Chapter 137: Chatper 137- The forging - II

Two epic items were already finished. Only Sigil’s piece remained. Leo and Hugh stood back and watched in silence as Sigil kept working.

Sigil had laid out the Umbra Shard and the Starfall Shard side by side as he started. He tossed the Umbra Shard into the crucible first, he followed it with the Starfall Shard along with the eternal flame, and watched as both materials softened, melted, and slowly began to merge into one.

Once he was satisfied, he let the mixture cool before picking up his hammer and beginning to fold it — again and again, layer over layer, until the alloy finally tipped over into epic rank. Leo had done something close to this himself before, so he already knew how the process would hold.

Sigil was fully absorbed in the work. ....He never once lifted his head to look at them.

Strike after strike landed in steady rhythm as he adjusted the heat, corrected his pacing, and let the alloy take shape beneath his hands. The dark material and the silver material were no longer distinguishable from each other — they’d become a single dense metal, with only the faintest silver sheen still visible running beneath the darker surface.

Then he started shaping it properly.

The piece came out thick through the center and tapered thin toward the outer edge. Sigil clearly wanted this one worn as a defensive accessory rather than carried like a shield, so he kept the overall design compact and close-fitting. The center carried most of the thickness, while the outer section was worked thin enough to spread force evenly across the entire surface.

Compared to what Leo and Hugh had produced, the piece looked deceptively simple. But the raw materials Sigil had started with weren’t anywhere close to epic rank on their own — everything came down to what he’d done with them.

He kept hammering, kept refining the shape long after most smiths would have called it finished. Almost an hour passed before the forging was finally complete.

[Ding~]

[Forging completed.]

...

Hugh stared at him, unable to hide his disbelief.

"Already done?"

Sigil didn’t bother answering.

He lifted the scale ward and turned it slowly in his hands, running his eyes across every inch of the surface. Everything looked right at first glance — the shape held true, the alloy had fused cleanly, and the system had already accepted the piece as complete.

Then Sigil pressed his thumbs against the surface at the center and dragged them slowly toward the outer edge. Halfway there, his thumbs stopped.

His expression shifted, just barely, for a second.

Leo caught it immediately. "What’s wrong?"

Sigil didn’t answer right away. He kept his attention locked on the ward, turning it over to check the thickness again from a different angle, then ran his fingers across the opposite side the same way he had done the first time.

"There." He pointed out.

Leo and Hugh both leaned in toward the spot he was pointing at.

"The force probably won’t distribute evenly from this point," Sigil said.

Hugh frowned and tapped the spot a couple of times with his knuckle. His frown only deepened. "The energy’s passing through fine, though."

"I know," Sigil said with a nod. "Even the system says it’s complete."

He paused, then added, "But this section is carrying more stress than the rest of it."

Leo ran his forge sight over the item as well, and still couldn’t find anything wrong with it. Nothing about the ward looked flawed to him. But Sigil clearly wasn’t convinced, and he wasn’t backing down either.

"It can be made better," Sigil said simply, setting the ward back down on the anvil and picking his hammer back up.

Hugh’s eyes went wide. "This guy isn’t joking. He’s completely insane—"

"Wait — wait!" Hugh called out, but the hammer had already fallen.

It kept falling, again and again, until the ward broke apart entirely.

Hugh grabbed his own head with both hands. "You just broke an Epic rank item! Are you out of your mind?!"

Sigil ignored him completely and kept working. After a moment he gathered the broken pieces and fed them back into the forge.

Watching this, Hugh looked ready to lose his mind entirely. "Is he actually serious?" he asked, turning to Leo.

Leo just nodded, eyes still fixed on Sigil. If he was honest with himself, he was just as caught off guard by the decision. Even he would have hesitated before deliberately dismantling something already ranked epic.

Sigil started the entire process over from scratch. He reordered the folds, made small adjustments to direction here and there that most people wouldn’t even have noticed. He altered the pressure behind each strike depending on the stage, and gave the alloy more time to settle between heat cycles than he had the first time through.

He turned it, folded it, flattened it, and repeated the whole sequence several times over. Afterward he compressed the center section more tightly, reheated the piece, and went through another full round of hammering — the rhythm just slightly different from before, more deliberate, more careful.

Slowly, the shape of the ward began to reform.

Sigil kept working while Leo and Hugh could do nothing but watch in a kind of stunned silence.

After roughly another hour, Sigil finally finished the piece and set it down beside the two other epic rank items already waiting there.

[Ding~]

[Scale Ward — Defensive Accessory]

[Rank — Epic]

[Quality — Master]

...

They had three complete epic rank items now. A weapon, a chest piece, and a defensive accessory.

Leo checked through his inventory and found he still had plenty of material left over — the Devil’s Scale was still sitting untouched among the rest. He planned to use it to forge a devil’s sword for the next auction that will be held in the game.

The first full collection for the auction was finally complete.

Seven days had passed since they’d started. The catalogue was finished, and for the first time in a while, the forge had gone quiet — no ringing hammer strikes, no roar of the flame, just silence.

...

Back on Earth, inside the seventh building, the last file closed as Elona finished reading through the completed catalogue from start to finish. Every entry was thorough — name, rank, type, attributes, and skills, all laid out cleanly.

The skill names themselves were listed, but the full details behind each one stayed restricted, kept private enough that only the eventual buyer would ever get to see the specifics in full.

Elona went through every item on the list one more time, including the three epic rank pieces — Stormbreaker, the Phoenix Mantle, and the Scale Ward.

Nothing was missing. Everything matched.

She signed off on the final page.

The staff immediately took the document and began preparations for the auction.

Elona glanced toward the display screen. "What’s the situation with registrations?"

"Still climbing," the staff answered. "It hasn’t slowed down at all."

"And verification?"

"Also climbing, steadily, but it’s falling far behind the registration numbers with every passing hour," the staff replied.

Elona raised an eyebrow. "How far behind are we talking?"

"We’re prioritizing complete applications first," the staff explained. "There are already thousands of registrations in the queue, and more are coming in every few seconds."

Leo nodded along, listening. It made sense, given the auction had already been publicly announced for tomorrow.

Registration would stay open until midnight, and once that window closed, both registration and verification would halt entirely, no exceptions.

"Check every one of them properly," Elona said. "Anyone who finishes verification before the deadline still gets to bid."

"Yes, ma’am," the secretary said, already turning to relay the instruction.

"Also, let it be known that more than one epic rank item will be on display," Elona added, sending the message out to her team.

The exact number of epic rank pieces, and the total number of items overall, stayed undisclosed — and likely would remain that way right up until the event itself.

Every news outlet and every forum online seemed to be running the same headline. The first system-recognized guild in the world was hosting a real-world auction, the first of its kind ever attempted.

That guild — the very first one ever officially recognized by the system — belonged to Leo.

News outlets and forums alike couldn’t stop discussing Leo, the Eternal Forge Guild, and their apparent connection to Space Z and Elona Mosk.

Elona checked the time and switched off the television.

She pulled up the guest list one more time. Invitations had already gone out to some of the most powerful and influential people in the world.

Not everyone had accepted, though. A few had turned the invitation down outright, clearly unconvinced there’d be anything worth their time.

There were similar issues showing up on the registration side. Plenty of people signed up initially, but a surprising number backed out once it came time to actually complete verification.

Elona had expected exactly that, though, so none of it caught her off guard.

She stayed in her office, waiting quietly, right up until an hour before the registration system was set to close for good.

Back at the forge, Leo and the others were busy preparing to broadcast the in-game items out into the real world for everyone watching to see.

...