Chapter 1

  There was beauty in fire. Not the kind found in campfires or candles, but the kind that roared inside a crucible furnace, white-hot and insatiable. It devoured impurities. It screamed truths. And to him, it was the only voice worth listening to.

  Elias Varnen had long since stopped listening to people.

  At twenty-nine, his days had shrunk into a loop of hammer strikes, grinding wheels, and the hiss of quenching steel. The apartment above his workshop was less a home than a storage closet with a bed. His fridge was mostly empty. His social circle didn’t extend beyond the delivery guy who brought him metal shipments—who, after months of short grunts and curt nods, had stopped trying to talk altogether.

  He had no job, not in the traditional sense. The few commissions he took were oddities: custom alloy rings for chemistry nerds, or strangely intricate lockpicks for god-knows-who. When he needed cash, he sold handmade trinkets online—bottle openers shaped like wolves, or bracelets forged from damascus steel. They sold well enough to keep the electricity running and the forge burning.

  But the truth? He didn’t care about the money. Every dollar that passed through his hands turned into new stock, new tools, or obscure samples of rare metals ordered from sketchy sellers in Eastern Europe.

  His life had narrowed to a singular point of obsession: alloys.

  Their behavior. Their structure. Their potential.

  Where most people saw metal as cold or lifeless, Elias saw something else—movement, harmony, possibility. He had majored in metallurgy in college, graduated with honors, and walked straight out of academia into obscurity, determined to uncover something no textbook had ever touched. Something real.

  The Varnen line had been blacksmiths for six generations. His great-grandfather had forged iron gates for noble estates; his grandfather made weapons for soldiers returning home. His father had been more artist than craftsman, creating ornamental steelwork that graced museums. Elias inherited all of it—the tools, the techniques, the pressure.

  And none of it filled the hollow space inside him.

  He didn’t hate people. He just didn’t find them… useful. Every conversation felt like wasted breath, every relationship a web of demands and compromises he couldn’t bring himself to care about. They distracted from the work. From progress. From truth.

  So he’d closed himself off. Chosen solitude. Some days passed without him uttering a single word. Some weeks.

  And he didn’t mind.

  Until the dreams began.

  It started as a flicker: a molten landscape of copper rivers and golden skies, seen behind his eyes as he drifted between exhaustion and sleep. The first time, he wrote it off as stress. The second, as a side effect of inhaling too many zinc fumes.

  But the third time?

  The third time, the dream spoke.

  It wasn’t a voice in the traditional sense. It was a presence—heavy, ancient, patient. Something vast, waiting beneath the flow of heat and ore.

  “You are wasted here,” it said. “Come where your hands matter.”

  Elias woke up in a cold sweat, trembling. Not from fear. From need.

  He tried to ignore it. Dismiss it. Go back to his experiments—he’d been working on a theoretical alloy that could retain cold for far longer than the best options on the market-he could probably make millions off of it but he just couldn’t bring himself to waste time doing that- But the forge’s heat felt dimmer. The metal under his fingers felt… less.

  Each night, the dream returned. It grew clearer. A shape began to form: a great anvil, ringed with fire and stars. A forge without walls, set in a sky that sang with every strike of the hammer. The promise of a place where metallurgy wasn’t a hobby, but a path to power.

  On the seventh night, Elias didn’t fight it.

  He stepped into the dream willingly.

  _________

  There was no blinding light, no thunderclap, no scream.

  Elias simply blinked—and the walls of his workshop were gone.

  The air was sharp with cold, carrying the faint tang of metal and wet stone.

  Elias stood on a grassy plain that rolled gently toward a jagged mountain range in the near distance. The peaks weren’t snowcapped, but iron-veined and red, their ridges glowing faintly beneath the twin suns cresting the early morning sky. The grass beneath his boots was dark green and thick, almost waxy, rustling with an unfamiliar breeze.

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  He turned slowly, taking it all in.

  To the west, a sparse forest hugged the edge of the plain, the trees tall and rigid, bark like hammered bronze. To the south, the land dipped into a wide valley choked with mist. And above, two golden orbs hovered in the sky—one larger, one dimmer, casting long overlapping shadows across the terrain.

  This wasn’t Earth. That much was obvious.

  He didn’t panic. He didn’t speak. He simply stood there, breathing in the metal-touched air, eyes scanning the terrain, waiting for whatever came next.

  And then it came.

  A chime—faint and harmonic, like tempered bells striking underwater.

  [Welcome, new arrival.]

  [You have entered the system domain of Arlen.]

  [Initializing core interface…]

  A translucent screen blinked into view in front of him—clear and hovering, outlined in subtle blue light. The font was crisp and simple, the text responsive to his gaze as he focused on each line.

  [Biometric scan complete. Soul-thread integrity stable. Transferring unique origin data… success.]

  [Due to your knowledge, history, and psychological profile, you have been granted three exclusive perks.]

  Three symbols flickered into existence beside the message—geometric shapes overlaid with circuit-like glyphs. As he focused, they expanded into detail.

  [Metallurgical Comprehension]

  Your understanding of metals is absolute. Upon contact, you receive total awareness of any metal’s nature, including composition, crystalline structure, impurities, forging potential, magical affinity, and alloying behavior. This effect is permanent and instinctive.

  [Artisan’s Ascent]

  Your craftsmanship can transcend material limitations. With sufficient technique and effort, you may forge items of higher rarity, power, and uniqueness than their raw components allow. Results scale with crafting process, not materials.

  [Alloyweaver]

  You may refine, purify, or dismantle metallic elements and their properties. Traits may be transferred between metals or erased entirely. You may also attempt the creation of alloys unknown to this world.

  Elias stared at the perks for a long time. Not out of awe—but calculation. His mind, already beginning to work, parsed the implications of each ability with the quiet, focused energy of a man sharpening a blade.

  These weren’t “cool bonuses.” They were tools. Powerful ones.

  [You will now select your starting class.]

  A new interface replaced the perk list, presenting a small selection of choices. He read them quickly.

  Base Classes Available:

  ? Light Warrior – Agile melee combatant, evasion and speed focused.

  ? Heavy Warrior – Durable melee combatant, excels in defense and control.

  ? Mage – Master of elemental and arcane forces.

  ? Rogue – Stealth-based attacker, proficient with poisons and precision.

  ? Archer – Ranged attacker, mobility and tracking expert.

  ? Healer – Support class, restores health and removes debuffs.

  ? Crafter – Non-combatant. Focused on item creation, material harvesting, and equipment enhancement.

  Elias didn’t hesitate. His hand moved instinctively toward the final option.

  [Crafter selected]

  [Base Class confirmed: Crafter.]

  [You have received the following base skills:]

  [Basic Crafting] – Basic – Enables the creation of items using materials. Upgrading skill allows creation of higher rarity items.

  [Tool Proficiency I] – Basic – Allows use of standard tools, including hammers, tongs, chisels, grinding wheels, and crucibles.

  [Material Identification] – Provides basic information about raw materials. Accuracy increases with skill level.

  He absorbed the information without emotion, his mind already pushing past it.

  Basic skills, he thought—this was just like the video games those college kids below his floor were always talking about.

  Except this wasn’t a game.

  There was no controller, no UI lag, no pause button. The air was real. The soil beneath his boots was warm and coarse. And the subtle vibration that hummed through his fingertips when he thought about forging something… that was real too.

  The system interface blinked once more before fading from view.

  [System calibration complete.]

  [Welcome to Arlen, Elias Varnen. Your journey begins now.]

  Silence settled over the field again. The only sound was the wind through the grass and the distant cry of some unseen creature circling the far cliffs.

  He exhaled slowly and looked toward the mountain range.

  The mineral veins running through the rock gleamed in the light like veins of gold and blood. Even from this distance, he could feel something calling to him. Not magic—at least not how fantasy books described it—but potential. Unshaped. Waiting.

  He crouched and brushed a hand over the soil. The dirt was coarse, flecked with bits of dull grey grit. He pinched a pebble-sized shard between two fingers and held it close.

  The instant he touched it, information bloomed in his mind.

  Unrefined iron silicate. Natural impurities. Crystalline growth disrupted by volcanic movement. Yield strength: low. Smelt point: moderate. Trace nickel and vanadium—usable.

  His lips pressed into a thin line.

  It works.

  No HUD. No text pop-up. Just… knowing. Deep in his bones.

  He stood and turned toward the mountain.

  There was no road, no marker. No friendly tutorial NPC. Just a raw world and the knowledge burning in his veins.

  There was no road, no marker. No friendly tutorial NPC. Just a raw world and the knowledge burning in his veins.

  And still, no panic.

  No anger. No shock.

  Just… quiet.

  A deep, hollow quiet that stretched far longer than the plains before him. The same quiet that had followed him through every empty apartment, every cold studio, every silent moment after hammering metal into shape long past midnight—when the ringing in his ears was the only thing keeping him company.

  Why wasn’t he panicking?

  He asked himself the question and found no answer. Or maybe he already had it.

  Because this… this made sense.

  The world back home didn’t.

  A college degree in metallurgy, four years of study, research, internships—useless. No one cared about alloys unless they had marketing buzzwords attached to them. His professors admired his obsession, sure, but the job market didn’t. He’d spent three years bouncing between failed contracts and overpriced commission work, barely paying rent by selling custom metallic puzzles, bespoke fireplace tools, ornamental hinges—anything niche enough for someone rich and bored to want.

  And every spare cent? Poured into metal. Into crucibles. Into failed attempts to synthesize a new alloy that didn’t exist yet. Not because he thought it’d make him famous. But because it felt real. Because it felt like something.

  He’d been sinking slowly. No friends. No direction. Just heat and hammer and a growing distance between him and the world.

  Now here he was.

  Dropped into a place where the first thing that happened was the world scanning his soul and deciding, “Yeah. You’re a blacksmith. Let’s do this right.”

  He didn’t need to wonder why he wasn’t sent here with a sword or spellbook.

  He’d already been forging his weapon for years.

  So Elias didn’t ask the sky why it had chosen him.

  He didn’t scream into the void. He didn’t check for Wi-Fi.

  He just looked at the mountain, saw the glint of ore across its ribs, and knew what came next.

  Work.