On the first day of the new year, Ink City awoke amid a cold stillness and the scattered echoes of firecrackers.
Qin Tiexin woke even earlier than usual. He tilted his head and listened. The alley was silent; even the Heavenly Craft Workshop across the way had finally fallen completely quiet. He climbed off the icy bed boards, put on his thick old padded jacket, and went into the backyard.
The snow had stopped. Heaven and earth were pure white, reflecting the lingering night with a clean, lonely blue. He took off his padded jacket and hung it on the woodpile beside him, then stood bare-armed in the snowy clearing, wearing only his thin training clothes.
Opening form · Furnace Fire First Ignites.
He inhaled and exhaled, his white breath shooting out like an arrow. The air after the snow was cold enough to stab his lungs, yet it left his mind especially clear.
He performed eight cycles, slower and more deeply grounded than on the previous days. With every form, he strove to bring each movement to the utmost perfection he remembered, to feel the minute changes in his sinews, bones, and muscles under fatigue, and to catch that almost imperceptible circulation of "heat." Sweat still emerged, swiftly condensing into white frost in the cold air, clinging to his bronze skin and short brows and lashes. When he finished, his body was still trembling noticeably, but he clenched his teeth and forced his slightly weakened legs to hold steady, slowly exhaling the last breath of stale air.
No work meant no income, but it also meant uninterrupted time. He could not sit idle.
He returned indoors, wiped himself down with cold water, and dressed. He had banked the stove fire the night before; after he stirred aside the ashes and added a few thin sticks, the flames soon sprang up again. He cooked a pot of thin porridge and ate four warmed steamed buns with the pickled radish a neighbor had given him before the new year. There was still venison left, but he could not bear to eat much of it, adding only two thin slices of dried meat to the porridge for flavor.
After eating, he found the old axe and tied it securely at his waist with hemp rope. Taking another coil of sturdier rope, he pushed open the back door and once again set out for Emerald Cloud Mountain.
The mountain path lay beneath fairly deep snow, which creaked underfoot as he left a trail of footprints of varying depths. He specifically sought out dead branches that had snapped under the weight of snow and fallen to the ground, or thick limbs the wind had blown down from rocky crevices and tall trees. The law forbade felling mature timber, but this "heaven-sent" firewood belonged to no one.
He swung his axe, chopping the branches into lengths convenient for bundling. The blade split wood frozen hard and brittle, sending dull thunks echoing through the forest. This work was no easier than training strength with stone locks at a martial arts school. It required deft application of strength, and even more endurance. Sweat soon soaked his undershirt again, heat steaming beneath the cold outer shell of his padded jacket.
By noon, two waist-high woodpiles stood in the clearing. He separated the thick pieces from the thin and bound them tightly with rope. The thick wood would be kept for his own fire; the thin, straight pieces could be chopped into short lengths and stacked neatly, ready to earn a few copper coins when the firewood market reopened after the new year.
On the way back, he carried one large bundle on his shoulder and dragged another in his hand. The heavy burden drove his steps deeper into the snow, his breathing as heavy as a bellows, but his stride remained steady. The padded jacket at his shoulder had once again been rubbed white, exposing the coarse cotton stuffing inside.
He did not rest that afternoon. He stoked the furnace high, and the sound of his bellows became the only noise in Soot Alley during the quiet holiday.
He took out the few ingots of the lowest-grade pig iron he had gritted his teeth and bought before the new year. Dull gray and rough-surfaced, they showed obvious impurities and pores at their broken edges, and cost only a third as much as good iron. He heated them red in the furnace, then lifted one out with tongs and set it on the anvil.
The hammer fell.
Clang-
The sound was not as crisp and pleasing as when he worked refined iron. It had a dull quality, almost as though the hammer had struck sandy earth. His aim was not to forge an object directly, but to purify the iron through rough forging. Repeated heating, folding, and hammering would use heat and force to squeeze out and strip away as many impurities-chiefly slag and excess carbon-as possible.
It was extremely tedious, strenuous work that demanded considerable experience. Strike too lightly, and the impurities would not come out; too hard, and the already brittle iron could crack. Temperature was even more crucial. Too much heat, and the iron would burn "pithy," soft and useless; too little, and the impurities would be difficult to separate.
Qin Tiexin concentrated fully. Guided by the color of the heated ingot, the sound and feel of each hammer blow, and the vague instructions on "analysis of the origins of materials" in the Illustrated Catalog of Ten Thousand Artifacts' Void Realm—though he still could not understand most of them—he carefully adjusted where and how hard his hammer struck.
Sparks scattered, mixed with a considerable amount of gray-black slag. Sweat dripped from his chin onto the glowing iron and instantly turned to white vapor. His arms rose and fell steadily, bronze muscles tightening and stretching in the furnace light, their contours like rocks scoured by flowing water.
A single ingot often needed to be heated and hammered seven or eight times, until the blows no longer sent so much black slag flying, its volume had noticeably shrunk, its texture had become relatively dense, and its surface had taken on an even dark red. Only then was the preliminary work complete.
In an entire afternoon, he rough-forged only two ingots. What he obtained were two wrought-iron billets, smaller than before but far more uniform in texture. He carefully set them aside for later use. This work brought almost no direct return, but it prepared him for opportunities that might come-if he had a chance to take a job requiring good iron, these pre-forged billets would save considerable time and fuel, and improve the quality of the finished product.
At dusk, he simply reheated the leftover morning porridge and ate it with pickles and the last two slices of dried venison. His body was tired and hungry, but a full day of labor had left his mind calm.
After nightfall, he sat cross-legged as usual and focused his mind to enter the "Virtual Realm · Forging Hall."
Time flowed at tenfold speed once again. Tonight, he "read" a section on "metal fatigue and hidden damage." Those abstruse illustrations and words remained difficult to understand fully, but paired with the subtle differences he had felt while rough-forging iron containing different impurities that day, he seemed to glimpse a way in. So those seemingly uniform ingots already held the "seeds" of future fractures within them, planted by the uneven distribution of impurities. And skilled forging did more than remove impurities: it guided the paths of the metal's internal "flows of force," distributing them evenly so they bore the load together...
As two hours of real time drew to an end, he withdrew from the virtual realm with his head threatening to split, his vision blackening in waves. Yet he struggled to light the oil lamp and took out his little notebook bound from coarse paper and his half-length charcoal pencil.
His handwriting was ugly and crooked, but painstaking. He worked to recall what he had seen and felt in the Void Realm and, combining it with the day's practice, drew simple diagrams in his notebook and wrote scattered phrases: "Impurities like sand, force flows like water... forging is not squeezing out, but seems more like channeling... heavy blows should follow the grain..."
The charcoal was rough, the paper poor, and the notes were disordered and unsystematic. But these were his own thoughts, the starting point of the difficult fusion between that unfamiliar knowledge, vast as a sea of stars, and the warmth and tactile understanding accumulated in the calluses of his palms.
The second day, the third, the fourth... the days passed in this repetition.
Physical training at dawn, gathering firewood in the morning, rough-forging iron in the afternoon, and studying in the Void Realm and recording his insights at night. Monotonous and exhausting, yet strangely fulfilling. The firewood he brought back gradually became a small hill in the backyard. He had also accumulated a small pile of rough-forged billets. Several more pages of charcoal writing filled his notebook, still scrawled, yet seemingly a little clearer.
Food remained his greatest problem. He rationed the new year's gifts from his neighbors and sliced the venison leg extremely thin, but still finished everything on the fourth day. He began truly accounting for every grain of rice consumed from the jar. Mixed-grain flatbreads became his staple; without oil or fat, he could only force himself to keep going through sheer quantity. He could feel the slight strength the venison had just restored slowly draining away again. The trembling and dizziness during his physical training had not eased.
Yet the light in his eyes had never gone out. It was a nearly instinctive tenacity that had instead settled within him after he had been driven into a corner with nowhere left to retreat.
On the fifth day, shortly after noon.
Crackle, bang-!
Deafening firecrackers suddenly erupted at the entrance to Soot Alley, their red paper scraps especially glaring against the snow that had yet to melt completely.
Qin Tiexin was splitting firewood in the backyard. His movements paused at the noise, then he continued swinging his axe, splitting a dead log as thick as a bowl's rim in two. He knew the Heavenly Craft Workshop had reopened.
When the firecrackers stopped, voices rose across the way. Zhao Ming's deliberately raised voice carried clearly across the alley:
"Friends and neighbors! Good fortune in the new spring! The Heavenly Craft Workshop fires up its furnaces again today, with thanks to customers old and new! From today until the tenth day of the first month, every ironware purchase at our workshop, whether sabers, spears, swords, and halberds or woodcutting knives and kitchen cleavers, gets an additional ten percent off! Ten percent off!"
A buzz of discussion rose from the crowd, mingled with cheers.
Qin Tiexin did not go out to look. He stacked the split wood neatly and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. Ten percent off... another tenth cut from prices already so low. They're openly leaving others no way to survive. He could almost hear copper coins pouring like water toward the counter opposite.
He returned to the front shop, ready to begin the afternoon's rough forging. He had only pumped the bellows a few times when a commotion rose across the way. Something seemed to have happened.
"Move! All of you, move! Get the shopkeeper out here!"
Two rough voices, carrying unmistakable resentment, drowned out Zhao Ming's calls.
Qin Tiexin kept his hands moving while listening to what was happening outside.
"Gentlemen, gentlemen, let's talk this over. Today is the joyous occasion of our reopening..." Zhao Ming's voice held obvious panic and forcibly suppressed impatience.
"Joyous, my ass! Young Master Zhao, look! Look at the garbage your Heavenly Craft Workshop sells!" One voice grew louder. "I only bought this saber here in the twelfth month. 'Hundred-times-refined steel,' 'flowing-water treasured saber'-you talked it up till flowers rained from the heavens! And what happened? I got into a fight outside the city before the new year, and someone chopped it in half with one stroke! It nearly cost me my life!"
"Mine too!" the other voice chimed in. "It's worse than my old woodcutting knife! Aren't you cheating people?!"
The crowd instantly erupted. Those who had just been tempted by the discount whispered among themselves, looking toward the two fierce-faced men waving a broken saber and a chipped one outside the Heavenly Craft Workshop-none other than Scarred Eye and Yellow Hair, who had tried to seize Hunter Zhao's deerskin before the new year.
Zhao Ming's face instantly turned the color of pig liver. He recognized the two notorious ruffians from the south of the city. He had not expected them to actually dare cause trouble on a day like this, carrying sabers sold by his own shop!
"Gentlemen, gentlemen! There must be some misunderstanding!" Zhao Ming hurried forward and lowered his voice, a threat in his tone. "Shall we speak somewhere private? Come to the backyard, please! Whatever your demands, we can discuss them!"
As he spoke, he signaled the assistants beside him with his eyes. Several burly assistants immediately stepped forward and, half coaxing and half hauling, "invited" the cursing Scarred Eye and Yellow Hair into the Heavenly Craft Workshop's backyard, shutting out the onlookers' view.
Only then did Zhao Ming turn back, forcing a strained smile for the watching neighbors and raising his voice. "Everyone! Neighbors! Those were two scoundrels deliberately trying to disrupt us! Who knows how they damaged those sabers? They want to extort our Heavenly Craft Workshop! Rest assured, anything that comes from our Divine Forging Furnace is absolutely guaranteed in quality! I'll give you my word today: anything purchased from our Heavenly Craft Workshop that suffers damage not caused by human action can be returned for its original price or exchanged within three months! Long-term repairs guaranteed!"
He shouted loudly, but his eyes involuntarily darted toward the silent Qin Household Blacksmith Shop diagonally opposite, holding a trace of lingering embarrassment and a deeper malice. It was as though he were challenging the youth who had never shown himself, or trying to bolster his own courage.
The crowd remained doubtful, and the buzzing discussion did not stop. The discount was still tempting, but the sight of those broken and chipped sabers had also lodged in many people's minds.
Diagonally opposite, Qin Tiexin had just lifted a glowing billet from the furnace with his tongs. He heard Zhao Ming's guarantee and the crowd's doubts. But he said nothing, merely sinking his waist into a horse stance and raising his hammer.
Clang-!
A deep, solid hammer blow drowned out all the clamor in the alley and rang out clearly.
On the anvil, sparks and impurities were squeezed out bit by bit beneath his steady blows.
In a private room on the second floor of the Drunken Immortal Pavilion, diagonally opposite the entrance to Soot Alley, the street-facing window stood open a crack.
Li Zhenwei sat alone beside the window, a few simple dishes and wine before him, pouring and drinking by himself. Since returning to his hometown, he had been caught up in one social engagement after another. Today offered a rare moment of peace, so he had come out alone for a stroll and, along the way, another look at the Heavenly Craft Workshop that County Magistrate Wang had so strongly recommended.
Through the crack in the window, he had seen and heard everything that had just happened in the alley clearly.
Zhao Ming's fierce-sounding but inwardly weak assurances, the crowd's doubts, the two ruffians' curses and waving broken sabers... of course, he had also seen the almost excessively quiet blacksmith shop diagonally opposite, and the steady, flickering furnace glow faintly visible through its door after that abrupt, solid hammer blow.
His fingers once again unconsciously brushed the scabbard of the old saber beside him on the table. The wear on it stood out particularly clearly in the daylight coming through the window.
He raised his wine cup but did not drink. His gaze settled for a long time on the shop opposite, which had no signboard, only a crude wooden placard standing beside its door.