By the seventh day in the Iron-Slag Ravine, the composite billet had ceased to look like a lump of mined earth.
It had been folded three hundred times, hammer-welded into an indivisible grain of over one hundred thousand tiny laminations. Under the dim animal fat lamps of the forge shed, the surface of the steel exhibited a dense, wood-grain pattern. Twisted together bands of silvery high-carbon steel and dark, leaden hard dark metal iron, resembling the cross-section of ancient stone-hard cedar.
Now came the profiling. Transforming thirty-two pounds of raw forged bar into the lethal shape of the Cloud-Splitter Cleaver-Saber.
Mo Tie dragged a long, narrow iron trough into the center of the hearth.
The trough was filled with crushed hard coal mixed with powdered bone ash. The smith set the billet into the trough, heating it section by section to bright cherry-orange (nine hundred and fifty degrees).
“Draw the spine first,” Mo Tie ordered. He wiped grease from his brow with a leather glove. “If the spine wanders by half an inch, the balance point will sit in your knuckles instead of the chopping head. If it sits in your knuckles, you can’t break armor. You might as well swing a lead club.”
Pei Jing stepped to the anvil.
He was no longer just the striker or the bellows boy. He was the designer dictating every strike.
He held the billet with long-handled offset tongs. He laid the glowing box-shaped bar on edge across the rounded horn of the anvil. Mo Tie swung a fourteen-pound flat-faced sledge, working in step with Pei Jing’s eight-pound hand hammer.
Clang-tink. Clang-tink.
The heavy sledge delivered the main crushing shifted weight. Pei Jing’s hand hammer followed a heartbeat later, correcting the angle. That kept the soft core from spilling over the hard dark metal cladding.
Under their timed together blows, the bar lengthened.
First to two feet.
Then to two point eight feet.
Finally to three point two feet.
As the length grew, Pei Jing shaped the cross-sectional shape with uncompromising fidelity to his blueprint.
At the ricasso—the four inches right away above the handle where the blade joined the tang—the spine was forged to a massive thickness of twelve tiny fractions of an inch. A spine this thick provided total stiffness, ensuring that when the weapon met an incoming strike from an iron mace or a heavy axe-spear, the force would be absorbed entirely by the mass of the blade rather than flexing into the wielder’s wrists.
From the ricasso forward, the spine kept a uniform ten tiny fractions of an inch through the middle third of its length, tapering only in the final six inches to seven tiny fractions of an inch.
Then came the chopping head.
Instead of tapering to an acute needle point after the fashion of a royal straight sword or curving into the gentle belly of a cavalry saber, the blade flared outward aggressively. The width of the blade swelled from two point five inches at the waist to a broad, intimidating four inches at the end-post head.
The tip was clipped at an angle of sixty degrees, forming a heavy, chisel-pointed wedge.
It was designed not for delicate thrusting between armor plates, but for blunt moving shearing. Smashing through boiled cuirasses, splintering oak shields, and snapping iron-banded polearms through sheer dropping driving force.
“Now the fullers,” Pei Jing said. He laid the rough-shaped blade into an iron clamping vise anchored to a granite pier.
“Fullers on a twenty-pound cleaver?” Mo Tie scoffed, though he was already rummaging through his wooden tool chest. “Most smiths only put fullers on dueling dress swords to save four ounces of iron.”
“On a weapon of this mass, fullers are load-bearing necessities,” Pei Jing replied.
He picked up a heavy, two-handled draw-scraper forged from hardened white iron.
“Without fullers, the blade would weigh twenty-eight pounds—too heavy for rapid recovery after a missed strike. By carving twin parallel grooves along both flanks, we remove four pounds of leech-like mass along the neutral bending axis while preserving ninety-four percent of the spine’s twisting stiffness. It creates an I-beam structure.”
Pei Jing set the curved cutting edge of the draw-scraper against the glowing red flank of the blade, four inches forward of the blade collar.
“Also,” Pei Jing added, leaning his chest into the wooden handles, “when a broad blade shears through thirty pounds of dense animal muscle, air pressure creates an empty pocket seal along the flat surfaces, pinching the steel inside the wound. Fullers allow sky air to penetrate the cut channel, eliminating blade suction.”
Mo Tie grunted, his single eye glinting with skilled appreciation. “A butcher’s physics. Pull the tool, boy.”
Pei Jing set his boots on the flat stone slabs.
Skrrr-shhh.
The hardened scraper bit into the hot hard dark metal steel. A long, curling ribbon of red-hot metal peeled away from the blade. It spiraled onto the stone floor with a sharp, dry rasp.
Pei Jing dragged the scraper along the blade’s waist, his broad back muscles and scapular muscles contracting in a smooth, nonstop pull. The Python Tendon Stance anchored his pelvis, ensuring the scraper moved along a laser-straight line, maintaining an exact depth of two point five tiny fractions of an inch.
He scraped the first fuller.
Then the second fuller, parallel to the first and separated by a heavy tiny central rib.
He unclamped the blade, flipped it over, and repeated the operation on the opposite flank.
Four parallel grooves, carved with machine-like consistency into the glowing steel.
The blade cooled from cherry-red to dull purple. Then, Mo Tie pulled a rough iron sketch of a gauntlet from beneath a pile of leather aprons. The drawing depicted three curved, hungry claws mounted to a thick brass knuckle-duster.
“You know what Hu Biao fights with, don’t you?” Mo Tie asked, pointing to the sketch. “He doesn’t use swords or spears. He uses three-pronged hard dark metal tiger claws, forged twenty years ago by my old master in the country capital. Those claws have three hooked talons, each eight inches long, notched like wolf teeth.”
Mo Tie held his fingers in a claw shape, mimicking a violent twisting motion.
“When Hu Biao parries a normal blade, he catches the flat of the sword between two of his talons, twists his forearm, and snaps the steel like a dry twig. He has broken thirty broadswords on the river wharves. What keeps your spine from snapping when his claws bite in?”
Pei Jing pointed the tip of his tongs at the thickest part of the cleaver’s spine.
“The hardness slope,” Pei Jing said.
He stepped over to the charcoal bin. He took a handful of heat-proof clay slurry mixed with wood ash and powdered iron scale.
“We’ll differential-temper the blade,” Pei Jing explained, smoothing the thick grey paste over the spine and flanks of the cleaver while leaving the edge exposed. “The spine will be coated in a quarter-inch layer of insulating clay. When we cool the blade in the salt water tomorrow, the clay-covered spine will cool slowly. It formed tough pearlite with a hardness of forty-eight on the stone scale. It will flex under extreme torque without shattering.”
He tapped the exposed cutting edge, which remained bare.
“The edge, meanwhile, will touch the freezing salt water instantly. The hard steel core will transform directly into martensite. It locked in a diamond-like hardness of sixty. When Hu Biao’s claws clamp onto this spine, the steel won’t snap. It will bite into his hard dark metal talons and trap his leverage.”
Mo Tie listened, his scarred head nodding in slow, deliberate assent.
“A soft back to bear the mountain, a hard edge to cut the sky,” the smith murmured. “The old border captains used that construction for armor-breaking axes. But few smiths have the patience to coat a cleaver in clay. It takes an artist or a madman.”
“It takes a clerk who understands margins of error,” Pei Jing said.
For the next three hours, Pei Jing carefully applied the clay mixture to both sides of the three-foot blade.
He worked with a thin bamboo spatula, ensuring the coating was uniform, without air bubbles or uneven ridges. The twin fullers were filled with extra clay to insulate the load-bearing ribs. Meanwhile, the four-inch chopping head was left bare along its heavy chisel edge.
The clay application was complete. Then, Pei Jing set the blade on an iron drying rack above the dying coals of the hearth.
The moist grey paste began to bake. That turned chalky white as the water evaporated into the warm air.
Pei Jing sat down on a split-cedar bench by the doorway of the shed. The cold mountain wind blew across his chest, cooling his sweat.
He opened his leather pack. He took out a small baked-clay bowl of salted turnip shreds, three boiled duck eggs. A cup of warm tea steeped with dried wolfberry fruit.
His body needed four thousand calories every twelve hours to sustain this pace of physical rebuilding. The intense clockwork loading from the bellows, the hammer swings. The nonstop micro-blast waves of the anvil were speeding up his tendon synthesis.
He bent his right hand.
The skin across his palms was calloused, the yellow horn-protein layers thick as horn. But beneath the skin, the deep grip tendons moved with buttery smoothness, fully free of stiffness or friction.
In his eye vision, the ledger lit up with glowing amber borders:
Mo Tie walked over, holding a clay pot jug of strong mountain rice liquor. He took a heavy swig, then offered the jug to Pei Jing.
Pei Jing shook his head. “Alcohol dilates outer tiny blood vessels and impairs tendon recovery.”
Mo Tie chuckled, wiping his mouth with the back of his rawhide glove. “You don’t drink, you don’t boast. You calculate every hammer strike like a tax collector counting grain bushels. If all the warriors in the empire were like you, the taverns would go bankrupt in a month.”
The old smith looked out into the pitch-black ravine, where the cold mountain brook rushed over the rocks.
“Tomorrow morning, at first cockcrow,” Mo Tie said. “The cold-well salt water pit is filled. If the gods of fire and water are with us, the Cloud-Splitter will drink.”
Pei Jing looked at the white clay-coated blade resting on the drying rack.
“The gods have nothing to do with it,” Pei Jing said quietly. “It’s entirely a matter of heat, saline concentration, and uniform full-body VR.”
He sat down on a cedar chest by the rack. He drew the Black Mountain Whetstone from his belt and laid it across his knees. With a damp rag, he cleared the day’s black coal soot from the dark stone. He felt the stone’s dished curve with his thumb to verify it was ready for tomorrow’s heavy grinding.