"I don't know."
"I dug it out of the mud."
"The Dragon Palace issued an order asking for all kinds of ironware, so I went through my collection..."
An eel—rather, most of an eel; the remaining small portion was being used as someone's head—wriggled in front of the phone camera and answered somewhat blankly.
It had a very good attitude. It answered every question, yet none of its answers contained any useful information. Shen Le's head throbbed painfully. All he could do was sigh silently before thanking Qing Li again:
"Thank you, and thank this General Eel as well. You've been a huge help. Could I ask you to search around while you're at it? If you find any ironware like this, bring it all over for us to try."
For the Dragon Palace, this was an utterly trivial matter. Qing Li casually gave the order, and the shrimp soldiers and crab generals got busy, quickly gathering another cartful of scrap iron and delivering it to Shen Le.
Unfortunately, his luck with the draw was poor this time. Shen Le nearly worked himself to death hauling that enormous cartload of iron fragments into the Ancient Residence and letting the lump of junk iron try every single piece, but none of them provoked any reaction from it.
With no other choice, Shen Le packed the lump of junk iron into a box and put it in his backpack, embedding spirit jade around the box to form a simplified Spirit Gathering Array. Then he wandered everywhere, searching everywhere.
He took a lap around the campus, but it was no use. The lump of junk iron showed no interest in any metal that came near it.
Whether it was doorframes, railings, the shells of vehicles parked by the roadside, or even the flagpoles