Smelting Hall Number Seven was not a place of creation; it was a place of brutal, unyielding destruction.
The moment Fang Lin stepped through the massive iron-reinforced archway, the heat hit him like a physical blow. The air inside the cavernous hall rippled and distorted, carrying the suffocating stench of sulfur, burning coal, and molten slag. In the center of the hall stood three colossal blast furnaces, each towering over fifty feet high, built from heat-resistant obsidian blocks and bound in heavy chains of dark steel. The roar of the fires was deafening, a constant, low-frequency rumble that vibrated straight through the granite floor and into the bones of anyone standing within.
Dozens of grey-robed outer disciples moved like ants around the base of the furnaces. Some were hauling massive iron carts filled with raw, jagged ore, while others swung heavy granite hammers, crushing the larger chunks into manageable sizes before feeding them into the roaring maws of the kilns. Their faces were smeared with black soot, their robes soaked in sweat, and their breathing ragged.
Fang Lin walked into the chaos, his completely unremarkable, average frame blending perfectly into the crowd of laborers. He carried no aura of arrogance, no sharp edge of a genius. To anyone looking, he was just another rogue body cultivator named Mu Tie, hoping to trade his sweat for a chance at a true legacy.
"You there! The new one!"
A harsh, grating voice cut through the mechanical roar.
Fang Lin turned to see a senior disciple marching toward him. The man looked to be in his late twenties, his face gaunt, his eyes sunken with chronic exhaustion, and his grey robes stained heavily with white ash. He wore a dark-iron badge on his chest, marking him as the hall's overseer.
"I am Senior Brother Ma Teng," the man barked, his voice hoarse from years of yelling over the furnaces. He looked Fang Lin up and down, his gaze lingering briefly on Fang Lin's thoroughly average build. There was no mockery in Ma Teng's eyes, only a deeply ingrained cynicism. "Elder Zhao sent word you wanted to earn points faster. Said you had ambition."
"I have strength, Senior Brother," Fang Lin replied smoothly, keeping his tone respectful but firm, perfectly matching his assumed persona. "And I have no fear of hard work."
Senior Brother Ma Teng let out a dry, hacking laugh that carried no humor. "Strength? Everyone who walks into this hall thinks they have strength. The heat here doesn't care about your muscles. It boils the Qi in your meridians and cooks your organs from the inside out. Ambition is just another word for burning out faster."
Ma Teng turned and pointed a soot-stained finger toward the right side of the hall, where a line of massive, flat granite anvils sat beneath heavy mechanical crushing arms.
"Crushing Station Four. And Fueling Gate Nine," Ma Teng ordered. "You want double merit points? Then you process two full carts of Black-Veined Iron Ore before the shift ends, and you keep Gate Nine's core temperature stable. Drop below the quota, and you get nothing. Collapse, and I'll have you dragged out to the medical tents at your own expense. Start."
Without waiting for a response, Ma Teng walked away, already yelling at another disciple who was slacking on a bellows crank.
Fang Lin did not argue. He simply walked toward Crushing Station Four.
He unstrapped the heavy black broad sword from his back, storing it away in a low-grade storage bag tied to his waist. He rolled up the sleeves of his coarse grey robes, revealing arms that were calloused and scarred, but otherwise completely ordinary in proportion.
A massive iron cart filled with raw Black-Veined Iron Ore sat next to the anvil. Each chunk was the size of a human head and weighed over a hundred pounds, laced with stubborn impurities that required immense force to shatter.
Fang Lin picked up the heavy, flat-headed crushing hammer resting on the anvil. The handle was thick, worn smooth by thousands of hands before him.
He didn't channel a single trace of Qi. He didn't need to.
Underneath his unremarkable exterior, his skeleton was forged to the Asura Flesh stage. His bones were denser than refined steel, his tendons woven with the terrifying, unending vitality of his suppressed Life Core. The heat radiating from the blast furnaces, which was already causing the standard Qi cultivators around him to pant and sway, felt like a mild summer breeze against his skin.
He raised the hammer.
*Clang.*
The impact was precise and devastating. The raw chunk of ore shattered instantly into perfectly sized fragments.
He did not swing with blinding speed, nor did he use explosive, earth-shattering force that would draw stares. Instead, Fang Lin fell into a steady, metronomic rhythm.
*Clang. Clang. Clang.*
He measured his pace perfectly. He calculated the exact speed required to finish two carts just before the shift ended, ensuring he looked like a man pushing himself to his absolute physical limit, without actually exerting more than a fraction of his true strength. He allowed his breathing to sound heavy. He let the ambient heat draw sweat from his pores, letting it mix with the coal dust in the air until his face and arms were covered in a gritty layer of dark soot.
Hours passed. The hall was a purgatory of noise and heat. Several outer disciples collapsed, their Qi reserves running dry as they tried to fend off the invasive sulfurous air. They were unceremoniously dragged away by attendants.
Senior Brother Ma Teng paced the walkways, his sharp eyes scanning the laborers. When his gaze fell on Fang Lin, Ma Teng paused.
The new disciple, Mu Tie, was not fast. He was not flashy. But he had not stopped moving for six straight hours. His unremarkable frame moved with the relentless, unyielding grind of a millstone. The pile of crushed ore beside his station was growing at a steady, uninterrupted rate.
Ma Teng's cynical expression softened by a fraction of a millimeter. *A dumb brute,* Ma Teng thought to himself, shaking his head slightly. *But a useful one. His bones are solid. If the heat doesn't fry his lungs, he might actually survive the year.*
Ma Teng marked something down on his iron clipboard and moved on.
Fang Lin noticed the overseer's gaze and the subsequent dismissal. It was exactly the reaction he wanted. He was now officially categorized as reliable, hardworking, and entirely unthreatening.
Having established his cover, Fang Lin turned his attention to his secondary task: Fueling Gate Nine.
He walked over to the base of the massive central blast furnace. The heat here was exponential, radiating from the thick obsidian blocks in localized waves that distorted the air. A massive iron chute led directly into the heart of the kiln, where blue-white flames roared with terrifying intensity.
Fang Lin began shoveling refined coal and crushed fire-stones into the chute. As he worked, he narrowed his eyes, his gaze piercing through the blinding light of the flames.
*The fire arrays in these furnaces are incredibly sophisticated,* Fang Lin analyzed internally, keeping his face blank as he shoveled. *But they aren't just designed to melt ore. The energy circulation is cyclical.*
He waited until Senior Brother Ma Teng was yelling at a disciple on the far side of the hall. Then, standing inches from the roaring chute, Fang Lin closed his eyes for a fraction of a second.
He did not use his Frost, Life, or Death cores. He simply drew upon the sheer, terrifying density of his Peak-Solid Soul. He compressed a single thread of his divine sense until it was infinitesimally thin, rendering it completely invisible to the ambient scanning arrays of the hall.
He extended the thread directly into the blue-white flames.
Instead of burning his sense, Fang Lin used the thermal currents of the fire array as a medium, tracing the energy pathway downward, past the floor of the smelting hall, deep into the bedrock of Broken Hammer Peak.
Down. Deeper. Past the local defensive formations. Past the subterranean water lines.
And then, his divine sense touched it.
It was not a physical object, but a conceptual weight. A suppression rune of such horrifying, ancient scale that it made the entire Black Tortoise Sect above feel like a fragile toy sitting on top of a sleeping leviathan.
The rune was completely ambiguous. It held no specific elemental affinity—no heat, no cold, no light, no darkness. It simply radiated an aura of absolute, crushing containment. It was a lock forged to hold something that defied the natural order.
Fang Lin's mind raced as his divine sense hovered at the very edge of the rune.
*The blast furnaces,* he realized, the pieces clicking together in his mind. *They aren't just smelting ore. The sect is using the massive thermal output of these kilns as an exhaust system. They are venting the ambient pressure of the seal, or perhaps siphoning the residual energy of whatever is trapped inside to power the forge.*
It was a brilliant, terrifying piece of ancient engineering. The Heavenly Forge Division was literally built on top of a ticking time bomb, using its latent pressure to forge weapons.
Suddenly, the blue-white flames in the chute flickered.
It was a microscopic fluctuation, lasting less than a millisecond. But in that instant, Fang Lin felt a minute, ancient pulse ripple upward from the massive lock below.
It was a heartbeat.
The rhythm of that ancient, suppressed pulse perfectly matched the silent, dormant thrumming of Fang Lin's own grey seed.
A chilling realization swept over him. Whatever was trapped beneath Broken Hammer Peak shared a resonance with the cosmic void energy slumbering in his spiritual sea. The realization was terrifying in its implication, but he forced the thought down, sealing it away.
Before the sect's deep-earth arrays could detect the anomaly, Fang Lin instantly severed his divine sense thread, pulling his awareness violently back into his physical body.
He stumbled half a step backward, his boots scraping against the granite floor. He quickly caught his balance, leaning heavily on the iron shovel and wiping a thick layer of soot and sweat from his forehead. To anyone watching, it simply looked like the heat had finally caused the hardworking brute to dizzy for a moment.
"Pace yourself, Mu Tie!" Senior Brother Ma Teng's voice barked from across the hall. "I won't have you collapsing and ruining my quota!"
"Understood, Senior Brother!" Fang Lin called back, his voice hoarse.
He resumed shoveling, his movements falling back into the steady, unremarkable rhythm of a laborer.
But behind his soot-stained face, Fang Lin's eyes were cold and sharp.
He had found the lock. He had sensed the faint resonance. Whatever was buried beneath his feet was incredibly dangerous—something he absolutely could not afford to provoke in his current state.
To dig deeper without being crushed, he needed access to the inner archives. He needed status.
*One thousand merit points,* Fang Lin calculated silently as the hammer fell again. *I will earn them in six months. Then, I enter the Heavenly Forge.*
The fire roared, the hammers crashed, and Fang Lin simply kept working, another cog in the massive, unfeeling machine of the sect.
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