Shota's Isekai NTR Adventure Chapter 2038: Hitting the limit

The divine energy I unleashed poured into the mold, and I could sense its shaping process happening right inside it.

Using this mold meant I only needed to pack it full to guarantee the blade ended up with the correct form.

All I really had to watch was preventing any overflow from the opening, though handling that turned out to be simple enough.

In the end, forming the blade didn't require much time at all.

As I pried open the mold to display the blade, every dwarf stared at it with clear contempt. They obviously disliked how this blade came from such a lifeless mold.

But for the rest of the group, this detail hardly mattered.

To them, the blade actually came across as pretty solid.

It matched the ideal length for a regulation blade and slid smoothly into the handles that had been prepared without any hassle.

With the blade ready, someone handed over a handle, and the full sword took shape.

Once the sword was assembled, testing its performance was the next step.

Those tests convinced everyone that the sword had no flaws whatsoever.

It functioned as a completely ordinary sword that they could wield effortlessly.

Yet, thanks to being forged from divine energy, it also proved quite capable against corruption energy.

This made it the ideal weapon to produce in large numbers for the racial alliance's troops.

Anyone holding this sword could stand against the monsters fueled by corruption energy.

Still, its effectiveness versus the Apostles of Destruction remained up for debate.

When facing the Apostles of Destruction, a traditionally crafted blade might be essential, just as the dwarves insisted.

But at this moment, pursuing that wasn't feasible.

Our immediate focus had to be churning out these swords in bulk and delivering them to the racial alliance's fighters.

Since the Destruction forces were staying idle, arming our side with the strongest possible weapons made perfect sense.

Yet to pull that off...

"I need more molds." I declared, much to the dwarves' disappointment.

Upon hearing those words, their faces naturally dropped without surprise.

They had opposed using molds from the start, so resisting extra ones was expected. That said, the dwarves recognized the crucial value these weapons held for the racial alliance.

After some internal struggle, they reluctantly set about crafting the additional molds.

Numbers grew from a single mold to a pair.

From that pair, it doubled to four, continuing the pattern.

Though crafting the molds wasn't overly challenging, the dwarves needed time to adjust since they rarely produced items like these. Creating molds devoid of any spirit clashed deeply with their blacksmithing honor.

That's why progress on the molds happened at a deliberate pace.

While they worked, I kept employing the molds to forge extra blades.

This setup caused me no trouble, as guiding the divine energy didn't require manual effort. A mere mental command sufficed to channel it into the molds positioned before me.

After infusing the molds with divine energy, extracting the blades didn't even demand my personal attention to open them.

I simply handed off that task to the helpers present.

They pulled the blades free, attached them to the handles the dwarves had readied, and then carried the completed swords elsewhere.

Our combined efforts in this manner swiftly transformed the process into an efficient assembly line for sword production.

That said, the operation didn't stay seamless forever.

Given our gradual buildup in output, hitting a ceiling was inevitable—and it arrived sooner than expected.

However, this bottleneck didn't affect the entire line; it was a personal constraint just for me.

As one individual, my solo efforts naturally had boundaries.

Handling more than twenty molds alone proved impossible, as control slipped beyond that threshold.

Ultimately, overcoming this would involve honing my command over the divine energy through practice.

But the true major hurdle lay in my restricted reserves of divine energy.

Filling all these molds demanded a hefty amount of divine energy, quickly draining what little I possessed.

"Spending at this rate won't last, and exhaustion is just around the corner." I pondered silently, though a countermeasure had already crossed my mind.

Invoking that fix required only a fleeting idea, but...

"No, I don’t want to." Queenie turned me down outright when I requested some of her divine energy.

I'd foreseen this reaction, so I'd lined up incentives to sway her beforehand.

Unfortunately, those efforts fell short, given her continued refusal.

She appeared to be sharpening her resistance to such temptations.

In the end, that forced me to gather even greater bribes for her.

Thanks to the connections Haley had established, tracking down Queenie's preferred items proved straightforward.

No matter her stubborn front, she couldn't resist indulging her urges.

Such was the nature of a sluggish divine envoy like her.