Kays Translations
Just another Isekai Lover~
Chapter 10: A New Ability
It had been a month since his first shopping trip and today was his second payday.
Tauro was excited because although he had been earning his daily living expenses through errand quests, this was the only day he would receive a large sum of money from working in the guild.
There were so many things he wanted.
Of course, he couldn't buy everything, but he planned to prioritize and buy what he needed first.
"Oh, that's right. I have to go thank Angus-san!"
The knife was working fine, so he hadn't had a chance to go there.
So he decided to go to Angus first, and then do some shopping.
When he arrived at the storefront, he could hear the sound of hammering, but the store was closed.
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Apparently, it was not open today.
He didn't know what to do for a moment, but since he wasn't a customer today, he went around to the back and called out to him.
"Angus-san, are you there?"
The blacksmith's door opened and out stepped a slender Angus with a hammer in his hand.
"Who are you? A human child? Could it be the one from that time?"
"Thank you for the knife..."
"Nevermind that! The hardening process has made the iron hard, but it's prone to breaking! What should I do?"
Angus approached Tauro and grabs him tightly on the shoulder.
"Angus-san! Calm down It hurts!"
The hands that were grabbing Tauro's shoulders were unbelievably strong and the momentum seemed to be crushing him.
"Oh, I'm sorry!"
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Angus hurriedly pulled his hands away.
Angus explained again as he guided Tauro inside.
"I've tried everything since then, but it's hard and breaks easily..."
For the past month, he had been experimenting with the tempering that Tauro had told him about.
"There's something called tempering..."
Tauro shared what he knew with Angus as best he could.
"Oh! I didn't know there was such a technology! Thank you, I think I've seen the light. Let me call you Master!"
Angus' joy was so great that he almost worshipped him.
"Calling me master is an exaggeration. It was just something I knew."
At that moment, the voice of the world echoed in his mind.
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"Condition for activation of special skill confirmed <He who holds True knowledge and is worshipped by experts> The special skill [True Eye] is obtained."
He was surprised to get an ability in an unexpected place.
"True Eyes" Is it an appraisal type of ability?
He had to stop his thoughts once Angus took his hand and was still rejoicing.
Angus asked Tauro to come back in a month so that he could make something better using the techniques he had taught him and Tauro left the store.
Tauro canceled his shopping plans temporarily and tried out the True Eye.
When he was conscious of the word "True Eye" in his mind, the object he saw was given a name.
If he tried to look at it in detail, he also got an evaluation.
It seems to specialize in seeing "things" similar to Nei's appraisal ability.
It appears it can't be used on people, but it's certainly quite useful.
"Nei-san, did you see things like this?"
Tauro thought that this was an ability that he wanted to show off.
The rest of the shopping trip was a pleasure.
If he hadn't had these eyes, he would have been fooled by the products he bought, but instead, he bought only the good stuff.
It was especially great to be able to choose the best deals, but it was hard to restrain himself from buying too much because he knew he was getting a good deal.
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"This is a dangerous ability."
Tauro smiled wryly.
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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