The Battle Armor Dilemma

Mu Chen smiled faintly at Tang Wulin's appearance. After greeting Tang Wulin, Lin Yu headed to his own forging room.

After Lin Yu left, Tang Wulin bid Mu Chen farewell and returned to Eastsea Academy.

Watching the two leave, Cen Yue said enviously, "President, the Aolai Forging Masters Association went too far. They had two such promising talents and didn't report either of them."

Mu Chen smiled and shook his head. "They're so poor over there they're practically pissing blood. Cut them some slack. With treasures like these, let alone them, even we wouldn't want to report them. There's nothing to say about it."

Cen Yue nodded, then heard Mu Chen say, "But since they've come to our Eastsea Forging Masters Association, we naturally can't let these two treasures slip away. We won't report their circumstances either. How many associations learn of them will depend entirely on how far these two little ones can go."

Cen Yue nodded in understanding. He naturally understood Mu Chen's intentions. The president is looking for a successor. It's about time I started looking as well. After all, from finding a successor to training one until they can truly take over, the process is a long one.

It would be a terrible loss if I only found one after growing old, then died before passing down my craft.

Unfortunately, Tang Wulin's forging relied purely on brute strength, while Qi Sect's techniques formed a lineage of their own. Neither was suited to inheriting his forging techniques, and Cen Yue could not help feeling regretful.

"I never thought that old bastard Qi would take in such a perfectly suited disciple. Why don't I have that kind of luck?" Cen Yue muttered unhappily.

Lin Yu had no interest in what the higher-ups of the Forging Masters Association were thinking. After accepting two Level 2 tasks and one Level 3 task in the association hall, he headed to the forging room he had rented.

"Beep."

As Lin Yu placed his electronic card against the access control panel outside the forging room, the soul-guided device emitted a crisp sound. Then, the heavy metal door slowly opened.

Lin Yu walked inside and reached for the switch of the soul-guided electric lights on the nearby wall. With a flick, the lights illuminated the entire forging room.

When choosing this forging room, Lin Yu had looked over its floor plan. There was nothing particularly special about its design; its only advantage was that it stood apart from the other forging rooms, making interruptions less likely.

The three tasks were not difficult for Lin Yu. Two had been placed by the same client: a custom order for Hundred-Refined components for a pair of soul-guided mechas. Not only did he need to complete the Hundred Refinements, he also had to forge them into specific component shapes.

Lin Yu took out the metals supplied by the client, then swung his twin hammers and struck them together in midair.

With no one watching him, he could freely make these little moves without restraint.

Over the course of an afternoon, Lin Yu completed both Level 2 orders. Then, his gaze shifted to the Level 3 one.

It was an upgrade forging job for Thousand-Refined mecha components: existing Hundred-Refined components had to be forged into Thousand-Refined versions without damaging their shape. The difficulty nearly reached Level 4, making it a challenge task Lin Yu had set for himself.

Lin Yu did not plan to finish this task today. Instead, he would use the remaining time to study the components' structure, then return on his next day off to focus on it properly.

In any case, the time limit for this task was generous. It only needed to be completed within two months. Thousand-Refinement mecha tasks were generally like this. For example, Xie's father had been waiting in line for a year without getting a slot. Requiring a finished product within two months already made this an urgent order.

The deposit for an urgent order was quite high as well. Lin Yue estimated that if he had not gotten there before Tang Wulin, Tang Wulin would probably have immediately turned around to take the Level 3 assessment and snatch the job upon seeing the price.

The deposit alone was far greater than the payments from both Level 2 orders combined.

Of course, the penalty for failure was equally severe. It was practically the equivalent of a betting agreement from his previous life.

Walking out of the forging room, Lin Yu narrowed his eyes slightly to adjust to the light beneath the setting sun, then headed down the pedestrian path toward Eastsea City's central district.

Eastsea City lay near the coast and was rich in seafood. At the same time, because it faced the sea, sea soul beasts—one of the relatively intact soul beast populations during the Douluo Continent 3 era—often had minor clashes with human coastal areas.

As a result, coastal cities were generally strategic-level cities, with far more soul masters than many inland cities. With soul power strengthening their bodies, these soul masters lived differently from ordinary people, and their nightlife was correspondingly much richer.

This time, Lin Yu planned to visit Eastsea City's central district and experience what the city had to offer at night.

After all, places with more soul masters also had more resources related to soul masters. Lin Yu now had the money given by the Forging Masters Association, the money from his father, and the payments just settled from those two Level 2 orders... all told, he had quite a fair amount of federation currency. As someone who spent whatever he earned, the more money he had in hand, the stronger his urge to spend became.

After all, this world was not his previous life, where saving money could save his life at a critical moment. In this world, if soul masters wanted to survive, they had to quickly turn the money in their hands into cultivation resources.

For soul masters, federation currency was usually no different from paper if it could not be exchanged for cultivation resources. It was too hard even to wipe their asses with.

It was not as if he had not considered an auction. Logically speaking, as a Level 3 professional, he would not need to pay a deposit for auctions over a hundred years old. But the prices there were too unpredictable and often wildly inflated, and most of the items were useless to Lin Yu.

What interested Lin Yu more were things like metals or soul-guided device design blueprints.

Such things might not seem particularly useful in the short term, but they could serve as references when he crafted his Battle Armor in the future.

Lin Yu did not yet have a particularly clear direction for his Battle Armor. More accurately, he was torn between two completely different approaches.

One was to make it a pure tank build, with every aspect of the Battle Armor designed around defense, leaving offense to the poison of his Jade Phosphor Seven-Extinction Flower martial soul.

The other was to improve everything as comprehensively as possible while equipping it with several close-combat transformation arrays. That way, if someone got in his face, he would not need to fill the area around himself with poisonous gas and make no distinction between friend and foe.

Both Battle Armor plans had their merits, and Lin Yu needed more time to consider them. Fortunately, he only had three soul rings now, and it would still be a while before he truly needed Battle Armor, so there was no need to rush his decision.

Entering Eastsea City's central district, he went into a fairly decent restaurant and ordered several lavish seafood dishes.

Lin Yu first ate his fill, appeasing the hungry stomach that forging had left him with.