After grumbling to himself, he got to work. He had no oil or water, but the magical sharpening stone didn't need it to work. It'd work better with it, but it wasn't necessary or worth the effort for a piece of rusty scrap metal pretending to be a weapon. He scraped the 'edge' of the 'blade' on the stone. The metal of the 'knife' was crappy so it gave way pretty quickly and soon he had a rather impressively sharp edge on the weapon. Granted the metal was so shit that a single slice would probably dull it, but there was a solution to that!
He dismissed the sharpening stone and thanked his lucky stars that it only took energy to conjure, not to maintain. It was basically permanent until he needed another item. In this case, he summoned an engraving tool. Doing so left him with barely any magical energy to speak of, annoying. He held the engraving tool in his hand as he decided to use the weakest, lowest tier, runic language that he knew. There were a ton of factors that determined the tier a language held. But, most low level languages had one thing in common, it took a ton of runes to do anything. Higher tier languages could do a fuck ton with a single rune. The trade off was in the mana cost to power the runes. Low level runic languages required very little mana to work their very weak effects. For high tier languages it was the exact opposite.
He held his engraver, which the new information floating inside of his head informed him was just of low quality. The quality of his tools was linked to how much mana he could spend on conjuring them, so pretty crap at the moment. Still, the tip was sharp enough and hard enough for him to start scraping thin lines into the flat of the shiv. He carefully took his time to etch each rune one line at a time. Was it perfect? Hell no. But none of his little mistakes were bad enough to prevent the runes from working. That was one good thing about low tier runes, they were more forgiving. If he'd been carving a high tier rune, he'd have blown himself up by now.
It took nearly half an hour for him to scribe just three runes into the flat of the shiv, none of them perfect. Still, he would happily admired the results of his effort... if he could actually power the runes. That was another drawback for the low tier rune languages, they had to be powered by the user and currently he had hardly any mana available. Having the Essence of the Artificer unlock his mana and give him the basics on how to use it automatically was excellent. Having the minuscule reserves of a freshly awoken mage of only thirteen years? Not so excellent.
Still, he was thirteen, homeless, and had no idea how long it would be until shit hit the fan in the supernatural world. Yet, he wasn't all that worried, as long as he had some time. With enough time, practice, and effort, he could make items that could rock the foundations of the world. Weapons, armor, potions, maybe even Sacred Gears. He'd be able to make anything he needed to survive with enough time and effort.
And materials... Those were going to be the hardest to get his hands on.
As he thought about his next step, his stomach growled loudly. First order of the day? Breakfast! Cause making a supernatural shiv didn't count for some reason.
Junichiro looked at his newly enchanted shiv and pondered what to do with it now. He used to just tuck it in the back of his pants since it's edge was shit. The only somewhat worrisome part of it had been the pointy tip. Now though? The edge was razor sharp, even if one good slice with it would likely dull the edge. That wouldn't be an issue once he could charge the runes he'd engraved on it that would preserve the edge. Just preserve it.
Sure, he knew tons of runes to make the edge even sharper, like monomolecular sharper. He just didn't have anything even remotely close to the necessary resources to pull it off. Anyway, the edge was sharp enough to slice his ass now if he carried it in the usual fashion. Time to improvise.
After setting the shiv down, or did it count as a knife now? After setting whatever it was down, he climbed into the front seat of the rusted out junker he'd slept in. He grabbed some wires hanging from under the steering wheel column and started ripping them out. He didn't own a belt but some wires weaved together and tied off should work.
could conjure a hammer. No, the only thing he couldn't easily rig up a crap version of was fuel, coal.