The next day, the tedious lessons drew to a close. The sun sank in the west, its lingering rays spilling through the window lattices of the Spirit Transferring Pagoda's classroom onto the thick books covering the desk.
Na'er lay slumped over the desk, her little face pressed firmly against pages of densely packed theory. Her once-sparkling silver eyes were now dull and filled with tears.
"Boohoo... it's too hard. I can't understand any of it..."
The little girl pouted and sobbed softly in aggrieved misery, a few glistening tears slipping down despite herself.
She had thought being a mecha repair technician was the most leisurely profession, perfect for a slacker who wanted to coast along, without having to toil away swinging a hammer and beating iron like a blacksmith.
But now.
Page after page of energy circuit layouts, principles of mechanical structure, and emergency repair procedures for damaged Battle Armor, with one obscure concept and complex diagram after another, left her head spinning.
"Lies... Xiao Chen lied..." Na'er rubbed her reddened eyes and grumbled under her breath. "What's leisurely about this? It's a hundred times harder than hunting everywhere for chicken drumsticks!"
Before she had spent long feeling aggrieved, the little girl suddenly jerked her head up, a glimmer of sly calculation flashing through her silver eyes.
"Wait! If I'm working this hard, Xiao Chen must be even more tired!"
She instantly perked up, sweeping away her aggrieved expression as she bounced out of her chair, privately finding some consolation.
Blacksmiths swing hammers and beat iron all day, hammering metal. That must be exhausting!
With that thought in mind, Na'er abandoned the deskful of books she could not understand and ran toward the Spirit Transferring Pagoda's forging room on her short, light-footed legs.
The Spirit Transferring Pagoda's forging room was a space dedicated to forging. Before she even approached, heavy hammering reached her ears, and waves of heat carrying the scorching smell of metal washed over her.
Na'er quietly clung to the forging room's doorframe and poked her little head around it to peek inside.
Inside the forging room, the furnace blazed fiercely, its crimson flames scorching the air, which was thick with the smell of heavy metal.
Xiao Chen stood straight before the central anvil. Facing him was a middle-aged man with an honest-looking face and thickly callused hands.
This was Zhou Ming, a bona fide Level 7 Blacksmith whom Leng Yaoyu had specially invited to teach him.
"Young Master Xiao Chen, you mustn't rush for results on the path of forging."
With a serious expression and boundless patience, Zhou Ming explained the fundamentals. His words were earnest, every sentence drawn from years of accumulated experience.
"All advanced forging, from Spiritual Refinement to Soul Forging, rests on a solid foundation of Hundred Refinement."
"Ordinary metals contain numerous impurities and have loose structures. You must hammer them repeatedly, removing their internal impurities little by little and compacting their grain. Standard Hundred Refinement is the most fundamental, and most important, first step."
Xiao Chen nodded slightly, his expression earnest. "I understand, teacher."
"Understanding comes second. Putting your hands to work is what matters."
"You're on the slender side, and this is your first time forging, so don't rush for results. Try completing thirty hammer strikes today. Keep your strength steady and find the right rhythm, and you'll have met the standard."
In his view, Xiao Chen was a Soul Master prodigy with an exceptional aptitude for cultivation, but forging relied on physical strength, endurance, and feel, making it entirely different from cultivating Soul Power.
Besides, for a six-year-old who had never worked iron before, managing thirty steady, evenly powered strikes without exhausting himself would already put him far ahead of ordinary beginners.
Without another word, Xiao Chen stepped forward, set the metal firmly on the cold, heavy workbench, and reached out to grip a standard forging hammer.
It felt substantial in his hand.
Following the rhythm and techniques for applying force that Zhou Ming had just taught him, he slowly circulated Soul Power through his arm, channeling it evenly into the forging hammer in his palm. With his mind steady, he aimed at the center of the metal.
The next instant, his wrist unleashed a sudden burst of force!
Clang-!
A clear, weighty metallic collision thundered out, crisp and decisive, without the slightest drag.
Soul Power of the utmost purity poured into the entire piece of metal in an instant, following the hammer's momentum.
Then something happened that left Zhou Ming frozen to the spot.
The instant that strike landed, all the dull impurities on the surface of the originally rough, dark metal peeled away. Its grain rapidly tightened and compacted, and its luster swiftly became mellow and translucent, pure and fine.
Textbook Hundred Refinement!
With just one strike, he had completed the Hundred Refinement purification that countless apprentices needed days and a hundred repeated hammer strikes to accomplish, reaching the goal in a single step!
Xiao Chen himself, meanwhile, wore a look of utter astonishment, towering waves surging through his heart.
Because the instant the Hundred Refined metal took shape, a line of white code appeared with perfect clarity on its surface, falling directly into his eyes:
/give@Xiao Chenminecraft:iron{display:{Name:"Hundred-Forged Metal"}}1
Xiao Chen's pupils contracted slightly. He was completely dumbfounded.
He could not have been more familiar with that string of code! It was a Minecraft command!
He exclaimed inwardly, What's going on?! Why has the Command Block suddenly risen from the dead?!
Normally, even when he concentrated on communicating with it and deliberately tried to activate it, the Command Block resisted appearing. Now he had merely struck a piece of iron, so how had he directly triggered a command?!
While he was privately puzzling over this, Zhou Ming beside him completely lost his composure. His eyes widened into circles, a feverish, starlike gleam bursting from their depths, and his entire body trembled with excitement.
He hurried to the workbench and carefully stroked the perfectly Hundred Refined metal, his voice trembling with disbelief:
"A... a genius! An absolute forging genius unseen in ten thousand years!"
"One strike! He completed Hundred Refinement in just one strike!"
Zhou Ming looked at the composed Xiao Chen, his eyes filled with shock as he exclaimed repeatedly:
"I've worked in forging for decades, taught countless novice apprentices, and seen countless forging prodigies! But no one has ever achieved anything like this!"
"Even Zhen Hua, our continent's Divine Craftsman, could never have accomplished Hundred Refinement with one strike when he first began learning as a boy!"
"Young Master Xiao Chen, you've simply overturned everything we know about forging!"
At those words, Xiao Chen instantly came back to his senses and glanced unobtrusively at the code on the metal's surface.
He discovered that Zhou Ming, who was beside himself with excitement, had noticed nothing, as though that line of code did not exist at all.
It seemed he alone could see these lines of command code from the Command Block!
Yet his doubts only grew heavier, weighing down his heart.
Had the Command Block revealed its ability at this particular moment because I wanted the metal to take shape quickly? But the Command Block never acted like this before, did it?
Could something have changed...?
Hiding at the doorway, Na'er had been waiting to see Xiao Chen panting from exhaustion and drenched in sweat. Instead, this outrageous scene left her little brain completely stalled. She stood there blankly, forgetting that she had come to restore her sense of balance.
Even Xiao Chen himself had never imagined that this seemingly ordinary anomaly during forging had already stirred the entire Douluo Plane.
On the Douluo Continent, at the Plane Core.
This empty space, without light or day and isolated from the world, was the oldest and most primordial core of the entire continent.
The heavy Clear Sky Hammer hung silently in the void, suppressing the feebly struggling Plane Consciousness and gnawing away at the Plane Authority day after day.
But now, the Plane Authority that had been settling into stability underwent violent fluctuations once again, and the authority that had been draining away slowly suddenly began dissipating faster!
Tang Hao's burly, standing figure jolted violently. Chaotic planar power rampaged madly around him, his crimson eyes filled with hideous bloodshot veins as his long-suppressed fury erupted completely.
Now, all he could do was rage helplessly.
"Who is it?! Who is secretly stealing my Plane Authority?!"
"You've repeatedly ruined a plan ten thousand years in the making! Show yourself if you have the guts!"
"If I didn't have to keep the Abyss from noticing, I'd make certain you died a wretched death!"
Before you continue