49 – Sinew-Stitcher

The project began in earnest.

Rhek barked commands, and, somewhat to his surprise, the Sorceress’s daughter obeyed without question—once more raising his estimation of her. Climbing the hierarchy had meant Rhek had needed to work with gigantic egos more and more commonly. Someone who would just listen for once was a breath of fresh air.

He discovered quickly that the woman had not lied about her rank. Her presence trivialized several steps of the process. Rhek assigned her to the tanning liquors first, since that normally took days of boiling, and most collaborators had skills to speed it up. While she reduced the [Wyrmwood Ash] into a potent concentrate, he began the delicate work on the [Unseen Reaping Shade] pelts. By the time he finished with the fleshing knife, several liquors of varying strength were ready. Before he’d even carved the pelts. Shaking his head in amusement, he brought the hides over and submerged them in the first. Another activation of a skill reduced the tedious process to minutes, the pelts darkening before his eyes. He moved them to the second, and they tanned with similar speed.

While they soaked, he had Nysari pulverize the [Crystalback Goliabeetle] shell into a shimmering dust and render the [Owlbear] fat into oil. He took the leather and cut the patterns for the armor—sizing them for a thirteen-year-old girl, a little large to be safe—then began conditioning them. The rigid pieces he submerged into a hot wax bath mixed with the beetle dust and a half-dozen other materials he’d helped Nysari prepare.

And so on and so on. When the hides were ready for stitching, the woman laid enchantments into them. That could be done before or after the item’s formation, though doing so early influenced the armor’s quality, so, in some circumstances, it was better to do first. But only if the enchanter was higher-ranked than the main craftsman…which didn’t happen often, since Rhek was a Master Leatherworker. A woman of many talents, this mage.

Even with a Grandmaster collaborator aiding him, leatherworking could be painstaking work. And nerve-wracking, for once. It had been a long time since Rhek had gotten his hands on a project this promising, and he didn’t want to squander the opportunity. He had a goal today. He always tried to make the best product he could—as any craftsman worth their salt should—but this project especially, he put every ounce of his concentration into every step of the process.

Because he wanted a masterwork.

Rhek had devoted himself to leatherworking for many years. By now, and for a Master-tier craftsman, a normal quality result meant he’d messed something up; getting one would decimate his mood for the rest of the week. But they did happen on occasion. Good was his baseline, his worse-than-average but not embarrassing outcome. Superior, he would grunt and be happy with. Extraordinaries rolled around a few times a year, typically for the projects commissioned by orichalcums with self-harvested materials. Those were the undertakings he put the most blood and sweat into.

But he had never managed a masterwork. Of the four Titled he’d worked with, each collaboration had yielded an extraordinary. They’d been pleased, because even that was a difficult-to-attain quality for a craftsman in the 70s.

There was a single tier higher than masterwork, but transcendents were for Grandmaster and Legendary craftsmen, and mostly the latter. There was an average of zero legendary craftsmen for each profession in the mortal lands. A handful across all disciplines, their names known throughout the world, more prestigious than Titled, if less glamorized. Grandmasters were more common, but still vanishingly rare.

Rhek wanted a masterwork under his belt. Desperately. And this was his best chance in decades, with a Grandmaster collaborator next to him, and a fully self-harvested material lined up with the rarest requests he’d thought to make—and then even more outrageous materials thrown in as an apparent afterthought.

After a grueling two hours—which was no time at all, to craft armor from scratch—he stitched the last lines of dark cobalt silk into the cuirass, finishing the first of four pieces of gear he had planned. He released a breath and stepped back.

Done.

He might have managed it. He hadn’t faltered once; several weeks of retirement hadn’t made his hands or mind clumsy. The relaxation might have done him good, in fact.

A masterwork? Maybe. He waited with bated breath for the item to recognize its completion. It always took a few seconds after the last stitch for it to realize it was whole.

In the end, the gods themselves were who judged the quality and worthiness of a piece, bestowing blessings unto the work by objective measure. Whether Rhek thought he’d done a good job mattered not a whit. Indeed, he remembered a number of instances where he’d smugly thought he’d worked a miracle, only for his efforts to be decried a moment later as ‘normal’ or worse. And to his disgruntlement, when he inspected those items with a keener eye, he did find flaws. The judgment of the gods was absolute.

He felt the cuirass settle into its final form. He hesitated, afraid to check. Plowing forward anyway, he activated a skill—that basic one even children had access to.

[Inspect].

***

Heartguard of the Fleeting Shade

Transcendent

Lv. 385

Description

A cuirass crafted from the white-gray hide of an Unseen Reaping Shade.

[Wyrmwood Purification]

[Effortless Weaving]

[Enchantment: Fount of Mana VI]

[Enchantment: Sorcerous Might IX]

[Enchantment: Aegis X]

[Enchantment: Arcanic Deflection V]

***

Rhek was an old man. Even fellow dwarves would say he’d trudged well past his golden years. For one of the long-lived races to go gray in the beard was a considerable feat. He wasn’t quite there—merely some wisps of ash hidden in the black—but that was a rare sight itself.

So he’d been through a lot, and seen a lot in his centuries of life. Especially as a craftsman who’d served in seven guilds across the dwarven enclaves, the human kingdoms, and once, an elvish city. He’d been commissioned by four Titled. More known leatherworking materials had passed under his hands than not to transform into gear that had likely gone on to save its wearer’s life. He’d almost died four times, only three of them his fault. Married twice, neither lasting more than a year.

The author’s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

So, after everything he’d been through, he was a hard man to shock. Even realizing the Sorceress’s daughter had hired him hadn’t fazed him much. A jolt to the system, maybe, but not something to leave him slackjawed.

This?

This ridiculous item?

He knew what should come out of a set of materials. Not the exact details, since crafting was always, to some extent, a dice throw. But a ballpark. A low and a high.

This was tossing a six-sided die and getting a seven.

Nonsensical.

“Hm,” the demon next to him said. “Not terrible. Maybe I should’ve pushed the enchantments harder.”

Not…terrible?

A vein bulged in his forehead at the words. Not terrible. A transcendent quality item described in that manner fell a few hairs short of blasphemy. He was offended on a moral level.

Transcendent.

He’d skipped over his first masterwork and gone straight to transcendent. How was that possible? How? Even a masterwork was something a Master-tier crafter dreamed of. Grandmasters only managed a few in their lifetime, from what he understood.

How?

He’d done a good job; he’d thought that before [Inspecting] the item. An excellent job. But…no. He couldn’t credit himself for this. He wasn’t delusional enough to claim the miracle in front of him. His eyes drifted to the bottommost lines on the screen displaying the item’s identification.