Floating Island - Triple S Talent-Chapter 586: Learn Again
The once-violent, near-exploding Star Core had transformed into a long, transparent sword. Its blade was as clear as star crystal, with calm streams of blue light flowing within.
No cracks. No vibration. Silence.
Gusti caught the falling sword and weighed it briefly in his hand.
"Not bad," he said flatly. "For engineered trash."
Then, without ceremony, he hurled the sword forward.
It shot through the air, its tip slamming violently into the metal floor just steps away from Varon.
DUM.
The sword stood upright, humming softly.
From the point of impact, fine cracks spread outward in all directions. But instead of random, chaotic fissures, the cracks moved with deliberate precision.
Several young blacksmiths stared, their eyes widening.
Across the plaza floor, the fractured metal formed two distinct words, perfectly legible from the Star Empire delegation’s platform:
LEARN AGAIN
The crowd fell dead silent for several seconds.
Then, a few apprentices couldn’t hold it in. Stifled laughter escaped into the air before they hastily covered their mouths, terrified of breaching etiquette.
Varon’s face drained of color, then flushed a furious red. The hand that had so confidently held the Star Core moments ago now trembled uncontrollably.
Distance. An abyss almost impossible to bridge. Not a distance of brute strength. Not a distance of aura. But a distance of fundamental understanding.
No matter how long he lived or how many weapons he forged, Varon knew the truth: in mere seconds, the bare-chested man before him had demonstrated a realm of mastery he might never touch.
Gusti glanced once at the sword embedded in the floor, then looked at Varon with absolute indifference.
"Take your toys and go," he said. "And don’t dirty my grounds again with failed products you deliberately designed to blow up my apprentices."
He turned and walked away, not bothering to wait for a response.
"If you want to talk about structure," Gusti added, his voice echoing without him looking back, "come again after you’ve spent a thousand years just trying to understand a single bolt."
Silence swallowed the plaza. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞
Varon opened his mouth, but his voice failed him. He stared at the sword, at the mocking cracks in the floor, and finally at Gusti’s broad back as it vanished into the steam-filled haze of the main workshop.
Behind him, the Star Empire guards looked physically sick. Not a single one dared to breathe too loudly.
Even the Star Empire’s Golden Ship, seemingly sensing an incomprehensible threat, chose to depart immediately—unwilling to linger before an entity that clearly defied the limits of their knowledge.
But the true spectacle... had just begun.
For those left in the plaza, it wasn’t just the transparent sword or the words etched into the floor that remained.
It was the sound.
DUM. DUM. DUM.
The phantom echoes of Gusti’s hammer continued to reverberate in the minds of thousands of blacksmiths, technicians, and apprentices.
At first, they thought it was merely an acoustic aftereffect. But as seconds ticked by, the echoes grew sharper, cleaner. It was as if the hammer were striking directly against their consciousness, bypassing the anvil entirely.
A young apprentice suddenly froze, his gaze turning distant.
Beside him, a companion reached out to shake him, only to stiffen as the resonance caught him too.
One by one, young blacksmiths, magitek technicians, and even veteran Lords with deep foundations in craftsmanship slipped into a profound trance.
They did not collapse. Their bodies remained upright, their breathing slowing to a steady rhythm. Their eyes were vacant, but their minds were ablaze.
Spontaneous mass meditation.
Within their inner worlds, they watched Gusti’s hammer fall again and again. They saw the invisible framework connecting each strike to the fundamental vibration of matter. They realized that true form wasn’t molded by crude force, but negotiated through a delicate balance of pressure and structural integrity.
Knots of logic that had bottlenecked their progress for years... unraveled in an instant.
The Eternal Forge plaza, usually a chaotic symphony of industry, was now completely, utterly silent.
***
Three days. Three nights.
For that entire span, the main plaza remained paralyzed in a sacred quiet, save for the soft whisper of molten rivers flowing across the ceiling.
Guards hastily erected protective formations, standing watch with bated breath. Yet, none dared to wake the meditators. In the Eternal Forge, an unspoken law reigned supreme:
If someone is dragged into enlightenment, disturbing them is a sin that lasts a lifetime.
On the fourth day.
An apprentice finally opened his eyes. Deep within his pupils, the faint reflection of metallic runes slowly rotated before fading.
He looked down at his calloused hands, then toward a solid steel barricade nearby. Hesitantly, he reached out and brushed its surface.
For the first time in his life, he didn’t just feel cold, hard metal. He saw it. The microscopic fault lines, the veins of strength, the very structural logic binding the steel together.
"I... broke through..." he whispered, his voice trembling with awe.
Similar gasps of revelation echoed from every corner of the plaza.
Hundreds of blacksmiths rose to their feet, their eyes alight with a newfound depth. Magitek technicians stared at mundane components and wept silently at the beauty of their underlying mechanics. Even the observing Lords felt a foundational shift—not in raw combat power, but in their intrinsic grasp of the world’s physical laws.
In one fleeting event, an entire generation of craftsmen shattered their limits simultaneously.
Naturally, such an anomaly could not be contained.
Within weeks, rumors swept across the neighboring realms like wildfire:
Whispers of a floating city that breathed. Of a bare-chested man who hammered an Unstable Star Core as casually as a bent nail. Of a plaza that stood frozen in time for three days and three nights... And of an army of blacksmiths who awoke with eyes that could see the truth of the world.
The name "Gusti, the Divine Forger" began to echo through the surrounding sectors.
To the ignorant, it was a cool title. But to those who truly understood, it was a stern warning.
Because behind that name stood not just a blacksmith. But an architect of civilization.
