Kazuma, who had been drifting along the row of cocoons and peering at each one with the intense scrutiny of someone who does not fully understand something but intends to, looked over. "So if I fed it a raw ice shard and a lava crystal, the outcome would depend on what Renher actually wanted from it?"
"Precisely. The forge is not random. It is interpretive. Do not overthink it — the owner learns to understand it with use."
Renher was still working through the architecture of it. "You said ten rings. Ten cocoons."
"Ten artifacts total. Each ring represents one. And each artifact has ten slots — ten raw materials that can be fed into it across its lifetime." The hollow eyes moved between them. "You need not fill all ten slots at once. You may forge with two materials and receive a functional artifact, then improve it later by feeding the artifact back into the forge and adding more."
"And once materials go in, they can't come back out," Renher said.
"Correct. You may store materials within this space as long as you wish. But once they enter a cocoon, the process is irreversible."
Kazuma floated back toward them, his expression carrying the particular focus of someone who has just thought of a question he actually cares about. "What if an artifact gets stolen before it's finished?"
"No one other than the owner can use what the Ten Rings produces. To anyone else, a sword from this forge is a dull piece of metal. A bow is a stick. The artifact knows its owner." The figure paused. "If an artifact is broken — which requires power at a comparable level to the Rings themselves — gather the pieces. Eighty-five percent returned to the forge is sufficient to restore it."
Renher nodded slowly, committing each detail with the practiced discipline of a man used to holding complex tactical information without writing it down.
Ten rings. Ten artifacts. Ten material slots each. Intent guides the forge. No retrieval once committed. Theft is possible but useless. Destruction is rare but recoverable.
He looked up. "When I need to feed materials — do I have to be here, inside the Rings, to do it?"
"No. The Rings will absorb materials from the physical world when you touch them to the band. What combination to forge, however, must be decided here, within this space." The figure looked between the two of them. "Which brings me to something I should have said before — your physical bodies are still in the forest. Your consciousness was drawn inward when you passed out. The Rings pulled you here."
Renher went very still.
"They are safe," the figure said, before the alarm could fully form. "The Rings conceal what they claim. No one can see your bodies. To any eye in that forest, you are simply not there."
"But physically," Renher said carefully, "we're still present. Someone could stumble over us. A fire could reach us. An arrow fired blindly in our direction—"
"Could still find you. Yes." The hollow eyes held his without flinching. "The concealment is visual. It is not armour."
A brief, pointed silence.
"Summarised precisely," the figure said.
Kazuma had gone quiet for a moment, floating above the cocoons in a slow, contemplative orbit. Then he descended slightly and said, with the tone of someone who has been sitting on a question and has finally decided to ask it:
"Can souls be used as raw materials? I would very much prefer not to spend the rest of my existence inside a worn-out sword."
The nameless figure regarded him with something that, in a face less ancient and less hollow, might have been surprise.
"In principle," he said slowly, "anything can serve as raw material. But extracting a soul and feeding it as a component — that requires a very specific kind of power. One that almost no one in this world possesses."
He stopped.
His hollow eyes moved between Kazuma and Renher with deliberate slowness.
"Almost no one," he repeated.
A pause that felt intentional.
Kazuma straightened in the air, and a smile — the specific smile of a man whose long shot has just come in — spread across his translucent face.
"Well," he said, with barely restrained satisfaction, "it just so happens that his body has exactly that power."
The nameless figure looked at Renher.
Renher looked back at him.
Something passed through those hollow eyes — something that had not been there before. Not surprise exactly, but the particular quality of attention that a very old mind gives to something it had not anticipated and now finds worth watching very closely.
"Is that so," the figure said quietly.
It was not quite a question.
"But the question remains," the nameless figure continued, his voice carrying the slow cadence of someone thinking aloud through a problem they find genuinely interesting. "The Rings absorb physical materials. A soul is not physical. The Rings cannot reach it directly."
He paused, and the hollow eyes grew distant for a moment — moving through centuries of accumulated knowledge, searching for a precedent and finding none.
"You would need a medium. Something physical that has been infused with the soul — an object it has bonded to, taken root in. Feed the medium into the forge, and the soul comes with it. The material and the soul together become the raw ingredient."
He had not finished the thought before his eyes moved — first to Kazuma, then back to Renher, then to Kazuma again. The pieces arranging themselves in the mind of something very old, arriving at a conclusion that had no entry in any record it had ever kept.
The smile on Kazuma's face had returned. It was the smile of a man who had been told by someone wiser and older that he would certainly lose, and had just watched his hand come up winning anyway — bright, unguarded, almost childlike in its satisfaction.
The nameless figure was quiet for a moment.
"I have spent a very long time forming my understanding of what is and is not possible," he said at last. There was no frustration in his voice — only something close to wonder, worn smooth by the sheer age of the mind it moved through. "I believe you two have just exceeded it."
He let that settle, then continued.
"In theory, this method could also be used to transfer a soul into a new body entirely. Not merely as raw material — as a relocation." A pause weighted with honest uncertainty. "But this has never been done. I cannot tell you what the outcome would be. The Rings were not built with that intention. What they would make of it — I do not know."
Kazuma drifted down until he was nearly level with Renher, the smug brightness of his expression softening into something more sincere.
"You have my permission," he said simply. "Use the sword. Use me as the material."
Renher glanced at him sideways, unhurried.
"Even if you wanted to refuse," he said, with the measured calm of a man stating an obvious fact, "there isn't much you could do about it on your own, is there."
It wasn't unkind. It was simply true, and both of them knew it.
A faint grin crossed Renher's face — casual, easy, the first one that had reached his expression since he'd woken in this world.
The nameless figure watched the exchange in silence.
What it must feel like, he thought, to be young. To have the weight of everything still ahead of you rather than behind.
He said nothing. But something in the hollow eyes, just briefly, was not entirely empty.