Blacksmithing Is Child’s Play for a Dark Mage - Chapter 92

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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 92
This artifact, with its unsettling name, was an agricultural aid.
Place it in a field, and crops would flourish luxuriously—a farmer’s dream invention.
Even without drought, agricultural output in this world was dismally low.
Wheat farming was particularly inefficient.
One need only glance at the population growth rates in Earth’s Western and Eastern history to see that rice cultivation was far superior in yield.
In an age when drought ravaged the land and crops withered to nothing, here was a scarecrow that made them flourish. By sheer efficiency alone, it was an overpowered item.
The problem, as always, was the side effect.
The moment you laid eyes on this scarecrow, mental erosion began.
Stare directly at it long enough and your mind would be nibbled away piece by piece—a rather sinister affliction.
“That’s going to be a headache.”
Tay paused to consider the matter.
But the solution turned out to be surprisingly simple.
“Just cover it with cloth.”
Draping cloth over the scarecrow to hide its form would do the trick.
If you don’t see it, there’s no mental erosion. It was a case where not looking was the answer—a bit of sleight of hand that worked perfectly.
The scarecrow’s effect activated simply by virtue of its presence in a place, so even shrouded in cloth, the crops grew well.
The farmers found cloth-wrapped scarecrows a bit eerie, but with their crops thriving, they had nothing to complain about.
Thus Tay began mass-producing two artifacts—the Freshwater Generator and the Mad Scarecrow—and even established workshops to manufacture them, building an entire production system.
At the same time, he worked ceaselessly to settle the endless stream of refugees as residents of his Domain.
Building homes, distributing plots of land, assigning work, registering them in the census books. The Territory absorbed people like a human factory, drawing them in endlessly.
And so a year passed.
One year later.
The Maker Barony’s population had swelled to 360,000 souls.
360,000 people.
At this point, calling it a barony was almost comical. It qualified as a viscountcy—and an upper-tier one at that, by population standards.
“Is this really still a barony?”
Even Tay himself occasionally got confused.
* * *
“My Lord. Kael has collapsed.”
Rant entered the office with his report.
But the messenger himself looked absolutely dreadful.
Dark circles hung beneath his eyes like curtains, and his complexion was ashen as someone who’d gone sleepless for days.
It was an ironic scene—the one bringing news of a patient looked like the patient himself.
“Hmm.”
Tay rose from his seat and made his way to Kael.
Kael’s condition was far worse than Rant’s.
Lying in bed, Kael looked like a walking corpse.
His face was pallid as blank parchment, his eyes hollow and sunken, his lips parched and cracked. The usually sharp, immaculate administrator was nowhere to be seen.
A priest was administering Holy Magic to Kael, yet even so, his condition looked far from encouraging.
One might say it looked utterly wretched.
Soft light enveloped Kael’s body, restoring his strength, but even in the midst of treatment, he was muttering work reports in his sleep.
“…refugees…census registration…three thousand names…”
The man had truly lost himself to work!
How had it come to this?
“What’s the diagnosis?”
Tay asked the priest.
“Exhaustion, my Lord.”
The priest replied matter-of-factly.
“There’s no physical damage or illness. He has simply worked too long and too much. Holy Magic will restore his vitality, but fundamentally, he requires rest.”
Exhaustion.
Had occupational injury insurance existed in this world, he would’ve been approved on the spot with 100% certainty!
“Thank you for your care.”
Tay bowed respectfully to the priest. The priest showed his symbol of faith in acknowledgment and withdrew.
That was when Kael’s eyes fluttered open slightly.
“M-My Lord…”
“Stay down. Don’t try to get up.”
“Like this…I might actually die…”
Kael murmured in a voice barely louder than a mosquito’s buzz.
And it wasn’t an exaggeration—every word was absolute truth!
Even a prodigy who graduated second in her class from the Imperial Academy couldn’t manage the administration of a thirty-million-soul domain alone!
Tay studied Kael for a moment before speaking.
“Kael. With our domain’s current standing, could we bring in Imperial Academy graduates?”
“……Pardon?”
“Administrative staff, I mean. You’re doing it all yourself, and look where that’s gotten us. Let’s hire more people.”
A faint glimmer returned to Kael’s hollow eyes.
The look of someone who’d spotted an oasis in the desert.
“Y-yes, it’s possible. With our domain’s current scale…… we could certainly attract Imperial Academy graduates. With a population of three hundred thousand and sound finances, they’d actually be lining up to come here.”
In the old days, no one had wanted to come, and Kael had been scraped together with difficulty; since then, they’d trained commoners to fill the gaps.
Now they’d reached a point where that wasn’t enough—they needed to expand their personnel. According to Kael, it seemed they actually could.
Well, that made sense now that the domain had grown!
“Then we’re set. Expand the staff. Spare no expense.”
“Th-thank you, my Lord…… Once I’ve recovered a bit more…… I’ll begin implementing it right away…….”
With those words, Kael fell asleep again, consciousness slipping away.
This time, no sleep-talking either.
* * *
Ten days later.
With his strength restored, Kael threw himself into personnel expansion.
The method was simple: gather up all the unemployed graduates from the Imperial Academy who had nowhere else to go.
Having once been in that very position himself, Kael knew better than anyone where talent lay scattered and waiting.
In a world turned upside down by famine, when a domain offered stable wages and regular meals, applicants flooded in. Working for a dying domain on the brink of starvation paled in comparison to employment in the thriving Maker Barony—they were orders of magnitude better off.
In short order, dozens of administrative personnel were added to the rolls.
With staff in place, the domain began to feel properly alive.
“Now this feels like actual living,” Tay murmured, sprawling across his chair.
He sighed with contentment.
“I couldn’t agree more, master.”
Rant nodded, his dark circles noticeably lighter than before.
“We’ve been living like something less than human.”
“You’re already a slave anyway.”
“……Don’t twist my words.”
In truth, to call the labor they’d endured mere jesting would have been to downplay its genuinely murderous intensity.
When the population suddenly ballooned past three hundred thousand, those in charge of managing it were ground down mercilessly.
The very concept of work-life balance had become an unaffordable luxury.
Rant sipped his tea before continuing.
“Still, ten years at this pace and we’ll be a genuinely stable power.”
“Why ten years specifically?”
“Because the people who’ve settled here will have developed attachment to this land.”
Rant gazed out the window as he explained.
“Most of our current inhabitants drifted in from elsewhere—they were paupers or refugees. For them, this domain is still just a temporary shelter. But after ten years, everything changes. They’ll have borne children here, watched them grow, buried their parents in this soil. Only then does a place truly become home. Without that kind of attachment, the domain could shatter like glass the moment a real crisis hits.”
“I see.”
Tay nodded slowly.
“That’s fair, actually.”
It was a sound argument. Gathering people and making them truly *your* people were entirely different matters.
Filling numbers alone didn’t create a solid force.
Meanwhile, conditions in other regions remained dire.
Wars between domains—nearly civil conflicts—were still unfolding in real time.
The cause was a vicious cycle.
Famine strikes. Food runs out. Lords wage war to seize food. The workforce needed for farming vanishes into war. Food dwindles further. The domain’s plight worsens. Everything spirals deeper into chaos. And war cannot stop.
Once the wheel begins turning, it cannot be halted—an infinite loop of death.
In game terms, it was like hitting the wrong difficulty setting and getting permanently cursed with infinite debuffs.
Fortunately, Tay’s domain was wealthy enough that no one dared attack it.
“We’re lucky to be doing so well,” Tay said with a shrug.
In truth, the Maker Barony was the sole paradise in this age of famine.
The Freshwater Generator artifact ensured water flowed endlessly, the Mad Scarecrow made crops flourish, and the drowned undead from the seabed hauled fish to shore by the ton—food became so abundant it went to waste.
While the entire continent starved from the drought, food surplus meant one thing: gold poured in like a flood.
Merchants from across the realm converged on the Maker Barony to buy food, water, and artifacts—supplies sold out faster than they could be restocked. The longer the famine lasted, the heavier Tay’s coffers grew.
If disaster was both crisis and opportunity, then Tay had grasped that opportunity with both hands.
* * *
It was as they bantered thus that it happened.

The attendant knocked on the office door.
“My Lord. A messenger from Harundel Marquess has arrived.”
Tay’s eyebrows rose.
“A messenger from the Marquess? What brings this on so suddenly?”
It was not common for Harundel Marquess to send messengers.
Usually he merely accepted the obligatory tributes and watched from a distance with the attitude of “that Baron is growing up well enough on his own”—but to send a messenger in person meant there was some business to attend to.
‘A messenger, in the midst of this drought turning the world upside down…’
Would it be good news or bad?
Tay pondered for a moment, then gave the attendant his instructions.
“Show the messenger to the reception hall. I’ll be there shortly.”
“Yes, my Lord.”
Tay rose from his seat.
Rant stood as well, asking,
“What do you suppose it is?”
“Can’t say. We’ll find out soon enough.”
Tay donned his coat and made his way to the reception hall.
A drought, refugees, endless war. And now a messenger arrives from the Marquess in the midst of it all?
What could it be?
The Black Mage Is Too Overpowered 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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