Yue Qianchou walked onto the enormous black platform, three to four meters thick, a hundred meters long, and forty to fifty meters wide, and inspected it. He could not help sighing inwardly at the old monkey's perseverance. The fellow had actually spent nearly fifty thousand years refining a huge iron slab—it was enough to leave one speechless. He then turned back in puzzlement and asked, "Yuan Hong, since it is even harder than the Shell Essence of the Temple Colored Spider, why did you not use it to forge the armor you wear?"
"I am truly ashamed." The Ape King clasped his hands toward Ancestor Nanming with some embarrassment and explained, "It is not that I did not want to, but this thing is simply too hard. My clumsy method was passable for making a large iron block, but casting it into fitted armor with interlocking sections was truly too difficult—so difficult that I had no choice but to give up. I happened to lack something sturdy enough to serve as a base when forging things, so I made do with it. But now that I have Master, surely Master will have a way to solve this."
He then pointed at the gravel on the ground in the center of the mountain's hollow, glowing red from the earthfire beneath it. "These fragments are the remains of that meteorite from beyond the heavens. They still contain some metal, more or less, but since there was no use for what I extracted, I simply spread them over the earthfire and used them as scattered anvil stones when refining things."
Yue Qianchou nodded slightly. Stroking his chin as he eyed the enormous iron slab beneath his feet, his eyes glimmered faintly. "Mr. Nanming, the treasures refined from this stuff should not be inferior