Agatha The Legendary Guild Master

"Now let's get started. As I can see, your level is just 13, so the closest standard design to your preference would be for level 15, or do you have a design you want to make?" Nada said.

"I want to learn first on a standard design, as I don't have any designs for now," I replied.

"Don't stress yourself honey, many players and even some NPCs don't have their own designs easily. Ok, tell me do you have equipment in mind to forge, or should I select one for you?" she asked.

I thought for a moment about her question, I didn't need a spear, as I had a perfect one already. I didn't know what to choose, so I replied:

"You can advise me with one."

"That depends upon the intention of yours, tell me do you want to use it or sell it?" she said.

"I want to sell it of course, and in the future I would rather keep some to my personal use," I replied as I was in desperate need for gold coins right now, and in the future I would need to stack some of the equipment I would make for my group members and my guild players in the far future.

"Leave tomorrow for tomorrow to come, now let's start forging equipment for sale. The hottest items here are swords, shields, and armors. So, I recommend choosing one of them," she commented.

Without any second thoughts I announced my choice:

"I choose the swords."

"Excellent, now I will show you the standard design of the sword. The design you will see now is limited only to your talent, which we will figure out soon," Nada said.

"Talent? Is there a test or something?" I asked with interest.

"The best test is to see the result of your forging, that's the real and most important test for all talents," she said, "here is the design, do you have any question about it?"

I looked at the screen to see a new drawing appearing on it. to be honest, I didn't understand anything from it.

"Can you explain it to me?" I asked.

"Which part do you want me to explain?" she asked back, which made more embarrassed, so she added:

"You want me to explain everything? Don't be shy, this is normal for a beginner like you. You came from far away, right?"

"Is it that obvious?" I said.

"Yes, everyone near here will know a thing or two about this design. Anyway, let me highlight the parts I'm going to talk about in red so you can spot them easier," she replied, and then some parts of the design began to shine in red color, while others were in silver color.

"As you can see, these parts have many writings on them, actually they are the instructions you need to follow in forging these parts, and they are very important. 

A good blacksmith always tends to care about small details, and the more you follow these instructions to the letter, the better your final equipment grade will be. It also plays a big role in determining success or failure when forging an equipment," she explained.

I tried to look at these parts, and I managed to vaguely see some writings, but they were all small and close to each other, so I couldn't make a single meaning out of them.

"Can you enlarge them for me?" I requested.

"Sure, let's see, this part has many writings on it, let's enlarge it first," she said as she enlarged the part that was marking the edge of the whole sword. 

The red markings over this sword were in the hilt, the tip of the sword, the base of the sword, the edge of the blade, and finally on the broad segment of the sword. 

This sword wasn't broad, but when Nada enlarged that sharp part, I realized there was more than I saw before. For example, that edge was divided into two parallel lines that moved along the length of the sword, beginning from the base and ending at the tip. 

Each line had some fine marks over it, and the sharp blade of the sword was squeezed in between them, and fortunately it had nothing. 

"As you can see, there are two small lines, but they aren't just lines, they are fine letters from our noble language here in the Frod's empire. you need to draw them very carefully and very fast too. 

You can now read the instructions well, so read them and tell me if you need to understand anything of it," she explained slowly, while the writing she enlarged became clearer to me.

I started to read them slowly, the more I read the more realization I felt. Blacksmithing wasn't an easy class at all. The instructions were about drawing a single symbol repeatedly at the lines marked in red. 

The trick here wasn't about the symbols itself, as I had some confidence in drawing them perfectly, the issue was about the time given to me for doing that. 

I was supposed to draw all these symbols to both lines in the time when the blade temperature ranged between 1500 and 1200 heat degrees. As the writing said, I had only less than five minutes to finish my drawings in them. 

If the time passed and I didn't manage to cover the whole edge of the blade with these symbols, the end result would be a failure. If I managed to connect one line and didn't manage to finish the other, the equipment would end as white grade, with a very high failure rate. 

If I managed to finish both lines, but the drawings weren't good, then the end result would be a white grade sword, with very low success rate.

I took a deep breath as I felt it was really hard to finish drawing these symbols perfectly just in the time given to me.

"How can I draw these symbols on the blade?" I asked, trying to drive away my worries.

"You will use one of the tools that's available to you here, have you understood this part? There are other parts to read too," she said.

'Oh boy, that's really tedious!' I muttered to myself with distress, as I didn't realize I was only viewing a single part of the design, and there were many others too.