Blacksmithing Is Child’s Play for a Dark Mage - Chapter 91

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

Episode 91
Tay had mass-produced Undead Serpents—which he’d used in his earlier battle against the Black Mage—along with countless other Undead specialized for underwater operations.
When these creatures dove into the Sea and drove schools of fish toward shore, the catch exploded in volume.
There simply wasn’t time to roast every fish caught one by one.
With fifty thousand additional mouths to feed, he could hardly afford the leisure of grilling fish.
And if they ate the catch raw, food consumption would spiral out of control.
So the menu of choice became fish porridge.
Whole fish went into enormous pots, grain was added, and everything was boiled down rapidly into a thick gruel that was then distributed to the populace.
Whatever it lacked in refinement, it made up for in nutrition, and above all, it could be prepared in vast quantities at speed and fed to enormous numbers of people.
To the starving refugees who arrived at the gates, a bowl of hot fish porridge was no different from the finest delicacies.
“This alone is more than we could ask for!”
“The lord is feeding us!”
“Fish porridge every day—this must be paradise!”
The refugees wept tears of gratitude into their porridge bowls, praising their lord.
These were people who days before had stood on the brink of starvation; to them, the simple promise of warm gruel each day felt like stepping into heaven itself.
And so the food crisis was weathered—for now.
Yet still the refugees kept coming.
As spring deepened into full bloom,
Tay received word of something new.
A Territory War had erupted nearby.
The cause was predictable enough.
Food.
Lords whose domains had been stripped bare by the Great Drought had drawn their swords to raid their neighbors, desperate to seize whatever grain remained in adjacent granaries.
It was the logic of desperation: starve to death or die in battle—either way you perish, so why not try to loot a neighbor’s stores first?
As the drought wore on, these plundering wars sprouted up across the continent like mushrooms after rain.
But what of the Maker Barony?
‘We won’t be touched.’
Tay’s prediction proved accurate.
No madman dared invade the Maker Barony.
It was already common knowledge across the continent, established through two prior incidents, that no force commanded by a Baron or Count could possibly overcome Tay’s domain—he possessed tens of thousands of skeleton soldiers.
No matter how desperately one craved food, no sane lord would thrust his head into a lion’s den.
To march in to plunder and have your entire domain ground to dust? That wasn’t plundering. That was suicide.
But what of the Harundel Marquessate, to which the Maker Barony belonged?
The Harundel Marquessate was holding its own quite well.
It was certainly a wealthy domain that had amassed considerable fortune through commerce, but something even more remarkable had come to light.
The Marquess of Harundel maintained constant reserves of grain—enough to feed his Territory Inhabitants for three full years.
Three years’ worth of food reserves.
This was no trivial feat.
It required enormous expense, sophisticated preservation techniques, and vast storage facilities.
In ordinary times it seemed like wasteful spending, but now that the Great Drought had descended, its true value shone forth.
‘So this is the Marquess of Harundel.’
Tay felt genuine admiration.
The foresight to prepare for crisis. The resolve to bear immediate losses in order to secure long-term safety. That was the secret by which the House of Harundel had maintained its wealth generation after generation.
‘He has earned the right to be rich.’
It was no accident he held the rank of Marquess.
He was not merely a parvenu with deep pockets, but a true merchant prince who understood how to make his money work and how to preserve it.
Tay nodded, thinking there was much to learn from the Marquess.
And in that same moment, he made a decision.
‘I need to build up reserves too. I can’t just feed them fish porridge forever.’
So long as refugees continued to arrive, the food problem would persist into the future.
Another project began to form in Tay’s mind.
* * *
The world had become a living hell.
The Great Drought fell indiscriminately across the continent, and in its wake wars erupted like weeds—an inevitable consequence.
Hunger turns men into beasts, and empty-coffers lords soon found themselves drawing steel, each eyeing his neighbor’s stores.
Domains that had exchanged greetings as neighbors in better times now found themselves rolling in the mud, grappling and clawing at each other’s throats.
Yet one peculiarity stood out.
No grand-scale war broke out between Empires, nor did Kingdoms collide in direct confrontation.
The reason was simple.
No food to sustain such campaigns.
Large-scale warfare, in truth, is not about the clash of blades—it is about the struggle for grain.
To move an army of tens of thousands, you need an enormous supply of food for those tens of thousands to consume each day, yet now the very food itself had run dry.
It was an absurd situation: one could wish to raise a great army, but without provisions, it simply could not be done.
So instead of grand wars, endless petty conflicts erupted across the land.
Within each nation, territories tore at one another’s throats in what amounted to civil war.
On the surface, countries appeared intact, but peer beneath the veneer and you would find territories devouring each other in utter chaos.
In a word, the world had gone thoroughly mad.
And in this age of disorder, Tay was—
Throwing himself into the development of his domain with obsessive fervor.
Whether the world burned or drowned in mud meant nothing to Tay.
His only concern was one: expanding his domain and accumulating wealth with overwhelming force.
This was not mere greed, but strategic calculation.
Tay’s body was not one that grew stronger through cultivation.
The Hunter System, by its nature, required leveling up by venturing out and defeating countless foes.
It was not a comfortable system where one could meditate in a corner room and gain power.
But now there were few conflicts worth fighting.
Territory wars?
Raiding another’s domain for plunder was not an answer.
Other territories were themselves starving, and to plunder them would be tantamount to slaughtering their entire populations.
The reason other territories did such things was clear.
They faced imminent starvation themselves.
They were desperate enough to massacre another’s inhabitants just to fill their own bellies.
It was a grim game where survival hung in the balance.
But Tay had no such cause.
His domain did not hunger. And to slaughter his own inhabitants while taking another’s food—when his own did not go without—was neither to his taste nor to his advantage.
“Territory wars don’t pencil out.”
What of conquest?
To swallow another domain whole, expanding both territory and population.
This too was impossible now. Though fishing had become more active and the food situation had improved somewhat, there was still no surplus to speak of.
To conquer and swell the mouths to feed would send the domain into crisis.
More than anything—
The population continued to grow without any action on his part.
Refugees poured in without end.
Even as he accepted them, they kept coming in waves—at this rate, the domain’s population would hit three hundred thousand within a year.
They had not reached that mark yet, but still, Tay was drowning in work just keeping the refugees fed, sheltered, and employed.
There was no time for conquest or plunder.
Simply processing the incoming flood left him operating at full capacity.
And so Tay reached a conclusion.
‘There is no situation to venture forth and cause chaos, so let us strengthen the foundation within.’
He would leverage the Madness Engineer ability to its fullest to develop his domain, and from it, accumulate wealth overwhelmingly. This was the grand design Tay had conceived.
* * *
For that reason, the first thing Tay created was—
The Madness Skeleton Freshwater Generator.
An artifact that transformed seawater into fresh water.
While rivers and wells dried in the great drought, this machine—which could turn bitter seawater into drinkable water—was nothing short of an oasis in a desert.
Of course, like any creation of the Madness Engineer, there were side effects.
Those who operated this machine would suffer from terrible nightmares each night. Moreover, the Undead could not use it at all.
Under ordinary circumstances, it would have been a troublesome drawback, but Tay had the perfect solution.
“Make the criminals run it.”
He decided to force the domain’s criminals to operate the freshwater generator as hard labor.
After all, they were people who had to pay for their crimes—let them contribute to society by enduring a few nightmares, his logic went.
Was losing some sleep not better than rotting away in a cell?
Was this not an act perfectly in keeping with the principle of rehabilitation through labor?
“With this, we need not worry about water!”
As the freshwater generator came online, clean water gushed forth in abundance.
Tay distributed this water lavishly to the farmland, rapidly expanding the cultivated fields.
The word “great drought” seemed hollow in the fields of the Maker Barony, where water flowed in excess.
But then something unexpected occurred.
Merchants who heard of this innovation came flooding in to purchase the freshwater generators in bulk.
“I only made this to solve our domain’s water shortage, and it’s selling like this?”
Tay was bewildered at first, but the reason soon became clear.
It was the height of the Great Drought season.
In an age when water was worth its weight in gold, a machine that could transform seawater into drinking water? For coastal domains especially, it was an object so extraordinary that eyes could scarcely believe it.
Salty seawater lay in abundance everywhere—and now it could be made drinkable. Everyone rushed forward, opening their purses.
Of course, artifacts that generate water existed.
But they had limited capacity.
What Tay had created, however, was massive—truly vast in scale.
A single prisoner working for a day could produce freshwater equivalent to a hundred times what a standard water-generating artifact could yield.
Buy this, and the drought is solved!
It was drought profiteering, plain and simple.
Disaster becoming windfall for some—the bitter truth of capitalism laid bare.
“Making money feels good.”
Tay’s lips curved upward as he established another workshop for the Madness Skeleton Freshwater Generator.
But this was not a man who stopped at satisfaction.
What he created next.
[Madness Scarecrow]
Black Mage Is Too Easy as a Blacksmith
Author |
Automaton G
Publisher |
Samyang C&C Co., Ltd.
Editor-in-Chief |
Editorial Department
Published by |
Samyang C&C Co., Ltd. – Dream Books
Address |
7F, Gwangseong Building, 28 Bongeunsa-ro 114-gil, Gangnam-gu, Seoul
UCI |
G720:N+A063-20260511100
Blog |
blog.naver.com/dreambookss
Twitter(X) |
@dreambookss
Submissions |
[email protected]
No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of Samyang C&C Co., Ltd. – Dream Books.

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