For a time, the Smith's days passed peacefully as he learned his craft.

He would do low status grunt-work for the Smithing Guild in exchange for money to purchase training and materials. He learned tempering and annealing and spot welding and how to avoid inclusions. He shoveled slag into carts for disposal; he sorted and smelted ore; he produced steel in large quantities.

He never complained.

He also rarely grew tired, and took fewer breaks than other Smiths, let alone apprentices and general laborers. All his levels with boosts in Strength and Endurance, as well as his [Persistence] Skill, were showing value that most people never realize.

Most people don't have a sum of thirty-two in their Class levels, after all. Not even in those days. Level ten in a professional class was considered good and proficient; levels for combat classes could be as low as three or four and be considered adequate for self-defense.

When he wasn't working, he was devouring books in the Guild's professional library. In those books were described dozens of unusual forging techniques and hundreds of little tips and tricks. Over half of the books were written by one man: Vulcan. None of the other Smiths were big readers, though they also had their own wisdom and tips and tricks passed down from Master to Apprentice within the smithy. James learned from them as well, when they needed his assistance or when he had the coin saved up to pay for training.

The Aspirant Knight remained busy as ever, and one day, lamenting that he had no other time to spend with his new retainer, he invited James to join him in the gym each morning.

And so James learned the art of strength training, and began spending his mornings with his lord and fellow retainer. In just a few weeks his strength, at least measured in ability to lift a weight, more than doubled, and he began to fill out, no longer thin, nearly gaunt from his brush with death by starvation.

This only made him more productive at the Smithing Guild.

One week, the Knight arranged for a Hammer Warrior from the Adventurer's Guild to come to the Knight's Order Headquarters to provide training. For the Knights, it was primarily training in how to fight a Hammer Warrior, given that a hammer strike could blow straight through armor. It was also, for James, training in how to actually fight with a hammer.

The Aspirant Knight himself even joined in, learning [Technique: Hammer Strike], and encouraged his subordinates to also learn to wield a hammer. While the Knights were focused mainly on learning Skills and tactics, relying on their Class, James had to learn everything manually.

"Study the movements, even if you can't learn the Skill, and practice on your own when you can," the Steward whispered. "You should have the Dexterity to replicate almost anything you see even without the Skill anyway, Dragonslayer."

Sebastian got a kick out of calling James a Dragonslayer, and meant no harm by it. Though it had cost James most of his right arm, and so he was more than a little traumatized by the memory, to be called a Dragonslayer was in those days considered extraordinarily high praise.

And so James practiced the forms of fighting with a hammer. The footwork, the movement, the positioning. Two-handed Greathammers, his bastard Steel Hammer, lighter and faster one-handed hammers and mauls, and even the relatively light and tiny hammers used by craftsmen.

The trainer had taken a page out of the Knifewielders' book, and carried on him almost a dozen hammers of various sizes, including some that only just barely qualified as hammers and worked with his Skills.

James soon bought a proper toolbelt and carried with him several small hammers at all times as well.

And finally, in the evenings when he wasn't practicing the movements of a Hammer Warrior, James would visit the archives of the Order until they closed, searching for information about other kingdoms, trying to figure out from which he had come.

He was greatly hampered by the lack of updated information, however, and the commonality of territories being traded back and forth between Kingdoms in wars and negotiations.

Research has shown that Mortimer Barony, wherein lay James' home village, had not only changed Kingdoms six times in the century prior to when the Smith was born, but that it had also changed names seven times.

The Knight's Order of Iberteria didn't even track the nobility of the other countries beyond its mountainous frontier below the rank of Count. It was just too much to keep track of, and changed too frequently, and quite simply, didn't matter to the Order on a day to day, year to year, even decade to decade basis.

There were more pressing issues to keep an eye on.

Eventually, he no longer needed an escort as he walked to and from the Smithing Guild each day. With his hammers, the low-level thugs and street gangs saw him as too dangerous to casually approach. With his Knight's Order armband, the consequences of attacking him in a large group were too grave to ignore.

The Smith could finally walk the streets of Cordova unaided.

James' days were busy and productive as the sowing season came to an end, and the Smithing Guild was flooded with requests for assistance from the affiliated semi-independent smithies of Cordova.

Cordova was blessed to sit on a plain favorable to farming, along a large river with abundant fresh water, and near to mines with the right metals to produce stainless steel: an alloy that could be fashioned into water pipes, and which wouldn't rust like regular iron would when exposed to water. Or, at least, would rust far less.

Inevitably, pipes would burst or wear out, and need replacement. And these problems were almost always brought to the smithies at the end of the sowing season, all at once, as the farmers of the plains finally had the time to inspect their irrigation equipment. And of course, every job was a rush job, because soon enough the seeds would start sprouting and need even more water, drawn from the river and pumped to distant fields, which only grew ever more distant as more and more of the plains around the city were brought under cultivation.

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And when the smithies of the city were overwhelmed with work, they would subcontract to the Smithing Guild, desperate for any help they could get.

James, at first, was put to work producing the precise kind of stainless steel known to be best for pipes, and his skill rapidly improved.

Smith Class Skill [Cementation] has reached level 8.

Smith Class Skill [Alloying] has been acquired.

…

Smith Class Skill [Alloying] has reached level 7.

Smith Class Skill [Inspect] has reached level 9.

Smith Class Skill [Appraisal] has reached level 6.

[Inspect]: Refined Austentic Stainless Steel, Grade: A, Ductility: B

At first, the Guild had him solely producing the steel, leaving it to more experienced Smiths to press into long strips, more like sheets or ribbons, ready to be folded into a circular shape around a mandrel and the edges welded together to produce a pipe.

But soon enough, there was more grade A stainless steel being produced than the smiths could use, and it was piling up.

So then James was shown how to press the steel he produced into strips, rather than just ingots, and for a time this was good: the experienced smiths were able to spend more time on actual pipe forging, and output increased.

Then the strips of stainless steel started to pile up, produced faster than the smiths could use them.

But this year's pipe season was already going better than any could remember. Rush jobs were actually being completed quickly, and specialized Weaponsmiths and Armorsmiths weren't being put to work producing pipes at reduced efficiency.

And so there was time for James to assist with actually forging the pipes, with folding the strips of metal shaped just so, so that their edges would meet perfectly and be welded into a tube of precise dimensions.

Smith Class Skill [Forging] has reached level 11.

Smith Class Skill [Welding] has been acquired.

…

Smith Class Skill [Welding] has reached level 7.

Pipe forging, in the way it was done in the Smith's day, was an exhausting task that required intense focus at all stages.

If the steel was worked carelessly, oxides would form on the surface which would interfere with the weld.

This was accepted in many applications. Almost none of the pipes in Cordova were pressurized, and they had overflow bypasses built in to avoid such a scenario. A weak or flawed weld was considered acceptable so long as it could transport water without leaking too much. Of course, it was better for pipes not to leak at all, and such pipes lasted far longer anyway.

But the Smith had never been one to be satisfied with an acceptable craft.

And so he sought perfection in every pipe he worked on. He cut no corners. He was meticulous.

And he simply didn't stop working.

Normal smiths at the journeyman level would grow tired. Even those with ten levels boosting their Strength would reach their limits after an hour or two of working heavy metal, and few had an endurance boost.

The Legendary Smith had Strength and Endurance in spades.

And that was to say nothing of his Willpower, which let him maintain peak focus for an entire day's labor. He was no less attentive at dusk than he was at dawn. Even his boosts in Intelligence aided him, and he picked up techniques like a sponge soaks up water. All of these advantages compounded, and in a few weeks of forging pipes James approached the skill of a master pipe smith.

[Inspect]: Watertight Stainless Steel Pipe, Grade: A, Weld: A

Freed from the burden of producing pipes in large quantities, the actual master pipe smiths were able to focus on the pipe fittings that joined the pipes together: the Y splitters, the elbows, the couplings, the reducers, and the tees that needed to be made custom to fit the individual pipes and installed on site.

It was during this period when a smith—it is known not who—showed the Smith an oddity, a mere little toy.

A roller stamp.

It was a small cylinder engraved in such a way that when rolled in the dirt, or covered in ink and rolled on paper, it would produce a short rectangular and repeating stamp.

This smith's stamp, apparently, produced a vulgar image. Rolling it in the dirt quickly produced several in succession, all identical.

And the Smith came to an understanding: a way to imprint onto tubes a pattern, even tubes too small to engrave by hand.

A way to engrave an enchantment onto the metal wire that made up chainmail.

Though the Legendary Smith was not the first to come up with this idea, in his day, this was considered a secret technique of master Enchanters and a select few grandmaster Smiths who worked with enchanters.

Enchanted chainmail was considered to be just shy of a Legendary Artifact.

It took James about two days to perfect a prototype. The hardest part was engraving the the tiled pattern in such a way that when the metal wire was twisted from a straight cylinder into a round toroid, the enchantment patterns wouldn't deform so much that they no longer functioned. The answer James came up with was to simply tile the patterns as closely as he could, ensuring that each individual pattern would only deform a little bit.

Doing this on the scale of links of chainmail pushed even the Smith's monstrous Dexterity to its limits.

This reverse-roller stamp method also worked with the particular way in which the Smith tempered the wire after it was drawn. The outer surface of the wire would be smooth, and—the Enchanter expected—magic stone dust would not stick to it. The stamped portion, however, would grip the magic stone dust just ever so slightly stronger, and so the link could be twisted and attached, then covered in dust entirely, then gently the dust could be blown off the parts of the link that weren't the enchantment patterns, then the mail dipped in Aqua Magia and enchanted.

Pipe forging season passed; James had advanced his Smithing skills incredibly rapidly, and he was dying to enchant.

After discussion with the Knight and the Steward, it was agreed between them that the Smith would begin training at the Enchanter's Guild.

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