My Anime Shopping Tree & My Cold Prodigy Wife!
Episode-181

Chapter : 361

He looked at the gleaming steel coiling around his arm, a grim promise of the justice, and the vengeance, that was yet to come. The ghosts of his past were out there. And he now had the perfect chains to drag them, kicking and screaming, into the light.

The heavy, gleaming steel chain remained coiled around his arm, a cold, metallic serpent of resurrected power. It felt… right. A familiar weight, a grim comfort. The Chain Shackles, his signature technique from the brutal, vengeful years of his first life, had returned to him, not as a hazy memory, but as a sharp, intuitive, and deeply ingrained skill. His newly forged B-Rank Steel Blood hummed in his veins, a quiet, powerful engine awaiting his command.

He sat in the pre-dawn silence of his study, the single oil lamp casting long, dancing shadows on the walls. The world outside was still, asleep, blissfully unaware of the quiet, terrifying reforging that had just taken place within this small, book-lined room. He flexed his fingers, and the chain responded instantly, tightening slightly, then loosening, a living extension of his will.

He contemplated the power now at his command, his mind, the mind of the Major General, cold and analytical. He weighed its potential, its applications, its limitations. He saw two distinct, yet interconnected, paths of power now laid out before him, a terrifying fusion of the two worlds he had inhabited.

On one path lay the chains. The magic. The Art of the Kill, as he had come to think of it in his first life. At B-Rank, the shackles were already a formidable weapon. He could manifest them with ease, control their length, their density, their sharpness, with a thought. They were perfect for close-quarters combat—for binding, for disarming, for a swift, brutal, and surprisingly quiet, kill. They were a versatile tool, a combination of whip, garrote, and bludgeon, all forged from unbreakable, will-bound steel.

But his knowledge, the memories of the assassin he had become, told him that this was just the beginning. The path of the Steel Blood extended far beyond this. He accessed the System’s newly unlocked skill tree in his mind, seeing the faint, glowing lines of potential upgrades stretching out before him.

A-Rank. R-Rank. S-Rank.

The description for the S-Rank mastery of the Chain Shackles ability shimmered in his mind, a promise of almost godlike power. At S-Rank, the user’s sensory connection to their manifested steel becomes absolute. The user can extend and control their chains over vast distances, guided not by sight, but by their Void Power’s innate perception of metallic and energetic signatures. The chains can be made to phase through solid, non-metallic objects—earth, wood, stone—as if they were ghosts, only solidifying at the moment of impact. The potential for assassination becomes… absolute.

The implications were staggering. To kill a man from five kilometers away, without ever being seen, without ever leaving his own room. To send a silent, ethereal chain slithering through a fortress wall, through the very floors of a castle, to find its target sleeping in his bed and constrict around his throat, leaving behind no trace but a corpse with the faint, inexplicable bruising of a phantom ligature. It was the perfect, untraceable, magical assassination. It was an art form. A beautiful, terrible, and utterly lethal, art form.

This, he knew, was the path of the Ghost of Ferrum. The path of the shadow warrior, the silent avenger. The path of magic, of Void Power, of the ancient, bloody legacy of his new world.

But then, his mind shifted. The other path. The other life. The other knowledge.

The cold, hard, beautiful logic of science.

He let the steel chain dissolve, melting back into the latent energy within him. He picked up a piece of blank parchment and a stick of fine, sharp graphite. And with the same hand that had just commanded magical chains, he began to sketch.

His movements were different now. Not the fluid, intuitive gestures of a Void master, but the sharp, precise, economical lines of an engineer. He drew a long, hollow cylinder. He sketched a bolt mechanism. He detailed the intricate, spiral grooves on the inside of the cylinder.

Rifling.

A simple, brilliant, mechanical principle from a world without magic. The spiral grooves that imparted spin to a projectile, granting it gyroscopic stability, a flatter trajectory, greater range, and a terrifying, almost supernatural, accuracy.

Chapter : 362

He then sketched the projectile itself. Not a crude, round cannonball, but an elongated, aerodynamically stable bullet, its shape calculated for minimal air resistance and maximum kinetic energy transfer upon impact. He drew the casing, the primer, the carefully measured charge of propellant. He didn't have the advanced chemical compounds of Earth’s smokeless powders, but he had the basic principles of explosive chemistry. He had access to sulfur, to charcoal, to saltpeter. He could create black powder. A crude, inefficient propellant, yes. But when contained within a properly engineered breech and directed down a rifled barrel… it would be more than enough.

He looked at the two concepts, side-by-side in his mind.

On one hand, the Chain Shackle. A silent, magical, almost artistic method of assassination. Elegant. Untraceable. Requiring immense personal power, focus, and years of dedicated, quasi-mystical training to master.

On the other hand, the sniper rifle. A cold, mechanical, brutally efficient tool of death. Impersonal. Replicable. Requiring only a steady hand, a good eye, and a fundamental understanding of ballistics. Its power was not in the user, but in the tool itself. A tool he knew, with absolute certainty, how to design. A tool he could, with the resources he was now accumulating, with the control over steel he now possessed, potentially… build.

The thought was a chilling, exhilarating revelation.

He could spend the next decade, the next two decades, painstakingly ranking up his Void Power, mastering the arcane arts of his bloodline, to become the perfect magical assassin.

Or…

He could spend the next year in a hidden workshop, with a skilled blacksmith and his own growing power, forging the components, refining the design, creating a weapon that could deliver the same lethal result as an S-Rank Chain Shackle—a kill from a kilometer away—with a simple, mechanical pull of a trigger. A weapon that could be taught, replicated, given to others.

The two paths stretched before him, a stark, profound choice. The path of magic, the ancient power of this world. And the path of technology, the cold, hard, beautiful logic of the world he had left behind.

Why, a slow, dangerous smile touched his lips, choose?

He looked at the drawing of the rifle, then at his own empty hand, feeling the phantom weight of the steel chains. He was Major General KM Evan, the father of the Mechanical Battle Suit. He was Lord Lloyd Ferrum, the wielder of the Steel Blood and the Black Ring Eyes. He was a paradox. An anomaly. A fusion of two worlds, two lifetimes, two philosophies of power.

He would not be just a mage. He would not be just an engineer. He would be both. He would forge an arsenal of magic and technology so potent, so revolutionary, that the ghosts of his past would have nowhere to hide. They had been in this world for decades, yes. They had accumulated power, built networks. But they were creatures of this world, bound by its rules, its traditions, its understanding of what was possible.

They had no idea what a sniper rifle was. They had no conception of aerodynamics, of ballistics, of the simple, brutal, beautiful physics of a spinning piece of lead traveling at twice the speed of sound. They were preparing for a war against a medieval knight with a few neat magic tricks.

They had no idea they were about to go to war with a Major General from the 22nd century.

The game hadn’t just changed. He was about to flip the entire board over. And the future of Riverio, whether it knew it or not, was about to get a whole lot louder. And a whole lot more precise.

—

The Elixir Manufactory was no longer a forgotten ruin; it was the beating heart of a commercial revolution. The rhythmic, heavy groan of the great water wheel, turning with a power that was steady and relentless, was the estate’s new pulse. Inside, the cavernous space hummed with a symphony of productive, organized industry. The air, once thick with the musty scent of decay and pigeon droppings, was now a fragrant, almost intoxicating, blend of warm, distilled rosemary, the nutty sweetness of almond oil, and the clean, waxy aroma of curing soap. It was the smell of progress, of profit, and of an empire being built one perfectly saponified batch at a time.