Su Li walked over to the anvil without rushing to begin.
He crouched first and glanced at the fire in the forge.
The flames were too dim, covered by a grayish layer of slag. The charcoal had burned unevenly—strong on the left, weak on the right.
Su Li reached in and stirred the charcoal pile, smashing several large chunks that had not burned through before stacking them again and giving the bellows two pulls.
The fire immediately brightened by a whole level, shifting from dark red to orange-yellow.
The entire sequence was clean and decisive, without the slightest hesitation.
Old Buck had originally stood there with his arms folded, waiting to enjoy a joke. Now, his arms slowly dropped.
Something was off.
The kid's way of arranging charcoal was far too practiced. It was not some flashy trick one could pick up after watching it a couple of times.
How the charcoal was stacked, how many times the bellows were pulled, which direction the tuyere faced—those were all muscle memories forged over more than a decade of hammering iron.
Su Li rose and swept his gaze over the pile of scrap metal beside him.
It was a disorderly heap of offcuts: rusted horseshoes, broken hoe blades, and several bent iron nails.
He did not pick the larger pieces. Instead, he rummaged through the pile and pulled out a palm-sized scrap of iron, weighing it in his hand.
A little over three jin, high in carbon and full of impurities.
In the hands of a proper blacksmith, this kind of material was garbage—too brittle even for making a door bolt.
But it was exactly what Su Li chose.
His strength was about the same as an ordinary person's right now; he simply could not swing a hammer at a ten-jin billet.