything beyond the blankets was dangerous.
Of course.
The common wisdom that winter was the off-season—that was everyone else’s reality.
In Tay’s lexicon, winter was always the perfect time to start something ambitious.
* * *
A snow-swept winter plain.
And there, in the thick of it, a line of wagons laden with towers built of bone.
Bone Tower wagons.
Upon those wagons stood Black Mages, each bellowing orders in their turn.
“Dig!”
“Khaaaagh!”
At the command, thousands of Skeleton Soldiers raised their pickaxes and spades in perfect unison and drove them into the earth.
Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
Thousands upon thousands of skeletons excavated with mechanical precision, not a single line out of step.
Frozen winter ground or no, they never tired, never rested—just dug and dug.
Instead of a work song, there was only the rattle and clatter of bone on bone.
The ultimate infinite-motion construction site, nowhere else on earth its equal!
The Bone Tower, incidentally, was another creation of Tay’s—forged through his skill, the Mad Engineer.
An artifact that let him control up to five hundred skeletons at once. The skeletal version of the Abomination Flesh Tower, you might say—the budget model.
Load it onto a wagon and roll it forward, and a single Black Mage could command an entire five-hundred-strong skeleton construction squad.
However.
The Bone Tower required an operator to function, and that operator paid a price.
Skeleton Addiction.
A signature debuff from the Mad Engineer’s workshop—leaving the holder feeling hollow and anxious whenever skeletons weren’t near.
So the Black Mages manning the Bone Towers all wore skull-faced masks and helms upon their heads.
Supposedly, keeping a skull on your head steadied the mind?
And so the Black Mages at the work site had all become a suspicious-looking band of skull-masked figures.
Anyone who didn’t know better would swear they were illegal practitioners of the Dark Arts.
Well, a mild compulsion disorder. Nothing too serious.
Probably.
In any case, this was how Tay managed to push forward with large-scale road construction despite the winter.
While others huddled against hearths and insisted the world beyond their blankets was treacherous, the sound of shovels rang out ceaselessly across Tay’s Domain.
He now commanded thirty thousand Skeleton Soldiers.
And he was deploying a full twenty thousand of them to this grand construction project.
Two-thirds of his military strength reduced to manual labor.
Anyone who heard would call him mad—but there were no wars in winter anyway. Better to put idle skeletons to work with a spade than watch them languish. It was, in a manner of speaking, sound economics.
A perfect off-season enterprise for an Undead legion.
And it was not mere excavation and compaction.
He was laying roads with mass-produced Brick Tiles, smooth and swift.
The Brick Tiles themselves poured from an expanded factory complex that churned them out night and day without pause.
Raw material extraction through final installation—all handled in-house. Complete vertical integration. The continent had never seen a construction enterprise quite like it.
And this road possessed one remarkable feature.
First: its width.
Six merchant carts could pass abreast without touching.
In an age when roads were often so narrow that two carts scraped wheels if they dared meet head-on,
a six-lane thoroughfare of such magnitude was a vision from fantasy. Merchants passing by stood slack-jawed at the sheer scale.
And at intervals, he had constructed small fortified shelters—waystations enclosed by walls.
The world teemed with threats to travelers: bandits, monsters, predators of every stripe.
He had built these rest stations and encampments beforehand, sanctuaries for the weary.
Anyone who had ever wandered knows the exquisite comfort of stretching one’s legs inside a walled shelter for the night.
Of course, there was a price.
And naturally, using the road itself carried a fee as well.
Toll for passage. Fee for shelter use. A revenue structure seen often enough elsewhere.
“Kwa-ha-ha! This is my toll road empire!”
Tay surveyed the completed section of highway, grinning with childlike delight.
Those around him had no idea what “toll road empire” meant, but their lord was so pleased that they applauded anyway.
When no one understands the joke, one must laugh alone. Solitary, but unavoidable.
With the road construction left entirely to his subordinates,
Tay himself turned his attention to a new venture.
* * *
As Tay’s Dark Magic seeped into the heap of bones, they began to shift and creak, groaning against one another.
They splintered into fine fractures, twisted, intertwined and tangled.
What emerged at last was a structure like a dense tangle of thorns.
A bone-woven spine fence, one might say—a peculiar object riddled with gaps and hollows.
“Good. Very well made indeed.”
Tay nodded with satisfaction.
“Oho! So you employ knowledge from that other world in such a manner!”
The voice perched on his shoulder spoke up at once, eager to show off.
“Hey. Keep quiet. That’s a secret.”
“My! Was that a secret!?”
Too late. The words were already spilled, the tongue already loose.
As expected, Ars emerged from the shadows, tilting his head forward. His eyes gleamed behind his spectacles.
“That other world?”
“Secret.”
“Hmm… a secret of the contract-holder, is it? How intriguing.”
Ars adjusted his spectacles with a slight push, and a merchant’s smile spread across his lips.
“What would it take for you to tell me?”
“Name your price.”
“I shall consider it for now.”
A true devil. He never expected information without payment.
The way he broached every secret with negotiation first—the very epitome of infernal commerce.
“But tell me: what is this?”
Ars gestured toward the strange structure before them.
Tay’s creation.
It stood roughly ten meters tall vertically, about three meters across. A rectangular tower-like edifice—and several of them had been erected in a row.
Towering bone-thorn windscreens lined up in succession, a sight unseen anywhere else in the world.
“It’s called a Gradierberg—or in your local tongue, a Salt Concentration Tower.”
“A Salt Concentration Tower?”
“You know that seawater contains salt, don’t you?”
“I do, though I confess the relevance escapes me.”
“There’s a technique for extracting salt from seawater. Salt Ponds.”
A brief note on practical matters here.
It’s not that salt ponds don’t exist in this era. But salt made from seawater is expensive!
The method involves pouring seawater into massive cauldrons and boiling it down over a wood fire—which means burning mountains of timber just to harvest a handful of salt. The fuel costs consume the salt’s value entirely.
That’s why salt production in this age relies almost universally on rock salt—salt mined from the earth in raw chunks. Rock salt is simply cheaper than seawater salt; it’s common knowledge in the trade.
Though even calling it cheap misses the point—salt didn’t earn the nickname “little gold” for nothing.
Salt is inherently expensive.
Humans cannot survive without it. Go without eating it and you die. There’s no substitute. That’s why it’s been used as currency in its own right. Demand is infinite while supply is strangled—a perfect market for essential goods.
But here’s the thing.
Tay knew a way to produce salt from seawater salt ponds that was economical.
He’d read about it in a web novel in his past life!!
Whether it was absurd nonsense or not, he’d even searched for it back then!
He’d carefully read through comment threads debating whether it actually worked—”Is this really possible?” “Yeah. There’s a real one in Germany”—and all of it. Never did he imagine that idle trivia would become a new business venture in another world. People really should absorb everything they can.
And that’s exactly what this is: the Gradierberg.
The principle is simple.
From the peak of this bone-thorn tower, seawater is allowed to trickle down bit by bit.
The seawater then flows down through the dense mesh of thorns, and in doing so, spreads thin and wide across the surface.
The Black Mage Is Too Easy as a Blacksmith
Author |
Automaton G
Publisher |
Samyang C&C Inc.
Editorial Director |
Editorial Department
Published by |
Samyang C&C Inc. – DreamBooks
Address |
7th Floor, Gwangseong Building, 28 Bongeunsaro 114-gil, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Korea
UCI |
G720:N+A063-20260511100
Blog |
blog.naver.com/dreambookss
Twitter (X) |
@dreambookss
Submissions |
[email protected]
The contents of this book may not be used in any form or by any means without the written permission of Samyang C&C Inc. – DreamBooks.

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————