The Yuhao Chronicles - Volume 1 Chapter 10

Over the week, Yuhao and his mother had been able to rent a house quite close to the workshop. It was moderately priced as it was fairly close to the main road and not too far into the common district. Each night after working on the lumps, Yuhao would have a short talk with Amra before cultivating throughout the night.

He found out, now that he actually had a spirit ring his cultivation technique could increase, he was generating about one year’s worth of origin energy for every hour he was actively cultivating. The passive aspect of his cultivation also generated energy however, at a decreased rate with only one year per four hours. Yuhao was still very happy as over the course of the week, including the extra day of travelling to Soutuo City, the 1020-year-old Black-Gold Turtle had become a 1,128-year-old ring.

‘Only 200 odd years until 1,000,000 years’ He joked to himself. However, he did sense that his cultivation technique would generate more origin essence as his spirit rank increased. How much it would rise was still unknown.

In regards to Yuhao’s job of hammering the metal, it was finally finished. After continuously hammering the iron lumps, he ended up with seven, flatter, purer, more silver, lumps than before. While his strength back on Earth would have been way more than enough to shatter the metal after continuous hammering, all the resources worldwide had been constantly infused by natural energies as they were created, enhancing their durability and strength several times over. This allowed spirit masters to use simple iron swords even when fighting against spirit beasts or other spirit masters, without them breaking constantly or being physically unable to cause harm.

“Haha, you have done nice work little Yuhao” Zeran stated, tapping his back in his now customary sign of congratulations and happiness.

“Thanks, Zeran. What am I going to do now?” He asked, curiosity shining in his eyes. Even if he had a combined mental age of forty-two, he could still look and learn about his hobbies with a child’s innate curiosity.

“Good. Good. To be honest, you have definitely surprised me. While at first I just wanted to see how you would go completing the task being so young, by the end of the week your perseverance and determination really astounded me. When I remember what I was doing back when I was your age, all I did was cultivate when my parents forced me to and played in the mud at the park with the other kids from the city.” The blacksmith said.

Embarrassed, Yuhao just scratched the back of his head, not knowing how to reply.

Zeran seeing this chuckled and continued, “Well, the next step is forging. While blacksmithing has both forging and casting aspects to it, I, like my father before me, never use casting unless it is the only viable way to do something. Even though I don’t want to tell you what to do, seeing as you are mature enough to make your own decisions, blacksmiths who only use casting techniques do so entirely for-profit purposes without regards to the resources they use and don’t care that they are selling their customers, inferior products. They are a blemish to the craft.”

“Yes, sir” Yuhao hastily replied, eager to move on from the topic that he noticed caused Zeran anger.

Zeran happy with his quick reply continued, “Forging requires a blacksmith to personally hammer the metal from start to finish. What you have done over the past week is a simplified process of this, somewhat resembling a machine pounding a metal. Now, the next stage for any good blacksmith to be able to read and understand the metal you are working with. Each metal is different, somewhat like how each cultivator is different.”

Following this statement, he picked up the first lump of metal that Yuhao had worked on during his first day.

“See this metal here. Can you see the difference in colour and texture the two halves have? This is the impurities. At the end of the day, you had compressed all of the impurities towards the bottom of the lump, which gave it this darker and lighter texture.” He placed the lump back on the table and gestured to the next few lumps.

“While I was planning on explaining this effect to you initially, I decided to see how you handle it. From what I see here, even if you have no consciously recognised the impurities, by the end of the week you have not only managed to make the compressed area of impurities much smaller, but also well on your way to removing them in a good way for the metal.”

As Zeran brought Yuhao’s focus onto the lumps he had hammered, he began to finally see the small minute details in them. While he wanted to activate his spirit eyes when hammering as he had read the effects it could have in the original story, he didn’t want to announce that he had dual spirit essences to Zeran.

He did trust him more so than random people he would meet, which could be seen when he showed him his Steel Space Dragon spirit, he wanted his spirit eyes spirit as a trump card in case anything happened. Even though the people at his spirit awakening knew he had spirit eyes, the next time he will see any of them will be four years later at Shrek Academy. By that point in time, he would have matured physically significantly, much more than the original Yuhao did and he will be using his Steel Space Dragon spirit as his main spirit. Therefore, he will be highly unrecognisable to his stepbrothers at Shrek and won’t be suspected of being the bastard kid who ran away with his mother.

If a situation calls for him to need a second spirit to protect himself, Yuhao over the course of the week decided to use his Ice Jade Empress Scorpion spirit instead. While the Spirit eyes have extreme versatility, they are much easier to hide than the scorpion spirit would be. He figured that by getting an illusion or imitation skill as the original Yuhao did for his second spirit eyes ring, he will be able to use the spirit eyes without anyone knowing. This theoretically means he can use three spirit essences while everyone else just believes he has two.

“Yes, I see them” Yuhao replied.

“Now that you see them, what we will do next is preserving the metal itself. While hammering, you should focus on removing the impurities from the metal in ways that increase the density of the metal and preserve its strength.”

As Zeran explained the process to his apprentice, they both had smiles on their face as they explored new aspects of their hobbies further. Zeran as he was sharing his skills to a child he has a soft spot for and Yuhao as he was learning from an experienced blacksmith about a craft he held a lot of passion and drive for.