"Maybe I should hold back a little. I don't need to stimulate the growth so forcefully—making rawhide cord would be enough..."
Shen Le methodically soaked, scraped, stretched, and tanned the cowhide, fine beads of sweat constantly forming on his forehead.
The newly grown(?) cowhide had to go through many steps before it could be made into rawhide cord, and not a single one could be skipped:
No matter how much Shen Le wanted to speed things up with magic, considering the durability of the finished product, he had to honestly follow the procedures he found online, step by step.
That left him with plenty of spare time in between:
"It's fine. There are still so many iron pieces to make up for, so I can work on them in the gaps. Once this side is done, that side will be finished too, and I can install them all at once!"
He did not even need to ask the Special Affairs Bureau for help with making the replacement iron pieces, such as borrowing some metalworking machine from a nearby factory.
The research institute had its own equipment: an electric heating forge on the left and an air hammer on the right. They were only some iron pieces. Even with a failure rate as high as seventy percent, he could definitely finish them in three to five days.
"Sure enough, no skill is ever wasted..."
Shen Le held a pair of tongs himself, gripping a red-hot iron piece and turning it back and forth. Bang, bang, bang, he worked at a blistering pace.
"I learned blacksmithing last time to make the Bronze Seal. Isn't it coming in handy now?"
Straight iron pieces, curved iron pieces, outward-curling ear guards. Smooth, gleaming armor plates appeared before his eyes one after another.
Although using modern