The Laboratory Blew Up Again
Early the next morning, Kong Deming set about putting the plan settled on the night before into action.
First, he found Xiao Hongchen some forging knowledge native to the Sun Moon Empire.
Though Sun Moon had built its empire on Soul Tools, it still had a foundation in forging. Records from the blacksmiths' guild, a few dusty metallurgy manuals from the imperial library, and old materials science texts buried under thick dust in a corner of Mingde Hall's warehouse were all dug out.
Most of these local materials were rudimentary, dealing with old methods like high-temperature smelting and stamping metal into shape. They fell far short of the kind of forging Bao Liang described as "hammering out the soul of metal, one blow at a time."
But it was better than nothing. At least it gave Xiao Hongchen a chance to get a feel for the temperaments of the metals on his own turf.
At the same time, Kong Deming secretly sent people into the Douluo Three Kingdoms to seek out blacksmith shops with long-standing traditions.
They went straight to throwing money at them until their secret forging manuals came out.
Blacksmiths didn't exactly have money to spare in the first place.
Things had been all right before, but now, selling one of those so-called ancestral forging recipes would feed a family well for years.
On top of that, the people from the Sun Moon Empire were generous, offering outrageously high prices. Hardly any blacksmith could refuse.
They even brought quite a few blacksmiths back to Sun Moon with them.
For a breakthrough in Soul Tools, these were all necessary costs.
And so, a week later, with both Kong Deming and Jing Hongchen lending a hand, the forging techniques of those "primitive men" from the Douluo Three Kingdoms were all brought back.
Xiao Hongchen was instantly buried under a mountain of forging knowledge.
But the forging experience passed down by those rough-and-ready blacksmiths was often crude and straightforward-"Just swing the hammer in a full arc and pound away by feel" nearly made Xiao Hongchen close the book. Other passages, however, left him lost in clouds and mist: "Listen to the iron breathe," "feel the iron's temper." Reading them made his head feel twice its size.
One battered handwritten manuscript opened with the sentence, "Iron is the bone of heaven and earth; forge it as you would caress an infant." Xiao Hongchen stared at the line and puzzled over it for a long time, but still couldn't figure out how exactly he was supposed to "caress" it.
Another book dealt with quenching, but didn't give a single temperature throughout. It only said, "Wait until the sound of the water falls from clamor to silence, then rises from silence to clamor; submerge after three breaths." He nearly thought he was reading a heavenly scripture.
At certain crucial points, he even had to pick up a hammer and try a few pieces of metal himself to get a feel for it.
Fortunately, his grandmaster stayed by his side throughout the process, occasionally pointing out key details with his Starfall Silver scepter and helping Xiao Hongchen translate those profoundly mysterious "lessons from experience" into principles he could understand.
Take "listen to the iron breathe," for example. Kong Deming explained it in a single sentence: the so-called breathing was nothing more than the metal expanding and contracting minutely as its temperature changed between hammer blows. You weren't listening for a sound, but for a sensation-after the hammer fell, could the skin of your palm feel a change in the force of the metal's rebound? If it changed, the impurities had been driven out. If it didn't, you'd hammered for nothing.
Understanding dawned on Xiao Hongchen.
Otherwise, he figured he would have had an even harder time.
But as the saying went, practice brings true knowledge, and failure is the mother of success-
Reading alone wasn't enough. He needed someone to help.
Bao Liang had also been dragged over to serve as labor.
Xiao Hongchen pulled him out of the cultivation room, his face full of confusion, and dragged him all the way to the workshop entrance. He was completely bewildered.
"Wait, what? Why did you drag me over here too? What use could I possibly be here?"
Xiao Hongchen shrugged. "Don't look at me. Grandmaster said science has to be rigorous.
"So he told me to bring you over for a control experiment."
"So that's why you dragged me over to cosplay as a lighter girl?" Bao Liang was stunned. "Come on, man, I have twin Ultimate Martial Souls! Did you give even a second's thought to how slowly I cultivate? And why are you still calling Teacher Kong 'Grandmaster,' anyway? Didn't you already take him as your master?"
"Don't look at me. I don't know. I just hammer iron." Xiao Hongchen went straight for a triple denial. "I can't help it. I've called him Grandmaster for so many years that I can't change the habit right away. All right, stop making a fuss. Grandmaster's here."
Then Bao Liang saw Jing Hongchen and Ye Yulin, each being carried in one of Kong Deming's hands, with Meng Hongchen strolling along behind them.
"Oh, wow~ He rounded up the whole lot of us."
Hearing Bao Liang speak, Kong Deming couldn't help snorting. "You'll have to ask these two old fools what they did!
"Good grief, we haven't even started exploring yet, and these two idiots went straight to trying it out themselves-together! They even did it in a laboratory they hadn't cleaned out beforehand. Sure enough, they turned the fire up too high and blew the lab apart in one go!
"Why didn't the blast just kill you two idiots outright?!"
Jing Hongchen/Ye Yulin: "Teacher Kong, we were wrong. It was all Ye Yulin's/Jing Hongchen's fault. He provoked me, saying, 'Don't tell me you can't do it or don't dare to,' and that's the only reason I started."
"Both of you, shut up! Make another peep and I'll hammer you two fools trying to hold back Sun Moon's progress to death before I hammer any metal!
"Honestly, I've lost count of how many laboratories have been blown up this month. Haven't you learned a single lesson?"
Jing Hongchen promptly looked at Bao Liang.
Bao "guilty conscience, no leg to stand on but loud and proud" Liang: I'll just smile and say nothing.
Once preparations were complete, everyone went to the dedicated, supersized forging workshop Kong Deming had ordered built overnight.
The workshop was enormous, a full size larger all around than Mingde Hall's main laboratory.
The domed roof had a black iron framework with tremendous load-bearing strength. The floor was paved with thick, shock-insulating runic stone slabs, and cooling arrays were embedded in all four walls. Even if the temperature throughout the workshop soared high enough to vaporize molten iron, those arrays could draw away all the heat in a few breaths.
The forging platforms stood in a row, ranging from large to small. The largest could hold an entire Dark Gold Terrorclaw Bear-though its size had been estimated based on Jing Hongchen's build.
All kinds of forging hammers lined the wall, from lightweight soul-guided forging hammers to giant drop hammers that took two people to wrap their arms around. Their heads came in every material from black iron and mithril to several alloys even Jing Hongchen couldn't name.
Dozens of kinds of raw ore waiting to be refined were piled in a corner, sorted into sections by color and density, like some kind of strange library.
To finish it so perfectly in a single night despite the rush-Douluo civil engineering was practically divine. With that kind of ability, who knew how many civil engineering brothers in his previous life would have died of envy?
And so, under Kong Deming's guidance, and with Bao Liang occasionally offering vague possibilities concerning forging from the original The Legend of the Dragon King, the path of forging slowly advanced beneath Xiao Hongchen and Bao Liang's feet, one step at a time.
Two months was neither long nor short.
It was enough time for one person to go from a beginner to forgetting food and sleep, and enough for a group to go from fumbling in confusion to barely getting the hang of things.
Xiao Hongchen had made the fastest progress of the bunch.
The Three-Legged Golden Toad's innate affinity for metal was like a fish in water when it came to forging. While the others were still staring blankly at metal samples, he could close his eyes and feel how tightly the grains were arranged and how deeply the impurities had settled. He could even tell how many times a piece of metal had been quenched from the sensation at his fingertips.
Kong Deming watched from the side and nodded inwardly.
The boy's talent with metal was indeed greater than that of most Soul Engineers.
But that was only greater in comparison to "ordinary people."
Before a true master of forging, Xiao Hongchen's skill probably didn't even qualify as entry-level.
Even so, in two months, that had been enough for him to progress from a Soul Engineer who could barely swing a hammer properly to someone capable of completing basic forging on his own.
Bao Liang hadn't been idle either.
Although he couldn't match Xiao Hongchen's ability to sense metal, the high-temperature control granted by his Ultimate Flame was just as useful in forging.
Some metals had to be hammered repeatedly at a specific temperature; a single degree off, and all the work would be wasted. Bao Liang's temperature control with his Ultimate Flame was precise enough to make Kong Deming's eyes light up.
As for the mysterious stages that required one to "listen to the sound of iron" and "sense the nature of iron," Bao Liang stood to the side as a spectator, watching and taking notes, occasionally mentioning a vague concept or two he had heard of in the original The Legend of the Dragon King.
Whether what he said was right could be considered later. At least the atmosphere couldn't be allowed to go cold.
Jing Hongchen handled overall coordination.
Though this old fox wasn't as skilled at forging as Xiao Hongchen, he was superb at managing people. He kept everyone's shifts, the movement of materials in and out, and the recycling of scrap in perfect order. Even the inside and outside of the workshop were kept spotless.
Ye Yulin, meanwhile, was responsible for technical oversight and theoretical support.
Though this Level 9 Soul Engineer was usually a man of few words, once forging came up, there was no stopping him. From the lattice structure of metals to the trace elements in different ore veins, from the proportions of quenching media to the resonance point between hammering frequency and the injection of internal force, he talked on and on, rattling everything off as though counting his own treasures.
Meng Hongchen occasionally dropped by, carrying a cup of hot soup or passing over a bottle of chilled spirit tea. Then her brother sent her back to continue drawing blueprints-she still had the Self-Created Soul Skill to worry about.
The days passed like that, one after another.
And just like that, a full two months went by.