Chapter 4182 — A Helpless Failure

The reaction was slow, so faint that an ordinary person could never have detected it. But Wei Zhao and Ragpicker Wang were no ordinary pair. Wei Zhao's senses were razor-sharp, needless to say, and Ragpicker Wang was a professional forger whose stock in trade was spotting the slightest shift in a material. That instant the lump of iron began to melt away like thousand-year-old ice could not possibly escape their eyes.

"It's working!" The two of them clapped palms in celebration at once. So long as the ice could be broken, everything that followed would come naturally, as water finds its channel.

Over the past two months and more, Ragpicker Wang had done far more than simply stare at that lump of iron. He had used the time to study the entire forging process ahead until he understood it down to the last detail, calculating every possible variation. He had prepared no fewer than a hundred contingency plans for this alone. If it still failed after that, one could only say the heavens willed it so.

Sure enough, the forging that followed showed Ragpicker Wang in complete command. Whenever the faintest sign of trouble appeared, he suppressed it at once, leaving it no chance to gather into anything more.

In the tense waiting, the days flew by in a flash. Wei Zhao's mood, at first calm and unrippled, gradually grew uneasy, because the final shaping had arrived!

Once it succeeded, given all the top-grade materials Wei Zhao had poured into it and all the effort Ragpicker Wang had spent, the divine weapon that emerged would be, if not unprecedented, then certainly one of the rarest in history. And Wei Zhao's already formidable strength would surely surge by another great measure!

And yet. In the midst of that hopeful dread, Ragpicker Wang's expression suddenly changed, and Wei Zhao's face turned subtly uneasy as well. At the very last step, the final shaping, it had stuck fast.

"What is it? Is something missing?" Wei Zhao could not help asking. To see it about to leave the furnace and then have it seize up like this—the feeling was like a hundred claws raking at his heart.

"Uh... nothing's missing, as it happens..." Ragpicker Wang turned and looked at Wei Zhao with a wry smile, and said helplessly, "When a divine weapon leaves the furnace, the heat control is everything. The temperature and the environment have to be regulated with absolute precision for it to come into the world smoothly. But I can't do it..."

"Huh? You can't?" Wei Zhao's face twisted in a grin that was half laughter, half tears. Of all times to announce that he simply couldn't do it—what was that supposed to mean?

"Brother Lin, if we fail again this time, the fault lies entirely with me." Ragpicker Wang's voice was grave, and then he scratched his head in stubborn disbelief. "But it's only this last bit of heat control. It's never given me trouble before. Why won't it work today? Is my forging really that lousy?"

"It's fine. We've come this far, so nothing else can go wrong. If one try fails, we try twice; if twice fails, we try three times. Let's just keep at it." Wei Zhao consoled him from the side.

Ragpicker Wang nodded and kept trying every method he could think of. But to his unspeakable frustration, no matter what he did, it simply would not work. There was always an error, tiny as it was, yet it seemed to have become an impassable gulf.

Now even Wei Zhao did not know how to console him. The two could only stare at each other, wide-eyed and speechless. Ragpicker Wang, usually so confident, could not help but begin to doubt whether his forging skills had truly failed him.

Little did they know that if the grandmaster forgers of the world ever heard of this, they would probably burst into tears.

Ten-thousand-year tree crystal, ancient pure-land soil, and a whole array of other rare treasures of heaven and earth—you two actually threw them all together into one furnace without a second thought? Even those genius grandmasters would find such materials hard to master. And you two novices dared to fire the furnace and have at it?

Truly absurd. It would be a wonder if it took shape at all. In fact, to have reached this final step was itself nothing short of a marvel of the age!

But Ragpicker Wang and Wei Zhao knew none of this. They still assumed the problem truly lay in their own skill, and they sat there glum-faced, at a loss for what to do.

The final shaping depended entirely on heat control refined to its absolute peak. There was no shortcut of any other kind. Unless one found a ready-made grandmaster forger to help, there was simply no way to think of a solution—and even an ordinary grandmaster forger could not manage it!

Yet forgers were exceedingly few. In all the Northern Island, apart from Ragpicker Wang, one would be hard-pressed to find even a few, and in forging skill they were likely no match for him, so none of them could truly be called a grandmaster forger. What was to be done?

With no other choice, Wei Zhao could only leave Ragpicker Wang alone in the cave to keep trying, while he himself returned first to the Welcome Pavilion. After all, sitting there doing nothing was no solution, and even if he stayed, he could not help Ragpicker Wang.

Still, this vexation would not leave him. Even alone and away from it all, Wei Zhao kept unconsciously knitting his brow.

"Little Junior Brother, what's wrong? Are you unhappy playing with us?" Shangguan Lan'er pouted at the sight, for these past few days she had been dragging Huang Xiaotao along to visit Wei Zhao whenever she had a moment, on the fine pretext of helping the two of them grow closer and being a proper matchmaker.

Huang Xiaotao, too, was watching Wei Zhao carefully from the side, quietly worried. She assumed that she and Shangguan Lan'er had been coming too often lately and had annoyed him.

"No, don't misunderstand. It really has nothing to do with the two of you." Wei Zhao hastened to explain. "I'm actually troubled by my own affairs. Lately a friend and I have been forging a weapon. We used a great many rare treasures of heaven and earth and spent a great deal of effort. That living-phase mushroom I went to such lengths to find earlier was in fact for this forging. But now, just when success is in sight, we're stuck at the last step. It simply won't take shape smoothly, and there's truly nothing I can do."

"Oh, so that's how it is. What a pity my grandfather doesn't understand forging either, or I could have asked him to help." Shangguan Lan'er shook her head regretfully. "My own weapon still has to be gathered from materials and sent to a forger to be made, but those forgers aren't very high in rank, so I doubt they'd be of any use..."

Huang Xiaotao could be of even less help in such a matter. The only thing she could do was comfort Wei Zhao from the side and tell him not to fret.

"There's no help for it. We'll just have to take it one step at a time and let my friend keep probing and trying. I only hope things don't get any worse before we find a solution," Wei Zhao said with a bitter smile.

After chatting for a while, the group dispersed. It happened that Shangguan Lan'er had just received a letter from Ning Xuefei, and she at once wrote back a detailed account of everything that had been going on with Wei Zhao of late—even his current troubles were written into the reply. (To be continued) R655