The Dawn of the New World

There were a few piles of junk that were sitting neatly in front of each forge blocking the view. Hao Xuan navigated through them and finally came upon a clearing near the end of the hall where Gamil was hunched over a desk tinkering with something.

He had gotten a little 'wider' over the last few months but most of it was muscle, mainly due to his job where he had to lift a lot of heavy pieces of equipment. If Arthur was the tallest then Gamil was the widest among the bunch.

Hearing the incoming footsteps he knew who they belonged without even looking.

"Master!" he turned around with a grin, holding what looked like a breastplate of some kind of armor with a hole in the middle.

Hands clasped behind his back, Hao Xuan nodded while glancing at the rows of covered mannequins to the side.

"How's the progress?"

"Excellent, see for yourself!"

He pulled the covers to reveal over 150 full-body armor sets..

"The last batch will be done within two weeks."

Hao Xuan went up to the first piece of armor and ran his hands along the greyish-black exterior. It was warm to the touch and instead of feeling an inorganic piece of processed metal, it felt alive somehow as if it was breathing.

There was a small notch in the middle of the chest plate, about two inches wide. He grabbed the shoulder piece and clenched as hard as he could. It groaned and squeaked under the pressure but that was it.

Hao Xuan suddenly broke out in a fit of laughter.

"Hahaha, so it worked! My god, we got really lucky with that one, huh?"

Gamil looked towards the forges that were brighter than ever before and nodded with a confident smile.

"Who would have thought dragon fire had such magical abilities."

Soon after the first batch was brought back from the ship cemetery they were faced with the first problem. Most of these unnamed alloys had such high resistance that the several thousand-degree fires that were burning within the forges were ineffective against them.

Hao Xuan asked Nidhora's help and she 'lent' him her fire. As long as she was nearby it would continue to burn and even just a small flame was enough to melt even the most obstinate alloys.

The best part was that the armor pieces that were made using her flame were somehow able to retain some of the magical properties.

The most important of which was that they were almost indestructible when there were multiple armors near one another. To be exact, each armor within 30 meters allowed both the armor sets to take twice as much damage. And obviously, the more the merrier.

Not only they were lighter and sturdier, but somehow they increased the movement speed of the wearer in proximity to one another.

Then there was the shield or barrier they naturally exuded able to block two full-powered attacks of a peak Spirit Realm cultivator before going on a sort of cooldown.

They were able to absorb the ambient spiritual energy that was left in the atmosphere and regain the barrier.

And on top of all that, Barracus came up with a strange design where each armor piece was divided into two parts, the front and the back sections, before being sealed together. There were veiny honeycomb patterns in the middle that allowed a liquid to be dispersed throughout.

Baracus had not yet told Hao Xuan why he made them so but there it was.

The headpieces were outfitted with the latest tech and numerous sensors. Visually they resembled a mixture of leather and steel armors but they were made whole of the same alloys.

It was just flexible enough that it felt like leather.

There was a lot of things added to the original designs and many little details were kept from Hao Xuan by Baracus and Gamil, which he didn't mind. They were plans for the far future.

What should have taken a few weeks to do had yet to be finished half a year later so it went to show how much they had been improved.

The weapons were made wholly by Gamil himself, without Baracus's interference. Using the strange and unknown metals and alloys stripped from those ancient ships, each weapon was slightly unique in its own way.

They had various abilities like inflicting wounds that would not close up no matter what, not until a certain amount of time had passed.

There were more than a few that Hao Xuan especially liked, he named one of them himself after Gamil showed it to him. It was a rapier but extremely thin, almost invisible to the naked eye. It was called 'Needle' and was chosen by a female Orc.

Maybe it was just luck but the one Gamil made for himself was an oversized warhammer that weighed several tons. The materials used for it were rather ordinary other than a small saint-grade ore which barely weighed anything.

Whenever he slammed it on the ground a 10-meter wide shockwave was produced in a perfect circle around him that actually moved in a straight line.

Hao Xuan had never seen something like that before.