The underground forge smelled of red-hot iron, coal tar, and cooled salt water.
Lin Ke stood beside the heavy anvil, holding a cold-steel chisel and a four-pound hammer. Across from him, propped up against the soot-stained granite wall, rested Meng Shan’s eight-thousand-pound black iron shield—an imposing slab of star-iron as tall as a man and thick as a castle gate.
Under normal circumstances, that iron slab was used to blunt moving battering rams and dragon claws.
Tonight, Lin Ke was turning it into a copper-braided spark earthing pylon.
“When the Golden Core chops on live metal,” Lin Ke said, his hammer tapping the chisel against the shield’s lower pipe rim with rhythmic clinks, “it won’t be a gentle division. Nine turns of rebased training represents eight thousand units of tightly packed Yang star-fire.”
Lin Ke paused, wiping iron dust from his cheek with the back of his wrist.
“My glass spirit veins have zero dilation. If even ten percent of that transient surge back-feeds into my intake pipe hub, my blood will flash-boil and my chest cavity will disintegrate. We need to shunt the excess surge straight into the ground.”
Meng Shan stood bare-chested in the heat of the forge, his torso scarred like old tree bark from a hundred battles. His heavy arms were folded over his barrel chest.
