Consciousness returned like a slow-loading video on dial-up internet—choppy, frustrating, and with the persistent feeling that something had gone horribly wrong. I found myself hunched over the Astral Forge again, my hair looking like I'd been electrocuted, clothes stained with soot and what I desperately hoped was just sweat.
The chunk of ore in my hands had the structural integrity of wet cardboard. I stared at it for a long moment, cataloging all the ways it had failed to become anything resembling a divine hammer component. The metal was pitted, discolored, and somehow managed to be both too brittle and too soft at the same time.
"Well," I said to the empty air, "that's attempt number one hundred."
I let the failed ore drop to the stone floor, where it shattered with a sound like breaking dreams. My foot connected with the forge base in what I told myself was a rational response to the situation. It wasn't.
The pain shooting up my leg was immediate and entirely my own fault. I collapsed backward, staring up at the vaulted ceiling I'd come to know intimately. Every crack, every shadow, every play of light from the stained glass windows above, I could probably draw a map of this place from memory by now.
"System," I called out, my voice echoing in the vast space.
The familiar ding preceded the materialization of my usual meal: instant noodles that tasted like salted cardboard and bottled water that somehow managed to be both refreshing and depressing. I'd long since given up hoping for variety in my dining options.
"Ah yes," I muttered, sitting up to examine my gourmet cuisine. "The cornerstone of any well-balanced diet. Sodium and preservatives with a side of existential dread."
I ate mechanically, my mind turning over the problem that had consumed the last... well, I'd lost track of time completely. Days? Weeks? The throne room existed in a perpetual twilight that made traditional timekeeping meaningless.
The Tears of the Origin sat in their container nearby, those crystalline drops that defied every law of metallurgy I'd ever learned. They pulsed with their own inner light, beautiful and utterly incomprehensible. I'd tried every technique I knew, traditional forging, the magical methods I'd painstakingly learned from the scrolls, even desperate improvisation that bordered on prayer.
Nothing worked.
****
After my hundred and first failure, I decided to approach the problem systematically. If raw determination wasn't working, maybe I needed to treat this like debugging code, isolate variables, test hypotheses, and document results.
I started keeping records. Scratch marks on the stone floor to track attempts. Arrangements of coins to mark different approaches. Gold pieces lined up in neat rows that stretched across the chamber like a metallic timeline of failure.
The work consumed me completely. I forged during what I assumed were days, then rested fitfully during what might have been nights. The Astral Crucible's flames became my clock, their cosmic colors shifting in patterns I began to recognize. Sometimes they burned blue-white like captured starlight, other times they flickered with deep reds that reminded me of dying suns.
My hands transformed from soft human appendages into something resembling well-used tools. Blisters formed and popped and reformed until eventually my skin gave up the pretense of sensitivity entirely. Calluses built up in layers, creating a natural armor against the heat and repetitive strain.
Somewhere around attempt 500, I started talking to myself. Not full conversations, I wasn't that far gone yet, but running commentary on my work, observations about the materials, frustrated mutterings when things went wrong. The empty throne room was an excellent listener, never interrupting or offering unwanted advice.
Around attempt 1,000, I realized I was organizing treasure. Not consciously, I'd just look up from the forge to find that I'd arranged rubies by size, or sorted emeralds into perfect geometric patterns. My subconscious mind had apparently decided that if I couldn't solve the forging problem, at least I could bring order to the chaos of scattered wealth.
The coin rows stretched further across the floor. I'd reached 50,000 individual pieces before I stopped counting altogether. The numbers had become meaningless, just another way to measure the scope of my failure.
****
My body began to fail in small, concerning ways. Coughing fits that left specks of red on the stone floor. Vision that blurred at the edges during particularly intensive forging sessions. A tremor in my hands that had nothing to do with exhaustion and everything to do with pushing human limits beyond their breaking point.
I caught my reflection in the polished surface of the anvil one day and barely recognized myself. Hollow cheeks, sunken eyes, hair that had given up any pretense of style or hygiene. I looked like someone who'd been lost in the wilderness for months, which wasn't far from the truth.
"Just one class," I whispered to my reflection. "That's all I wanted. One stupid class unlock."
The cosmic joke of it all wasn't lost on me. Here I was, surrounded by divine weapons and mystical forges, living in a treasure vault that could fund entire civilizations, and all I'd managed to accomplish was a comprehensive study in how many different ways rare metals could fail to cooperate.
I'd sacrificed everything for this trial. My life on Earth, my streaming career, the comfortable mediocrity of existence I'd never fully appreciated until it was gone. And for what? To slowly starve in a divine throne room while trying to forge something that might not even be possible?
The despair hit me like a physical weight. I found myself sitting in the middle of my coin arrangements, surrounded by the ordered chaos of my obsession, and seriously considering just... stopping. Lying down and waiting for whatever passed for natural death in this place.
****
It was during one of my coughing fits, when I was bent over double and trying not to think about what the red specks on the floor might mean for my long-term health prospects, that something clicked.
Not a revelation, exactly. More like a puzzle piece sliding into place, small, almost insignificant, but somehow completing a picture I hadn't realized I was building.
"The forge does not tolerate cowards," I said aloud, the words from that first day echoing in the vast space. "You accepted the anvil, you will bear the heat."
I'd been approaching this wrong from the beginning. This wasn't about technique or knowledge or even skill. Those were prerequisites, necessary but not sufficient. The trial was about something deeper, about being willing to sacrifice everything for the chance to create something divine.
I looked at the Astral Crucible, its flames dancing in patterns that seemed almost alive. Beautiful and terrible and hungry. It had been waiting patiently for me to understand what it was really asking.
The Tears of the Origin weren't just rare materials. They were a test of commitment. Of courage. Of the willingness to risk everything for the possibility of transcendence.
I stood up slowly, my joints protesting after hours of sitting among the coins. My body was failing, my mind was fraying at the edges, but I finally understood what I had to do.
I approached the Astral Crucible with the careful deliberation of someone about to make a decision that couldn't be unmade. The cosmic flames danced higher as I drew near, as if sensing my newfound resolve.
"No hesitation," I said quietly. "What's left to lose anyway?"
The answer was everything. My hands, my health, possibly my life. But I'd already lost everything that mattered when I'd accepted this trial. Earth was gone, my old life was gone, and the only way forward was through the fire.
I plunged my hands into the Crucible.
The pain was immediate and comprehensive. Every nerve ending in my arms lit up like Christmas tree lights, sending signals to my brain that it was never designed to process. I could feel flesh burning, could smell the acrid scent of my own cooking meat, could hear my own screams echoing off the obsidian pillars.
But the forge held me fast. Whatever divine mechanism controlled the Crucible had made its own decision about my commitment level, and apparently found it satisfactory. I couldn't pull back even if I wanted to, which was fortunate since every instinct I possessed was screaming at me to do exactly that.
The pain reached a crescendo that threatened to shut down my consciousness entirely, and then—
Golden text appeared in my vision, crisp and clear despite the agony consuming my nervous system.
[Congratulations. You have levelled up.]
A voice spoke, calm and utterly alien: "You have evolved from [Blacksmith] → [Magic Blacksmith]."
"The inheritance shall now take effect."
The change began in my bones, spreading outward like liquid light through my circulatory system. My consciousness expanded, suddenly able to perceive layers of reality I'd never imagined existed. Mana flowed through the air like visible currents, and the Astral Crucible revealed itself as something far more complex than I'd understood.
In my mind's eye, I saw a hammer, not physical, but conceptual. The idea of a divine tool, perfect and eternal, waiting for someone with the skill and determination to bring it into reality. It was beautiful in the way that mathematical equations are beautiful: elegant, precise, inevitable.
My body was still broken, still screaming protests about my recent life choices, but mana responded to my will now in ways it never had before. I could feel the flow of power through the air, could sense how to manipulate it with the same instinctive understanding that let me work a forge.
I placed the Tears of the Origin into the Crucible, and for the first time since I'd arrived in this place, they responded. The crystalline drops dissolved into the cosmic flames, their essence mixing with powers I couldn't name but somehow understood.
What followed was less like forging and more like conducting an orchestra where the instruments were made of pure possibility. The Astral Crucible sang—literally sang—with harmonies that resonated in my chest and made my teeth ache with sympathetic vibrations.