Chapter 1: The Magicless Engineer and the Sword That Shattered Common Sense

Arcana Fantasia.

A medieval-style fantasy game set on the magic-developed continent of Tristan.

A considerable amount of time has passed since I was dropped into this world governed by swords, magic, and the f*cking yard-pound system.

Based on my experiences so far, I, Kang Haneul—no, Tarsha—could come to one conclusion.

“It’s so damn boring.”

Being born into a fantasy world was fine.

I could even concede, a hundred times over, to being in a woman’s body.

But the biggest problem was that I was magicless.

A body that could neither feel nor utilize mana was considered the absolute worst disability in this fantasy world.

‘Weren’t cheats supposed to be the standard for reincarnation…’

This world was harsh to the magicless in many ways.

Because of this, my current parents were extremely careful, worried that I might get hurt.

The problem was that their overprotection was too severe.

‘To think I’ve never even been outside the village at this age.’

They even forbade me from approaching the forge where my father worked, for the simple reason that it was dangerous.

In the end, I was stuck at home, forced to relieve my boredom by drawing fictional bridge blueprints on parchment or writing down the engineering formulas I remembered.

While wasting time like that, I realized one thing.

Although I had died from overwork in my past life, I still loved engineering.

Analyzing phenomena and expressing them with formulas.

I felt a thrill in the process of constantly questioning and researching how to improve existing designs to be cheaper, more efficient, and more stable.

For someone like me, this world was full of possibilities.

Strange minerals that didn’t exist on Earth.

The existence of mana and magic.

And even materials that could be obtained from various creatures.

To think that such things were within arm’s reach, yet I could do nothing.

My shoulders trembled with anger.

‘It would be better if I at least had more paper.’

I moved the pile of parchment, tattered from so much use, to a corner of the room.

Right.

My days of wrestling with parchment were over starting today.

Today was my fifteenth birthday.

In this rural village where I was reborn, there was a tradition where parents would show their workplace to their child who had come of age on their fifteenth birthday.

This was no exception for me, a magicless person.

In other words, it meant I could finally see my father’s forge with my own eyes starting today.

“Tarsha.”

As I was up and waiting since early morning, it wasn’t long before my father called for me.

I answered immediately and dashed out of the room before my father could even fully open the door.

“Yes!”

“What’s this. You’re up early. We’ll go to the forge right after breakfast, so go get dressed properly first.”

“This is properly dressed, isn’t it?”

I was only wearing a single loose outer garment on top.

It was easier to move in, and this body, unlike my previous one, generated an excessive amount of heat, causing me to sweat constantly.

“A girl shouldn’t dress like that. If you keep this up, I won’t take you to the forge.”

A woman must be demure.

What man would want you otherwise?

You should learn from your mother, etcetera, etcetera.

Faced with my father’s threats and the pouring cascade of nagging, I had no choice but to put on a few more layers of clothing.

It was still as hard to adapt to the fact that my body was female as it was to the yard-pound system.

---

I wolfed down my breakfast and set out on the street with my father.

It was quite a distance from home, but not far enough to ride a horse, so we decided to just walk.

As I quickened my pace, I felt my heart pound in tandem.

The forge is a good place.

A place where hard steel is processed with pure heat and power alone.

Some even say that the beginning of engineering started in the forge.

I was one of them.

In modern times, many metal processing methods have been developed, but they were all built upon and evolved from the framework of classical methods.

The thought of seeing metal processing with my own eyes, something I had only seen beyond textbooks, made my excitement impossible to contain.

What would a forge in this world look like?

Would there be anything special?

After walking so diligently, we arrived at a building with a chimney from which black smoke was rising.

“Tarsha. I’ve told you time and time again, but you must not act on your own. There are many hot and dangerous things inside the forge. Especially for a magicless person like you…”

“Yes, yes. I know. I’ll keep that in mind.”

The inside of the forge was filled with hot air, the smell of iron, and the sound of the bellows.

At first glance, it didn’t seem much different from the forges of the world I used to live in.

“The smell might be a bit overwhelming. How are you?”

“I think I’m fine.”

Saying so, I took a deep breath with all my might.

This hot air filling my lungs and the distinct, metallic smell tingling my nose were more fragrant than any perfume, far from being sickening.

“From now on, I’ll show you how I make a sword myself. It’s dangerous, so stand far back.”

Alright.

This is where it begins.

With my eyes wide open, I focused on my father and the piece of steel on the anvil.

My father skillfully placed a red-hot lump of steel on the anvil.

As he took a deep breath and concentrated, I could see the muscles in his forearm bulge slightly.

Clang! Clang! Clang!

The force with which he struck the steel didn’t come from muscle alone.

People in this world could enhance their physical strength with mana.

It was something I, a magicless person, could only dream of.

How long did he hammer it?

Once the shape of the sword was roughly complete, my father picked up the dark red sword with tongs and plunged it straight into the water bucket next to him.

Chiiiiiik!

Steam shot up with a violent sound.

Quenching.

A process to maximize hardness by rapidly cooling steel.

Up to this point, it was the same as on modern Earth where I used to live.

I looked forward to the next step, my eyes sparkling.

Iron that has only been quenched is brittle.

Therefore, a process of slow cooling is necessary.

A prime example is tempering.

Tempering gives toughness to the iron.

It was an essential process to create not just a hard, but a tough iron.

So, at what temperature and for how long would they do it here?

However, contrary to my expectations, my father simply took the sword out and placed it on a cooling rack.

Then, as if satisfied, he wiped the sweat from his forehead.

“There. Now, once it cools, we just need to sharpen the edge and attach the handle, and we’ll have a fine sword.”

For a moment, I doubted my ears.

‘That’s all for the heat treatment process? Just forging and quenching, and that’s it?’

‘What about tempering? And now that I think about it, I don’t think he did any annealing before quenching either.’

“What? D-Dad. Is that it?”

“No. There’s still work to be done. The sword will break too easily as it is.”

‘Of course, it would,’ I thought.

But what came out of my father’s mouth was completely unexpected.

“I’m going to pay a mage to place an enchantment on it so the sword doesn’t break. Only after that process is finished can you say the sword is properly made.”

“…What?”

A mage.

An enchantment.

A shock, as if my head had been struck by a hammer, coursed through my brain.

“Do all the other forges make swords like this?”

“The broad strokes won’t change. There might be minor differences.”

“Don’t you, say, cool the iron slowly or something…?”

“Why would we waste time doing that? We need to make them quickly and hand them over to the mages.”

In fact, living in this world so far, I had felt that something was off.

This world used the f*cking stupid yard-pound system for its units of measurement, yet its level of civilization was too high.

However, I hadn’t thought deeply about it.

I just casually brushed it off, thinking, ‘It must be because it’s a medieval-style fantasy game~’.

But at this very moment, the ‘hole’ in this world’s technology that I had vaguely sensed was laid bare before my eyes.

A blacksmith from my Earth would know from experience that cooling iron slowly makes it tougher and more flexible, even if they didn’t know the exact principles.

But the blacksmiths here don’t know that fact itself.

Since they can do the post-processing with magic, they never felt the need to extract the material’s properties to their limits.

Covering up technical limitations or inefficiencies with the convenient method called ‘magic’.

That was how this world operated.

On the Earth where I lived, people once thought the sun revolved around the Earth.

They thought you had to draw blood to cure the Black Death, and they believed without a doubt that Newton’s classical mechanics was the only truth in the world.

In those times, that was common sense.

Such cases were rampant in my original world, and this world even had magic from long ago.

So, it might be perfectly natural for their thoughts and ideas to revolve around magic.

But I just couldn’t accept it.

This inefficiency.

This rule-of-thumb process.

“This isn’t engineering…”

The fact that such a crude process was being carried out in a forge, which is called the beginning of engineering!

‘First off, there’s not much to be careful about in the forging process. If I had to pick something, it’s not to strike too hard and cause internal cracks. And the quenching… wait. The material used was just iron. If they don’t know techniques like tempering or annealing, they might be using iron that’s completely unsuitable for a sword to begin with.’

“Ta-Tarsha…?”

My father was saying something beside me, but I couldn’t hear him.

Talking to myself was a bad habit of mine that carried over from my past life.

My thoughts wouldn’t organize properly unless I said them out loud.

After muttering for a long time, I came to a conclusion.

“Let’s try carburizing first.”

“Ca-carbu… what?”

“It’s burning charcoal and soft iron together.”

It was to make carbon steel.

I didn’t know exactly how much charcoal to burn and how much carbon to feed it to create the ideal carbon steel, but as long as I knew the method, I could just repeat the trial and error to derive the optimal value.

Ah, the grind.

This might just be the essence of mechanical engineering.

All the graphs and charts in today’s textbooks are the fruit of the sweat born from the grind of our seniors in those days!

“Dad. I have a favor to ask.”

I bowed my head towards my father, who was staring at me blankly.

“Please let me work here too.”

---

About a year later.

William, the head sword instructor of the prestigious Ceylon Academy located in the center of the Tristan continent, calmly gazed at the table.

On the table was a classic box, and inside it lay a single sword.

“So this is the sword? The one you said was so hard?”

“Yes.”

William took the sword out of the box and held it up.

The blade gleamed, reflecting the light from the mana lamp.

He didn’t feel anything special about it.

The only peculiar thing was the beautiful wave pattern engraved on the entire blade.

But a sword was a weapon to be swung, not an ornament, so it was an irrelevant feature.

William continued to examine the sword from all angles.

Then, realizing something, his eyes widened.

“This sword. It doesn’t have a magic circle engraved on it.”

Engraving a reinforcement magic circle on a finished sword was an indispensable process.

A sword without a magic circle was sharp, but it broke easily.

Therefore, a sword’s performance was determined by how skilled a mage engraved the magic circle.

Of course, now that magic was highly developed, many commercial magic circles that produced decent performance with little mana had been developed and were in use, but when making an important sword, one had to pay a large sum to commission a first-rate mage.

In any case, the first thing one did upon receiving a sword was this ‘magic circle check’.

Anyone who prided themselves on having swung a sword a bit could roughly deduce its performance just by looking at the engraved magic circle.

But this sword had no magic circle.

Meaning, there was no magical post-processing.

At that fact, William glared at his subordinate and said.

“Are you trying to play a joke on me right now?”

“N-No, sir. The adventurers who used it directly said this sword is incredibly hard even without activating a magic circle.”

“Fine. In that case, we’ll just have to test it.”

William, as if any more time was a waste, nonchalantly drew a sword hanging on the wall.

As he infused mana into the sword, the magic circle engraved on it glowed faintly and activated.

‘Yes. This is a proper sword. A sword without a magic circle is just a fragile lump of iron. The result is obvious without even needing to see it.’

The moment the two blades clashed with that conviction.

Clang-!

A sword broke.

The one William swung.

“……!”

William stared at the two-piece sword in his hand with a shocked expression.

The sword that just broke was one sold on the market; the magic circle’s efficiency wasn’t bad, and the price was reasonable.

Because its cost-effectiveness was quite good, when novice adventurers were looking to buy a sword, most people would recommend one with this magic circle.

In short, it wasn’t a great sword, but it wasn’t that bad either.

And a sword with no magic circle just cut it down?

‘This can’t be. No. The magic circle on this sword might be faulty. If I check with another sword…’

William rushed to the academy’s warehouse.

Training swords were lined up in a corner of the warehouse.

Drawing one, William once again infused it with mana and swung.

Clang-!

But the result was the same.

Even when he swung again.

And again.

Clang-! Clang-!

The sword that broke was always the one William swung.

“Impossible.”

Even if they were for training, all the swords here had met the academy’s standards.

Then does that mean this sword, without a magic circle, is truly far superior to one with it?

At that moment, the same clanging sound from before echoed in William’s head.

It was the sound of the common sense he had taken for granted, and his preconceptions, cracking.

‘If something like this is really possible…’

William stood there blankly for a long time, as if he had been hit hard on the head.

Only after seeing his subordinate, who had followed belatedly, did he quietly give an order.

“Could you find out the forge that made this sword?”

“Yes? Yes. What will you do after we find it?”

“You ask the obvious.”

William carefully placed the wave-patterned sword back into its box and continued.

“I have to meet them in person. The blacksmith who made this sword.”

His voice and gaze were more serious than they had ever been.