Yoriichi looked at the heavy hammer held out to him. The handle was worn smooth by decades of sweat and grip, the black iron head scarred from countless battles against unyielding metal. It hung in the air like a gauntlet thrown down by a giant.
Tie Shan, the Master Smith of the Xiao Clan, watched him with eyes that were narrowed slits of skepticism. The heat of the furnace roared between them, a wall of thermal pressure that distorted the air and would have withered a lesser man.
"Well?" Tie Shan grunted, his voice rumbling over the crackle of the fire. "Talk is cheap, Young Master. The hammer is heavy. Can you lift it, or do you just have a tongue sharp enough to cut air?"
The apprentices nearby stopped their work. The rhythmic clang-clang of the hall died down, replaced by a suffocating silence. Dozens of eyes—some amused, some pitying, most mocking—bore into Yoriichi's back. They waited for the humiliated young noble to drop the hammer and run.
Yoriichi didn't respond with words. He reached out.
His hand, wrapped in thin, dirty bandages that were already stained with the day's grime, grasped the handle.
Heavy.
That was the first sensation. The hammer weighed at least thirty kilograms. For a cultivator with Dou Qi, it was a toy. For Yoriichi, whose body was currently a wreck of fractured ribs, torn muscles, and depleted energy, it felt like lifting a mountain.
A bolt of pain shot up his arm, screaming across his shoulder blade and stabbing into his chest. His ribs protested violently, the bone threatening to grind against bone. His knees trembled, the shin injury from the morning training flaring up with a hot, sickening throb.
"Breath of the Sun," Yoriichi commanded his internal biology, his mind overruling the agony of the flesh. "Total Concentration. Stabilize the core. Create a corset of muscle to hold the skeleton together."
He inhaled sharply—a sound like a whip cracking in the silent hall.
The air around him seemed to vibrate. He tightened his grip. The trembling in his arm ceased as he flooded the limb with oxygenated blood and his dense, compressed Dou Qi. He lifted the hammer. He brought it up to his chest level, steady as a statue.
His expression remained terrifyingly calm, devoid of the strain that was ripping his body apart internally.
"I accept," Yoriichi said softly.
He stepped up to the anvil. The heat was blistering here, singing the fine hairs on his arms and drying his eyes. The bar of Ice Silver glowed with a sickly, uneven blue light. To the others, it just looked unstable. To Yoriichi, it was screaming.
He didn't use the Transparent World. The headache from earlier warned him that his brain couldn't handle the strain of visual processing. Instead, he closed his eyes.
He listened.
He tuned out the roar of the fire. He tuned out the whispers of the apprentices ("He's actually going to try it?"). He tuned out his own pain.
He listened to the soul of the metal.
Ping... screeee... hiss... ping...
The vibration of the Ice Silver was chaotic. It was suffocating. Inside the molten lattice, tiny pockets of gas—sulfur and wood smoke from the coal bellows—were trapped, acting like tumors. They were preventing the cold Ice element from fusing with the iron structure, creating a war within the bar.
"There," Yoriichi thought, his mind locking onto a microscopic point of dissonance. "It is choking."
He raised the hammer high above his head.
Tie Shan's eyes widened. The boy's stance... it wasn't the stance of a smith. It wasn't the brute-force posture of someone trying to smash rock. It was the stance of a swordsman preparing to cut the neck of a demon. His feet were rooted, his hips aligned, his breathing synchronized with the pulse of the glowing bar.
Clang.
Yoriichi struck.
He didn't hit the center. He didn't hit the edge. He struck a specific, innocuous point three inches from the tip.
The sound wasn't a dull thud. It was a sharp, piercing ring—a bell tone that echoed through the entire hall, vibrating in the teeth of every man present.
Tie Shan gasped. He saw it—a tiny plume of grey smoke hissed out of the metal, forced out by the precise pressure of the strike. The screeching wail of the metal dropped an octave.
Yoriichi didn't stop. The rhythm had taken him.
Clang.
The second strike landed on the opposite side, twisting the metal's vibration. It forced the internal lattice to align, shoving the molecules of Ice Silver into the gaps left by the gas.
Clang.
The third strike was the hardest. It was a finishing blow, a command for the metal to submit. Yoriichi put his entire hip rotation into it, ignoring the scream of his injured leg.
THRUM.
The sound lasted for seconds. Yoriichi exhaled, a long, white stream of breath leaving his lips like steam from a kettle. He lowered the hammer.
The change was instant and miraculous.
The erratic, screeching vibration stopped. The Ice Silver bar no longer pulsed with a sickly, flickering light. Instead, it glowed with a steady, deep azure luminescence, calm and profound as a frozen lake. The core had stabilized. The air pockets were gone. The metal was now ready to accept Dou Qi without shattering.
The hall was deathly silent. Even the fire seemed to hold its breath.