[Warning: Player is skipping the tutorial.]
[Player has not learned the Life Skill: Basic Forging.]
[Attempting to forge without this skill may destroy the materials.]
Three system notifications appeared in succession before Lu Tiechen's eyes inside the beginner village's smithy.
Several players nearby stopped to watch.
One couldn't help warning him, "Dude, the system just told you. You have to learn the skill before you can forge anything."
Lu Tiechen ignored him.
He stood before the furnace, a Common Forging Hammer in his hand, watching the heated iron blank before him.
Dark red.
Orange-red.
Bright yellow.
To his eyes, the patterns inside the iron slowly unfolded as its temperature rose. Several tiny impurities shifted within the glow of the flames.
It was no different from forging in the real world.
No.
If anything, he could see it even more clearly here.
The system asked again.
[Would you like to learn the Life Skill: Basic Forging?]
Lu Tiechen tightened his grip on the hammer.
"No need to make it complicated."
The system paused.
[Please confirm.]
Lu Tiechen used the tongs to move the iron blank onto the anvil.
"I know how."
A moment later, the hammer rang out.
Clang!
...
In the twenty-fifth century, a young man telling the world's most advanced game AI that he knew how to forge should have been laughable.
In the real world, after all, forging had long since become obsolete.
The nanofurnaces in the city's upper districts burned day and night. A molecular printer needed only three minutes to manufacture an alloy blade that met every specification.
Smelting, shaping, cooling, inspection—machines handled it all.
Precision.
Efficiency.
Those were the only things this era demanded of manufacturing.
As for furnaces, anvils, and forging hammers, they belonged on museum information plaques.
Yet deep within Slum District No. 9, one smithy remained: the Lu Family Smithy.
It was wedged between two dilapidated apartment buildings.
Inside, there were no intelligent robotic arms or automated production lines. Just an old-fashioned furnace, a battered anvil, and a few hammers whose handles had been polished smooth by years of use.
The Lu family was the only family in the city still practicing traditional forging.
Lu Tiechen's grandfather, Lu Shanhai, was also the most stubborn old blacksmith in the entire city.
Whenever someone praised the precision of machine manufacturing, the old man would tap his pipe against the anvil and snort.
"Does a machine know how much heat the iron has taken?"
"Does it know when the metal should be soft and when it should be hard?"
"Something truly worth using is made by a man's own hands, one hammer blow at a time. Machines don't know shit."
In the twenty-fifth century, that was a ridiculous thing to say.
But the people of the slums couldn't laugh.
They couldn't afford the standardized parts sold in the upper districts, much less the exorbitant diagnostic fees charged by smart repair equipment.
When a door hinge snapped, a water pump broke, or a component in an old motor vehicle cracked, it would eventually find its way to the Lu Family Smithy.
Lu Shanhai grumbled and cursed, but his hands never slowed.
Once the furnace was lit and his hammer came down, things the machines had condemned as scrap could often last another few years.
Lu Tiechen had grown up to the sound of those hammer blows.
He first picked up a forging hammer at the age of seven.
That day, Lu Shanhai was making a wire-cutting blade from a piece of discarded alloy.
The alloy contained too many impurities and had already developed internal flaws.
The old man lifted the glowing metal with his tongs and was about to strike when Lu Tiechen suddenly spoke.
"Grandpa, don't hit it there."
Lu Shanhai's hammer stopped in midair.
"What did you say?"
"It's going to crack there."
Lu Shanhai looked down at the alloy blank.
The crack was hidden inside the material, almost impossible to detect from the surface.
Even an ordinary blacksmith might not have judged it so accurately.
He narrowed his eyes.
"Then where should I hit it?"
Lu Tiechen pointed to the edge of the blank.
"Here."
Lu Shanhai changed the angle of his hammer and struck.
Clang!
Sparks flew.
The internal flaw that had been about to spread actually stabilized.
The old man was silent for a long time. Then he handed Lu Tiechen a smaller hammer.
"You try."
The hammer was heavy.
Seven-year-old Lu Tiechen could only hold it with both hands, his arms trembling uncontrollably.
Yet when he looked at the anvil, every sound around him seemed to vanish.
All he could see was that piece of alloy.
He could see tiny dark lines shifting inside the material.
Not yet.
Wait a little longer.
The glow changed.
Now.
Lu Tiechen gritted his teeth, raised the hammer, and brought it down.
Clang!
The sound was faint, even a little dull.
But Lu Shanhai lurched forward in astonishment.
There wasn't enough force behind the blow.
His stance was still clumsy.
But the timing and point of impact were frighteningly precise.
That single strike had forced the hidden flaw back into place.
"A genius."
For the first time, Lu Shanhai's voice trembled.
"You're a genius, Little Chen."
"At last, our family has someone truly born for this trade."
From that day on, Lu Shanhai taught Lu Tiechen himself.
How to read the color of heated metal.
How to listen to a hammer's ring.
How to understand different materials.
What took other people years to learn about heat, he could remember after watching just a few times.
Where others relied on experience to judge the right moment, he seemed able to see it with his own eyes. He always lowered the blank into the quenching tank at precisely the right instant.
Lu Shanhai said those eyes were Heaven's gift to a blacksmith—a guarantee that he'd never go hungry.
Lu Tiechen had once believed him.
Then he grew older.
Cheap repair robots began appearing in the slums, and business at the Lu Family Smithy grew worse and worse.
Many people would rather buy a machine-made product that lasted only six months than pay a little more for something Lu Shanhai could make to last five years.
They had no money.
And no time.
The furnace no longer burned every day.
Dust began gathering on the hammers hanging on the wall.
A teacher once encouraged Lu Tiechen to work for a materials testing company.
"You have excellent powers of observation. With professional training, you could at least find a stable job."
"But sir, I still want to forge things!"
The teacher fell silent for a moment, then shook his head.
"There's no future in that."
That night, Lu Tiechen returned to the smithy and found his grandfather sitting alone before the dying furnace.
The old man held the forging hammer he had used for decades and muttered a curse.
"Machine-made things are cold. Soulless."
After a long silence, he added,
"But I suppose this world doesn't need a soul anymore."
Lu Tiechen watched quietly from outside the doorway. He didn't go in.
Only then did he understand. His grandfather knew perfectly well that the times had changed.
He simply refused to accept that something he had spent his entire life preserving was truly about to disappear.
Lu Tiechen refused to accept it, too.
Then a promotional trailer for Age of the Ancient Gods appeared on homepages across the internet.
The world's first full-immersion online game with realistic physics.
Touch, weight, and temperature feedback were almost indistinguishable from reality. Every class and crafting system was calculated in real time by a supercomputer AI.
Players on the forums were all researching which class to choose after Level 10.
Lu Tiechen alone was fixated on the trailer's final two seconds.
In one corner of the screen, an NPC blacksmith brought his hammer down on an iron blank.
Sparks flew.
Lu Tiechen saw the patterns inside the iron shift, just as they would in the real world.
It wasn't a canned animation.
The material was actually changing.
That day, he watched those two seconds hundreds of times.
Finally, he gritted his teeth, took out the money he had saved from years of part-time jobs, and bought the cheapest neural-interface headset available.
On launch day, Lu Shanhai sat outside the smithy, frowning as he watched him put on the headset.
"Playing a game?"
"There's a smithy in it."
Lu Shanhai's hand, holding his cigarette, stopped in midair.
Lu Tiechen looked at him.
"Maybe people still need forging in there."
The old man was silent for a long time. Finally, he stubbed out his cigarette.
"Then go and see."
"Don't disgrace the Lu family's hammer."
The launch countdown reached zero.
Lu Tiechen entered Age of the Ancient Gods.
Other players rushed out of the village to fight over the first rabbits and wolves.
He went against the crowd, entering the smithy on the village's eastern side.
And so the opening scene unfolded.
...
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Clang!
The first hammer blow fell.
The iron blank neither warped nor cracked.
The hammer face landed precisely where the dark internal lines intersected, forcing several impurities that had been about to spread toward the edges.
The NPC blacksmith, who had been lounging by the furnace, abruptly raised his head.
A line of text that had no business appearing in a beginner tutorial slowly emerged.
[Unknown forging method detected.]
[Recalculating manual forging assessment...]
This beginner wasn't much for following instructions.