The third furnace roared with a focused, high-density heat.
Unlike the common bituminous coal used in the main hearths, the fuel Tie Long brought was black anthracite mined from the northern slopes of the Heaven Dou frontier—dense, low-smoke, burning with a pale, fierce blue cone at the heart of the tuyere.
Tang San tied her hair back with a fresh leather thong she retrieved from her bundle.
Her gray sleeves were folded back past her elbows, revealing forearms that were pale, slender, and seemingly without muscle bulk.
Yet as she picked up the thirty-pound block of imported northern spring steel using a long pair of forged iron tongs, her wrists remained dead level, displaying not a single tremor of kinetic strain.
Xiao Wu sat on an overturned nail keg five paces back, out of reach of flying scale.
His chin was propped in his hands, his long scorpion braid looped loosely over his lap, watching her with large, unblinking black eyes.
Every other smith in the workshop had abandoned their own anvils.
Tie Long and his journeymen stood along the stone partition wall, their breath catching in their chests, whispering in hushed, nervous tones.
“Watch the blade,” Tie Long muttered to his eldest apprentice.
“Look at the grain of that imported stock.
Northern cold-drawn steel has three percent manganese.
If you heat it past cherry-red, the crystal structure crystallizes into coarse slag.
A grown man needs three annealings just to draw out an edge without fracturing the core.”
Tang San did not need an annealing chart.
She thrust the billet directly into the blue heart of the anthracite fire.
Her left hand worked the double-acting piston bellows, not with the hurried, violent jerks of an apprentice, but with the measured, hydraulic cadence of a clockwork escapement: four counts forward, four counts back.
Her eyes narrowed, the Purple Demon Eyes engaged at a subtle, low-frequency hum behind her dark irises, reading the radiant thermal spectrum of the steel.
*Dull orange: 750 degrees Celsius.*
*Bright cherry: 850 degrees.*
*Salmon: 920 degrees.*
The instant the steel reached 940 degrees—a shade of luminous, pale peach that lasted scarcely three breaths—her left hand ceased pumping.
Her right hand swept the tongs forward, pulling the glowing bar from the coals and placing it flat against the dressed face of the anvil.
She did not reach for the twelve-pound sledge.
From the rack beside the hearth, she selected a seven-pound finishing hammer—a tool with a rectangular cross-peen and a slightly convex face, balanced for rapid kinetic dispersal rather than brutal mass compression.
*Clang.*
The first strike fell like a dropped coin.
*Clang-clang-clang-clang—!*
The rhythm that followed was terrifying.
It was not the heavy, booming thunder of the Wind Splitting Method she had used on the pig iron.
This was the Tang Sect’s *Seven Stars Chasing the Moon*—a precision cold-drawing technique designed to separate high-carbon spring steel into ultra-thin, high-density plates without breaking the directional grain of the rolled metal.
Her hammer did not lift higher than four inches above the anvil face.
Her wrist rotated with microscopic, twenty-degree flicks, each impact landing within a hair’s breadth of the last, driving the glowing steel outward like rolling dough.
The hammer seemed to float, vibrating with a high-pitched, singing hum that echoed off the river-stone walls like the chirping of iron crickets.
In the span of half an incense stick, the three-inch billet of northern steel had been beaten flat.
It was now an eight-inch plate, exactly one-twelfth of an inch thick, perfectly uniform across its entire surface, without a single visible hammer mark or surface pit.
“Heavens above…” a journeyman whispered, his mouth hanging slack.
“The face is as smooth as rolled copper.
She didn’t even use a leveling plate.”
Tang San did not pause for their awe.
She dropped the hammer, reached for a hardened steel chisel, and began cutting.
With rapid, terrifying accuracy, she sectioned the plate into twelve narrow strips, three rectangular housing plates, six miniature ratchet teeth, and three high-tension coil springs.
Every cut was clean, executed with two hammer taps and a twist of the wrist.
Then came the dangerous part: the quench.
In the Tang Sect’s mechanical doctrine, a sleeve dart mechanism was only as reliable as its mainspring.
If the spring was too soft, the dart lacked the kinetic yield to pierce boiled leather armor at fifteen paces; if it was too brittle, the internal tension would shatter the coils during ballistic release, turning the brass housing into a miniature fragmentation grenade against the user’s own forearm.
Tang San placed the six coil strips back onto the edge of the coal bed, allowing them to soak in the lower-temperature radiant heat until they turned a uniform, deep straw-brown.
Beside the anvil sat a heavy ceramic crock filled with twenty pounds of rendered mutton lard—viscous, opaque, and smelling of greasy tallow.
“Water is an executioner,” Tang San said softly, more to calibrate her own internal timing than to instruct the watching smiths.
“Water robs heat too violently, shocking the martensite into chaotic grain boundaries.
Oil cushions the transition; animal fat allows the carbon to settle into an unbroken matrix of pure spring tension.”
*Sssssssss—!*
She plunged them vertically into the white mutton lard.
A thick, greasy plume of white smoke erupted from the crock, carrying the heavy, sickening stench of scorched animal grease.
Tang San did not pull them out immediately.
She held the steel submerged for precisely twenty-four heartbeats, her jade hands feeling the micro-vibrations through the iron tongs as the molten fat conducted the heat away from the steel in a controlled, continuous curve.
When she drew them out, the metal was no longer silver, nor was it red.
It was a deep, iridescent midnight blue—the unmistakable, oily sheen of perfectly tempered spring steel, resilient as dragon sinew, hard as river flint.
She dropped them onto the stone floor to cool, turned to the finishing bench, and picked up the jeweller’s files.
For the next two hours, the only sound in the third bay of the Zhen Tie Workshop was the rhythmic, insectile scrape of hardened steel against hardened steel: *skrrrt, skrrrt, skrrrt.*
Tang San sat cross-legged on a low stool, her back straight as an iron pillar.
Using the Purple Demon Eyes, her vision magnified the microscopic teeth of the files, carving thirty-two gear notches into the central ratchet wheel, each notch measuring exactly three-tenths of a millimeter in depth.
She filed the internal rifling grooves into the three brass launch tubes she had purchased from Tie Long’s private stock.
She ground the trigger sear—a delicate, hair-thin lever designed to release under five ounces of pressure applied via a fine silk cord connected to a hidden leather ring around her middle finger.
Beside her, Xiao Wu had stopped swinging his legs.
He had crept closer, kneeling in the soot beside her stool, his large, dark eyes following every movement of her pale fingers.
He didn’t speak.
He didn’t interrupt.
He was watching the terrifying, inhuman focus of her hands.
Those hands, which had so gently held his mother’s wooden comb only hours before, were now assembling an engine of lethal, unblinking mechanics with the cold, absolute detachment of a spider weaving a web across a hunting path.
“San’er,” Xiao Wu whispered, his voice barely audible beneath the file’s rasp.
“What does it do?”
Tang San fitted the last hardened steel pin into the side plate.
“It eliminates variables,” she replied.
*Click.*
With a small, brass-headed hammer, she tapped the retention pin into place.
The mechanism was finished.
It lay across the palm of her left hand: an elongated, rectangular box fashioned from cold-drawn spring steel and polished brass, measuring seven inches in length, one and a half inches wide, and scarcely three-quarters of an inch thick.
Its corners were rounded, chamfered to prevent catching on the lining of a sleeve, and its surface had been chemically treated with sulfuric acid dregs from the pickling vat to turn the metal a matte, non-reflective slate black.
At the front were three cylindrical apertures, each three-tenths of an inch in diameter.
At the rear, a fine, wax-coated hemp cord extended from a sealed internal grommet, terminating in a soft leather loop designed to slip over the user’s middle finger.
*The Silent Sleeve Dart: Triple-Shot Variant.*
Tang San adjusted the leather harness strapped beneath the left forearm of her gray working-student uniform.
She aligned the black steel casing with the inside of her wrist, running two leather straps through copper buckles and pulling them tight against the flexor carpi radialis muscle.
The box sat flush against her skin, completely invisible beneath the wide, falling cuff of the academy sleeve.
She reached into the fifth jade of Twenty-Four Moonlit Bridges.
Three four-inch steel darts—their tips ground into three-edged bodkin points, their rear shafts rifled with spiral stabilization grooves—appeared between her fingers.
She slipped them into the three front barrels one by one.
*Clack.
Clack.
Clack.*
Each dart engaged the internal coil spring with a dull, heavy click, compressing sixty pounds of kinetic potential behind a hardened steel sear.
Tang San stood up.
She faced the far stone wall of the workshop, twenty paces away, where an old, water-damaged pine timber three inches thick had been propped against the masonry to serve as a backstop for scrap iron.
Tie Long and his apprentices watched her, their eyes wide with intense, uncomprehending curiosity.
“A wrist-box?” Tie Long muttered, scratching his beard.
“A toy crossbow without a bow-stave?
Without arms to provide leverage, how can a spring that small generate enough draw-weight to throw an iron nail twenty feet?”
Tang San did not answer.
Her left arm hung naturally at her side, her fingers relaxed, her hand open.
Her wrist did not raise.
Her elbow did not bend.
Her middle finger simply gave a microscopic, three-millimeter backward twitch, pulling the leather loop tucked inside her palm.
*Thwip.*
There was no explosion. The source of this chapter is g.com.
There was no hum of spirit power.
There was only a sound like an autumn leaf tearing in a sudden gust of wind.
*THWACK-CRACK!*
A sound like a butcher’s cleaver splitting an ox-bone echoed from the far wall.
The three-inch pine timber didn’t merely catch the dart; the wood shattered along its central grain, a ragged, four-inch crack tearing downward from the impact point.
Buried in the center of that crack was the three-edged steel bodkin.
The dart had punched entirely through the three inches of solid, seasoned pine, its chisel-ground point striking the granite masonry behind it with such catastrophic kinetic energy that the steel tip had flattened against the rock, throwing a shower of white sparks into the gloomy corner.
The entire workshop went dead, suffocatingly silent.
Tie Long’s sledgehammer slipped from his grease-stained fingers, striking the dirt floor with a heavy, hollow thud.
“Three…
three inches of seasoned pine…” Tie Long choked out, his eyes bulging until they looked ready to roll out of his skull.
“At twenty paces…
without a bow-stave…
without spirit power…
through three inches of pine?!”
If a Spirit Master had struck that plank with a yellow hundred-year offensive skill, Tie Long would not have blinked.
Spirit skills were miracles; they were gifts of the heavens, fueled by the mysterious resonance of the soul.
But this was metal.
This was steel, spring wire, and animal fat, built by a six-year-old child using scrap files on a rented anvil.
A weapon like that, hidden beneath the sleeve of an ordinary foot soldier who had zero spirit power, could punch through the breastplate of an imperial cavalry officer before the horse could clear the ditch.
“It is an engine of assassination…” Tie Long breathed, a cold, prickling terror breaking out across his scalp.
“That isn’t a blacksmith’s tool.
That’s a clan-killer.”
Tang San lowered her left sleeve, the dark cuff falling smoothly over her hand, concealing the black steel box entirely.
“The draw-weight is sixty-two pounds,” she said calmly, her voice level and devoid of pride.
“The effective range against unarmored targets is thirty paces.
Against boiled leather or light chain, fifteen paces.
It is merely a device to catch sparrows when the winter is long.”
She walked to the timber, reached out with two jade-white fingers, gripped the flattened steel dart, and pulled it free from the oak grain with a single, effortless twist.
She turned to Tie Long, dipping her head in a formal, thirty-degree artisan’s salute.
“Thank you for the hearth, Shopkeeper Tie.
The remaining scrap spring steel belongs to your shop.
It will serve for your pike contracts.”
Tie Long didn’t speak.
He simply bowed—a deep, trembling bend of his thick spine, treating the six-year-old girl with the terrifying, reverent terror one gave to an imperial inquisitor carrying an execution writ.
Tang San turned to Xiao Wu.
“Let us go,” she said.
“The evening bell will toll in half an hour.
The dormitory must be swept before the lamps are lit.”
Xiao Wu leaped off his nail keg.
He didn’t ask to touch the weapon.
He didn’t ask how it worked.
He walked close beside her left flank, his shoulder brushing against hers, his large black eyes darting down to her concealed sleeve with a strange, fierce pride.
“San’er,” Xiao Wu whispered as they stepped out into the cold canal mist, his scorpion braid bouncing with every step.
“Yes?”
“If someone tries to hurt me…” Xiao Wu smiled, his sharp little canines catching the lantern light from the tavern stalls.
“Will you shoot them with that?”
Tang San looked at his bright, fearless face.
Beneath the linen of her left sleeve, the cold steel of the silent sleeve dart rested against her pulse point—a machine designed for the sole purpose of severing life without a name.
“I will,” she said softly.
And together, they walked back toward the iron gates of Nuoding Academy as the twilight surrendered to the freezing dark.