Danmachi- Hell’s Forge

Chatterbox

This was all predicated on whether or not I could successfully create a cursed tool like this to begin with so lets not get ahead of ourselves here. I had given the water creating and controlling ring to Bell who told me that it worked fine but was rather weak after he passed the ninth floor and entered the tenth. That was as I discovered not something I could fix either as I was apparently too weak to summon enough power to create truly powerful cursed tools. This was one of the flaws of my inferior energy type rearing it's ugly head unfortunately as I knew for a fact that a level two magic item had no such issues.-

A level two that could make magic items could create them strong enough to mimic a level threes magic attack but had limited uses before breaking. Still cursed energy wasn't about extremely powerful effects but rather turning weak effects powerful through very elaborate uses or expansions. Take the special grade cursed tool [Inverted spear of heaven] for example that simply dispersed all cursed energy it came into contact with it.-

In a cursed energy users hands it was worse than useless, it was a hinderance. but used AGAINST a cursed user and well it was a fucking nightmare as it scattered all cursed techniques with a simple touch regardless of what they did. That meant no domain expansion, reverse cursed technique, barriers or any attacks either worked. That sounded powerful right? Truth was it was actually very weak in literally any other scenario. All cursed techniques were more or less the same way, my own was no exception. You put me in a solid steel box and I will be entirely helpless, hell you could drop me in the middle of the ocean and I'd be fucked six ways to sunday. -

What I had to do however was not create overpowered items right off the rip but useful ones instead. Bells water ring for example sucked offensively but I guarantee that if I were to put it up for auction it'd sell for a small fortune due to it's tactical uses. The biggest limitation that the deep delving familias have is the lack of food, water and restorative items found there. They instead have entire platoons of people who are meant to carry these things into the dungeon.-

But what if they didn't have to? What if instead they simply had to have some of their members casually wave their hands to have an effectively unlimited source of water or food? How much do you think that they'd be willing to spend in order to have such a thing? I don't know for sure but I do know that it won't be a small amount. Hell even the water ring that Bell has that could only summon and control no more than five gallons at a time would sell for a pretty penny.-

The trick that I wanted to pull off though was to create a set of cursed tools that covered all the bases and then sell them for a massive mark up. A ring for water, a ring for food and a ring for healing that all only cost the user some time and mana. I could even call it the [Exploration set] and rake in the payday. Obviously I wasn't just going to mass produce the things either as that would merely cause me to miss out on future profits. No I was going to spread out the sale of the things after demand reaches insane proportions like that of grimoires. -

Making the water creation rings were easy since I just copied the one that Bell had but the other two were less easy. As it turned out healing was not really something that cursed energy was good at. In fact it was really really fucking hard to do even if you knew how to begin with, spoilers I don't. Needless to say my idea flopped like a fish out of water before I could even get excited about it. Making food though in exchange for mana was totally possible though I doubted anyone would actually WANT to eat it.-

See I created a ring that converted energy to this sort of thick grey paste that was chock full of nutrients but looked and tasted downright lethal. It had no smell so i had no warning at all before I tasted it myself. It was like I had eaten concentrate of bitterness as I almost immediately threw up. I destroyed that hellish artifact and after failing to make anything that worked as food gave up. Well it sucked that I couldn't pull off my idea but as I said the rings of water I made were valuable on their own and I still planned to sell them.-

For a start I made four of them and set them aside as I moved onto a different project that I had in mind. The idea for this was to create a box that you could slot the communication coins into in order to have multiple lines of communication open at the same time without having like a dozen different coins working all at the same time. I succeeded too and affectionately refer to the item as the chatterbox. The way it worked was by slotting up to a total of ten coins into the box.-

The box itself concentrated all of the coins connections into a single rotary phone looking area that had ten different labeled cursed stones that lit up when the corresponding coin was used. Basically rather than having to monitor all the coins separately you could instead watch all of them at the same time. By picking up the phone looking part and touching a stone you could talk to the corresponding coin and the best part in my opinion, swap to another coin by simply touching a different stone.-

Right now my familia only had me and Bell with coins so the other eight slots were free but if I throw some of these into the deal with Hephaestus and her own coins she could increase her efficiency greatly. The only real downside to the chatterbox was that ten different coins was the limit I could stretch the technique on the item to. This meant for a massive familia like the Hephaestus familia she was going to need a LOT of these in order to truly make the most out of it. That was her problem to figure out though as I did what I could at the moment.-

The next day I unfortunately wasn't able to go delving as Hroldar and Ogun both showed up with the new level four from their familia. While I could understand the level fours presence given the nature of the information I wanted being rather personal Ogun's presence was an entirely different thing all together. When I asked about this the dark skinned god said he was merely interested in seeing how I would take this information and transform it into a powerful weapon.