"Not bad. What about you?" he asked Sera.

"Well, sure," said the dragon calmly, grabbing one of the bars as Beth put hers back in the fire.

"You ever use your fire in smithing?" Erosh asked mildly.

"Not yet," Sera answered.

"Good. Don't even start trying that till late Expert. You won't have the control; you'll just melt stuff," he explained.

"I have pretty good breath control," Sera countered.

"Not about the breath," he grunted. "You don't have enough control while crafting or understanding of the metal. Just trust me on that."

"Well, you know more than we do," she said.

"Damn right," he replied.

"What level did you get to, anyway? As a smith," Beth asked.

"Sage[1]," he said. "Not the best possible, certainly, but we all had other things on our minds. Out of the thirteen of us in the box, only one other is a Sage, and she's a Sage[0]. Now, even the very first level of Sage is pretty impressive, but there's simply a vast gulf between the start and end of Sage. Hell, there's a huge, huge leap just from zero to one as Sage, and it only goes up every level from there. Those're the levels where each and every increase is massive."

"It's the equivalent of a Mithril skill, right?" Beth asked as they watched Sera, slightly slower and more methodical, finish the two pieces for the hinge.

"Eh, yes and no," Erosh said, tilting a plate-sized hand back and forth. "Yeah, they're the same tier, sure. But there's a difference. Ah, how do I explain this? So, right, a skill at Mithril is way more powerful. You might have noticed, if you've gotten anything to Platinum, that that's a big jump, right? Well, it's very similar for Mithril. Diamond isn't as big a jump, it's more a continuation of Platinum, as the skill keeps going like it did at Plat but gets a lot stronger. At Mithril, the skill evolves again, and it gets a lot more utility and versatility. It doesn't always make it immensely stronger, in terms of pure power, but it's a very noticeable upgrade.

"Compare that to a crafting skill; the progression is that a Master knows their craft intimately, a Grandmaster has an understanding on a deeper level that lets them start to do things beyond the normal, while a Sage has grasped almost an entirely new way to craft. It's not just a small change; getting to Sage is a whole paradigm shift. It might sound similar to the jump to Mithril, but it is so much different. Here, let me demonstrate."

He grabbed one of the bars from the fire, grabbed two beast cores out of a bin full of the lower-level ones, and grabbed a small bit of mana crystal. He put the three items on the anvil, but he didn't start hammering them right away, or at all, for that matter. Instead, Beth watched, shocked, as the items all hovered into the air before starting to melt. Erosh gestured with his hands and runes appeared in the air by the dozen, circling around the items before embedding into them. The items continued to hover and continued to melt or dissolve or fracture, coming apart and reforming as Erosh worked. The items slowly started to meld together, mixing and combining as more and more runes flew into them, turning into something vastly different. After about ten minutes, Beth noting that Odorra had brought Blood over to watch, apparently thinking it would be a good experience even for a leatherworker, Erosh was done. A sword now sat on the anvil, without a wrap for the hilt and without a pommel stone, a threaded hole at the bottom of the hilt left where one could be threaded.

"What the fuck was that?!" Beth exclaimed, the first of anybody that said anything.

"That's how real crafting works," Erosh answered with a grin.

"What he means," Odorra cut in to explain, "is that once you become a Sage, you no longer are doing such base things as hammering metal or sewing chunks of leather together. The process of creation is performed entirely with mana, power, and knowledge. He crafted a basic blade just to demonstrate, but anything a Sage or Divine makes would be done in the same manner."

"Then why are we bothering to learn how to hit pieces of metal with hammers?" Sera asked in some exasperation.

"Did you know how to sprint and stab your spear before learning to crawl?" Erosh retorted crossly. "You need all this as foundational knowledge. You have to learn how metal works, beast cores work, how to infuse, how to forge and hammer. I could do what I just did because I have twenty-five hundred years of practice as a smith. If you think those people who make a Mana Physique early are rare, let me tell you, somebody who can learn to forge with mana and runes without going through the learning process makes those early birds look as common as grains of sand."

"He's right," Odorra immediately interjected. "Crafting with mana and runes is something you learn and develop over time, and it relies on you having a very good understanding of how your craft works. Enchanters have an advantage here, but only because they are so much more familiar with the runes. Even they have to learn new techniques and a new understanding to progress to Sage."

"So, this is why we've heard before that all crafting becomes more similar, not less, as we go up in ranks…" Beth said.

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"Right. I'm not going to claim I could do the same things with leather," Erosh explained. "But I could do similar things with a lot of materials or to create a lot of various products. Some crafts are a bit easier, not that I'm insulting leatherworking; Odorra could do similar things with smithing if she had hit Sage. Something like alchemy, however, is vastly different; I wouldn't be able to make hide nor hair of trying to forge even a simple potion. Enchanting is a different beast, as it encompasses everything, and a good smith or leatherworker will incorporate enchantments directly into their product without needing the services of an enchanter. Not that an enchanter can't do more than the smith or leatherworker could; I can't really do what a Sage enchanter could, but I can get by just fine."

He gestured at the blade, which Beth picked up and examined, noting that it was sharp without even having been run over a grindstone. It had minor durability and minor repair in the description, even though Erosh was not an enchanter and hadn't added any enchants other than whatever he did with the runes. It was also a Rare-tier weapon, having a blue name and some minor stat increases as well as requiring a minimum of level one hundred. Thinking about how it was just a bit under ten minutes for Erosh to make it, and he had gone slowly so they could watch everything he was doing, she could see how high-end crafters could make quite a lot, both in terms of volume and money, quite quickly.

"Why you gotta learn runes," Erosh refocused them, shrugging as he tossed the sword on the workbench. "Can't get past Grandmaster if you don't."

"Well, we've been studying, but I couldn't do anything close to that," Beth said.

"It takes lifetimes," he said with a shrug, Odorra taking Blood back to a different workbench. "You just worry about learning how to shape and forge metals. When you get to Expert, then you can focus on incorporating other components, or doing it more completely."

"You mean like the beast cores and mana crystals?" Beth asked, referencing his earlier performance.

"Yep. Journeyman, get good with the metal. We'll start you on steel after a bit, then try some mithril, just to get a feel for it. If you can afford it, that is. Expert, we'll get you on merging different components and elements. Master, you start to use the materials to their utmost, making things near the limit of what a material can do. Grandmaster is where you start, you start, hear me? On runes. And you work on pushing past what the limits of a material can do. Runes and using multiple materials together gets you there. To get to Sage, you have to make something more than the sum of its parts. Take some steel, some beast cores, an elixir, and a bone from a level five hundred boss and make a Legendary level five hundred weapon."

"Speaking from experience, there?" asked Sera.

"Did something like it to get to Sage. Materials that shouldn't make a weapon or armor piece as good as you do. I know of one guy who got to Sage by making an Epic hammer out of some mana copper and a shark tooth. All kinds of stuff out there; can't really even imagine all the possibilities, but you need to take the normal and demonstrate you know how to make it abnormal. That's the gist of it from the material side," he answered.

"That's an interesting perspective," Beth said. "I also haven't heard anybody lay out what the stages are like that before."

"Bah," he snorted. "Lot of people want to use all this fucking mythical, mystical mumbo-jumbo to describe it. I know it gets there at Grandmaster, and certainly does at the line in moving to Sage, but you don't need all that at Journeyman. It's not some great philosophical experience; take some metal, make it hot, hammer it into shape, and do some finishing. Got it? Good, you're a passable blacksmith now."

"I think it might be just a bit harder than you make it sound," Sera said, rolling her eyes just slightly.

"Nah, simple. Hit the metal, make the shape, you're a smith," he said with a shrug. "And speaking of hitting the metal, let's get back to it."

Beth and Sera each took some heated stock and moved to two different anvils to work, hammering at the metal. Erosh leaned back against the workbench again and grunted commands at the two of them, telling them to hit the metal higher up or alter their swings most often, but also explaining why the metal moved or distorted or shifted how it did. Beth and Sera made another hinge before heating the metal again, listening to Erosh lecture while they did. He was a musclehead and very straightforward, but it was clear he had spent absolutely untold hours in the forge working on his craft. His explanations were simple and to the point, but they were easy to understand and gave both the of the girls a better understanding of what they were doing. There was no big epiphany or anything and that wasn't what they were going for, clearly, but there was a steady progression in understanding what they were doing.

He asked them each to make a knife or dagger next, watching their processes without any comment. A dagger was a bit more complicated and took a bit more time, and Erosh just observed the whole thing, not commenting even when they had to take breaks to let metal heat back up. He just observed everything they did, including how long they let the metal heat and where they put it in the furnace. Eventually, they each had a more than passable dagger, though they hadn't done all the finishing work, including wrapping the hilt. It was strange, but there was a definite inflection point that the Path would go from considering the work a part or a collection of parts to an item in its own right. If Beth used her eye power to analyze what they had sitting on her anvil right now, it only came back as parts. Even with the blade mostly done, the handle done other than the wrapping, and most of the work finished quite well, it still wasn't labeled by the Path as a finished product.

"I'm not going to be overly critical," Erosh said, picking up Beth's dagger and examining it. "And I will say, finishing is certainly important, but there's somewhat less of an art to wrapping a little cloth or leather around a hilt than there is to forging raw metal into a shape. So, I'll just look at what you two have done in terms of forging and shaping the copper."

"We've had a bit of practice with copper," Beth said. "I don't say 'a lot' of practice, because I think that would be stupid, talking to someone who spent thousands of years smithing. But we can get by."

"Get by is right," Erosh grunted, running a thumb over the edge. Even were it sharp, it would likely not do anything to the massive digit, and Beth watched as he did the same examination of Sera's blade. Once he was satisfied with both blades, he picked Beth's back up and started twisting it, slowly bending and distorting it until it was a pile of scrap before doing the same with Sera's. He wasn't done there, however, and picked each up and effortlessly cracked them apart, splitting them across the middle with such a quick motion that it was like a blade had slashed them in half.

"You did well in forging them solid," he muttered. "See here," he continued, pointing at the broken blade, "where the center of the metal is. You managed a nearly fully uniform pattern in the grain of the metal. How long you heat it, how much you hammer it, and how many times you heat it are big factors in the internal consistency. You should focus on fewer heats and less hammer strokes to accomplish the same thing that you did with this. Practice, practice, practice. I don't see anything dramatic I need to correct; you both have the right idea. Just need to spend your hours in the forge. Get to Journeyman[5] and then we'll start working heavily with mana steel."

"You wanna go back in the box, or you gonna watch?" Beth asked.

"Blood Stars, kid, ain't like I got anythin' more interesting goin' on," he said with a grunt, resuming his lean against the workbench.

Beth and Sera set to it, Beth glancing over at Blood to see her and the phoenix empress deeply enmeshed in piles of leather, fabric, and thread. Blood looked…well, if not happy, at least indifferent, and was taking to the lesson well, working on creating some new pieces herself. Beth refocused on what she was doing, heating and hammering metal, getting lost in the rhythm of the forge. Even the little pauses, the times waiting for metal to heat or cool, had a rhythm, a measure to their pace and flow, passing slowly as they did. She and Sera worked side-by-side, though on different projects, the two of them talking very little but exchanging looks, small touches, and even larger movements; a quick caress and squeeze or long press of bodies against each other as they passed when moving around their work area.

They all worked for a few hours, Erosh only making a few comments, though Beth could hear a low drone from Odorra most of the time. The phoenix was quite chatty, enjoying talking constantly and giving long, detailed explanations of whatever she and Blood were doing at any given moment. Beth had them break after a while just so they could get some food, a lot of drink, and have a short rest. Blood wanted to stay in the kitchen, but Beth hauled her back down to the workroom, determined to get at least a few good hours out of her while they were all in the zone.

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