Nuoding City’s western district smelled of sulfurous bituminous coal, scorched animal horn, and the sharp, acidic bite of pickling brine.
It was the ironworking quarter.
Forty-odd low-roofed workshops huddled along the muddy banks of the canal, their open timber fronts belching columns of greasy, soot-black smoke into the overcast afternoon sky.
The sound of metal striking metal was continuous—a jagged, irregular polyrhythm of heavy sledges and light finishing peens echoing across the cobblestones like a running skirmish.
Tang San walked along the south embankment, her gray working-student uniform neat, her hands tucked inside her sleeves.
Xiao Wu had insisted on following her, bounding two paces ahead and stopping every ten yards to poke his head into vegetable carts or examine the cages of squawking river fowl brought in by the canal barges.
“Why are we going to an iron shop?” Xiao Wu asked, turning around to walk backward, his glossy scorpion braid swinging across his narrow chest.
“The air tastes like burned nails.
My nose feels full of soot.”
“To earn silver,” Tang San replied, her eyes scanning the shop signs.
“And to rent an anvil.”
“You already have a gold coin from the Spirit Hall,” Xiao Wu pointed out, tilting his head.
“One gold coin can buy two thousand carrots.
You could eat sweet turnips every day until the snow melts and still have silver left over.”
“Capital that is spent without generating yield is merely consumption,” she said with the dry, instructional cadence of her first life’s economics texts.
“A single gold coin will vanish within three months if I buy refined materials at retail price.
But if I use it to secure raw stock, process it into precision components, and sell the finished goods to private buyers, the capital returns multiplied by a factor of four.
More importantly, I need machinery that cannot be forged in the academy kitchen.”
Xiao Wu blinked twice, his dark eyes wide and slightly crossed as he tried to digest the terminology.
He puffed out his cheeks, letting out a soft sigh.
“You talk like the old tortoises who live in the deep mud pools, San’er.
Big words that make my ears itch.”
Tang San did not reply.
She halted before a workshop near the end of the lane.
Unlike the ramshackle open stalls around it, this smithy was built of solid river-stone, with a wide double archway supported by heavy pine timbers.
A weathered wooden sign hung above the lintel, bearing the charred silhouette of an iron anvil and the character *Zhen*—the Zhen Tie Workshop.
Inside, the heat was intense.
Four open forge furnaces burned with cherry-red intensity, their heavy leather bellows worked by half-naked apprentices whose backs gleamed with oily sweat.
In the center of the flagstone floor, an immense oak stump supported an anvil weighing at least two hundred pounds.
Standing before that anvil was a broad-shouldered man with arms like cured hams, his thick beard peppered with gray ash, wielding a sixteen-pound sledgehammer with rhythmic, monotonous power.
*Clang!
Clang!
Clang!*
Tang San watched his strike.
*Arm drive: ninety percent.
Core rotation: thirty percent.
Footing: flat and rigid.*
The smith was strong—possessing perhaps two or three ranks of residual spirit power that augmented his raw musculature—but his technique was purely linear.
With every stroke, twenty percent of the kinetic rebound was lost into his elbow joint, vibrating upward into his cervical spine.
Within ten years, the cartilage in his right shoulder would grind to dust, leaving him as crippled as the Outer Sect smiths she had tended in her second life.
She stepped past the threshold.
The heat washed over her face, but she did not blink.
Her breathing remained shallow and cool, the Mysterious Heaven Skill circulating along her skin, keeping her core body temperature strictly regulated.
The master smith arrested his hammer on the downstroke, resting the heavy iron head on the glowing bar of iron with a dull hiss.
He wiped a river of sweat from his brow with a greasy leather forearm, turning a pair of soot-rimmed, bloodshot eyes toward the entrance.
“The shop doesn’t sell kitchen knives to children,” the smith rumbled, his voice like gravel sliding down a chute.
“Run along to the candy stalls, little girl.
One stray spark will burn right through that cheap cotton dress.”
Tang San stepped forward, stopping three paces from the oak stump.
Her posture was completely upright, her center of gravity low and stable.
“I am not here to purchase kitchen knives, Shopkeeper,” she said, her voice cutting clearly through the roar of the four hearths.
“I am here to ask if the forge has thirty pounds of high-carbon spring steel, and whether I may rent four hours of anvil time at the third furnace.”
Two journeymen at the finishing benches let out loud, barking laughs, wiping their greasy hands on their leather aprons.
“Rent the third furnace?!” one of the journeymen mocked, pointing an iron punch at her small waist.
“Little girl, the sledge at the third furnace weighs twelve pounds.
If you drop it, it’ll break your shins like dry hemp stalks!”
The master smith did not laugh immediately.
His gaze dropped from her calm, clear eyes down to her small, calloused hands, and then to the black leather of Twenty-Four Moonlit Bridges around her waist.
A smith who survived thirty years in a garrison city developed a nose for unusual things.
An ordinary village child did not wear fine jade-studded belts, nor did she stand three paces from a cherry-red hearth without flinching at the radiant heat.
“My name is Tie Long,” the master smith said, leaning his heavy forearms on the butt of his sledgehammer.
“This is the Zhen Tie Workshop.
We hold the contract for the Nuoding garrison’s pike-heads and wagon axles.
I don’t rent hearths to strangers, especially little girls playing at men’s work.
It ruins the coal beds.”
Tang San reached into the twenty-fourth jade of her belt.
A single gold spirit coin appeared between her index and middle fingers.
The gold was pure, stamped with the deep, sharp impression of the Heaven Dou imperial sun-crest, catching the fiery glow of the forge with a rich, heavy luster.
She placed it flat on the corner of the two-hundred-pound anvil with a clean, ringing *clink*.
The workshop went completely quiet.
Even the roar of the drafts seemed to soften as seven pairs of soot-stained eyes locked onto the gold disc.
“One gold coin,” Tang San stated, her voice as smooth as cold glass.
“Eight silver coins to purchase thirty pounds of high-carbon spring steel stock.
One silver coin for three bushels of anthracite coal and half a bowl of mutton tallow.
The remaining one silver coin is the rental fee for the third anvil from now until sundown.”
Tie Long stared at the coin.
His jaw twitched twice beneath his graying beard.
A single gold coin was equal to half a month’s gross turnover for the entire workshop.
“You have coin,” Tie Long rumbled, his eyes narrowing with a craftsman’s stubborn pride.
“Spirit Master stipend, I take it?
Some noble brat from the academy testing a childish whim.
But having silver doesn’t mean you know iron.
I have seven hundred pike-heads due to Captain Xiao of the city guard in four days.
If an amateur blows up my hearth or cracks my anvil face with bad striking, all the gold in Heaven Dou won’t keep the magistrate’s bailiffs from nailing my shutters shut.”
He picked up a twelve-pound sledge resting against the oak block, turning it around and thrusting the rough ash handle toward her chest.
“You want to swing iron in my shop?
Show me you can lift the tool.
Drive this wedge three inches into that cold iron scrap on the floor.
If you chip the edge, take your gold and get out.”
Xiao Wu took half a step forward, his scorpion braid twitching, his crimson-tinted rabbit eyes narrowing with sudden, predatory irritation.
“Hey!
Old beard!
She can—”
“Xiao Wu,” Tang San said softly, raising two fingers of her left hand.
Xiao Wu halted mid-stride, his teeth clicking together, though he continued to glare at Tie Long’s thick neck with unmistakable ferocity.
Tang San reached out her right hand.
Her small fingers, pale and delicate as white jade, closed around the heavy ash handle.
Tie Long expected her arm to drop.
He expected the twelve-pound iron head to drag her slender shoulder downward, forcing her to grab the shaft with both hands like a peasant hauling an overfilled water bucket.
The hammer did not drop an inch.
Tang San lifted the weapon with a single wrist motion, the twelve pounds of solid iron coming up level with her shoulder as smoothly as if it were a wooden spoon.
Tie Long’s eyes bulged.
A twelve-pound sledge held at arm’s length by a six-year-old child using only the forearm flexors—that was not the strength of a girl; that was the skeletal density of a beast-soul cultivator who had awakened a bear or a mountain ape!
Tang San did not look at him. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
She stepped over to the scrap pile.
A square block of raw, unrefined pig iron lay half-buried in the soot—a cold, brittle casting head, rough and pitted, roughly the size of a loaf of bread.
She set her feet.
Left foot forward, right foot anchored back at forty-five degrees.
Her spine aligned like a plumb-line.
*Mysterious Heaven Skill, second tier circulation.*
*Wind Splitting Hammer: First Vector.*
Her small frame did not rely on arm strength.
Her hips twisted, her core muscles coiling like a tempered clock-spring, drawing kinetic force from the flagstones through the Three Yin meridians of her calves, rolling through her lats, and detonating down the length of the ash handle.
*CLANG!*
A sound like an imperial temple bell being struck by a bronze ram exploded through the workshop.
A blinding spray of white-hot sparks erupted from the cold pig iron.
The heavy twelve-pound sledge did not bounce back uncontrollably; Tang San’s wrists rolled with the impact, absorbing eighty percent of the rebound and feeding it instantly into a second, continuous rotational swing.
*CLANG!*
*CLANG!*
*CLANG!*
Nine strikes.
Nine unbroken, perfectly rhythmic concussive detonations, delivered in the span of four breaths.
Each blow struck the exact mathematical center of the iron block, within half a millimeter of the previous strike’s crater.
The sound was so deafening, the localized kinetic compression so violent, that the cold, black block of pig iron began to glow a sullen, dark cherry-red—not from hearth fire, but from pure, forced atomic friction.
By the ninth blow, the brittle silica impurities inside the iron had been completely shattered, blown outward as a cloud of gray dust.
The block was one-third smaller, its surface smooth, dense, and ringing with a clear, harmonic note.
Tang San arrested the hammer at the top of the tenth arc, letting the kinetic momentum bleed harmlessly into her lower Dantian, and set the twelve-pound tool down against the anvil face without making a sound.
Her breath was completely steady.
Her gray uniform had not shifted an inch.
“Is the technique adequate, Shopkeeper?” she asked, her voice calm and level.
Tie Long stood paralyzed.
His mouth was open, his thick fingers frozen mid-reach.
Behind him, the four apprentices were staring at the glowing block of scrap on the floor as though an imperial deity had just descended from the clouds to spit on their anvil.
“Nine…
Nine-fold kinetic return…” Tie Long whispered, his gravelly voice cracking into a high, disbelieving squeak.
“Continuous rebound forging…
That’s the secret art of…
You’re six years old!
Who…
whose disciple are you?!”
“I am an apprentice of a blacksmith from Holy Spirit Village,” Tang San said, her dark blue-tinged eyes locking onto his with an unblinking, impenetrable calm.
“May I have the spring steel now?”
Tie Long swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing twice.
He grabbed the gold coin from the anvil, shoved it deep into his leather pocket as though afraid it would grow wings, and turned to his apprentices with a roar:
“What are you standing there for, you brainless mules?!
Clear the third hearth!
Bring thirty pounds of the imported northern spring steel from the locked bin!
Get the refined mutton lard from the larder!
Now!”
The workshop exploded into frantic, terrified activity.
Xiao Wu stepped up beside Tang San, looking down at the compressed, glowing iron block, then up at her face, his ears twitching with quiet amazement.
“You really can hit hard, San’er,” Xiao Wu murmured, a faint, proud smile touching his lips.
Tang San rolled up her sleeves, her hands already turning the translucent, oily white of the Mysterious Jade Hand as she stepped toward the third furnace:
“Now…
we build the needles that don’t make a sound.”