Chapter 4182 — A Helpless Failure
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 2
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.