Danmachi- Hell’s Forge

To be clear I purified the worm slime and sold that directly to the Blue pharmacy and kept the normal drops for myself. My first experiment was with the crystal mantis carapaces and wings and I was frankly unable to use them in the best way. Both of the drops were most useful in the creation of staves but the problem was that to make the best staves you needed to [mage] developmental skill which I obviously lacked. Crystal mantis drops like the name implied were made of crystal and as such while fantastic at passing mana through for magic but were also brittle and thus not well suited for a melee weapon or armor.-

It was perhaps wasteful but I could only either sell the stuff to the guild or turn it into windows. I of course did the latter option since the end goal was to turn the church into a fortress made out of drop items. Naturally this also included the windows which were ironically the only part of the church I couldn't weaponize before now since the glass didn't come from a living source.-

The drops being crystal meant that all I had to do was flatten them out into the shape of a pane of glass before transforming the color of the crystal to be perfectly clear. I debated about whether or not to put the Hestia divine emblem on the windows but Hestia was vehemently against the idea since that would be tacky according to her. She was the boss so regular clear crystal windows it was. The other drops were thankfully so much better suited for my purpose as they were all for weapons and armors. Wyvern scales were surprisingly the most interesting in how much energy they could hold before it became too much for them.-

A single scale could hold no less than twelve different properties(albeit weak one) before it cracked and broke apart. With that in mind I fused twenty of the scales together into a single solid pink plate of material. I then repeated that process again until I had two plates of material roughly circular and exactly two feet across. Next I refined these plates as much as I could regardless of energy(which was considerable) until they were insanely hard and sturdy. Once that was done I carefully started imbuing the plates with a technique that I had high hopes for.-

The technique had exactly two functions and a whole mess of restrictions due to how easily it could go wrong. The functions were simply to extract mana from magic stones without destroying the stones and to convert that mana to cursed energy to get sent back into the stone. I split this technique between both of the plates and prayed to Hestia that it worked. If I was successful my supply of cursed stones would suddenly explode which would open me up to many avenues of crafting.-

At the moment it should be understood that I needed to wait for a magic stone to get empty before personally turning it into a cursed stone. I also couldn't go out and purchase the empty stones as first they are crushed and turned into fertilizer for the fields of the city and second that would be suspicious as all shit if someone went out of their way to buy something universally accepted as near useless when empty. With this setup though I could simply have Hestia feed magic stones into the are between the two plates and then wait to collect the finished product.-

Sure this is basically having my goddess working for me but she just lazes about most of the day anyways so it's no big deal if she has something like this going on as well. Plus it's not like this is super hard to do either as it's place stone, remove stone, repeat and profit. Plus she could literally just have a pile of magic stones next to her that she could be sitting down and going through as she did it. All the really hard parts of the process get done by the two plates.-

Of course that was all in theory before I actually created the set up. As you may have already guessed however nothing I do ever goes that smoothly as far as first attempts in crafting so the set up became a detonation point instead. As in it looked like it was going to work but the moment the mana was extracted from the stone it overpowered the cursed technique and exploded. I was smart however and was hiding behind a wooden shield the size of my body the moment I put the magic stone in it's designated location.-

"Hmmm, first attempt is a failure from mana riot. Perhaps if I slow down the extraction rate drastically the technique wouldn't get over powered?" I muttered as I pieced together the plates again.

My next attempt also failed , followed by the third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh attempts failing before I finally succeeded on the eight.

"I'm going to need more than one of these things aren't I?" I muttered with a sigh as I calculated the amount of time it would take the set up to complete a single grade two orc magic stone.

Two hours, it was going to take two whole hours for the set up to fully extract all the mana safely, convert it to cursed energy and then stuff it back into the empty stone. By my calculations it would take even longer for higher grade and larger stones like the infant dragon or level two monster. This unfortunately was the best I could do at the moment however as I was getting dangerously close to overclocking the material limit of the scales. I made another three of the set ups before moving on to the other drops that I found were worse at holding large amounts of energy but had their own affinities that could be used in future crafts.-

I directly turned the Almiraj hides into fluffy pillows that Hestia absolutely adored since they were so soft and wonderfully white. The horns I kept to turn into handles and the Lamia, Hellhound and Wyvern drops I had left over I just experimented with in various way until I was satisfied with my discoveries. Something curious happened the next day as Bell borrowed a book from the hostess that turned out to be a grimoire he used. I was suspicious that Syr was involved but she swore it really had nothing to do with her.-

The funny thing was that all the girls at the hostess were of the same mind about the matter "It sucks to be the person who forgot it." and easily moved past it. I was pretty sure that Bells new magic [Bolt] was the most broken spell ever as it was basically pure mana but it could take elemental properties if he added "fire, water, earth and wind" to the incantation which was a super short "Bolt!".