She did not bother picking it up, instead clutching Su Li's arm tightly with both hands.
"Really not leaving?"
"Not leaving. Running away is too tiring." Su Li reached out and gave her waist a squeeze. "Hurry up and eat. Once we're done, we'll head back and take care of the real business."
Saina's face turned bright red. She picked up the chicken from her lap and stuffed it into her mouth, chewing at lightning speed.
A month later.
The backyard of Wading Village's blacksmith shop.
The furnace was packed with coal, flames leaping half a meter high as waves of heat rolled outward.
Bare-chested, Su Li gripped a thirty-pound sledgehammer in both hands.
A chunk of pig iron, heated red-hot, lay atop the anvil.
Su Li raised the hammer high.
Then brought it down.
Clang!
Sparks scattered in all directions.
The muscles in Su Li's arms bulged high. Nurtured by his Sword Spirit Root, this young body grew stronger every day. Aether from the air flowed through his pores and into his meridians, and he did not feel tired at all, no matter how hard he worked.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
The thirty-pound hammer became a blur of black in his hands.
The force of each blow was downright absurd.
The pig iron on the anvil rapidly changed shape, its impurities forcibly hammered out.
Old Buck stood two meters away, holding a coarse clay mug of tea.
The kid had been here for a month, swinging that sledgehammer every day.
His strength was utterly unreasonable.
Old Buck had worked iron all his life, yet he had never seen anyone wield a thirty-pound hammer so effortlessly. And every strike this kid made landed without the slightest deviation; his grasp of the heat was even more precise than that of an old