Gengxin City

The journey from Blacksmith Village to Gengxin City took three days.

Ye Lingling traveled faster than Nan Feng had expected. At the academy, she walked without any particular haste, but when they really needed to cover ground, she never fell a step behind.

The two followed the main road north and a little east. They traveled by day and rested at small roadside inns in the evening. When they encountered caravans heading their way, they rode in their wagons for part of the journey.

On the evening of the second day, a gray-black silhouette emerged on the horizon at the end of the road. Smoke and dust rose from a dense cluster of chimneys, staining half the sky gray.

Gengxin City looked nothing like Nuoding City.

Nuoding City had blue-brick walls and gray-tiled roofs, with leisurely pedestrians strolling through its streets. Gengxin City was like a block of iron thrown into boiling water, giving off heat and hammer blows everywhere. The air was filled with the smell of white steam rising from red-hot metal plunged into cold water.

The city walls were nearly twice as high as Nuoding City's, built from black-gray ore and pitted across their surface. Long lines of wagons waited to pass through the gates, loaded with ore, iron ingots, coke, and metal materials Nan Feng couldn't name.

Carrying his bundle, Nan Feng entered the city among the crowd. Ye Lingling followed beside him, her gaze caught for a long while by the iron archway at the gate.

Two crossed hammers and a furnace were carved into the archway. Three characters were engraved on the stone base below: Gengxin City.

A wave of heat hit them as they passed through the gate. Blacksmith shops and metalworking workshops lined both sides of the street, and the sound of hammering rang from one end to the other without pause.

Flames in the furnaces lit the blacksmiths' faces red. Bare-chested men swung heavy hammers against anvils, sweat running down the grooves of their backs.

"The fire-attribute presence here is very strong," Ye Lingling said.

Nan Feng nodded.

The Blacksmith Association's headquarters stood in the center of the city. The vast stone hall was square, with eight stout stone pillars across its front, each carved with a different forging design.

A huge iron plaque hung over the entrance. The four characters for "Blacksmith Association" were cast in relief, their strokes thick and solid.

Nan Feng looked up at the plaque. A line of small characters in its lower right corner gave the year the association had been founded, more than three hundred years ago.

"Do you have business here?" Ye Lingling asked.

"I'm looking for something."

Nan Feng hitched his bundle more securely onto his shoulder and headed for the hall.

A burly man in a leather apron stopped him at the entrance and looked him up and down. Seeing that he was young and carrying a bundle, and didn't look like someone there to do business, the man waved him inside.

The hall was cooler than outside, with a soaring ceiling and vents in the dome. Metal goods were displayed along both sides: farming tools, weapons, ornaments, and several intricate machines whose purposes were unclear.

Nan Feng made a circuit of the hall, extending his perception through the tower to scan each exhibit.

A few gave off faint Spiritual Power responses, but their grades weren't high, and all were protected by restrictions. He couldn't touch them.

A corridor at the back of the hall led to the used materials market. Nan Feng followed it out into an open-air square.

The square was piled high with metal materials, from heaps of scrap iron and offcuts to neatly stacked rare ores, sorted into dozens of rows.

People came and went across the square. Blacksmiths selected materials while merchants haggled over prices. Several youths around Nan Feng's age crouched among the scrap heaps, rummaging through them.

Nan Feng made his way around most of the market, spreading his perception loosely like a cast net.

Ordinary iron, copper, and lead formed a hazy gray background in his mind. The occasional brighter points were things like hundred-year Cold Iron and hundred-year Red Copper, nothing particularly rare.

Ye Lingling followed beside him, occasionally crouching to look through the ores. She knew nothing about metals, but the Nine Heart Begonia's perception of life energy allowed her to recognize which ores held active Spiritual Power.

Nan Feng stopped at the third row.

That row was piled entirely with scraps collected from various places: broken fragments of blades and swords, shattered pieces of armor, and lumps of slag left over from smelting.

Nan Feng crouched down and sorted through them one by one. His hand sifted through the dusty scrap iron, every piece cold and rough against his fingertips.

A dozen or so pieces in, his fingers touched something that felt different.

Its surface was extremely coarse, like molten slag that had cooled after being burned at high heat. In his hand, it felt nearly twice as heavy as the surrounding pieces of iron.

The instant his fingertips touched it, the Soul Power in his dantian jolted, and the cyan light in the crack at the base of the tower flashed for an instant.

Nan Feng pulled the object out. It was the size of a fist, wrapped in a pitted shell of gray-black slag, no different from ordinary furnace waste.

He turned it over and found a chip in the bottom. The shell had broken along the edge, exposing a small section of the metal within.

It was deep cyan, with an exceedingly fine, cold sheen under the daylight, almost like rippling water. He leaned closer and saw tiny, dense patterns on the metal's surface, like frozen ice crystals, or tree rings shrunk hundreds of times and layered together.

Old Huai's voice drifted from the crack at the base of the tower. He kept it very low, but couldn't conceal his excitement.

"Cold Iron Core. A thousand years old. Wrapped in slag and thrown into a scrap heap-some blacksmith shop must not have recognized it while smelting iron and tossed it out as waste."

Clutching the Cold Iron Core, Nan Feng stood and walked over to the attendant buying materials.

The attendant was in his twenties, crouched in front of another scrap heap and keeping accounts. When Nan Feng approached, he casually turned the piece over and hefted it.

"Scrap, sold by weight. Thirty copper coins."

Nan Feng didn't haggle. He counted out thirty copper coins and handed them over. The attendant took the money, made a mark in his ledger, and waved him away.

Nan Feng tucked the Cold Iron Core into his bundle and left the used materials market. He wasn't in a hurry to leave, so he returned to the hall and stopped at the forging practice area.

The association had set up several simple forges in a corner of the hall, equipped with hammers and anvils. Nan Feng borrowed a set of tools from the old master in charge of the forges and chipped away the slag shell around the Cold Iron Core bit by bit.

The shell was brittle, and he had to be extremely careful when striking it, or he would damage the Cold Iron inside. He used a small hammer to tap around the edge of the chip, and the gray-black shell flaked away piece by piece, revealing the whole Cold Iron Core.

The intact Cold Iron Core was a size larger than he had expected. Its blue-black metal surface was covered in fine, dense patterns, and it gleamed with a cold cyan light in the glow of the furnace.

He turned the Cold Iron Core over several times, checked that there were no cracks on its surface, and put it away.

The old master came over for a look and let out a surprised sound.

"Where did you find that piece?"

"At the used materials market. I dug it out of a scrap iron heap."

The old master looked again and shook his head.

"Good material. I don't know what spendthrift threw it away. You've got good luck, young man."

He patted Nan Feng on the shoulder, then turned and walked away without asking further.

By the time they left the association, it was dark. Nan Feng found a cheap inn in the west of the city and asked for two adjoining rooms.

Ye Lingling returned to her room to rest. Nan Feng shut the doors and windows, sat on the edge of the bed, and took out the Cold Iron Core.

He pressed the Cold Iron Core to his chest, closed his eyes, and sank into the depths of his soul. The nine-story Bronze Tower floated in the darkness. The base of the first-floor door at the bottom of the tower had been welded in place by the Meteoric Iron Core, holding firm without any sign of loosening.

He drew the Cold Iron Core's Spiritual Power into the tower, where it became a cyan-white ball of light that floated toward the base. The tower shuddered when the light touched its lower edge.

The ring of verdigris around the tower's base darkened as if splashed with cold water, then spread outward from the edge, smoothing over a small patch of the mottled, uneven surface.

The power of Cold Iron was different from that of the Meteoric Iron Core.

The Meteoric Iron Core provided "stability," welding down the foundation of the door's hinge. The Cold Iron Core provided "extension," like laying another sheet of iron around the doorframe, filling in the tiny gaps and cracks around the edge of the tower's base.

The tower as a whole was a little more complete than before. It was like an old house whose main beam had first been reinforced and whose cracks at the corners had then been patched.

Nan Feng tried to activate Tower Suppression. The moment the cyan halo spread through the guest room, he felt that the suppressive force had gained another layer of substance compared with when he had used it in Blacksmith Village.

His Soul Power consumption hadn't changed, but the same amount of Soul Power produced a much weightier suppressive effect.

"The first floor is nearly ready," Old Huai said. "The foundation of the door hinge has been welded in place, and the edge has been patched all the way around. But the door itself hasn't been pushed open. Only when your Soul Power reaches level twenty can it be fully opened. That's when the tower will evolve for the first time."

"Tower Suppression can now hold down opponents a tier higher than before. But that alone isn't enough. To push your Soul Power from level sixteen to level twenty, you can only rely on cultivation for the four levels in between. Keep practicing the Circulation Acceleration Method and the Compression Method, and use the Power of Mountain Suppression to protect your meridians."

Nan Feng withdrew his consciousness and opened his eyes to look at the Cold Iron Core in his palm, which had lost most of its luster. Its color had changed from blue-black to gray-white, and the ice-crystal patterns on its surface had dimmed as well.

He put the Cold Iron Core back in his bundle and lay down on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Water stains had spread across the wooden boards overhead, forming patterns like a map.

He stared for a while, calculating the road ahead in his mind.

Heaven Dou City, Ye Lingling, and then onward north. His Soul Power was at level sixteen, four levels short of twenty.

At a normal cultivation speed, it would take well over half a year. With the Circulation Acceleration Method and the Power of Mountain Suppression working together, he could shorten it to four or five months.

The first-floor door at the base of the tower was steadier than before, and the output of the Power of Mountain Suppression was a little more substantial as well.

He closed his eyes and circulated the Primordial World Qi Refining Art. The Soul Power in his dantian traveled through his meridians in cycle after cycle, warm and steady.

Nights in Gengxin City were noisier than in Blacksmith Village, and the distant hammering didn't stop until late. Nan Feng sank into sleep before it ceased.

The red hair ribbon around his left wrist draped over the edge of the bed, taking on a warm glow in the moonlight filtering through the window.