To explain this question, let’s just say that Arcanium Metal is typically manufactured by melting sea salt and iron together.
That’s a combination of (metals) potassium salts, sodium salts, magnesium salts, etc. And Chlorine, Bromine, Sulfides, etc.
Once heated up to extreme heat, many of these salts break down into elements respectively.
Meaning that we can have an alloy of about several metals and a bunch of other random salts(let’s assume that Alkali metals don’t break down in the forging process coz I’m too lazy.
So we will have an Steel-Alloy sword containing trace amounts soluble salts of metals like Magnesium, Copper, Cobalt, Silver, Tin, Titanium, Mercury (if you don’t know, the ocean has mercury and eating a lot of fish will cause you to have mercury poisoning in mass amounts, but you should be fine if you don’t eat like 20 big fish a day, also this will make the alloy slightly more brittle), Gallium(also makes it more brittle but not too much), Nickel, etc.
The salt on the other hand will cause the alloy to be more brittle, however, let’s treat it so that it is similar to carbon in that it would cause it to become slightly more sturdy.
What you get is an unrefined, not very strong sword that cannot hold itself easily, however, the forging process might actually not affect the iron too much and instead create tiny holes that these other metals and salts were originally at.
Magic plays a part on this and I’m unsure on how it can interact with the metal, so let’s just say that it just makes the metal more chaotic by making tiny little cracks and holes in the sword.
So what you get is a steel sword that seems to be able to conduct magic more easily and because of these tiny microscopic(or atomic) holes, what you get has very little to do with magic. These holes just help magic flow more easily.
Do what you will with this information, I am just theorizing without any basis.
