Envoy Wu was clutching the edge of a shattered dark wood desk like a drowning sailor clinging to a spar in a hurricane. His fingers were white, his silk collar was soaked in cold sweat. His high-born arrogance had been reduced to fine powder by seventy-two tolls of the Heart-Inquiry Bell.
Yet even as the twelve Arbiters stood in stunned awe before Frank, the desperate instinct of a cornered bureaucrat flared one last time in Wu’s chest.
“Wait!” Envoy Wu croaked, his voice cracking like dry bamboo. “The sign-off... It can’t be ratified!”
Grandmaster Feng looked at Wu with eyes cold enough to freeze summer dew. “Envoy Wu,” Feng said, his tone heavy with warning. “You challenged his teaching credentials. His apprentice forged an iron-hard Golden Core with a single word. What further insult do you dare utter?”
Wu scrambled to his knees, wildly pawing through the pages of his crimson scroll. “Chapter Eight, Subsection Nine of the Imperial Frontier Multi-Occupational By-Laws!” Wu shrieked, pointing a shaking finger at the text. “In the militarized northern frontier, a 3-Star Master Teacher must possess mastery over backup craft disciplines to forge vessels for the Dao! Lu Zhen has zero registered Blacksmith credentials! Without a Blacksmith token, his teaching sash can’t be sealed by the Regional Pavilion!”
The twelve Arbiters looked at one another, their expressions troubled. “The envoy speaks the letter of the law,” the chief Judge admitted unwillingly. “The frontier decree mandates that all high-ranking instructors understand the forging of spiritual armaments. It’s an ancient rule, but it remains on the royal books.”
Frank let out a long, heavy groan that rattled his tool belt. “You guys love paperwork more than a city zoning board,” Frank muttered, tossing his empty pumpkin seed bag into a nearby refuse bin. “More red tape than a check on a nuclear power plant.”
Before anyone could speak, heavy, soot-stained footsteps echoed from the forge annex at the western side of the hall. Striding into the hall was a burly, barrel-chested man with wild mutton-chop whiskers that bristled like iron wire. He wore a stiff apron of boiled rhinoceros hide, his hairy forearms covered in burn scars. This was Elder Tie, the Guild’s resident 2-Star Blacksmith Master.
“A blacksmith test?” Elder Tie rumbled, crossing his thick arms. “If this lad wants a blacksmith token, he must prove he understands the temper of iron! A true smith doesn’t play tricks with stance! He must coax the spirit from the stone!”
Elder Tie pointed toward the massive forge in the annex. A roaring fire burned with sky dragon-breath coals, fed by double-action leather bellows the size of wine vats. “There’s our sacred fire,” Elder Tie said proudly. “And there’s a barrel of lunar spring water. Take this billet of raw pig iron. If you can smelt and forge a 2-Star Spirit Ingot within three quarters of an hour, I’ll personally stamp your blacksmith token. If not, pack your cart and leave!”
A junior smith rolled an iron trolley forward. It carried a rough, pitted billet of raw pig iron from the scrap heap. It was twenty pounds of jagged black melted rock waste, filled with brittle graphite inclusions and sulfur crust. To refine such garbage into a spirit metal bar typically needed six hours of nonstop folding, ten pounds of expensive flux, and intense spiritual fire.
Frank looked at the roaring fire, then at the double-action bellows, and finally down at the ugly pig iron. “Thirty minutes of pumping bellows? In this heat? With no air-flow hood? The carbon monoxide buildup in that annex must be forty parts per million. You’re giving yourselves brain damage just standing near it.”
Elder Tie blinked, his whiskers twitching. “What did you say?”
“I said turn off the fire,” Frank replied mildly. “You don’t need fire to fix iron. You just need to relieve the leftover lattice stress.”
A neon-amber test display snapped into focus over the black billet.
Frank read the system breakdown with a satisfied nod. He didn’t walk toward the roaring fire. He didn’t pick up the heavy twenty-pound blacksmith tongs. Frank strolled over to a bare cold anvil sitting in the drafty corner of the hall. He picked up the twenty-pound lump of pitted pig iron with his bare left hand and set it down on the polished steel anvil face with a dull clunk.
Clunk.
Elder Tie’s jaw dropped. “Are you mad?! You can’t forge cold pig iron! It has no ductility! The moment a hammer strikes cold iron, the brittle graphite will shatter it into a hundred useless pieces!”
“It only shatters if you hit it off-hum,” Frank said. He unhooked a small, eight-ounce ball-peen hammer from the side loop of his tool overalls.
The hammer looked tiny compared to Elder Tie’s sixty-pound forging mauls. It had a hickory handle polished by twenty years of sweat and a small, ball-shaped steel peen barely the size of a walnut.
Frank turned to the blind boy standing beside his table. “Xiao Yu. Give me the reference pitch. One thousand eight hundred and forty-two point six Hertz.”
Xiao Yu stepped forward, his blindfold turned toward the cold anvil. He lifted his right steel tuning fork, struck it lightly against the edge of his belt buckle. Then he held the shaking tines an inch from Frank’s ear.
HUUUUUUUUMMMMM.
A high ringing pitch whispered through the room. Frank tilted his head, listening to the sound hum. His hand relaxed, letting the eight-ounce hammer balance lightly between his thumb and forefinger.
“Watch the grain boundaries,” Frank muttered to his crew.
He brought the ball-peen hammer down upon the cold, black melted rock waste-crusted iron billet.
Tink.
The strike was light, crisp. Then it struck with clean, steady care at the node of the iron’s internal crystal-clear lattice. A hairline wave of shaking raced through the cold metal. Frank paused for half a second, letting the sound wave travel to the base of the billet and reflect back to the surface. Then, he tapped it a second time.
Tink.
The second strike landed at the moment of ringing anti-phase, canceling out the inner tearing stress that held the brittle carbon flakes trapped between the iron atoms. Deep within the billet, the dendritic ferrite crystals began to slip along their natural cleavage planes, reorienting themselves into an ultra-dense, defect-free body-centered cubic lattice.
Elder Tie frowned, leaning forward. “What’s he doing? He’s just tapping it like a cobbler fixing a boot heel!”
Frank didn’t answer. He delivered the third strike.
TINK!
The third tap was struck with a minute flick of Frank’s wrist, introducing a high-pitched shear pulse that traveled through the billet at five thousand meters per second.
CRACKLE.
A faint sound, like dry autumn leaves being crushed under a boot, whispered from the cold iron. Frank reached into his overall pocket, pulled out a small cloth bag of coarse pickling salt. Then he dumped it into a wooden bucket of cold well water sitting beside the wash basin. He stirred the water once with the handle of his hammer. That created a twenty-percent soaked salt water solution. Then, Frank picked up the cold iron billet with his bare hands. Then he dropped it straight into the salt water.
SPLASH.
TSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!
A column of pure white steam erupted from the bucket. It carried a crisp scent of clean winter ozone and crystal-hardened salt. The water bubbled wildly for three seconds, then went glassy smooth. Frank reached his bare hand into the water, retrieved the metal. Then he tossed it onto Elder Tie’s velvet check tray.
CLINK.
The billet hit the tray with the clear, bell-like chime of fine crystal. As it came to rest, the blackened crust of melted rock waste, scale, and rusted sulfur suddenly split open like the shell of a roasted chestnut.
Flake. Flake. Shuck.
The black debris peeled away in brittle sheets. It fell into the velvet liner and exposed what lay beneath. Elder Tie froze. His breath caught in his throat, his eyes wide with shock.
Lying on the tray was a spotless, mirror-polished box-shaped metal bar of pure, silver-gold spirit metal. Its surface was so flawless it reflected the high chandeliers without the slightest distortion. Even more remarkable, woven into the natural crystal-clear grain of the metal were fine, detailed, self-formed six-sided patterns that coiled and shone like living sky dragons. A pure, calming spiritual aura radiated from the metal bar. It filled the grand hall with the clean deep ring of a 2-Star High-Grade Spirit Ingot!
Elder Tie tumbled backward over his wooden stool, scrambling on his hands and knees to claw at the velvet tray, tears streaming through his bristling mutton-chop whiskers. “The Legendary Three-Strike Sound Normalization! No fire! No dragon coal! No bellows! He awakened the weapon spirit... Through sound lattice deep ring! This... This is the lost forging craft of the First Epoch!”
The twelve Regional Pavilion Arbiters erupted into wild motion. The chief Judge snatched a royal jade seal from his sleeve, slammed it into a bowl of vermilion paste, and stamped Frank’s 3-Star Master Teacher certificate with thunderous force!
THUMP!
“Approved!” the Judge cried, his voice trembling with respectful awe. “3-Star Master Teacher! 2-Star Grand Blacksmith! Ratified by the full power of the Hegemonic Regional Pavilion!”
Another Judge hurried forward, presenting a heavy bronze medallion engraved with two crossed hammers and a silver star. The official guild token of an approved Blacksmith Master.
Envoy Wu lay curled beneath the shattered desk. His eyes were wide and vacant, babbling incoherent syllables into his soiled silk collar. His final office card had not merely failed. It had been hammered into an old family monument.
Frank took the Blacksmith medallion, weighed it in his palm, and nodded. “Decent bronze casting. Clean deburring on the edges. That’ll do.”
He tucked both credentials into his tool roll, turning back to his students. “All right, crew. Certifications are stamped. Shitou, go to the guild supply yard and get four rolls of six-gauge copper wire and three crates of zinc-coated bolts. Tell them it’s on the army’s tax-exempt account.”
“Yes, Master,” Shitou said, turning toward the door.
Before Shitou could take three steps, the entire guildhall wildly shuddered.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
It wasn’t the sound of a hammer or a falling desk. It was an earth-shattering sky blast that rattled the teeth in everyone’s skull. The sky outside the blown-out windows flashed a sickly, unnatural violet. A high-pitched shrieking siren began to wail from the castle walls, its wild pulses screaming of an immediate, total military emergency.
Grandmaster Feng’s face turned white as bleached linen. “The bright light...” Feng whispered in total terror, staring out the shattered window toward the mountain ridge. “The Sun-Severing Sky-Spike has overloaded!”