Stacking Craft: Black Iron Eleven

"If you really can't get over it, you can come stay at my house for the night. My place is pretty big. And while you're there, tell me about Senior Heartless's life in the sect."

"No, no need. Some other day."

Lu Li refused again and again. Never mind that he had no idea what Lu Ling's situation was like now—if she discovered the fact that he was packing down there, this rich young miss might scream and accuse him of molesting her.

Having lived two lives, Lu Li understood one truth all too well: the prettier a woman was, the less she could be trusted.

What if this girl waited until he was asleep and took his kidneys... Well, she probably wouldn't care about those three spirit stones, but his skin and lungs were worth money. What if she skinned him, dug out his Qi-Combining Cauldron, and sold them for cash to buy premium pears? What then?

"How about we make a bet?"

"Bet on what?"

"Let's settle it in the day-after-tomorrow Heaven-grade welder examination. If your results are better than mine, I'll do one thing for you within my abilities... Well, nothing bad, of course! But if I win, you'll become my Dao companion."

When she mentioned doing one thing, Lu Li's first thought was the Azure Underworld Demon Fox's hide. With the Mo Family's influence, obtaining a rank-one spirit material for him presumably wouldn't be difficult.

As for the penalty for losing...

Elder Duan suddenly cut in.

"Good disciple, this is a good thing! Look, win or lose, you can't possibly come out worse off."

"Worse off my ass! If she finds out I've got a little brother, she might kill me on the spot to prove her Dao, turn her back on me, and switch to the Path of Heartlessness. Believe it or not."

"Then just cut it off. Cut once, cure forever. I told you long ago to cut it off, but you wouldn't listen. Hey—it's nothing shameful. Plenty of sects forbid their disciples from coupling before the age of a hundred, or else it counts as puppy love. So lots of those disciples have been castrated."

At that, Lu Li felt a chill run through his crotch. So castration was common in this world? He refused to believe it, nor did he want to pay attention to this old hag who spouted nonsense at every turn.

After weighing it over again and again, Lu Li ultimately decided to agree. He declared with righteous solemnity, "I absolutely will not lose!"

There was one day of rest between the Earth-grade and Heaven-grade examinations.

The Heaven-grade examination topics were announced the next day, and the spirit materials had to be paid for out of pocket. That day gave examinees ample time to purchase materials. This year, the material limit for both the fitter and welder examinations was five spirit stones.

The fitter examination required candidates to forge a bladed whip. The evaluation was based on knocking down obstacles—the more layers it pierced through, the higher the score.

The welder examination, meanwhile, required them to design a reconnaissance-type spell array. Scores were based on detection distance: the farther the range and the broader the area covered, the higher the score.

By then, Lu Li had barely any spirit stones left. He had no choice but to sell the wind spirit stone Zhu Yi had given him for fifty spirit stones, using the money to purchase the various materials needed for the examination.

Why else would people say cultivation was a money-burning profession?

Lu Li's father had once been an Earth-grade fitter and had applied for the Heaven-grade fitter examination three times, only to fail every time. Between registration fees and material costs, he had spent twenty spirit stones.

Given his family's circumstances at the time, that price had been truly steep. His father had been despondent for a long while afterward, even once believing that he had failed to make the list because he had not paid off the examiners.

The next day, as Lu Li himself stepped onto the examination ground where his father's generation had fallen three times, his heart brimmed with complicated emotions. He could feel several gazes occasionally sliding his way.

At his assigned station, five rank-one mechanical constructs had already been laid out, all generously provided by the Mo Family. They included the [Earthfire Furnace], [Profoundweight Hammer], [Six-String Milling Machine], [Fire-Thunder Welding Gun], and [Flamewind Instrument].

These five constructs were standard equipment for medium-to-large workshops. The first three were mainly used for fitting, while the latter two were mainly for welding. Together, this set was worth at least a thousand spirit stones.

Their operation was similar to that of ordinary mortal mechanisms. Lu Li had familiarized himself with them in advance yesterday, so he could use them directly.

Looking at the midstream disciples, they had everything Lu Li had, though their models appeared different and were likely of better quality. And they also had things that Lu Li did not.

Some wore eyepieces over their faces, while others had arm guards on their hands. Lu Li could not tell what those constructs did just by looking at them, but he felt these people had come not to forge artifacts, but to march onto a battlefield and kill enemies.

And that was only what showed on the surface. Hidden mechanical constructs like Lu Li's Qi-Combining Cauldron, concealed within the body, had yet to be revealed.

There were only a handful of local craftsmen from Maple Fragrance City in attendance. The mechanisms they could produce were far shabbier, and they could not even afford to rent mechanical constructs. The disparity between all sides was plain to see.

As the saying went, if a craftsman wished to do a good job, he must first sharpen his tools; even the cleverest housewife could not cook without rice. Tools determined a craftsman's upper limit, and no examination had ever been absolutely fair.

Disciples of White Moon Palace came down and began inspecting whether the spirit materials everyone had brought into the venue complied with regulations. They calculated the materials' total value according to market prices and removed any excess.

The welder examination lasted an entire day. When the bell rang, Lu Li first picked up a piece of black iron and tossed it into the preheated Earthfire Furnace, secretly activating his Qi-Combining Cauldron.

He had taken a clever shortcut here. The spirit ores he had bought were all of low purity, and he intended to use the Earthfire Furnace together with his Qi-Combining Cauldron to refine them on the spot, obtaining the highest-purity spirit ore at the lowest possible cost.

The method was not hard to think of, but others only had Earthfire Furnaces and lacked the assistance of a Qi-Combining Cauldron. Thus, Lu Li was confident that his spirit ore purity would surpass that of most people.

The earthfire blazed fiercely, turning Lu Li's face crimson. Without the Earthfire Furnace, the temperature of an ordinary forge would never be enough to refine black iron. That was where the gap lay.

Lu Li spent half an hour completing the refinement of eleven steel billets. The eleven billets were identical in length and width but varied in thickness. The two thickest pieces were placed at either end, while four thick and five thin pieces alternated in the middle, forming a single row.

"What swift technique. Only half an hour has passed, and she's already finished refining the steel billets."

"Wait, could this be... the eleven-layer black iron stacking technique? This girl has some nerve. If it goes wrong, there'll be no saving it."

Quite a few of the spectators present knew their craft. The theory was right there: twisting multilayered stacked black iron billets could greatly enhance their hardness. But craftsmen who could truly pull it off were few and far between.

The clangor of metal striking metal rose and fell across the square, completely drowning out the roar of the Qi-Combining Cauldron within Lu Li's chest.

The process was far too complicated. The slightest mishandling would turn everything into scrap iron, and both the time cost and success rate were abysmal. Yet that was not all. What shocked everyone even more was that Lu Li actually took out earplugs and put them on, then closed his eyes, while his hammer never paused for even a moment.

"What is she trying to do?"

"Could she be planning to hammer blind?"