The heat inside the hearth shed climbed past one hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit.
The radiant energy pouring from the mouth of the brick fire was so intense that the coarse pine boards of the tool racks thirty feet away were dry as kindling, hot to the touch. In the darkest corners of the ceiling, spiderwebs curled into grey ash and drifted down like burnt snowflakes.
Pei Jing’s hands never slowed.
Push. Pull.
Chuu-chuff. Chuu-chuff.
Three hours had elapsed since midnight. His grey linen pants were soaked through with sweat, clinging to his thighs like wet river clay. His chest and belly glistened with a fine, nonstop sheen of oil and sweat that evaporated almost right away. It filled the shed with the faint, animal scent of burning animal fat.
Under ordinary body conditions, a human body subjected to this level of external heat stress and aerobic hard effort would experience rapid cardiovascular decompensation. Outer vasodilation would drop brain blood pressure, heat tiredness would set in, and the central nervous system would collapse into heat stroke within ninety minutes.
Pei Jing didn’t collapse.
His Flesh Forging Tier 6 Limit-Break adaptation controlled his tiny blood vessel beds with clean, steady care.
The dense micro-fibrillar connective tissue network across his back and torso acted as a heat buffer. When the blasting heat hit his outer skin, the superficial tiny blood vessels tightened slightly. He drove the heated blood inward toward his liver and kidneys. There, his sped up body-energy breath flow faded away the heat load through rapid breathing exchange.
Every breath out from his nostrils was a high-pressure puff of white-hot water vapor.
His resting heart rate hovered at fifty-two beats per minute.
Beside the hearth, Master Mo Tie worked with terrifying, careful speed.
The smith had clamped three thick graphite-clay crucibles directly into the hard coal firebed. Into the crucibles he fed the chunks of South Hill pig iron that Pei Jing had brought up the mountain.
The bellows forced a nonstop vortex of high-pressure oxygen through the underground copper tuyeres. Then, the fire heat breached twelve hundred and fifty degrees.
Inside the crucibles, the brittle grey metal softened, collapsed. Then he transformed into a bubbling, blazing bright pool of liquid gold.
“Flux!” Mo Tie roared, his voice cutting through the roar of the water chute outside.
Pei Jing didn’t break the rhythm of his strokes. With his left hand holding both hickory handles. It used his shoulder tendon stretch to pump the eighty-pound piston single-handedly for ten seconds, his right hand caught a wooden scoop from the bin beside him.
He scooped two pounds of crushed river glow-stone and powdered limestone, dumping the white powder directly into the bubbling crucible.
Hiss!
A cloud of purple-tinged smoke erupted from the fire throat.
The powdered glow-stone acted as a chemical spark. In the presence of high heat, it bound instantly with the free sulfur and phosphorus dirt floating within the molten iron. That turned the brittle elements into a thick, sticky, frothy glass that rose to the surface of the melt.
Mo Tie grabbed a long-handled paddle of heat-proof clay.
With a practiced flick of his corded wrists, the smith skimmed the glowing scum off the surface of the pool, slinging the melted rock waste into a stone trench where it solidified into brittle green glassy pebbles.
“Clean!” Mo Tie yelled, his single ear twitching against the heat. “Not an ounce of sulfur left to poison the grain. South Hill iron is sweet ore when you burn out the rot!”
The smith turned to an iron table, where three bars of high-carbon blister steel lay waiting. These were imported billets from the northern military arsenals, forged from mountain iron and carburized in charcoal kilns until their carbon content reached zero point eight percent. It was hard, keen, but brittle on its own.
Mo Tie dumped the molten hard dark metal iron into a heavy box-shaped cast-iron metal bar mold, then used a pair of massive tongs to thrust the central billet of high-carbon blister steel directly into the heart of the cooling melt.
It was the ancient three-layer folded blade construction. Three layers of metal forged into an indivisible whole.
The outer jacket was high-hard dark metal iron—ductile, tough, capable of absorbing bone-shaking moving shock from iron maces without fracturing. The inner core was high-carbon steel—rigid, crystal-hard, capable of taking and holding an edge sharp enough to shave arm hair.
Together, they formed a composite structure that negated the weaknesses of both metals.
“Four hours!” Mo Tie suddenly barked, checking the water clock dripping into a brass bowl on the wall. “Drop the handles, boy!”
Pei Jing brought the twin hickory poles to a controlled stop against the oak faceplate.
He didn’t let go suddenly. He eased the piston to its resting notch, stepped back two paces onto the cool flat stone slabs near the water chute, and stood motionless.
His ribs swelled once, deep and slow.
In his vision, the eye ledger flared with bright, amber runes:
The breakthrough was with an immediate body sensation.
The burning tightness in his forearms and between-rib muscles faded away. His sweat rate dialed back by forty percent as his under-skin vasculature steadied its automatic tone.
He picked up his clay pot flask from the bench, drinking two pints of cold salted water. He was followed by three thick spoonfuls of rendered bear animal fat from a clay pot crock.
The fats entered his stomach, coating the mucosa and providing instant rich fat fuel for his cellular recovery.
Mo Tie watched him eat the raw fat without flinching.
The old smith stepped over to a wooden water trough, ladled out a gourd of water. Then it splashed it over his scarred face and chest. He dried his whiskers with a piece of rough canvas, then leaned his heavy frame against the anvil block.
“You don’t breathe like a town clerk,” Mo Tie said, his grey eyes fixed on Pei Jing’s shoulders. “I hammered broadswords for the Northern Garrison for twenty-five years before the judge took my ear and pension. I’ve seen sergeant-majors with thirty years of spear drills collapse on that bellows after two hours. Their lungs turn to leather, their spit turns to black tar, and their elbows lock up with bone spurs.”
Mo Tie pointed with a calloused finger at the level silver seam across Pei Jing’s back.
“You took a cleaver across your shoulder blades not two weeks ago. The scar is fresh, but the flesh beneath it’s clamped tighter than forged wire. What art do you practice, boy?”
“The art of daily buildup,” Pei Jing replied. He wiped the animal fat from his lips with the cuff of his sleeve. “Two hours of deliberate clockwork load. No wasted motions. No missed days.”
Mo Tie stared at him for five seconds. Then he threw back his head and let out a short, barking laugh that shook the copper hood above the hearth.
“Daily buildup! Ha! The world is full of young fools who burn their marrow for three days, claim they’re martial geniuses. Then spend the next three months drinking flower wine in the brothels while their joints rot.”
The smith’s face sobered, his jaw setting hard as an anvil horn.
“Hu Biao sent three cutthroats up here yesterday morning,” Mo Tie said. His voice dropped into a low, gravelly rumble. “They brought twenty silver coins and a jug of poisoned wine. They told me that if I forged a single arrowhead or mining chisel for the Pei Clan, they would burn my water chute, smash my waterwheel, and throw me head-first into the cold-well cool pit.”
Pei Jing looked at the smith. “What did you do with the cutthroats?”
Mo Tie jerked his thumb toward a dark heap behind the scrap-iron bins.
“I broke their collarbones with a three-pound peen hammer and threw them into the ravine. The wolves have probably finished gnawing on their ribs by now. But Hu Biao won’t stop with three scouts. The Black Tiger Gang has two hundred men. When the river freezes in sixty days, they will control every bag of flour, every cart of coal, and every boat of salt that enters Cloudford.”
Mo Tie stepped to the brick fire, picking up a heavy pair of four-foot forged iron tongs with forged jaw hooks.
He thrust the tongs into the coals, clamping the glowing orange composite metal bar.
With a grunt that engaged his thick back, Mo Tie swung the fifty-pound glowing mass out of the fire. It slammed it down onto the center of the eight-hundred-pound horn anvil.
Thud.
A circle of white-hot scale scattered across the flat stone slabs. It glowed like fireflies before turning into black iron dust.
The billet was radiant orange-yellow, glowing at eleven hundred degrees. Heat radiated from it in visible, shimmering waves that distorted the air.
Mo Tie grabbed an eighteen-pound two-handed forging sledge from the anvil rack, thrusting the backup pair of guiding tongs into Pei Jing’s hands.
“The air is burned out. The core is wedged. Now comes the real labor,” Mo Tie roared, his voice filled with the ancient, brutal pride of the forge. “If the metal cools below cherry-red, the weld fails. If you hold the tongs loose, the shaking will shatter your wrist bones. If you hold them too rigid, the hammer will bounce and take off your teeth.”
Mo Tie swung the sledge back over his right shoulder, his massive torso twisting like an old oak in a gale.
“Grab the tongs, boy! Turn the steel on every third count! We fold this beast three hundred times before sunrise!”
Pei Jing stepped to the anvil.
He gripped the forged iron tongs with both hands. His palms were blistered from the bellows. But as his skin touched the rough, grease-darkened metal. His fingers were locked with iron-hard, tendon-anchored grit.
He planted his feet in the Python Stance, feeling the cold granite flat stone slabs beneath his boots. Beneath his leather apron, the Black Mountain Whetstone rested heavy against his hip in its rough hemp pocket. Feeling the dark rock’s cold heavy rush through the canvas gave his core an unmoving anchor against the anvil’s coming recoil.
“Begin,” Pei Jing said.
Clang!
The eighteen-pound sledge dropped from the ceiling. He struck the glowing metal bar with the force of a falling boulder.
A shower of orange sparks cascaded twenty feet into the rafters.
The forging of the Cloud-Splitter Cleaver-Saber had begun.