Chapter 68: Two Years Later...

"Little lamb, studying won’t fill your belly or fix your posture," she nagged gently, though her eyes softened as she placed a warm cup of milk right beside my plate. "If you keep pushing yourself like this, you will end up looking like an old man before you even hit ten."

"He already talks like an old man," Ignatius chimed in, chuckling loudly. "Yesterday he was lecturing a customer on the density of brass pins like he had been forging locks for forty years."

"At least I know what brass pins are," I countered, taking a sip of the warm milk. "You spent twenty minutes trying to untangle your own sword belt last week."

"That belt had a faulty buckle!" Ignatius protested, waving his fork defensively. "It was a mechanical failure, not my fault!"

"It was a basic tongue buckle, Ignatius," I said flatly. "You put it on backward."

Victoria let out a soft laugh, shaking her head as she wiped down the wooden counter with a damp rag. "Listen to the two of you. Anyone walking past the shop would think I was running a daycare for retired soldiers."

"Hey, I am about to be a registered adventurer," Ignatius said proudly, puffing out his chest. "By this afternoon, I will be taking official requests near the outer city gates. They are offering good coin for clearing out low-level river goblins."

I ate my breakfast in peace, enjoying the loud, simple chatter between Ignatius and Victoria.

Ignatius kept boasting about his upcoming monster hunt and his new iron shortsword, while Victoria complained about the rising price of mineral oil for the guild’s lamps and how stingy the upper district nobles were getting with their repair payments.

This was my normal world. Simple, loud, warm, and ordinary. And I was going to make sure it stayed that way, no matter what foreign kingdom tried to mess with it.

After finishing his third plate, Ignatius stood up and strapped his sword belt around his waist. "Alright, I am off to the guild hall before the line gets too long. Wish me luck!"

"Do not do anything stupid, Ignatius," Victoria called out as he headed for the door.

"I never do!" he yelled back, waving before disappearing down the street.

A few minutes later, Victoria put on her formal cloak and picked up her leather ledger. "I am heading out to meet with a few noble clients in the Commercial District, Silvester. Keep an eye on the guild and do not let the apprentices mess with the fine tools."

"I will," I promised.

Once she was gone, I walked to the front of the guild, flipping the wooden sign on the glass door from CLOSED to OPEN.

A few moments later, the front door chimed as the regular guild member locksmiths began filtering inside for the day.

"Morning, little boss," an elderly locksmith named Master Tobias greeted me, nodding respectfully as he hung his coat on the rack. "Any interesting requests on the board today?"

"Just standard residential door locks and a few rusty padlocks from the docks," I replied, pointing toward the wooden service board near the counter. "Nothing you cannot handle in an hour."

"Good, good," Tobias chuckled, pulling a wooden tag off the board. "My joints are too stiff for heavy vault work today anyway."

"Take your time, Tobias," I said with a nod. "Make sure the apprentices clean the metal filings off the floor before lunch."

I left the locksmiths to their daily work and walked back to my private workbench at the rear of the shop.

I pulled out the secret floorboard beneath my desk, reaching down into the dark insulation space. I carefully pulled out the heavy Vhaltrar core mold, laying it side by side with my Master Key and Spatial Key on the dark wooden surface.

I picked up my magnifying loupe, attaching it over my right eye, and leaned over the workbench.

I carefully inspected the structural differences between my Master Key, Spatial Key, and the dark-silver alloy of the foreign mold.

My current spatial key was forged using standard local methods. It could pick and lock any spatial gate built within the kingdom, relying on standard atmospheric resonance.

The Master Key was built with dwarven special star-iron that boosted my mana thread control to incredible levels. Still, its true main function remained largely unknown even to me.

But against Vhaltrar’s compressed, high-density alloy, both keys fell short. The foreign metal was too dense, absorbing mana without letting it grip the internal tumblers. My current tools lacked the necessary structural weight and high-frequency range required to hold their spatial frames.

"If I want to lock their doors," I muttered, running my thumb over the cold, heavy surface of the foreign mold, "I need to forge a new key using their own metal alloy as a foundation."

"They thought my skills were too local," I whispered to myself, studying the precise runes carved into the dark silver edge. "They think local locksmiths only know how to turn brass pins."

I pulled out a fresh sheet of thick parchment, a brass ruler, and a sharp drawing pencil from my side drawer.

"If your metal uses compressed spatial layers," I reasoned, placing the brass ruler against the paper, "then my new key needs an internal channel that compresses my golden mana before it hits the teeth."

I began sketching out a new key design, drawing a dark-silver alloy frame capable of compressing mana to match foreign frequencies.

I designed a double-threaded shaft, a reinforced star-iron core lining, and a specialized tip contoured to grip high-density foreign tumblers.

It was going to be the most complex key I had ever attempted to forge. It would require melting down part of the Vhaltrar mold itself to harvest the dark silver alloy.

I picked up my pencil, finishing the fine details on the key’s handle. A small, confident smirk formed on my face as I looked out the shop window at the bright morning sky.

"Let us see how good your locks really are, Vhaltrar guy."

Two years had passed since the night I stood in that old district’s secret laboratory and watched a man in a black three-piece suit walk through a folded spatial door.

In all that time, I never encountered another trace of black thread mana. There were no corrupted monster cores thrown into residential alleys, no frantic cultists shouting about dark gods, and no strange spatial doors opening in the dark.

It was as if the Black Circle had completely erased itself from the Novaria Kingdom, leaving behind only quiet streets and peaceful nights.

It feels good but honestly it’s not.

I was ten years old now. I had grown a few inches taller, though Victoria still insisted I looked like a breeze could blow me over.

My hands were still small, but my fingers had grown far more dexterous, capable of feeling small variations in metal tumblers that adult locksmiths missed entirely.

Over those two years, my focus never shifted. The idea of traveling to the Vhaltrar Empire sat in the back of my mind like a locked chest waiting for the right key.

Getting into Vhaltrar was not a simple matter of walking down a highway. The empire was locked in an intense cold war with the Novaria Kingdom over disputed border territories for centuries.

Guard posts were fortified, trade routes were strictly monitored, and ordinary citizens from Novaria were flatly forbidden from crossing the border. That’s why the empire’s characteristics is unknown to anyone especially the commoners.

If a ten-year-old boy simply walked up to the border gate and asked to enter, the empire’s border guards would either throw him into a damp dungeon or shoot him full of arrows. According to Duke Voulstridge who was once entered the empire in his youth.

I needed a bulletproof cover story. More importantly, I needed a reason for the empire to let me open a door for myself.

My plan was simple. I was going to enter Vhaltrar as an independent locksmith merchant and establish my own small workshop right inside their territory. Artisans who possessed unique, high-value technical skills often received special commercial waivers, even during political standoffs.

To make that plan work, I needed a massive amount of capital. I refused to start a shop on a shoestring budget in an enemy empire.

So, I spent two years revolutionizing the safe and vault industry of the Novaria Kingdom.

It started with a simple idea. Most wealthy merchants and low-ranking nobles relied on heavy iron boxes locked with standard brass keys. Those safes were heavy, expensive to forge, and easily bypassed by any decent thief with a thin wire or a weak fire spell.

I decided to combine local earth magic with advanced mechanical gear trains grom my previous life to create something completely new.

I called them Earthen Vault.

Instead of heavy iron plates, these vaults were constructed from high-density compressed stone, reinforced with internal bronze gears and hidden spring triggers. The locks did not just hold a bolt in place.

When the key turned, the stone structure itself shifted, interlocking the granite teeth of the door directly into the surrounding wall frame.

A fire mage could blast it for an hour, and the stone would simply absorb the heat without melting the internal tumblers. A thief could try to pick the keyhole, but the internal brass pins were protected by anti-tamper chambers that locked the entire mechanism if the wrong tool entered the slot.

The lower and middle districts went wild for them.

"Is it true, Silvester?" a fat merchant named Master Bentor asked one afternoon, leaning over my workshop counter with eyes wide as saucers. It seems that he sniffed a white powder again. "You are telling me this stone box cannot be smashed open with a warhammer?"

"You are welcome to try, Master Bentor," I replied, pointing toward a prototype resting on a heavy wooden bench. "There is a sledgehammer leaning against the wall. If you can crack the door frame in three swings, you can have the safe for free."

Master Bentor spat on his palms, grabbed the heavy iron hammer, and swung it with all his strength directly at the center of the compressed stone door.

BANG!

A loud, metallic ringing sound echoed through my small workshop. The wooden handle of the hammer snapped in half from the severe vibration, sending the heavy iron head rolling across the floorboards.

The stone safe did not even have a scratch on it.

Master Bentor stood there holding the broken wooden stub, his mouth hanging open in complete shock while his hands trembled from the shockwaves.

"I will take five of them," he gasped immediately, pulling out a heavy pouch of gold coins. "Name your price!"

This is normal. Scenes like that happened almost every week. Within six months, every merchant house, wealthy guildmaster, and practical noble in the upper districts wanted an Earthen Vault stamped with the signature mark of our guild.

Orders flooded in faster than we could process them. I licensed the basic mechanical designs to the older guild members, taking a comfortable thirty percent royalty on every unit sold while keeping the high-security custom models for myself.

Money poured into my hands like a steady river. By the time I turned ten, my secret savings beneath my bedroom floorboards had grown into a massive fortune.

I had enough gold to buy a comfortable estate in the upper district, but I kept every single coin liquidated and packed in secure magic leathered pouches.

Every gold piece was a brick in the foundation of my future Vhaltrar workshop.

"You are counting your coins again, little lamb," Victoria said, leaning against the doorframe of my workroom with a warm grin. "At this rate, you will be richer than the Duke before you get your first beard."

"I don’t need a beard to count gold, Victoria," I replied, sliding a fresh stack of coins into a small leather pouch. "And the Duke has far more gold than I do. He just spends his on heavy armor and shiny horses."

"Well, your shiny stone boxes paid for three new forge furnaces downstairs," she reminded me, walking over to pat my head gently. "The apprentices think you are some kind of gold coin profiteer."

"Hahah sort of. But," I said, offering a faint smirk. "I am just a guy who knows how to make stone valuable as golds."