15. Fifth Step

To start, he sprinkled a bit of a special catalyst that his family made themselves. This dust would immediately bond with any metal that it touched so Mark had to utilize a wood tool they had to have custom built by a carpenter in the village.

There was another tool he could use for anything that was not a blade but the wooden one was faster to use and would suffice for the part of the blade he was working on.

He just had to place it between two parts of the wood and clamp it down by screwing in a part on both ends. Then he added the powder where he wanted to remove the metal and wipe it off before flipping it and doing the same thing.

Then he removed it from the tool and placed it in one of the melting parts of the forge.

The catalyst then glowed brightly as the part he wanted to remove began to disappear. There was no gas, it just vanished with the catalyst.

His father always taught him that this technique turned the unwanted metals into energy.

"We smiths believe that all things are just energy, and this technique just adjusts the form of that energy to a more volatile form that can't retain it's physical properties. Thus, we remove this physical energy by making it intangible energy."

Mark remembered the words of his father when he first learned this technique.

'It's just going back to energy. . .'

Mark was halfway in his typical trance when he was watching the process. He didn't allow himself to slip fully into the trance though, since this step was quick and he would need to remove it from the heat quickly for the next part.

Once the bright glow subsided, he pulled it out of the melting flames and placed it on the heating coals.

Then he poured some melting beads into a crucible and prepared a mold.

For this part, he had to fill the missing places in the original mold for this tool with some iron before he let it cool so he could actually expand it.

With the mold prepared he pulled the red-hot tool out of the fire and sprinkled the bonding catalyst on it before he placed it in the mold and poured the molten iron into the empty spots where the blade was melted off. He put the rest of the molten iron in the crucible back in the melting area of the forge.

While he let it cool, he grabbed the red-hot hammer pick that had been cooling long enough in its mold and quenched it to ensure the metal would last throughout the years.

With that done, he took it over to the whetstone to polish it off before he sent it off to its owner. To do this with a whetstone, he sprinkled a coarser sand on the stone and then used that to polish the metal. It was just more convenient than some other methods. Then he rubbed it with some wood ash to give it a shine.

He really didn't have to do this part but his father always said the people like shiny stuff so he did it anyway.

Once that was done, the blade was ready to be worked on again.

He pulled it out of the mold and smacked it a few times with the hammer to ensure it was well-bonded and to work out any inconsistencies in the metal. Then he placed it in the heating coals to make sure the whole tool was well heated.

While it was heating, he got his expansion tools ready since he now needed to make the spiderweb patterns.

The blade was ready quickly, so he took it out and made the patterns he needed.

Since it was just on the blade of the tool, he only made the spiderweb pattern on one side so it had the entire pattern along the edge.

Once that was done he sprinkled the bonding catalyst and poured the rest of the molten iron into it and then let it cool.

While it was cooling he ate a couple of pieces of the dried warg while he was staring at the fire in his forge.

The flames were trying to tell him secrets once again and he was trying to decipher what they were saying. 

There was silence at the forge, save the soft crackling of the fire, and Mark absentmindedly put the food in his mouth as he stared at the flames.

This went on for about 20 minutes until Mark was taken out of his trance when he bit his finger. He was out of meat and since he was basically eating while unconscious, he ended up biting his own finger.

There was no pain and no damage. He had strong skin, especially on his hands.

He just turned to the blade he was working on and grabbed his hammer to set the bond.

Ding. Ding. Dink.

It just took him a few hits to get it ready for the next step. While letting it cool off the rest of the way, he went over to his father's workstation.

The fifth step required a special hammer that one of their ancestors created when they invented the fifth step.

He grabbed the hammer and looked at the unique design.

It had a large purple crystal on one end and a regular hammer head on the other end. The metal and crystal had been fused with some bonding technique that Mark was unsure of replicating. It looked like it was genuinely a hybrid metal-crystal hammer.

The metal was also a blue color instead of silver. It was not even one of the ores that had a blue sheen to it, the metal was just blue.

It felt right in his hands though, it almost felt alive. It also gave him the feeling as if they were exchanging power between human and hammer. It was a weird feeling to him.

With everything ready for the fifth step, Mark prepared the blade on his anvil as he took a seat on his stool and he observed both sides of the blade.

Once he was satisfied, he began the restructuring process as he used the hammer to compress the metal back to its original width and length.

To accomplish this he had to hit the hammer at the angle he wanted to compress the blade and the hammer would give off a very slight purple blast of light with each hit. 

He had to wait about a second between each hit which resulted in him almost carrying a musical beat as he worked the metal to a desirable position.

It did not take long for Mark to compress the blade and give it a rudimentary edge.

After the fifth step, he just had to give the blade of the scythe a sharpen so it could be used properly in the future and then buff out the impurities on the surface of the blade from heating with some wood ash.

Once that was accomplished he just placed the scythe with the shovel and pick before he moved on to the next tool that needed an edge replaced.