Blacksmithing Is Child’s Play for a Dark Mage - Chapter 88

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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 88
In summary, this domain during winter operated like a factory complex running twenty-four hours a day, and the domain’s residents worked busily enough to forget the meaning of the phrase “off-season,” earning coin all the while.
Any domain residents complaining about the workload?
There were none.
Remembering the days when they’d rummaged through garbage in Harundel’s slums just to survive, an abundance of work wasn’t something to grumble about—it was something to be grateful for.
“Long live the lord!”
“Not a soul going hungry this winter—is this a kingdom? No, is this a domain?”
“You mean that in a good way, right?”
“Of course! Where else in the world could you find a domain like this?”
The domain residents’ loyalty showed no sign of cooling, even as winter deepened.
* * *
And Tay was.
Practicing the black magic he’d newly acquired over the past six months.
Not training, but practice.
The two seemed similar but were fundamentally different concepts—training was the blood-and-sweat process of acquiring something new, while practice was the process of refining what you’d already mastered until it became second nature.
Tay had already acquired all of the dozens of black magic incantations Ase had taught him.
Thanks to the Hunter System, the knowledge sat perfectly formed in his mind, and he could even cast them.
The problem was proficiency.
Knowing something in your head and having it in your hands are two different things.
Just as you can’t speed down a highway the moment you pass your driving test, acquiring an incantation doesn’t mean you can use it freely in actual combat.
Practicing to reduce casting speed. Practicing to optimize mana consumption. Practicing to chain multiple incantations together. These were all things that only repetition could make instinctive.
An empty lot on the outskirts of the domain.
Black magic experiments were in full swing today in that place, which had become Tay’s personal training ground.
“Spirit Fusion.”
As Tay cast the incantation, two evil spirits floating in the air merged into one, becoming a darker, more substantial apparition.
Spirit Fusion was an incantation that merged several weak spirits into one to create a stronger spirit, and when linked with Wraith creation, it was the ultimate cost-efficiency spell—yielding mid-tier products from low-tier materials.
“Wide-Range Life Force Absorption.”
This time, life force was simultaneously drawn from the dozens of chickens released across the lot.
Where the conventional Life Force Absorption had been a one-to-one transaction, draining one creature at a time, the wide-range version was a wholesale operation—drawing from every living thing within the area simultaneously.
The extracted life force was condensed into Life Essence and stored. It served as material for healing potions, as a supplement for Amelia’s life force reserves, and had uses beyond counting.
The chickens whose life force had been drawn became weakened but didn’t die. A few days of good feeding would restore them, so from the chickens’ perspective, they were being forced to donate blood.
One might raise concerns about animal rights in this situation, but this world had no animal protection organizations.
“Wave of Decay.”
As the black wave spread outward, the logs scattered across the lot rotted and crumbled to dust in an instant.
An incantation that forcibly accelerated the decay of organic matter, whether living or dead.
In combat, it could be used as a siege weapon to dissolve an enemy’s wooden defensive structures; in peacetime, it could be used as an agricultural revolution spell to produce compost at incredible speed.
That the same incantation served as both siege weapon and compost maker spoke to the enigmatic nature of black magic.
“Growth Acceleration.”
This incantation was used on the Undead, accelerating the maturation of newly created Undead.
Undead grew stronger over time as necromantic power seeped into their bodies after creation, and this spell accelerated that process by orders of magnitude.
Using it on a freshly raised skeleton soldier meant that a raw recruit instantly became a veteran—making the speed of army recruitment fundamentally different.
Beyond that, he practiced and mastered dozens more incantations one by one, making them his own.
Since his body didn’t require sleep, his practice time was infinite.
Even during the nights when others slept, black light flickered across the lot, and rumors spread among the domain residents that “the lord does something in the lot every night,” though no one dug too deeply.
Medieval domain residents instinctively knew that prying too deeply led to nothing good.
Thus winter deepened.
Tay’s black magic grew more proficient with each passing day.
“Hah… This is something. With the spell library suddenly expanding like this, it’s getting tight, isn’t it?”
Tay stood in the center of the practice ground and wiped the perspiration from his brow.
Strictly speaking, he wasn’t sweating.
Thanks to the Hell Heart that came with his Immortal Life, his body had no concept of fatigue.
He was merely going through the motions out of habit, but it seemed the habits from his human days lingered with surprising persistence.
He’d loaded all Class 4 incantations into his mind, but the problem was that he could currently only use Class 3 incantations.
The reason was simple.
His level wasn’t high enough.
His current Black Mage level was 5, which allowed him to use up to Class 3 incantations. To use Class 4 spells, he needed to reach Black Mage level 7.
It felt like having loaded a game with full specs while his computer was too weak to run it except on minimum settings—the sensation of a gamer who’d bought the latest game only to be bottlenecked by hardware.
He’d accumulated a decent amount of Experience Points from defeating that Wizard before, but hadn’t quite reached the next level.
Certainly, at this point, it was starting to feel restrictive.
That’s how levels worked, after all.
At lower levels, experience points accumulate quickly—a few slimes here and there do the trick. But as you climb higher, the requirements grow exponentially.
Once I’d passed Level 16 total, ordinary hunting barely nudged the experience bar at all.
‘From here on out, I’ll need to put in serious effort to level up.’
The fact that I’d killed a Class 4 Black Mage and still hadn’t leveled meant I needed even stronger prey for the next threshold.
Stronger prey.
Dungeon bosses. Or massive monster swarms. Or war.
‘None of this is easy.’
I exhaled sharply, and footsteps sounded from behind me.
“Master. Is your training complete?”
It was Rant.
“It’s practice, not training. And yes, I’m done. What is it?”
Since I didn’t sleep anyway, I could always resume later. But Rant’s willingness to seek me out here meant something had come up.
“Refugees have begun arriving.”
“Refugees?”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Winter’s just started. What kind of fool travels in this season? It’s suicide.”
In a medieval world, traveling through winter is a death sentence.
Freeze to death on the road, starve, become wolf food—multiple endings, all of them bad.
“It’s early winter that drove them here,” Rant replied calmly.
Rant answered without emotion.
“Had it been deep winter, they’d have perished en route. They’ve hurried because they know this is the last window to travel safely.”
“Hmm.”
“And from what we’ve learned, many more refugees are heading this way.”
“Many? How many?”
“The exact number is unclear, but what’s arrived seems to be an advance party. The refugees themselves speak of larger groups still following behind.”
I folded my arms and fell silent for a moment.
Refugees.
Refugees meant something had made somewhere uninhabitable—war, famine, plague, monster outbreak. None of it was good news.
But at the same time.
‘Population.’
My territorial management instincts stirred.
Refugees were crisis and opportunity both. Take them in, and the population grows.
Population meant labor. Labor meant production. Production meant coin.
Having once accepted ten thousand poor from Harundel and expanded my Domain tenfold, refugees to me were walking bonus stages.
Of course, taking in refugees of unknown origin was risky.
They could carry plague, harbor criminals, or in the worst case, be spies for some rival power.
So I needed to assess them directly first.
“Bring the refugees who’ve arrived. I’ll meet them myself.”
“As you wish, Master.”
Rant nodded and turned to leave.
* * *
The Lord’s private audience chamber.
A man who appeared to be the refugee representative was bowing so deeply his waist nearly touched the floor.
“Y-Your Lordship! An honor to meet you!”
It was an exaggerated bow—his spine had bent past ninety degrees into acute angles, the kind that would have earned a yoga instructor’s praise for flexibility.
The man’s appearance was another matter entirely.
His clothes were little more than rags, his cheeks were sunken, and his hands were swollen and reddened as if he’d barely survived frostbite. Every inch of his body bore the marks of a grueling journey.
Yet his eyes were alive.
There was a desperation in them, a yearning—eyes that spoke without words of this being a last hope.
“Lift your head. What’s your name?”
I asked.
The man carefully raised his gaze.
“My name is Hansen, Your Lordship.”
“Hansen. Where are you from?”
“From the east, Your Lordship. From the Philon Barony.”
The Philon Barony lay to my east, a considerable distance away, with a substantial stretch of untamed wilderness lying between it and the Maker Barony.
In other words, they’d traveled far.
For them to have come all this way, something catastrophic must have happened.
“You’ve come from quite far. What drove you to abandon your homeland and journey here?”
At my question, Hansen’s face twisted.
An expression twisted by fear, sorrow, and rage in equal measure.
Hansen spoke.
The Black Mage finds the blacksmith far too easy.
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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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