Kays Translations
Just another Isekai Lover~
Chapter 10: A New Ability
A month had passed since Tauro’s first shopping trip.
Today was his second payday, and he was in high spirits.
His errand quests covered his day-to-day living expenses, but payday was when he received a substantial sum all at once.
There were countless things he wanted.
Of course, he couldn’t buy them all. He intended to set priorities and purchase the necessities first.
“…Oh, right! I need to visit Angus and thank him properly!”
The knife had worked without any problems, so Tauro had never found another reason to visit.
He decided to stop at Angus’s smithy before beginning his shopping.
When he reached the shop, he could hear iron being hammered, but the storefront was closed.
Apparently, Angus wasn’t open for business that day.
Tauro hesitated, then reasoned that he hadn’t come as a customer and went around back to call for him.
“Angus? Are you there?”
The forge door opened, and a haggard-looking Angus emerged with a hammer in one hand.
“…Who’s there? A human child? Wait—are you the brat from before?!”
“Thank you for giving me that knife—”
“Forget that! This quenching method makes the iron harder, but it also makes it brittle! What am I supposed to do?!”
The intense dwarf bore down on Tauro before he could finish.
“P-please calm down! That hurts!”
Angus had seized both his shoulders with far more force than he realized and seemed close to crushing them.
“Ah, sorry!”
He hurriedly released Tauro.
After ushering him inside, Angus explained the problem again.
“I’ve tried all sorts of things since then. The iron becomes harder, but it also breaks too easily…”
Apparently, Angus had spent the entire month experimenting with the quenching technique Tauro had mentioned.
“There’s another process called tempering…”
Tauro did his best to explain everything he knew.
“Oh! There’s a technique like that too?! Thank you—I finally see a way forward! Brat—no, please let me call you Master!”
Angus was so overjoyed that he looked ready to worship Tauro.
“Calling me Master is far too much! I only happened to know about it!”
At that moment, the Voice of the World echoed in his mind.
“One activation condition for special skill [Garbled Text]—<A Knower of the Genuine Revered by an Expert>—confirmed. [True Eye] acquired.”
Tauro was startled to acquire an ability in such an unexpected situation.
[True Eye]? Is it some kind of appraisal ability?
Before he could think further, Angus seized his hand and continued celebrating, so Tauro first had to calm him down.
Angus promised to make something good with the techniques Tauro had taught him and asked him to return in another month.
After leaving the smithy, Tauro postponed his shopping long enough to test [True Eye].
When he focused on the words [True Eye] in his mind, names appeared over the objects he looked at.
When he tried to examine an object more closely, an evaluation appeared as well.
After testing it on various targets, he concluded that the ability resembled Nei’s [Appraisal] and specialized in examining objects.
It didn’t seem to work on people, but there was no question that it was extremely useful.
“Is this how objects look to Nei?”
Tauro now understood why she had seemed so proud of the ability.
His shopping afterward was great fun.
He passed over merchandise that might have deceived him without [True Eye] and bought only good-quality items.
Being able to identify exceptional bargains was particularly useful. The hard part was stopping himself from buying too much.
Once he knew something was a bargain, leaving it behind felt like losing money.
“This ability is surprisingly dangerous.”
Tauro gave a wry smile.
1) It seems weird how tailored his skill is for someone that got reincarnated,my impression of the skill the God was going to give him was it would be random. Maybe I missed something?
2) Why would a skill that requires acknowledgement by people work on objects and not people? I’m not saying it should do both, but shouldn’t it only work on people?
3) So far time seems to be passing reasonably in the story, I like that.
Non-tempered steel is worse than brass and prone to rust and break. Like, it’s super soft compare to brass. Unless there’s some magical reason there’s no way people would use non-tempered steel instead of copper.
That depends on the alloy. You actually seem to be describing pure iron, which isn’t really able to be heat-treated or tempered. Pure iron is very easy to work with, but bends easily and won’t hold an edge. As you say, it’s soft compared to brass. Bronze is hard but brittle, and can easily hold a razor edge. As such, it actually took a long time to transition from bronze to iron, simply because the bronze was easily much better than the iron. But, as it became increasingly hard to find “good” ores for bronze (it’s an alloy, and good bronzes were mostly accidental/natural alloys with good properties), people learned to make good use of iron’s very different properties.
They’re probably working with basic iron, not steel. Before smiths really understood steel, they mostly worked with nearly-pure iron, because impure iron is “useless” without knowledge they initially didn’t have. For iron, simply beating it into shape and then sharpening it was sufficient. It’s soft, easily bent, and won’t hold an edge, but making a knife is not that much time, and if it bends, it can be bent back. If it dulls, it can be sharpened. And the total commitment of time, fuel, and effort is lower for iron than steel, once reasonable sources of iron were known.
There are plenty of examples of forging with bog-iron on youtube, and they’re a good reference for this.
Making steel was discovered accidentally. If you “bake” the iron while it’s immersed in hot carbon, you can sometimes accidentally convert some of the surface iron to carbon steel. Eventually smiths discovered how to reliably do this (initially by pulverizing charcoal or coal and wrapping a layer of mud around the charcoal and iron bar, then heating the whole thing).
Once you’ve got carbon steel, you can change its properties pretty significantly just by controlling the profile of heating, then hitting it a lot to remove any interstitial contaminants (silicon for example, although silicon can be helpful, with MUCH more advanced metallurgical knowledge) that might distort the grain. Then, if you properly control its cooling profile, you can favor the formation of strong lattice structure (hard, brittle, easily-sharpened but prone to breakage) or a more amorphous microstructure (tough, bendable, won’t hold an edge, but hard to break).
And yeah. Carbon steel rusts easily. If you started from pure iron (condensed bog iron, iron sand, etc), you’ve got no “accidental” chromium, vanadium, molybdenium, etc. Pure carbon steels rust badly, but are simple to handle, and the heating profiles are forgiving enough that it can be done by “eye” (judging temperature by brightness and color of the glow). Alloy steels can easily be given rust-resistant properties, but they’re dependent on subtle and unforgiving recipes, and even tiny differences can make a huge change in their properties and necessary heating profiles.
It’s only been about two centuries since non-carbon steels stopped being “black magic”, dependent on accidental discovery and secret recipes involving such things as “ore from this mountain, coal from that seam, quenching in the blood of a bull”, without understanding exactly what properties of those materials contributed the desired effects.
I wonder if the original knowledge he shared with the blacksmith was “hardening” before this time sharing knowledge of “tempering”. It would make more sense than teaching him “tempering” twice. A little odd that this master blacksmith hasn’t learnt something a little similar already though.
yeah, considering a quick search gives quenching as being in existence sometime around the classical era/early middle ages