Danmachi- Hell’s Forge

The final step

"I'm glad you like it, now we just have to figure out how to get it to your manor. Don't get me wrong it's definitely not fragile or anything but it is rather large and heavy." I said honestly.

"That is simple really, I'll just hire some adventurers to haul it back to my manor. If all goes well it will be in place by sunset." Ptah said unbothered by my concerns.

I suppose I shouldn't have expected anything different from him really as clearly he couldn't care less about shelling out large amounts of money for art. He had quite a lot of money anyways as his familia was well known and requested for their artistic works that brought in loads of money for them. They were a "business" type familia and as a result didn't really have any members who delved and fought monsters regularly.-

After that the two gods left and Ptah came back with a team of adventurers hired to move the statue just like he said. I almost felt bad for them really as the statue was refined dungeon crystal and weighed an easy eighteen tons. The group of twenty men were all between level two and three with high strength builds and even then they BARELY managed to load the statue onto the massive cart they brought for it.-

Ptah handed over the other half of the payment for the statue and I told him I'd like a break to recharge before doing another commission like this. It was funny to see his face as he was clearly about to ask for that very thing but I really was burnt out a bit from this statue. There was something about the sheer scale that I was working with that stressed me out.-

I knew what it was too, my desire for perfection in what I made. I stressed about missing some small detail or having something out of place because of the size. For some reason I didn't mind imperfection in my cursed tools but when it came to stuff like my figurines or this statue I didn't want to settle for less than my absolute best. In hindsight that might actually be why they were so popular. All people want perfection in some form, we crave it without knowing in most cases. -

So when presented with an example that approached that concept our brains immediately want to impulsively and irrationally possess it. Thanks to this my figurines that pressed that button were things that you couldn't help but impulsively buy. I from this understanding also figured out why i didn't mind imperfections in my cursed tools, I knew I couldn't obtain it. That was the nature of cursed tools and energy, there was always a downside, a flaw. True perfection was an impossible concept to achieve with the stuff and I, knowing this, didn't agonize over failing to attain it. It was expected instead, embraced if you will.-

This related in fact to the thing I wanted to achieve before i updated my falna again. I wanted to push my limit from four properties in an object at full strength to five. Now that might sound easy but it very much was not. In truth that was a whole twenty five percent increase which I felt in my gut was something I NEEDED to hit before I updated. Why I felt this need I have no idea but my gut hasn't led me wrong since I got to this world so I was going to fucking listen.-

This of course led me to sitting in my now empty workshop staring at a goblin tooth dagger blankly.

'I've got no fucking clue where to start!' I mentally complained, I was stuck.

Once I figured out how to make cursed tools originally the process was pretty instinctual but now I ACTUALLY had to figure out how to improve in it rather than just messing with the standard settings. That's all I had really done until now, follow the rules I discovered to achieve a predictable result. I hadn't actually tried to go beyond those rules and something told me that was the problem here.-

Even my experiments with spatial cursed tools was done by following the rules I knew but tweaking the technique I was imbuing as well as the restrictions within those rules. Now however it was clear that I needed to go beyond the rules to achieve a consistent increase in properties on all my future projects. I tried to brute force it at first thinking that was the solution but it became clear that that wasn't the strat when I started hemorrhaging cursed energy which was quite unpleasant let me tell you.-

You ever get like a really bad cut or nosebleed and FEEL the blood leaving your body? It felt like that, yeah I immediately shut that shit down real fast. Well if brute force was off the table that just left finesse and I will admit that wasn't exactly my strong suit. I liked my freedom to just DO things as I wanted. Probably my less than sound mental thought processes fault for that one but it was either go a little insane or break entirely on earth. Sanity didn't really work out all that well there after everything started to look hopeless.-

Working till your body was on the verge of collapse just to be able to barely survive and having no hope of ever retiring tends to break ones will to live. From there the insanity rears it's head and you end up eccentric, suicidal or murderous. I ended up seeking escape in anime and other media which in turn made me eccentric. Sorry about that I'm getting off topic here, the point I was making was that I was having trouble with this improvement that was probably actually easy. I tried chaining properties together but all that ended up doing is fusing them together into a more powerful property with both the effects but the same cost.-

Obviously this was a great discovery in and of itself but it wasn't what I was after. To be honest I probably should have figured that out a lot sooner but to be fair I AM sort of winging it. The Jujutsu Kaisen manga was not super detailed on the how of things like this so much as the what they did. I was pretty much working off of snippets of incomplete information and crossed fingers to figure shit out.-

My third attempt at adding five properties to a weapon made me want to bang my head on the wall when it worked. Remember when I said it was probably so simple thing I should have easily figured out? I was on the fucking money because my third attempt was to structure the properties in a pentagram mentally. Not because pentagrams have any actual power or anything but because I was all like "well what if I put the properties in a geometric shape?" and then tried it and lo and fucking behold it worked. The answer was so damn simple that I had to actively control myself from lashing out in anger when I figured it out.

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