Inside the Dry-Well Royal Industrial Forge, the heat from the twenty dragon-fire furnaces was strong enough to roast an ox in three minutes, yet the five hundred former sect blacksmiths weren’t even sweating.
Above every anvil hung a fused [Cold-Spring Mist Pipe] that sprayed a fine, refreshing mist of Sweet-Spring water over the workers’ shoulders, keeping the air cool and smelling faintly of mint.
Chief Blacksmith Iron-Hammer Huo stood beside the central quenching trough, his muscular chest gleaming like polished red copper. Before defecting to Great Yan five days ago, Huo had been the senior outer forge-master of the Azure-Sword Sect for thirty years. He had forged over two thousand spirit swords for the sect’s elders, yet because he had a “Low-Grade Fire Root,” the sect had never once let him keep a single sword for himself—and had even docked his wages whenever a spoiled Inner Disciple chipped a blade on a rock.
Looking at his tooltip, Pei Xuan couldn’t help smiling:
“My Lord,” Iron-Hammer Huo said, picking up one of the newly stamped iron shovels from the top crate with his thick, calloused hands. “We followed your blueprint down to the last millimeter. Instead of hammering these out by hand one by one, we used the waterwheel trip-hammers and heavy steel molds to stamp them out of solid black pig-iron plates! Six seconds per shovelhead! Four thousand shovels an hour!”
