Blacksmithing Is Child’s Play for a Dark Mage - Chapter 46

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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 46
At this stage, I couldn’t even present a business card in this world.
Just look at the Marquis of Harundale—the madman constantly maintains an uncountable number of summoned creatures.
Either way, rank-and-file monsters were handled with the Bone Trap!
And beyond that.
Thanks to the Overpowered Black Mage job skill Lord of Death, my Skeletal Soldiers multiplied dramatically.
With this skill’s power to command unlimited basic Skeletal Soldiers, I’d steadily produced a force of six hundred of them.
And these weren’t ordinary Skeletal Soldiers either—they were bulked-up, fused-bone versions with serious muscle.
In fact, Skeletal Soldiers were overflowing; the real problem was finding equipment for them.
Of course, I solved that by spending my earnings on Heavy Armor for them.
Without the sale of Bone Spears, I might have had to craft equipment for the Skeletal Soldiers myself.
True, I could probably make anything with the Madness Engineer ability—but the thought of all that extra work made me sick. Fortunately, money solved the problem.
“The Lord’s Black Magic is terrifying indeed.”
“The monsters just go crazy and kill themselves!”
“Working under the Lord means food, dead monsters, and everything else! It’s the best!”
The fiefdom’s people cheered at the sight.
Thanks to monsters attacking so frequently, the territory had become a specialty exporter of monster corpses.
Of course, slaves were assigned to butcher and store the carcasses.
With three hundred slaves on hand, they were useful for all sorts of work.
And naturally, that generated decent coin.
It covered all the expenses for accepting freemen and left a surplus.
Beyond the mercenaries I’d hired to defend the fiefdom, monster hunters also began appearing.
And then the Black Spear Guild quietly made contact.
“Lord, if I may—we’d like to establish a branch of the Black Spear Guild here.”
They wanted to set up a branch to serve the mercenaries hunting and selling monsters, and turn a profit themselves.
“So long as you pay your taxes properly, it’s fine. And you mustn’t disturb the peace.”
“Of course, Lord.”
And so the Black Spear Guild’s branch was established.
Then.
The Silver Shield Guild decided to open a branch as well.
In fact, the Silver Shield Guild and I had become strategic business partners.
I’d spent considerable money with them, and since the mercenaries I’d hired for territorial defense belonged to the Silver Shield Guild, it was only natural.
With that, hundreds of mercenaries began passing through a fiefdom of just two thousand people.
“A money-making opportunity!”
I immediately created something new.
Brewery of Sacrificial Offerings
Quality: Excellent
Grade: Magical.
In primitive times long ago, they say offerings were made before brewing, conducting sacred rituals.
Beer is produced at the highest quality without exception.
Function: Excellent-quality beer production.
The Brewery of Sacrificial Offerings!
Once a year.
When you make an offering and conduct the sacred ritual, this brewery produces excellent-quality beer. It has an eerie appearance, but the taste is exquisite.
The offering doesn’t have to be human—any sentient being will do.
And goblins and orcs, while technically monsters, are sentient beings with surprisingly high intelligence.
I immediately captured an orc and made it an offering.
So when I started producing and selling beer……
“Why is the beer here so delicious?”
“Damn. Everything we drank before must’ve been orc piss.”
“Should we just stay? The money’s good anyway…”
The mercenaries who came to my fiefdom to earn coin were caught by my wealth-draining absorption spell!
Of course, I didn’t just make beer.
Along with farming, I worked to raise livestock as well.
And so I chose something……
A poultry farm, to be precise.
“Chickens multiply that fast!?”
“No—why do these damned chickens grow so well?”
“Chicken again today!”
Chickens grow quickly.
Though few in this era knew it, Tay—who had lived in Korea in his past life—understood all too well just how formidable a creature the chicken truly was.
It was the livestock most efficient at converting feed into protein.
Tay, having absorbed countless web novels across every genre, was the sort who had read through both alternate history and territory development stories with equal diligence.
Thanks to that breadth of knowledge, he’d set up a poultry farm and begun a thriving business breeding chickens in bulk.
Listen.
Why wouldn’t you build a poultry farm?
Of course, the chickens of this era weren’t the selectively bred strains of Korea, so reaching maturity took considerable time.
Modern Earth chickens reach full size in one or two months and can be eaten straight away.
But these chickens required roughly five months to reach adulthood.
Yet what manner of place was this?
Wasn’t it a fantasy world?
So he turned to magic.
Our Baron Tay, now drowning in gold, purchased potions from an alchemist.
Growth Acceleration Potions.
Originally used to rapidly mature crops—chiefly deployed during wartime.
But using them exhausted the land’s fertility entirely, rendering the next year’s harvest a total loss—a truly terrible substance!
However.
Feeding it to livestock made them grow at astonishing speed.
The drawback was that they required proportionally more feed, but chickens ate scraps and anything else with equal vigor, so that posed no real problem.
And this potion besides—
wasn’t even particularly expensive.
One bottle required only a single Goldmanta gold coin to produce, and when diluted, could accelerate a thousand chickens to maturity.
Thus Tay secured a poultry farm and began breeding and selling chickens in vast quantities.
A perfect machine for emptying mercenaries’ pockets had been born.
“Damn! Chicken and beer—they go together like nothing else!”
“Wow, this tastes absolutely divine!”
Oil was extraordinarily expensive in this era.
So rather than frying, he sold the chicken roasted over charcoal.
With a light glaze brushed on before roasting, the flavor became extraordinary.
Paired with good quality beer, mercenaries one and all consumed chicken and ale without restraint.
Among the freedmen, the quick-witted few scraped together what capital they could and converted the houses the Lord had provided into small taverns.
They’d buy chickens, cook them by their own methods, and sell them alongside beer they acquired wholesale.
The market began to flourish.
Through all this activity, Tay found himself perpetually swamped with work.
Too busy even to find time for leveling up.
The small mercy was that passive hunting—monsters that invaded the territory only to be slaughtered by Skeletal Soldiers—had raised his level by one.
And an unexpected surprise reward came with it too……
-You have acquired a special reward skill.
-You have acquired [Skill: Mark of Madness].
[Skill: Mark of Madness]
Rank: Unique
Type: Active
A power that grants the ability to inscribe the Mark of Madness.
Objects bearing the Mark of Madness radiate madness to their surroundings.
The intensity of madness that spreads scales with the skill owner’s level.
“What… another insane skill?”
The Madness Engineer profession itself dealt in crafting various objects that afflicted the mind, but it wasn’t a profession that unleashed unlimited mental attacks.
This one had no such limits.
Simply intend to inscribe the Mark of Madness and the skill activates.
The mark appears anywhere, on anything.
And the moment it’s inscribed, it launches mental attacks indiscriminately—a truly broken skill!
One might argue it’s no different from the skeletal decorations, but those are legitimate crafted items requiring multiple materials.
This requires none of that!
The drawback that allies also fall victim to mental attacks was troubling, but that didn’t change the fact it was an absolutely unbalanced skill.
He’d never obtained anything like it in his past life—there was little left to say.
“Good things are good things.”
Tay let it go.
Somehow his present life felt subtly luckier than his past one had been. Well, if that was the case, he’d take it.
And so autumn arrived, bringing the harvest season.
Remarkably, Tay’s territory experienced an abundant harvest.
And yet.
Other regions fell into terrible famine.
* * *
“Master, this could become rather problematic.”
Lant had grown noticeably taller in the year since, developing with surprising grace.
And she had become lovelier too.
Still bearing the softness of youth, but at this rate she would grow into a true beauty.
Though Tay paid such things no mind.
“Problematic how?”
“Yes. Word has come that most other territories are suffering from famine conditions.”
“The rains were sparse this year, it’s true.”
Rain.
This year had brought precious little of it.
Lands blessed with rivers or streams fared reasonably well.
Tay’s pioneer fiefdom had no such troubles, fed as it was by mountain springs flowing down from the valleys.
Groundwater welled up from below and ran down the mountainside in abundance.
And the reservoir constructed that spring provided additional security.
Water was no shortage.
The high-quality fertilizer Tay had crafted using Decay Magic—a Grade 2 Black Magic—had proven remarkably effective as well.
The problem lay elsewhere: the inland territories.
Lant had brought word that farming communities relying on wells had suffered grievously, their crops failing to grow properly.
“Do we know yet how many fiefs under the Marquis of Harundale have been hit?”
“No. Shall I investigate?”
“Yes, do.”
Harundale was a port city, but it commanded a substantial river as well.
The fiefs along its banks would fare better, at least—they had water.
But those fiefs distant from the river would be devastated entirely.
“So then. What exactly do you mean by problematic?”
“Territory wars could break out.”
“They’ll come for my grain. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
As Tay had developed the farmland, he’d learned something from the settler-farmers among his people and from his slaves.
One grain of wheat, grown and harvested, yields five or six grains—that is what they call an average harvest.
This land was extraordinarily fertile soil.
And he had spread fertilizer with abandon.
So from a single grain of wheat, the harvest yielded ten grains.
In other words: abundant harvest.
The fiefdom’s population had swelled past two thousand to nearly twenty-five hundred, and counting the mercenaries in residence, the total populace reached roughly thirty-two hundred.
The harvest of wheat and barley this season was vast enough to feed twenty thousand people for a full year.
Of course, measured against a city the size of Harundale, it was nothing remarkable.
But by the standards of a small fief, it was undeniably an abundant year.
Had Tay’s territory held ten thousand people, they would have harvested enough grain to feed two hundred thousand for a year.
The Black Mage Is Too Good 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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