He picked up the arm and examined it one last time for any flaws or failures. After looking it over completely, he set it back down and pulled off the shirt he'd been wearing along with the bandages covering his stump. For a thirteen year old, Junichiro was in excellent shape. He was even beginning to show signs of emerging muscles. It was probably the best time in his life to get into shape given the absolute flood of hormones and testosterone running rampant through his body thanks to puberty.
However, none of that had drawn his gaze. Rather, he was staring blankly at the stump where his right arm used to be. He'd managed to somewhat ignore it over the last few hours thanks to working on the replacement. Now though, now he was staring at the completely exposed stump. Thanks to the scroll that helped with his healing, the wound didn't look fresh and, in fact, looked like it was months if not years old.
Junichiro stared at the scarred over flesh where his arm abruptly ended. The scroll did heal him wonderfully, but it was natural healing meaning that the stump looked terrible where it had been sliced off. Thankfully the stray had sliced his arm off rather than ripping it off. This left him with an even flat plane to work with. Otherwise, he might have had to cut off a ragged end to make it flat and even so the prosthetic would be easier to wear.
All of this went through his mind in a sort of numb fashion as he slowly reached out with his left hand and gently touched the scarred over end of his missing arm. It was a surreal moment for him that took his attention so completely that he didn't even realize he was crying as he did so. Tears silently rolled down his cheeks as his distressed mind tried to figure out if he could feel himself touching the stump where he would assume there were no nerves, or if it was a figment of his imagination. He continued to examine the sight of his arm until Azazel cleared his throat.
Jumping slightly at the sound, Junichiro realized what he'd been doing and gave Azazel a sheepish look while wiping his cheeks dry. He didn't apologize, as was his first instinct, rather he just moved on. He picked up the new arm and slowly slid the end of his stump into the harness. The straps to hold it in place were designed to loop around his body and reconnect with the harness allowing him to put it on by himself. He was pretty awkward with it, this being the first time he'd ever done it, but he soon had the arm strapped on tight enough that it wouldn't just fall off for no reason.
The pair of them quietly stared at the hanging wooden arm as the runes for the connection slowly initialized. It was impossible for Junichiro to include any sort of feedback into the arm simply because the material just wasn't good enough. To simulate a real arm as much as possible would require a highly magical material, preferably from a living creature, and an absolutely massive number of runes to almost act like a programming language.
It took almost a minute but finally one of the attempts Junichiro was making to move the wooden fingers worked! It was just a twitch, but the index finger of the wooden hand did move! It was another few minutes before the arm completely initialized and he was finally able to move the entire thing. Curious, and slightly impatient, Azazel asked, "How does it feel?"
Junichiro stared at the wooden arm as he flexed it and moved the fingers, opening and closing a fist, "It... doesn't. I feel nothing and it's so strange looking at it move as if it were my arm. Granted it has no flexibility and looks strangely stiff, but it should work until I can make something better."
Due to the nature of the material, the fingers and thumb were stuck in their orientation and could only open and close in a specific manner. He had designed the hand to be excellent at holding things like the handle of a hammer but with no flexibility that was the limit of the motion the fingers could perform. So, he could grab stuff, and that was pretty much it.
"It will do for a first version. Thank you for your help Azazel."
After Azazel left, looking a little lost in his own thoughts, Junichiro remained inside of the workshop. He was still watching his new wooden arm carefully as he opened and closed his fist and tried to understand the flexibility he'd managed to work into the arm. For obvious reasons, it wasn't supremely flexible. He'd need something far more complex made of different materials to even come close to replicating the way a normal human hand could move. He'd probably need to study some medical texts focused on the hand to get a better idea of what he would need to do.
Still, it was good enough for him that he'd be able to close his hand and grip a hammer, or anything similar. The fingers and thumb were just too linear, at the moment, for him to do anything else. Lucky for him, being an Artificer meant he was, technically, ambidextrous. The problem was, even if he was, technically, just as skilled with his left hand as he was with his right, he had zero practical experience using his left hand for much. He would just need to work on gaining that experience from this point on.
He lowered his new arm and focused on the next step that he needed to perform. He needed to learn as much as he could about the properties of the Mana Steel that Azazel had provided. He moved past the Mana Steel and over to one of the smaller gas forges. He had been provided with five of them, each distinguished by the number of burners they had.