“A blacksmith needs a flame,” Cha Ming muttered. He summoned the Grandmist flame but immediately banished it. If anyone saw the unique flame, his cover would be blown within seconds. No, he needed to do things the hard way here. In the South, he was not Cha Ming but Pai Xiao, a fire-and-metal dual cultivator. He summoned two flames, a gold one and a red one, and forced them together into an orange-gold flame. It would possess superior temperature control while also possessing the ability to mold and shape metal to some extent. It wasn’t a common flame, but neither was it rare. It was a perfect fit for Pai Xiao, an undiscovered talent who’d come very far on his own with little formal training.
Nodding in satisfaction, Cha Ming walked downstairs where the worried Guo Xiang was waiting for him as the old smith, Li Ning, was packing as quickly as possible.
“Relax, there’s no need to fear for your job,” Cha Ming said. “I’ll need someone to keep people away while I work.” She relaxed visibly when he said this, but much of the discomfort remained.
“Now where did Li Ning put the blacksteel?” he muttered.
The attendant jumped at his words and immediately babbled out a string of incomprehensible words.
“Sorry, what did you say?”
“So sorry, Master,” Guo Xiang said. “It’s in the warehouse, third row from the back. I’ll lead you there right away.”
“Please,” Cha Ming said. The words they exchanged were few but very telling. She wasn’t just his employee; she was his servant. Or so he thought, until he spotted a mark on her forearm near her wrist. It contained a number, a pictograph, and many interconnected lines.
He realized he’d seen that mark somewhere before. It had been on one of the documents Li Ning had passed on to him as part of the sale.
Guo Xiang, it seemed, was his slave.
Chapter 6: Reaping
Black rocks melted in a golden cauldron, which hung atop a fire in the back of Cha Ming’s workshop. The ore in the cauldron, a dark-gray rock marbled with lighter gray impurities, was eighty percent blacksteel. The dark metal was one he’d grown familiar with over the past two weeks. It was strong, had a low melting point, and was abundant everywhere on the continent. He’d also seen it used in the other smithies in town, which gave him a reference point for his work.
The black liquid that ran off the gray remnants of the ore was the result of the first step in spiritual blacksmithing: extraction. Like alchemy, each step was crucial in the smithing process. Cha Ming stirred as most of the ore was reduced to a thick black liquid speckled with gray solids. Other ores didn’t melt so readily; they could only be partially separated, the remaining impurities needing to be hammered out at higher temperatures to complete the purification process.
Melted blacksteel, on the other hand, could be directly cast into a workable metal. The solid black material could be used to make least-grade or lesser-grade magic weapons, depending on the skill of the smith.
After giving the melting pot another half hour, Cha Ming used his soul force to retrieve the grit, which he placed in a second pot. There, he intensified the temperature. A quarter of the gray flecks melted into a liquid silver puddle in the smaller pot. This metal, true silver, was useless to his current project, so he poured it into a small brick cast, smacking it out with his hammer into a quench barrel upon cooling. He stored the resulting silver brick on a shelf before returning to the golden pot, which contained the melted blacksteel he desired.
A hundred percent black iron is no good for a high-quality blade, he recalled from a book he’d read. Runes inscribed on the metal are too susceptible to qi erosion. The quenched metal was also too soft to make higher-grade magic treasures. Unlike mortal swords, runic ones were better off being hard. There were exceptions to the rule, of course. Things like heavy blades and great axes, whose large size allowed for a more spread-out runic diagrams, benefited from a tougher, softer metal. But he’d already fulfilled his childhood fantasy of making a giant sword earlier this week, so for now, he’d make a longsword.
How much more time are you going to waste here? Sun Wukong asked, appearing beside Cha Ming as he worked. I finished planting the memories two days ago, and your paperwork was finalized a week ago.
Not much longer, Cha Ming replied. I just want to finish this blade for the city lord. Consider it my final apology. He motioned to a shelf on the side and summoned a small dark-gold brick and a larger dark-silver one. The first was an alloying metal called geralsium. He took the brick of metal, which was soft in its pure form, and cut it in half with a single swipe of his soul-alloy knife. He plopped one half of the gold bar into the pot and stirred it quickly. The metal goop within thickened as the bar melted, forcing him to increase the temperature. The two metals would strengthen and harden as they bonded, allowing Cha Ming to forge a much stronger weapon from the base metal.
An hour later, the last of the gold bar finished dissolving. Cha Ming took the dark-silver bar and began whittling away shavings of it into the golden pot. The shavings quickly dissolved into the molten black metal. There was no change in color or texture of the liquid mixture this time—the changes would only materialize on hardening.
Cha Ming rolled up a cast to the side of the hanging pot once the shavings finished melting. He tipped the pot, and the red
