As soon as Melancholy Smile clicked on one of the master's crafting videos, a tall, sturdy figure materialized inside the basketball-court-sized room — a bearded man with bronze-colored skin covering his entire body.
"No way… it's a holographic image!" Melancholy Smile stared at the bearded man who had appeared out of nowhere, her heart jolting in surprise.
Plenty of skilled crafters' videos were floating around the Divine Realm's official site, but those were just flat recordings — they could never compare to experiencing something firsthand.
Moreover, this was a hologram of a Master Blacksmith. In terms of forging skill, every crafting player in the entire Divine Realm was nothing but scraps compared to an NPC Master Blacksmith. This allowed players to observe Divine Realm forging techniques in the most intuitive way possible.
"As expected of a Master Blacksmith. So there's actually a method like this for crafting solidified magic equipment."
Melancholy Smile had only watched it once, yet she could already feel her own shortcomings and the areas she needed to improve — especially the technique involved in drawing magic runes.
The magic runes drawn by the bearded man flowed with effortless perfection; a single stroke was all it took.
The design blueprints provided in Divine Realm only included the most basic text descriptions and a few elementary demonstrations. You could never truly learn forging skills from them — you could only experiment over and over, groping in the dark like tossing stones to test the water.
Now, watching the Master Blacksmith's crafting video felt like a golden road opening up into a brand-new world.
"If the crafting video is like this, then what about the crafting key points?" Melancholy Smile steadied her excitement, shifted her gaze to the annotated crafting key points, and gave them a light click.
The moment she clicked, a system notification chimed in her ear.
System: Crafting Annotation Mode activated. The player must pay sufficient energy to activate it. The basic energy source is Magic Crystal — one Magic Crystal sustains the mode for one hour. Would you like to pay?
"I need Magic Crystals too?" Melancholy Smile couldn't help but be surprised.
The Master Blacksmith's crafting video hadn't required anything, but the annotated key points demanded energy consumption. That alone showed how much more valuable the annotated key points were compared to the video.
Melancholy Smile didn't overthink it. To craft solidified magic equipment, she had plenty of Magic Crystals on hand — spending even one wouldn't matter.
She clicked agree, and one Magic Crystal disappeared from her inventory.
System: Crafting Annotation Mode has been activated. Loading Solidified Magic Equipment Template No. 017. The player may now begin crafting solidified magic equipment.
"Is that it?" Melancholy Smile didn't notice any change in herself or see anything new appear in the room.
But since the system said so, and she had been wanting to start crafting solidified magic equipment anyway, she might as well begin.
After all, Shi Feng had given them instructions — they needed to mass-produce solidified magic equipment as quickly as possible.
Just as Melancholy Smile picked up the materials and began smelting them over the fire, a stream of data and holographic images suddenly appeared before her eyes. The data and images were semi-transparent, so they didn't interfere with the crafting process.
However, after seeing those images and data, Melancholy Smile was completely stunned.
Because the images and data were literally guiding her step by step on how to craft the solidified magic equipment. All she had to do was overlay her movements with those shown in the hologram, and also monitor the smelting progress of the materials — the displayed data gave precise cues for everything.
It was like practicing calligraphy with a copybook. The most standardized forging steps were laid out for her; all she had to do was adapt to and follow them. This was far superior to simply watching the Master Blacksmith craft solidified magic equipment.
As Melancholy Smile followed the prompts time and again to craft each piece of solidified magic equipment, her success rate and speed climbed steadily higher.