God Ash: Remnants of the fallen.-Chapter 1149: Hammering Away (3).

Around the hundredth attempt, Cain discovered something crucial.

The Chaos Ether didn’t need to be distributed evenly throughout the material. In fact, it worked better when concentrated along specific planes within the metal’s structure. Like layers in a sandwich, with each layer serving a different purpose.

That opened up entirely new possibilities.

He started experimenting with laminated structures. Thin sheets of the material entrenched with Chaos Ether, sandwiched between layers of mana-infused steel. The trick was getting them to bond, or rather flow over, without rejecting or repelling each other.

Temperature was critical too.

Too hot and the excited energies would tear each other apart. Too cold and they wouldn’t fuse at all. There was a narrow window, maybe five degrees wide, where the two types of matter would grudgingly accept each other’s presence.

Finding a way to stabilize at that window took another hundred attempts.

But when he found it...

Cain pulled the sample from the furnace and held it up to the strange light of this universe. The metal gleamed with an odd sheen— hints of silver-grey and azure with accents of indigo dancing beneath the surface. It was impossibly light for its apparent density, and when he tested it with a hammer strike, it rang with a clear, crystalline note.

Almost like the clear chirp of a bird at dawn.

He ran it through a series of tests. To his joy, the material held up beautifully, showing none of the brittleness or instability of his earlier attempts.

"Got you," Cain whispered.

But he wasn’t done yet.

This was just the very beginning...

However, with that tied down, he now had the foundation. In a few hours, he would be replicating it in a grand scale.

Now that he had the base material, it was time to craft the weapons.

And he had a very specific design in mind...

The {Stellar Razor} took shape in the depths of his consciousness. A traditional sword with a leaf-shaped profile and a central ridge for structural integrity. The edge would be ground to an extreme angle, taking advantage of the Chaos Ether’s natural sharpness. The balance point would be slightly forward of center, giving it stability in flight.

But the real trick would be in how it interacted with his magic.

He’d already confirmed that traditional mana and Chaos Ether couldn’t coexist peacefully. But what if he didn’t try to force them together? What if he used the blade as a conduit instead, channeling his mana through the Arcane Steel layers while letting the Chaos Ether layers do their own thing?

The metal-attribute mana would resonate with the steel, creating the propulsion and guidance for his spell. The Chaos Ether would provide the cutting power, its inherent instability making wounds nearly impossible to heal.

In theory.

Testing that theory meant more experiments.

Cain forged dozens of prototype blades, each one slightly different from the last. Different ratios of materials. Different layer thicknesses. Different edge angles. He tested each one, channeling small amounts of mana through them to see how they responded.

Most failed spectacularly. The energies would clash, causing the blade to vibrate itself apart or simply crack down the middle.

But slowly, through countless iterations and adjustments, he narrowed down the parameters.

The breakthrough came on what he estimated was day fifteen inside the furnace’s time-dilated workspace.

He’d been experimenting with adding a third element, a thumb’s worth of that strange green-lustered stone that seemed to shift colors. The stone had unusual properties, almost like it existed partially out of phase with normal reality. When incorporated into the blade’s central ridge, it acted as a buffer between the mana-infused steel and the Chaos Ether layers.

The blade he pulled from the final quench was perfect...

Silver-grey metal with purple highlights dancing along the edge. The azure green core created a faint luminescence that pulsed in rhythm with the ambient energy of this universe. When he held it up, the blade seemed to hum with eagerness.

Cain tested it carefully, channeling a trickle of metal-attribute mana through the handle. The energy flowed smoothly through the steel layers, resonating with the blade’s structure. At the same time, the Chaos Ether layers activated, their unstable nature creating a visible distortion along the edge.

When he released the blade, it shot forward like a missile, cutting through a block of smelted steel.

The blade punched through with almost no resistance, leaving behind a wicked gouge that crackled with residual Chaos energy.

"Perfect," Cain said, grinning despite his exhaustion.

But one blade wasn’t enough. He needed many. Hundreds, ideally. Enough to make his planned spell evolution actually work.

Which meant perfecting the process and then repeating it. Over and over and over.

Cain looked at the pile of materials still waiting to be processed. Then he looked at the furnace, still burning hot and ready for more work.

"Right," he said, wiping his sweat. "Mass production. My favorite part..."

***

Cain’s remaining days inside the furnace blurred into a rhythm of heat, hammer, and focus.

Cain had the process down to a science now. He could forge a complete {Stellar Razor} in roughly an hour, from the raw materials all the way to finished product. That included smelting the ores, forming the laminated structure, shaping the blade, grinding the edge, and final heat treatment.

An hour per blade. Twenty-four blades per day. With five days remaining inside the furnace’s time dilation, he could potentially create a hundred and twenty blades.

Not nearly enough for what he had planned, but it was a start.

He worked through fatigue, pushing his weakened body to its limits. His back ached from bending over the anvil. His eyes stung from squinting at glowing metal for hours on end.

Thankfully, his actual arms didn’t need to use his hammer. The arms created from metal elemental mana did all that heavy lifting for him.

By the time he stepped out of the forge, Cain had completed a hundred and thirty blades, a little more than expected.

A hundred and thirty perfectly crafted weapons, each one capable of channeling his magic while cutting with the brutal efficiency of Chaos Ether.

He emerged from the forge covered in soot and sweat, his robes practically destroyed from the heat and sparks. His hair was also singed in places, and he was pretty sure he’d lost some weight despite eating regularly.

But he was grinning like an idiot.

In his hands, one of the {Stellar Razors} gleamed in the strange light of the Graveyard of Stars. The blade seemed to pulse with its own internal rhythm, the purple and green energies creating mesmerizing patterns beneath the surface.

Two days had passed in the outside world. Two days of relative peace while he’d been locked in combat with materials and draconic forge fire.

Cain took a deep breath of the cold, static air. His body was exhausted, but his mind was already racing ahead to the next challenge.

A hundred blades was a good start.

But he was going to need a lot more than that...