Blacksmithing Is Child’s Play for a Dark Mage - Chapter 117

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 117
Crack!
The earth split open with a violent thrust.
Excavation Spell.
Quite literally, a spell for digging up the ground.
There was a legend that it had been created for mining development—an extraordinarily practical form of life magic.
Depending on the amount of magical power, considerable quantities of earth could be excavated in a single cast. It was said that truly skilled mages, or even those of the highest ranks, could bore through solid rock with remarkable ease.
Yet the pit that had opened beneath Madon’s feet—a mere 1st Class mage—showed excavation volumes that would be impressive for a 3rd Class caster.
“Ahhh… I can actually do this much!”
Madon, overcome with emotion, caressed his staff tenderly.
Stroke after stroke, with meticulous care. Though there was something unsettling about the glistening sheen in his eyes.
The secret lay in this staff itself.
[Obsession-Receiving Bone Excavation Staff]
Quality: Superior
Grade: Magical Artifact
An excavation-specialized staff carved from bone by the Crazy Craftsman.
It amplifies the power of earth-digging magic threefold.
However, the user becomes deeply obsessed with the staff.
Function: Excavation Magic Power Increased 3x
Function: Status Affliction – Staff Obsession Induced
Tay had crafted it himself and distributed it among the mages he’d hired.
Why, you ask?
To dig the canal.
Hiring mages accelerated construction speed exponentially.
Skeleton Soldiers were an inexhaustible labor force, admittedly, but they were still just laborers with shovels.
Each scoop of earth required physical time. But a single cast from a mage’s excavation spell could clear in an instant what a dozen Skeleton Soldiers would spend half a day removing.
That was why Tay had employed mages in such quantities, and Madon was one of them.
Of course, befitting a staff made by the Crazy Craftsman, the obsession debuff came attached—
But so what? Mages who doted on their staves were already common enough in the world.
The severity was simply heightened. Sleeping while cradling it, seating it beside them at meals—such things were hardly more than endearing quirks, were they?
The construction site itself operated with flawless coordination.
Mages like Madon cast excavations, tearing through earth at staggering speed.
Then staff members commanding Skeleton Soldiers would smooth the excavated soil and layer stone slabs along the exposed ground.
Since they were building a canal, the bottom and walls had to be finished in stone. Leave it as bare earth and the water would seep straight through.
Mages dug. Skeletons refined. Stone was laid.
A division of labor that moved like a conveyor belt, smooth and efficient.
And on another section, mages and construction workers from the Construction Guild were busy installing water wheels.
Word was they planned to connect forges and mills to those wheels.
‘The Maker Baron really doesn’t do things halfway, does he?’
Madon marveled anew as he surveyed the scene.
A canal project, yes—but with water wheels and a forge included as part of the package. Even to the eyes of a common sellsword mage, the scale and meticulous planning of this construction site were extraordinary.
Then.
Ding. Ding. Ding.
The sound of a bell rang out across the site.
The signal that today’s work had ended.
“Hah. Fried chicken and beer tonight.”
A broad smile spread across Madon’s face.
There was a separate dining hall for laborers on the construction site. You had to pay to eat there, but they served Maker Barony’s specialty products: fried chicken and beer.
Crispy, golden-brown poultry, paired with a refreshing glass of cold beer.
No finer reward for a body wrung dry of magical power all day long. Perhaps this was why everyone worked without complaint—because fried chicken was a universal truth, even across worlds.
Staff held close to his chest, Madon made his way briskly toward the dining hall.
And so Maker Barony continued its relentless advance, yet another day closer to prosperity.
* * *
Splash-splash-splash-splash-splash~
The sound of rushing water filled the valley completely.
Hundreds upon hundreds of bone jars stood in neat rows, ceaselessly pouring out their contents.
They were positioned downstream of a mountain range’s valley stream.
Hundreds of Bone Jars dumped water day and night into a sizable reservoir constructed at that location.
Hundreds of never-ending water-generating artifacts.
The result was dramatic.
Due to the sheer volume of water, what had been a mere stream had become a proper river.
A creek elevated to river status in the blink of an eye—an astonishing acceleration of nature’s work.
The Bone Jar had accomplished in mere months what nature would take tens of thousands of years to complete.
Cartographers would clutch their heads if they knew. Yesterday’s thin line marking the waterway would need to be redrawn in bold.
“Mm. Things are progressing well.”
Tay gazed down at the sight and nodded with satisfaction.
But there was one detail worth noting here.
Gazed down, he had said.
That’s right—Tay was riding a skeletal steed, and it was flying through the sky.
What on earth was this?
A skull flying through the heavens?
One might well ask.
But it was something Rant had become capable of creating once he reached Class 4.
The Skull Phantom Steed.
An Undead with a body of bone wrapped in spectral essence, possessing the power of flight.
It raced through the empty air, trailing ghostly blue flames beneath its hooves—eerie and yet somehow radiating an undeniable coolness.
Its combat abilities were exceptional, and its speed was impressive.
How fast? Riding it from Maker Barony to the southern Valley of Old Huit Barony at the far east took three hours.
Because it traveled through the sky at one hundred kilometers per hour!
Extraordinarily fast!
It ignored roads and mountains and rivers entirely, flying in a perfect straight line.
No obstacles, no signals, never tiring like a horse would. By the standards of this age, it was nothing short of a personal helicopter.
Now inspecting his Domain had become as routine as a commute.
“Was there really any need to come see it in person?” Rant asked flatly from his own Phantom Steed flying parallel.
Everything in those reports reached his desk; yet here was the lord himself, flying three hours just to verify it with his own eyes. From an administrator’s perspective, it seemed terribly inefficient.
“I wanted a visual confirmation.”
Tay swept his gaze along the new river branch spreading from the reservoir.
Numbers on paper and the actual sight were not the same thing. Even SimCity was only fun when you were watching the screen.
There was no report that could replace the thrill of witnessing a river born with his own money, observed firsthand.
“Truly magnificent.”
“Indeed. To undertake such a massive project…….”
Rant gazed down at the reservoir and the canal construction site below, then asked suddenly:
“What do you intend to do once the canal is complete, my lord?”
“Create a specialty product.”
“A specialty product?”
“That’s right. Without a proper commodity, I’d be reduced to farming alone and running the territory at a loss forever.”
The waterway was merely a blood vessel. No matter how well you opened a blood vessel, without blood flowing through it, the whole thing was useless.
Cargo to haul upon the canal. Goods that sold for profit. Those were what would make this grand project break even.
Bake, Zain, Huit—three rustic Domains with no specialty products, forever looking to the sky. Now it was time to give them a flagship commodity to sell.
Rant glanced at Tay out of the corner of his eye.
“You seem to have something in mind.”
At that question, Tay’s mouth curved into a grin.
“I do. Alcohol.”
“Alcohol?”
Rant’s eyebrows rose slightly.
“Distilled Spirit, to be precise.”
“Distilled Spirit?”
This time, Rant too seemed genuinely surprised.
And for good reason.
In this age, Distilled Spirit was an expensive luxury.
Of course, for the nobility it was hardly a luxury at all, but for common folk, it was the very epitome of extravagance.
A dream drink—something an ordinary person might wet their lips with once or twice in their entire life, perhaps on a festival day.
Why?
Because fire was required.
A brief lesson in the basics.
What is Distillation?
Put alcohol in a pot and heat it. The alcohol fumes—the essence of spirits, in other words—evaporate before the water does.
Pass that vapor through a cold tube and collect it again as droplets, and out comes a spirit far more potent and concentrated than the original.
This is Distillation.

In other words, it’s a concentration process—extracting only the spirit from the alcohol. You boil diluted liquor mixed with water, then filter out only the pure essence.
The problem is that “boiling” part.
To extract a single bottle of distilled spirit, you have to keep a cauldron bubbling for hours on end, and all the while firewood gets sucked into the furnace without pause. It’s the same fuel-burning structure as salt evaporation—a financial hemorrhage.
And on top of that, grain prices take their heavy cut too.
Alcohol, after all, is made by fermenting grain.
Tay’s Domain yields decent harvests, but other regions are plagued by crop failures and droughts in turn.
When people don’t even have enough grain to eat, the idea of fermenting grain into alcohol? That’s a quick way to be branded self-indulgent.
Fuel costs and raw material costs—doubled expenses mean there’s no way around distilled spirit being a luxury good.
But.
Tay has both of those problems solved.
Grain will pour out abundantly from the Bone Jar water and fertilizer.
As for fuel, he has something prepared.
“…So you mean to use that Magnifying Glass?”
Rant narrowed his eyes and hit upon the answer.
“Exactly that.”
That oversized Magnifying Glass they’d used to concentrate salt brine at the salt flats.
Just place it over the distillation cauldron and you’re done.
Distilled spirit boiled by sunlight.
A solar distillery where alcohol drips without burning a single stick of wood.
Others can’t afford to make the spirit because of fuel costs, but Tay extracts it from free sunlight.
A structure where the game is lost from the raw materials themselves—a market-destroying exploit, turning a luxury good into mass-market pricing.
It’s already a proven technology.
One Magnifying Glass wrung out once by salt, then wrung out twice more by alcohol—an economical infrastructure recycling at its finest.
“Truly… as expected of the master. Your resourcefulness is extraordinary.”
Rant shook his head slowly, uttering something between amazement and resignation.
“Resourcefulness, he says.”
Tay cleared his throat with a solemn air.
“This is what you call creative thinking. Cre. A. Tive. Think. Ing.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“The nuance is different. The nuance is.”
And with that loose conclusion, the two turned their horses’ heads back toward home.
The Black Mage Is Too Easy as a Blacksmith
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Automaton G
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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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