The midday sun beat down upon the western rocky embankment. There, the sound of metal clinking against stone echoed off the dark rock bluffs.
Tie Shan stood before his open-air rock hearth. He stared down at a glowing billet of scrap iron with a furrowed, soot-streaked brow. The seven-foot titan bear held a heavy iron tongs in his gray-furred left hand. At the same time, his golden titan right arm rested against his thigh. In the hearth below, a heap of dry pine branches crackled and spat showers of angry sparks, billowing thick, bitter grey smoke into the afternoon air.
Lin Xiao hopped over the gravel with a set of floating bounds. He carried a small wooden bowl filled with chilled spring dew.
“Uncle Tie,” Lin Xiao called out, resting upon a smooth flat rock beside the hearth. “You’ve been squinting at that fire for two hours. What’s troubling the forge?”
Tie Shan let out a heavy, gravelly sigh. It set the tongs down on his anvil block with a hollow clatter.
“It’s the fuel, Lord Xiao,” Tie Shan rumbled. He wiped a streak of black soot from his braided beard. “Pine and birch are fine for boiling water or roasting a side of pork. But they’re utterly useless for serious metalworking. They burn too fast, leave mountains of acidic ash, and barely reach six hundred degrees. To smelt raw iron ore into fine steel, a forge must roar past eleven hundred degrees without spitting sulfur. With this smoky pine garbage, I can’t even forge a decent kitchen knife, let alone spirit implements or farming plows.”
Su Ling’er stepped up to the embankment, her vermilion scholar sleeves pinned back with white cord, her three snowy tails flicking thoughtfully behind her.
“Master Tie is correct,” Su Ling’er noted, her amethyst eyes analyzing the hearth. “Ordinary timber contains too much water and volatile wood gas. When burned in the open, the energy escapes as acrid smoke rather than blasting heat. In the northern courts, high-grade weapon smiths rely on white charcoal burned in sealed earth mounds.”
Tie Shan nodded vigorously. “Aye! True white hardwood charcoal! It burns odorless as clean air, leaves almost zero ash, and glows with the heat of an underground magma vein. But building a proper charcoal mound takes weeks of trial and error. If the draft fails, the entire stack turns into gray ash instead of hard black silver.”
Lin Xiao gave an elastic, confident wobble.
“In my last life, we had an entire branch of heat-powered building dedicated to this,” Lin Xiao said cheerfully. “It’s called controlled anoxic pyrolysis. You don’t need magic or weeks of guesswork, Uncle Tie. All you need is a sealed curved earth kiln with adjustable draft intakes, a heat-proof stone lining, and dense hardwood.”
Tie Shan blinked his round eyes in confusion. “An-oxic pyro-what?”
“It means baking the wood without letting it catch fire,” Lin Xiao explained with a smile. “We heat the timber in a chamber starved of oxygen. The moisture and tars boil away as vapor, leaving behind ninety-five percent pure, carbonized crystal-clear structure. Let’s build an authentic high-heat kiln.”
Su Ling’er’s [Divine Governance Mind] engaged instantly, her sharp mind calculating heat volumes and heat-rising drafts.
“The red clay bluff seventy paces to the west,” Su Ling’er suggested. She pointed a slender finger toward a south-facing slope of dense, compacted river-bed clay. “It’s fully dry, sheltered from the river winds, and sits directly above a bedrock shelf of heat-resistant dark rock. We can carve the firing dome directly into the earth itself.”
“Lead the way, Minister Su,” Lin Xiao said with a bounce.
The chosen site was an eight-foot-tall embankment of dark, ferric red clay. Dense, cohesive, and naturally rich in alumina stone-glass, making it a natural heat-proof material that could withstand extreme heat swelling without crumbling.
Lin Xiao took the lead in digging.
Rather than having Tie Shan spend all day hacking away with an iron spade, Lin Xiao tightly packed his internal water pool. He drew upon his [Laminar Hydro-Cutter]. He extruded a high-pressure water blade thin as a dragonfly’s wing:
SSSSSS-CHHHH!
The high-pressure hydro-jet sliced through the compacted red clay like a wire through cold cheese. Under the Dao Spirit’s precise spatial guidance, Lin Xiao hollowed out an amazing, curved beehive-shaped chamber within the hillside. Eight feet wide at the base, six feet tall at the domed crest, with a gently sloping floor designed to drain moisture toward an external drainage sump.
Next came Tie Shan’s master stonework.
The titan bear strode to the nearby dark rock cliffs. With a single strike of his golden titan claws, Tie Shan split out forty box-shaped slabs of dark, fine-grained fiery dark rock. Stone that had cooled from ancient lava and was naturally immune to heat shock. Carrying eight blocks at a time, Tie Shan lined the inner base and firebox of the chamber, mortaring the joints with a smooth slurry of white river clay and crushed quartz sand mixed by Lin Xiao.
At the rear of the domed chamber, Tie Shan carved an upright exhaust chimney pipe eighteen inches in width. He rose through the top of the clay hill to vent exhaust gases. At the front entrance, he built a low arched loading portal flanked by two adjustable draft damper stones.
Meanwhile, Xiao Hei was tasked with logging.
The black hound sprinted into the high rocky ridges where ancient mountain iron-oaks (Tie Li Mu) grew in abundance. These were dense, slow-growing hardwoods whose wood fibers were so tightly compacted that dry logs would sink in water like iron metal bars. Using razor-sharp wind blades from his front paws, Xiao Hei cleanly felled three fallen, sun-dried iron-oak trunks. He dragged the massive hardwood logs down the mountain slope inside a swirling cushion of silver mist.
By late afternoon, the timber was cut into uniform three-foot billets.
Under Su Ling’er’s precise sharp-angled direction, the loading of the kiln began.
“The thickest oak billets must stand vertically at the back of the chamber, packed tight as a warrior’s shield wall,” Su Ling’er instructed. She gestured with a cedar measuring rod. “The thinner branches go near the front. We leave a two-inch air gap beneath the dome to allow heat-rising heat to roll from front to back before exiting the rear chimney.”
Tie Shan carefully stacked over two thousand pounds of dense iron-oak inside the curved vault, wedging the final billets so firmly that not a single piece could shift during firing.
At the entrance portal, Tie Shan built a small kindling fire using dry pine shavings and glowing coals from the camp hearth.
“Now seal the door!” Lin Xiao commanded.
Tie Shan hoisted a massive dark rock slab into place, blocking ninety percent of the entrance, sealing the outer edge gaps with thick, wet river clay until only a narrow three-inch air intake remained at the bottom.
Whoosh...
As the kindling fire caught, the natural draft of the rear chimney pulled the flames inward. Hot air began to circulate through the packed oak billets, initiating the first stage of carbonization.
Lin Xiao hovered near the top of the chimney, using his [Thermal Regulation] and internal sense array to act as a living fire gauge.
“Dao Spirit,” Lin Xiao focused his mind. “Readout on internal heat and exhaust composition.”
A soft chime sounded in his mind:
“Internal heat currently two hundred and forty degrees,” the Dao Spirit reported smoothly. “Moisture vaporization phase active. Exhaust plume: dense white water vapor.”
For the next eighteen hours, the kiln baked the mountain timber in an oxygen-starved embrace.
Lin Xiao, Tie Shan, and Su Ling’er took turns monitoring the kiln. As night fell, the thick white steam rising from the chimney gradually turned into a pale, semi-clear blue smoke. It smelled richly of caramelized wood sugars and oak tannins.
“Blue smoke,” Lin Xiao noted, nudging Tie Shan awake at dawn. “The volatiles and pyroligneous acids are burning off. Internal heat has passed seven hundred degrees. Uncle Tie, prepare the damper stones!”
Tie Shan sprang to his feet, wide awake.
Following Lin Xiao’s instructions, Tie Shan slid the front draft stones nearly shut, reducing the air intake to a narrow slit barely the thickness of a thumb. For another twelve hours, the wood was allowed to cook in deep, anoxic heat, transmuting the cellular plant fiber into dense, pure carbon.
Finally, on the morning of the second day, the blue smoke vanished entirely.
Rising from the stone chimney was nothing but a shimmering column of see-through, distortion-heavy heat waves. Not a single wisp of smoke or soot could be seen.
“Now for the refining spike!” Lin Xiao called out. “Open the intake wide for ten minutes to burn off the leftover surface tars, then seal it fully!”
Tie Shan kicked the draft stones open. A rush of fresh mountain air surged into the white-hot chamber. Inside the kiln, the wood embers ignited into a blinding, white-hot roar, spiking the internal heat past a thousand degrees of white-hot kiln fire!
Ten minutes later, Tie Shan slammed the dark rock door shut, throwing shovels of wet river clay over the intake and the chimney top, sealing every single tiny pore.
“Air fully cut off,” Tie Shan panted, wiping sweat from his chest. “Now we wait for the smothering cool-down.”
It took two full days for the dense red-clay kiln to cool to room heat.
On the fourth morning, with the entire founding council assembled around the red clay bluff, Tie Shan stepped forward with his five-hundred-jin sledgehammer. With a booming shout, he cracked away the dried clay seal. Then he pulled away the heavy dark rock door slab.
A cool, sweet scent—like crisp autumn earth after a rainstorm—drifted from the dark chamber. There was not a trace of acrid smoke or bitter soot.
Tie Shan reached into the chamber with his massive paws, carefully pulling out a long, three-foot tube-shaped billet.
The entire council leaned forward in awe.
The piece of wood was no longer brown oak. It had transformed into a spotless stick of black-silver charcoal, possessing a deep, lustrous metal sheen that glittered in the morning sunlight. Its surface was hard as black glass, fully clean to the touch, leaving not a single smear of black soot upon Tie Shan’s gray fur.
Tie Shan picked up a second piece of charcoal and gently tapped the two billets together:
TINGGGGGGG!
A clear, sustained metal ring echoed across the western embankment, singing with the pure, ringing pitch of a bronze bell or fine china chime.
Tie Shan froze.
His jaw trembled, tears of deep, craftsman’s joy welling in his fiery amber eyes.
“A bell tone...” the old bear whispered, his voice cracking with emotion. “It rings like struck bronze! In two hundred years of blacksmithing across the mortal kingdoms and beast clans, I’ve never held charcoal of such supreme purity! Not a single crack! Not a grain of ash!”
Tie Shan turned toward Lin Xiao. He dropped to both knees on the gravel with the silver charcoal cradled against his broad chest like a priceless treasure.
“Lord Xiao!” Tie Shan roared with joyful respect. “With this charcoal, my forge can melt meteorite iron! We can temper blades that cut through jade! We can forge cooking pots that last a thousand years! You have given this old blacksmith the greatest forge fire under heaven!”
Lin Xiao hopped onto the titan bear’s knee, giving an elastic, cheerful wobble.
“Save the sky flying swords for later, Uncle Tie,” Lin Xiao laughed warmly. “Our priority today is much more important. Tonight, you and I are forging the safe hall’s first proper kitchen knives!”