Jade Dragon Beauty

That night Shen returned to the forge. There were two young men there, one seventeen and one nineteen. She watched them for around a minute, talking and joking instead of concentrating on their work, when the younger one saw her standing there. "Come to watch some men work, huh?" he said, flexing his bicep. "I don't mind. Name's Jing, and this is my cousin Mang. I doubt he minds letting a young woman watch him either, even if he is a bit older."

"Hey," said Mang. "I'm only two years older than you." he responded, tending to the fire in his forge now that his friend wasn't distracting him."

"I meant you were too old for her." Jing responded. "Of course, I'm not that much older than you, so if you want to watch, feel free to do so. Maybe after my shift I can even give you a closer look."

"Really?" said Shen, acting embarrassed, like she was the kind of girl he was hoping for. "But are you sure you should be saying that kind of thing. After all, it's still two days before I'm an adult."

Jing looked embarrassed and Mang looked at him and started laughing. "I knew you were into younger women, but you got to wait until their fifteenth." he said, giggling. Of course, if she had been significantly younger it would have been a much bigger deal, but with her being so close it was more of a joke.

Ming was about to say something when Shen held up her hand. "How about this. Before you embarrass yourself further by asking me to come back in two days so you don't risk starting a rumor, how about we change the subject?" She went over to the backup smelter and threw in a load of coal, then snapped her fingers. A tiny flame formed on the end of her index finger and she threw it into the coals. The chi quickly spread out and lit several pieces.

"Hey, you can't just use the equipment." protested Jing, "You've got to talk to the boss first, and…"

Shen held up a stone tablet she had been given when she finished fixing the forge. "I talked with Kan this morning. He's renting me the backup smelter for three days."

Jing looked the tablet over. "This is a rental slip. But are you sure you know what you are doing? I mean, you don't look weak or anything, but…"

Shen smirked. "I know better than you do." she said, standing up to go to the storage shed. It had already been opened by the other two, as they needed to get ore from it, so she was able to go inside and get her cart. The two boys looked surprised that she could move such a heavy cart by herself. "How about we make a bet." she said after returning. "Ten stones says I'll smelt my two barrels of ore faster than the two of you can smelt two barrels, and it will be higher quality afterwards."

Jing checked to make sure that the ore was the same quality as their ore before agreeing. Both of them were likely using ore pulled out of the same mine, so the quality was nearly identical. The two of them nodded and Mang pulled out the stones. "Sure, I'll take that bet." he said. Shen looked at Jing and he also nodded, putting her stones on ingot shelf beside Mang's.

Shen nodded. "In that case, let the contest begin." She raised her palm towards the smelter and shot out a jet of flame, adding a good bit more heat which started spreading through the equipment. The boys looked surprised that she could do that, but didn't say anything, quickly going over to their own smelter to tend to it.

Shen's smelter quickly got up to temperature and she lifted one of the barrels off the cart before throwing her sword on the ground without using her hands, stepping onto it, and floating to the top of the smelter. It was more difficult to use a flying sword while carrying something, but she had already learned to do so while hauling flowers back at the sect, so she was able to do it easily. Normally you wouldn't add the ore directly, as the pieces would be too large to smelt properly, leaving unrefined metal in the middle of the ore chunks. She had a way to deal with that, however. Once she was high enough she set the barrel on the rim of the smelter's top and motioned for a chunk of ore to come out. When it did, supported by what Earth and Metal chi she could make without concentration, she had the metal chi pull it apart into smaller pieces, an action which resulted in almost all of the iron ore within the rock being near the surface. She then dropped the pieces into the smelter and grabbed another.

The two boys had dumped their ore into a giant mortar, and were using a metal pestle, working together to drop it on the chunks, to crush them. By the time they had broken up all of the rocks in the first barrel Shen had finished loading her smelter.

She returned to the ground and started watching the flames. While she could increase the temperature with her fire chi, the volume of the smelter was so large that she would exhaust herself if she did so for very long. At best, she could melt half of the iron with what she had, and that was only due to its extreme purity and the practice she had done to maximize her capacity.

An hour later she placed the sand-mold ingot trays below the drain and removed stone plug. Liquid iron began coming out and she filled all of her molds within a few minutes. Once all of the iron and slag had left the smelter she grabbed the tool and started scraping out the gravel that was left in the bottom of the machine. While it was at the same temperature as the melted iron, at least 16 lik, she used her fire chi to put a barrier around her skin to block the heat. Blocking this much heat would deplete her reserves in about an hour, so she couldn't use it all of the time, but it was good enough for now.

After emptying it of gravel she grabbed the other barrel and loaded the smelter a second time. The boys were just now reaching the correct temperature with their own iron, having used the billows to make the coal burn faster and hotter so that the ore heated faster. She didn't worry, though, and after loading the machine with both ore and coal, returned to the ground. There she sent a stream of fire chi into the ingots and started moving their heat into the ore, then did the same with the large pile of hot gravel. She depleted her own reserves by doing this but got the new batch of ore up to over eight lik by doing so, hot enough that the coal in the smelter started to burn.

She returned the stone plug to the drain and sat down beside the pile of gravel to start meditating. The rapid cooling of the ingots might have caused them to crack if she had moved their heat away too quickly, so she spent just as long doing so as with the entire pile of gravel slag. It didn't matter how quickly she cooled the slag, so she didn't bother trying to cool it evenly, resulting in most of the material being smaller than what it had been as the stress of rapid cooling had caused it to break apart.

An hour later, after emptying the ingots and refilling them with sand, she sent her divine sense into the smelter and saw that it was at around sixteen and a half liks in temperature and that all of the iron had pooled in the bottom of the smelter, so she removed the plug and filled more molds with the liquid iron. Once they were finished being filled, she repeated the process of removing the slag gravel and reloaded it with scrap spirit iron.

By the time she finished returning the heat to the new batch the boys were adding the second load of ore to their smelter. They had to wait for the slag to cool before they could remove it, so they were just now starting on the second batch.

Shen acted like she wasn't interested in what they were doing and returned to meditating. Here in the forge, beside two furnaces and a pile of warm stone, she could easily study the fire, and spent the next hour examining it. Desert heat seemed different than the Fire she was used to in the mountains, and the heat produced by coal fire was different than the charcoal fire she had gotten used to there as well, so by the time it was time to start on the second load of scrap iron she had gained another percent on her Fire purity, bringing it up to 29%. She would have to cycle that chi later to condition her meridians better.

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She loaded another set of scrap iron then, after refilling her reserves again, started pulling out old armor and weapons and disassembling them, removing anything that wasn't metal. She sorted the metal components into the various types and by the time the smelter was finished she had enough spirit iron for a fifth and part of a sixth batch, enough spirit steel for at least one batch, and a small amount of other metals.

"Okay," said the older boy, Mang. "We finished the second load, so whenever your's is finished cooling, we can compare them.

"Oh, this is actually my fourth load." Shen said, throwing a broken and rusted spirit iron sword blade on the pile. "The two sets of ingots from my ore are in that stack, though, if you want to look." She pointed to two neat stacks on the nearby work table. "I just had a lot of scrap metal to smelt as well, and didn't want to waste the heat."

Jing came over, covered in sweat and soot, and punched Mang on the arm. Not that Shen wasn't also covered in those things. "See, I told you she was going at twice our speed. I saw her doing something with her hands, and the heat from the hot gravel went back into the smelter."

"Strange enough that she can clean it out without waiting for it to cool." scoffed Mang, "But now you're telling me she can somehow magically move heat from a pile of slag on the ground to the ore in the furnace?"

"Chi technique, not magic." said Shen, "Though I guess they do call it chi magic sometimes, so you aren't entirely wrong. Anywhere there's heat, there is fire chi, and by moving that you can move the heat."

"So you're a cultivator?" asked Jing, surprised. "I thought so, when I saw you use your sword to lift you up, but wasn't sure."

"Yep." she said. "I'm a Fire cultivator, and also a relic crafter. If you want me to make you something, though, I can." If you'll wait a minute, though, I think this load of iron is done." She got up, emptied the smelter, and reloaded it with more scrap, and after it started smelting she went over to the ingots. "So, what do you think?" she asked the two boys.

"We got a little over half a bar more than you from each smelt." said Mang. "That's a bit of lost productivity. Quality wise, I'm not sure how to test it."

"Well, I can tell you that both of our first batches were Average quality, with mine only slightly better, but my second load was High quality, due to using fire chi to heat it up half way. I burnt out more impurities and left a little more chi in the metal. If you want a test you don't have to be a cultivator to use, though, we can use a scratch test." She looked through a few drawers in the table and found what she was looking for, a few diamond shards. The gem was common enough in the desert, but weren't very useful outside of some industrial uses and the occasional relic crafting use, like making fake spirit stones comparable to middle grade ones which weren't destroyed on use, so they were only on par with spirit stones in value. Since they likely had a local source Shen decided to look into them as a possible power source for her talismans in the future. "Here, scratch them with this. As long as you use the same amount of pressure both times, my second batch should scratch to less than half the depth of my first or either of your two batches."

Mang did so and, as predicted, Shen's was only scratched deep enough to hang a fingernail while Mang's was scratched enough to easily notice. Jing sighed. "Guess she wins." he said, and Mang agreed.

"Yeah. Her yield was a bit lower, probably due to rushing the crushing of her ore, but it is better quality." He motioned towards the shelf of twenty spirit stones and Shen nodded before loading them into her ring. "So, I'm guessing being a cultivator is what let you beat us, but if it just speeds up the smelting, I don't see how it's worth the time."

"Oh, it does a lot more than that. I'm way stronger than I look." Shen went over to her cart, which likely weighed more than a horse, and, after sliding under it, Released her chi and bench pressed it three times before setting it back down and sliding out from under it.

"Great." said Jing. "Not only is a little girl able to smelt faster than us, but she's as strong as a horse too."

"Not too little for you to flirt with, though." she said, and Mang giggled. "I have a few other tricks too, like fire barriers and attacks, but they don't directly translate into smithing. Would make you a better fighter, though, if you decide to do that after you've learned smithing."

Mang shook his head and sighed. "Let me guess. The Boss put you up to this. He wanted us to see how useful cultivation is, so we would be willing to practice, and figured we would be so embarrassed by a girl beating us that we would be willing to try it."

Shen nodded. "Yeah, I came up with the idea, and he agreed to give it a try."

Mang nodded. "Consider the sale made, then." He went inside to get the manual and brought it out. "Cultivation seems way too useful to not do it." he said, setting the book on the table. "I don't know about Jing, but I'll start now, while the smelter works."

Shen nodded and walked over to her smelter, where she sat down in front of it. "Well, if you need any pointers, I'll be over here, studying the fire chi. There's a lot you can learn from it once you learn what to look for."

Jing smiled and laughed. "Good one." he said, going to sit beside Mang.

"I wasn't joking. Look for the term 'dao' in the book. The dao of fire isn't the most complicated one, but it is quite useful."

For the rest of the night Shen smelted scrap and the boys smelted two more loads of ore. She ended up doing eight loads, seven spirit iron and one spirit steel, and the boys did four loads of iron. When Kan got there the next morning He was surprised to see that four entire loads had been smelted and that Mang was meditating, though Jing was busy trying to activate a talisman of some sort. He walked over to where Shen was also meditating and gave her a questioning look.

"Mission accomplished." she said, not opening her eyes. Kan was a bit surprised, but she spoke up again. "Divine sense, extending my sight. I'm also looking through the surrounding desert to see if there is anything useful out there, but so far I've only found a few pieces of scrap metal that aren't worth going after."

"Well, I can see that Mang is trying to meditate, but Jing?"

"I gave him a light talisman. I told him I would give him a stone if he could make it glow constantly for an entire minute by the time I return tonight, so he's trying his best to win it. I did take five stones from each of them last night, after all."

Kan nodded. "Well, that does make a pretty good chi control exercise, but it doesn't exactly use enough chi for him to heat a forge or anything."

"Enough to light it, though. Besides, he's only in the middle of Cleansing at the moment, so he doesn't have much chi anyway. Even something that simple is draining him faster than he can naturally recover, though, so he probably can't keep going for more than another five minutes before he's too weak to even stand up." Shen opened her eyes and stood up. "I would get him to stop drinking for a few weeks while he uses a detox pill every day. His liver is looking a bit more stressed than Mang's, but I'm not an apothecary or alchemist, so I don't know if that's a big deal. Still, he won't be able to stomach the alcohol once he's on the pills, and they'll get him to peak."

"Any idea about their potential?" Kan asked.

Shen shook her head. "Don't have a technique to test them, but if you want one, I can make you a potential testing stone. I've got the formation in one of my books. I'll only charge one stone, since they aren't that hard to make."

He agreed, so Shen picked up a Stone sized stone from the ground nearby and brought an engraving tool from her ring, and five minutes later the stone started glowing bright blue. She took it over to a table and set it down. "It's done." she said. "Red is Cleansing potential, Yellow is Gathering, Green is Foundation, Blue is Nascent, and White is Immortal. Theoretically there's also a purple, which is Ascended, but it's unlikely you'll ever see it, as I doubt there's more than two people with that potential on the whole world."

Kal picked it up and it glowed a dull green. "Not bad. Foundation potential. Though not a lot of chi capacity." Kal looked at her confused. "The brightness tells you how much your chi reserves will naturally increase with each realm. There's an exercise you can do to improve that, but naturally you won't have much chi. Maybe four times as much with each level. Maybe five. I'm not the best at reading the brightness."

Kal nodded and handed the stone to each of his apprentices. Jing's was a bright red that lit up the area, and Mang's was a duller, but still bright enough, yellow. "Not bad." said Shen. "Though I'm guessing Jing has an addictive personality, which is blocking him from reaching Gathering. Most heart demons at that level are simple to understand things like addiction or trauma. Not always the easiest to fix, though."

Kal nodded and thanked her, and, after she sold him two sets of Average and one set of High quality spirit iron, she left for the inn. She definitely needed a bath.