He used a little bit of mana to create 1kg of each ingredient. 100% pure sulfur and salt peter. Then, it was time for the last ingredient.

He needed charcoal. Specifically, he wanted charcoal at absolute maximum purity.

He mentally typed the word into the system, expecting a simple block of pure carbon to pop out. Instead, a massive list flooded his vision.

The dungeon could only create items that had entered its borders at least once. This immediately made Adrian pause. He had no idea how raw sulfur and saltpeter ended up inside a basic goblin cave.

’Who cares.’ he thought. He dropped the issue right there since he had actual work to do.

Checking the search bar again, he realized pure charcoal wasn’t an option. The system just generated a massive list dividing the stuff by tree types.

Oak, pine, birch, and a bunch of weird fantasy trees popped up on the screen.

Rather than guessing, Adrian just highlighted the whole list. He told the dungeon to drop ten grams of every single type.

Piles of black chunks started appearing right on the floor.

Adding it all up, he walked away with roughly two kilos of charcoal.

To keep everything organized, Adrian asked the system to create small pieces of hemp paper. He mentally wrote the name of the specific tree on each paper and placed them directly in front of their matching charcoal piles.

Once his materials were sorted, he used his authority as the Dungeon Master.

He didn’t need a mortar and pestle for this part. He simply willed the dungeon to alter the physical state of the charcoal. The black lumps instantly collapsed, grinding down into the finest, microscopic powder possible.

Now it was time for the recipe.

He remembered the standard formula for black powder perfectly. He needed 75 percent saltpeter, 15 percent charcoal, and 10 percent sulfur by weight.

He used the dungeon’s interface to measure out the exact weights. He then commanded the room to perfectly blend the three powders together.

The ingredients mixed seamlessly, leaving him with several small piles of weaponized black powder.

’Now I just need the gun.’ Adrian thought, dusting off his hands.

He wasn’t going to build a complete firearm right away. He just needed to test the explosive force of the powder first.

He opened the creation menu and spawned a thick steel barrel. He sealed one end and attached a very simple trigger mechanism. The lever was connected to a sharp steel pin designed to strike the exact dead center of the barrel base.

Adrian looked at his primitive looking contraption and immediately realized he made a very stupid mistake.

He had gunpowder, but he didn’t have any bullets.

He had two choices right now. He could go the primitive route and make a musket. That meant dropping lead balls down the barrel and stuffing loose gunpowder behind them.

Or he could go the modern route and make actual cartridges.

Even though he was using old school black powder, he chose the modern route. Reloading individual bullets was vastly superior to packing a musket in the middle of a life or death fight.

He scrapped the basic steel pipe. He tweaked the design in the system, giving it a solid wooden stock and a proper firing chamber. For now, this would do but he planned on adding a bolt action system whenever he felt too bored or drained from focusing on the other items.

By the time he finished, the final product basically looked like a standard musket rifle with a few tweaks. It only held a single round, meaning he had to manually reload every time he shot it.

He was planning to jump right into making bullets next. Then he let out a massive yawn.

Looking at the time, he realized it was way past midnight.

He just turned off the system screen and went to sleep.

When he woke up the next morning, the sun was already high in the sky. He walked out of his room and noticed the house was quiet.

Aria had already left for her morning knight training.

Adrian felt a sudden pang of guilt in his chest. He was making a five year old girl work incredibly hard. But alongside that guilt, he felt a massive wave of pride.

She was incredibly disciplined. He just told her that he wanted her to learn knight techniques, and she went out and did it without a single complaint.

’I need to make sure I can actually protect her.’ he thought, "Or at this pace, she’ll be the one having to protect me..."

He went to the bathroom, took a long, relaxing bath, and put on a fresh set of clothes.

He headed to the dungeon to resume his work instead of sitting in his room. Today was all about the bullets.

He started with the brass casing. He needed to make sure the back cap and the hollow shell were completely flawless before he even thought about stuffing gunpowder inside.

Adrian originally assumed this would be an easy process. He was completely wrong. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

Making a bullet casing from scratch took infinitely more time and effort than designing the primitive looking rifle of his.

Back on Earth, as a part time keyboard warrior, he spent hours falling down Wikipedia rabbit holes. He had a hyper fixation on firearms for a few months, so he knew the general vocabulary of bullet manufacturing.

He knew he had to go through specific steps. Blanking, cupping, deep drawing, heading, and bumping. After those were done, he had to focus on necking, tapering, and finally annealing the metal.

The problem was that he only knew the concepts. He was a jack of all trades and a master of none.

He knew how the steps worked in theory, but he didn’t know any of the actual engineering numbers. He had no idea what specific temperature the brass needed to reach during the annealing process. He didn’t know the exact millimeter dimensions of an open casing.

Adrian had to rely on pure trial and error.

Making a brass sheet and trying to cup it just resulted in cracked metal.

Tweaking the thickness didn’t help either. The next attempt literally melted into a puddle.

It became a highly annoying cycle of changing numbers and messing up. This definitely wasn’t a quick afternoon project.