Chapter 832 – The Dwarven Royal City

After strolling around for a while and returning to the cottage, Mo Lan took out some specialty ingredients from the Three Thousand Mirror Ruins World and, directing her cooking utensils, prepared a dinner with otherworldly flavors.

Mother and daughter sat around the dining table, enjoying their meal while chatting about what they had seen and experienced during their years apart.

Mo Lan’s experiences in the other world couldn’t be shared with anyone who hadn’t been to the Well of the Sky, so most of the time, it was Mama Shanna recounting amusing stories from her life in the City of Chaos.

Outside the window lay the tranquil night of the mirror space; inside, the warmth of a mother-daughter reunion mingled with the aroma of fine food.

After dinner, the two of them, stuffed to the brim, lounged on the sofa without a care for appearances, contentedly stretching their bellies in remarkably synchronized movements, as if they had returned to those days many years ago in the Emerald Creek Plains.

Yet warm moments were always fleeting.

Mama Shanna still had the Mind Healing House to look after, and she returned to the City of Chaos before dawn.

After seeing her mother off, Mo Lan didn’t linger either. She tidied up, took along a carefully prepared gift, and once again used Spatial Magic to teleport to her next destination—the Dwarven Royal City deep within Durin Volcano.

The hammer-choosing ceremony for Forgestar’s child was being held today at noon.

For Dwarves, this was a momentous occasion comparable to a coming-of-age ceremony, and she certainly couldn’t be late.

Mo Lan appeared outside the magnificent boulder walls of the Dwarven Royal City.

Rather than entering the city directly, she first mounted her broom and flew to an Iron Stone Monster ranch outside the city, following the address Cheryl had given her.

Twenty years ago, after Cheryl had traveled to this place, she used her past savings to purchase this ranch from a senior Witch.

Since then, she had been raising Iron Stone Monsters while studying Dwarven forging techniques.

Cheryl was delighted to see Mo Lan.

After graduation, although they had occasionally kept in touch through letters, they had never met face to face again.

After exchanging pleasantries, Mo Lan asked about Forgestar Riftgold’s situation.

“Him? He’s become one of the most sought-after master forgers in the Dwarven Kingdom in recent years!”

Cheryl spoke with admiration in her voice as she began telling Mo Lan the story.

It turned out that back then, Riftgold Forgestar—the Dwarf who had been schemed against by the Angel using star marrow, afflicted with the light element disease, and doomed to live forever in the light—had not only been incredibly fortunate to return to his beloved homeland after leaving Shadowless Mountain, but had also leveraged his years of holy silver forging experience and his ancestral tenacity to revive the long-fallen Riftgold Forging Workshop.

With astonishing craftsmanship, he produced top-tier mithril equipment rivaling holy silver weapons, causing a sensation throughout the entire city and thoroughly clearing the Riftgold Clan’s name from years of false accusations of betraying the God of the Forge. The name of Riftgold was restored to glory.

Cheryl was now both one of the ore suppliers for the Riftgold Forging Workshop and a partner forger.

“What’s even more wonderful,” Cheryl said with a smile, “is that a few years ago, he fell in love with and married the little princess of the Dwarven Kingdom. Not long after, they had an exceptionally strong and healthy child! Forgestar named the child ‘Liguang,’ meaning that the descendants of the Riftgold Clan have finally and completely escaped the curse of the light element disease, regaining health and freedom!”

Hearing this, Mo Lan felt genuinely happy for Forgestar and the Riftgold Clan.

“Today is little Liguang’s hammer-choosing ceremony,” Cheryl added. “It’s an important Dwarven tradition, usually held when a child turns three, symbolizing that they’ve grown strong enough to swing the lightest forging hammer—the official starting point of touching the path of the forge.”

Mo Lan had read about this in books before. Seeing that it was getting late, she and Cheryl mounted their brooms together and flew toward the Riftgold Forging Workshop in the central district of the Dwarven Royal City.

When she saw the massive workshop with its roaring furnaces, occupying an entire volcano, and the throngs of guests gathered in the workshop plaza to offer congratulations, Mo Lan finally got a sense of what it meant to be the Dwarven Kingdom’s most sought-after master forger.

Forgestar Riftgold had changed greatly from the Dwarf in the crowd. His gaze was steady, his bearing dignified. Standing beside his wife, he proudly watched little Liguang in the center of the grounds—a sturdy, tiger-headed toddler curiously fiddling with a row of ornately decorated small forging hammers of various sizes arranged before him.

If Cheryl hadn’t pointed him out, Mo Lan would never have been able to connect him with the Dwarf child who had once lain on the ground, calmly waiting to die.

Mo Lan was not using the same appearance she had worn when she first met Forgestar, so he didn’t recognize her.

In the guise of an ordinary Witch guest attending the ceremony, she stood quietly among the crowd, watching as little Liguang finally wrapped his arms around a compact forging hammer with a blue crystal embedded in its head, drawing cheers and blessings from everyone around.

After the ceremony ended, Mo Lan didn’t go forward to reveal herself to Forgestar. She simply handed a prepared gift to an attendant and quietly slipped away, heading into the royal city to search for a property suitable for establishing a teleportation gate.

With her gift, she had enclosed an unsigned card, written in veiled words that only Forgestar would understand:

“Starlight never fails the weary traveler, and the ring of the hammer finds its place in the hall at last. Congratulations, Forgestar, for all you have won, and even more so for Liguang’s future. —An old friend.”

She believed that when Forgestar saw this gift and message, he would understand that she had been there.

Mo Lan then began wandering through the city, searching for a suitable property.

However, this task proved far more troublesome than it had been in the City of Chaos.

The vast majority of buildings in the Dwarven Royal City were built into and against the massive mountain.

Everywhere she looked, there were clanging blacksmith shops and forging workshops belching thick plumes of smoke, either carved directly into the mountainside or housed in natural or expanded cave dwellings.

The environment was exactly what one would expect—the air was saturated with the ever-present smell of coal smoke and the searing heat of molten metal. Even with a powerful ventilation system, the intensity remained overwhelming.

Noise was inescapable: the thunderous pounding of metal, the roaring of bellows, and the grinding screech of turning gears all blended into one cacophonous symphony.

Finding a property that was independent, well-lit, and relatively quiet and clean was extremely difficult.

Mo Lan inspected several cave dwellings that were up for sale. One had a forging workshop right next door, the vibrations making her skull throb. Another was situated directly below a ventilation shaft, with coal ash drifting down in a constant shower. Yet another was deep inside the mountain, completely cut off from sunlight.

Even though she only intended to use this place as a location for a teleportation exit point, these drawbacks couldn’t be ignored.

She certainly didn’t want every trip from her Witch’s home to the Dwarven Royal City to involve being driven mad by noise, covered head to toe in soot, or having to adjust to total darkness.

Left with no choice, she continued searching farther toward the city’s outskirts and higher elevations.

Finally, near the edge of the royal city on a mountaintop platform at a higher elevation, she found a relatively secluded stone house with an expansive view.

Though the distant rumble of the city could still be faintly heard here, it had weakened considerably, and the air was much fresher.

The only downsides were its remote location, the inconvenience of getting around, and the lack of any lava geothermal source that could be channeled for forging.

But none of those drawbacks mattered to Mo Lan in the slightest.