How many words do I need to have this in Demigod, and it not have any silly recipes?

Picture = thousand words.

1. You click on the blacksmith menu. You inventory comes up like at the shops.  You drag the item you want to upgrade to the first slot, which would show what you have upgraded and what you can upgrade.  In this case..  Strengthening Boots at "level 1".
2. Color codes for common values to make comparisons easy.
   These numbers would change to reflect upgrades. (so it'd go from +15% to +25% to +40% increased attack speed with both attack speed upgrades.)
3. Upgrades you can do are in gold with a glowing line leading to them.
4. Upgrades you can't do are redded out.
5. When you roll over it'd show the bonus for the upgrade and it's cost.  Or it could just always show them sort of like how I have it..
6. The paths show the prerequisites for the upgrade.
7. HOLY SHIT AWESOME.

There should be a max of like "3 points" or whatever to use for upgrades, PER ITEM.  So.. you can only reach 1 of the final paths.  At least that's what I think.. otherwise the prices would need to go up after each point you spend, or something..

If an item has more than 2 stats then the different ones would be grouped together in either path.
If an item only has 1 stat then one path would upgrade that, the other would add a new one.(or just all items should have a minimum of 2 stats.)

Another good point about this is that it'd reduce clutter in the shop. About 40% or so of the items in the shop are basically slight variation sof each other, or upgrades of each other.  It would stream line things a lot. =]   More accesibility = great.

Rolling over Items would bring up something like this:

1. The up arrows and number shows which upgrade path each stat is on(if there was 3 stats, then 1 of them would be by ^1, the 2 others would have ^2 by them.).
   In this way you can tell which stats get upgraded by each branch BEFORE you by them.
   I think after using the blacksmith once this would become very very simple.  New players migth ask "what's the arrow by stats for?" to have people say "put it in blacksmith/upgrade thing" and it becomes easily understandable, at least I think!
2. The Upgrade path # at the bottom shows what extra stats the item gets depending on what path you take. 
   #1 would be doing both lvls up upgrade1.
   #2 would be doing 1 lvl of each.
   #3 would be doing both lvls up upgrade2.
   I think this is also instantly understandable once you use the upgrading for the first time.
3. I moved the $ amount by the name to condense it some.