Chương 84: The Iron Yaksha (2/3)

"The arm that kills must not be slowed," Shi Yan continued, his voice cutting through the forge's rumble with surgical precision. The orange glow from the furnace painted harsh shadows across the lower edge of his bamboo hat.

"If iron catches for even a moment when I draw or turn, that moment is enough to lose my life. My right arm needs speed, not protection."

His gloved fingers tapped once against the workbench's scarred surface, a measured rhythm that punctuated his words like the fall of an executioner's blade.

Silence settled over the forge.

The blacksmith's single pale gray eye widened fractionally, the pupil contracting as though struck by sudden light. The muscles along his jaw shifted beneath the tangled beard, ash drifting loose as understanding dawned across his burn-scarred features.

He looked at Shi Yan with new eyes—the gaze of a craftsman who had just glimpsed the cold, lethal logic behind madness.

In his mind, the armor had already taken shape.

It was ugly.

It was uneven.

It broke every rule of ordinary design.

The left side would be clad in brutal black iron, heavy as a city gate—layers of overlapping plate that would turn aside sword, spear, and Qi-strike alike. The right side would be wrapped only in leather, light and bare, like the limb of a beast waiting to tear out a throat. No encumbrance. No delay. Only killing speed preserved in sinew and hide.

It was a vicious, unnatural thing.

A philosophy of violence rendered in metal and thread.

"I understand," the blacksmith said at last, his voice rough as grinding stone. The words carried the weight of a craftsman's vow. He reached for a piece of charcoal and a sheet of flattened bark with his scarred hand, fingers moving with practiced efficiency despite their gnarled appearance. The charcoal scratched against the bark's pale surface as he quickly began sketching the dimensions, marking measurements with the confident strokes of decades spent shaping iron.

"Is there anything else? A helmet? I have a deep-mountain iron helm that covers—"

"No helmet," Shi Yan cut in immediately, his tone brooking no debate. The forge's heat shimmered between them, distorting the air like ripples on disturbed water.

"But I do need a mask."

He leaned over the workbench, the waxed canvas of his cloak rustling softly as he shifted forward. Coal dust puffed up from the wooden surface where his sleeve brushed it. Taking the charcoal from the blacksmith's giant hand—his own gloved fingers small by comparison against those massive, burn-textured knuckles—Shi Yan drew the piece across the bark with deliberate strokes.

"A half-mask," Shi Yan said as he drew, the charcoal leaving dense black lines that stood stark against the bark's fibrous grain.

"Dark iron. It must guard the jaw, the cheekbones, and the bridge of the nose. Leave the eyes uncovered."

His hand moved steadily across the surface, sketching the rough outline with the mechanical precision of someone drafting tactical equipment rather than decorative craft. The forge light caught the edge of each stroke, shadows pooling in the charcoal's wake.

Along the mouth and lower cheeks, he marked several deep slits, angled and wide—channels cut into the iron itself.

"Open these here," he said, tapping the charcoal against the marked slits with sharp, staccato strikes that left smudged emphasis marks.

"Let the breath pass easily. Line the inside with hardened boar-hide, so if I take a blow to the face, the iron will not crush my teeth inward." His voice remained clinical, as though discussing the maintenance of a weapon rather than his own flesh.

"Near the nose, leave a small hollow. I may place charcoal or medicinal herbs there against swamp poison and foul miasma."

The blacksmith lowered his gaze to the drawing, his thick brows—what remained of them beneath the old burn scars—drawing together. The firelight reflected in his lone eye, turning the pale gray iris to molten silver.

The thing Shi Yan had sketched looked more like a killer's face than any protective gear. With its dark iron frame and jagged openings, the lower half resembled nothing so much as the mouth of some starving ghost—the kind that clawed its way from the Yellow Springs to feast on the living. The angled slits gave it the appearance of bared fangs frozen mid-snarl.

"Venerable..." the blacksmith said slowly, unease flickering in his lone eye like a candle guttering in a tomb's draft. His thick fingers curled slightly against the workbench's edge, knuckles pressing into the wood.

"This thing, once forged, will not look like a man's face. In the mist, others may take you for a Yaksha or some Netherworld fiend."

"Good," Shi Yan said, tossing the charcoal back onto the workbench. It clattered against the wood, rolling once before settling beside the bark sketch. A thin trail of black dust marked its path.

If others feared it, that was no loss to him.

He only wanted it to be useful.

When his body art stirred, white vapor would pour from those jagged slits like the breath of a demon—visible proof of the heat his blood generated when pushed to its limits. If that sight caused hesitation in an enemy's heart, if it bought him a single fraction of a second while they hesitated in superstitious dread, so much the better. Psychological warfare was as valid as steel.

"Can you forge it?" Shi Yan asked, his tone flat and expectant.

The blacksmith rubbed his heavily scarred chin, calloused fingers rasping against the coarse beard with a sound like leather dragged over stone. Ash and soot flaked loose, drifting down to settle on his massive chest. His single eye remained locked on the Yaksha mask drawing spread across the bark, tracing each angular slit, each harsh line. It was the face of a starved demon. The face of something that belonged in the lightless depths beneath the world.

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"Of course." His voice emerged slowly, thoughtful, as though weighing each word against the anvil of his professional pride.

"Though I am not a cultivator and cannot forge artifacts like those blacksmiths who wield spiritual fire to bind formations and inscribe Dao-patterns into steel, I remain a master smith of the Iron-Ash Furnaces—the finest mortal blacksmith among them."

His chest expanded as he drew in a deep breath, the forge light catching on old burn scars that webbed across his forearms like cracked clay. When he spoke again, his voice dropped low with stubborn, mortal pride—the kind that refused to bow even before the Heavens themselves.

"While artifacts lie beyond my reach, no one crafts superior equipment for mortals," the blacksmith declared, each word struck like hammer against anvil.

"If your silver is enough to feed the fire, Venerable, then I can forge the chains to bind the Netherworld itself."

Shi Yan said nothing more.

He reached beneath his heavy canvas coat, his gloved fingers brushing against the coarse fabric before finding the concealed opening. His hand slipped inside, fingertips grazing one of the unsealed spatial pouches he had looted from the Cloud-Mirror disciples—the ones whose bodies now cooled somewhere in the wilderness beyond the city walls, their blood long since seeped into the earth.

Without a word, he plunged his hand inside. The spatial distortion tingled against his skin even through the glove, a sensation like pressing fingers into cold water that had no bottom. He withdrew three gleaming ingots of pure, refined silver, each one heavy as a brick and stamped with the maker's seal. Dropping them onto the heavy anvil with deliberate finality, he let the metal speak for itself.

Clang.

The sound rang out sharp and heavy, cutting through the forge's ambient roar like a temple bell struck at midnight. The ingots caught the furnace light, reflecting orange and gold across their polished surfaces. Undeniable weight. Undeniable wealth.

"Make it sturdy," Shi Yan said flatly, his tone carrying no more emotion than if he were ordering rice at a roadside stall.

"And make it quickly."

The blacksmith did not immediately reach for the silver.

Instead, his scarred hand disappeared beneath the workbench, rummaging briefly before emerging with a blackened abacus—its wooden frame darkened by years of soot and handling, the beads worn smooth from countless calculations. He set it on the workbench with a solid thunk, adjusting his stance so the forge light fell across it properly.

"Let us speak of the exact toll, Venerable," the blacksmith rumbled, his thick fingers already moving to slide the first row of beads across the worn frame. Each bead clicked softly against its neighbors, a rhythm as familiar to him as breathing.

"The hide of the Stoneback Boar is no common thing," the blacksmith said, his soot-dark fingers sliding across the abacus with practiced efficiency. Click-click-click went the beads, settling into their grooves with the weight of accumulated cost.

"To bring back this one hide, the hunters left behind two lives beneath its tusks—one man gored through the belly, another crushed when the beast turned and charged. For the inner battle-jacket alone, this old one must ask eighty taels of silver. As for the pond-spider silk and the ox-hair lining, that is another twenty."

He shifted another string of beads, the abacus clicking like bones rattling in a diviner's cup. Then he lifted his chin toward the stacked leather by the furnace wall, where hides lay folded in shadow, their surfaces gleaming with the sheen of careful preservation.

"The hide of the Ironfang Panther is coveted by the Vermilion Pavilion," he continued, his voice taking on the cadence of a merchant reciting established truth.

"They fashion it into scabbards and cloud-treading boots for their disciples—pay three times market price when a pristine hide reaches their gates. If you would have enough for a full inner leather coat, the price is one hundred taels. As for the core plates of Blood-Quenched River Iron, the single-sided shoulder guard, the heavy arm-guard for the left side, and the leather wrappings for the right arm, those together come to sixty."

The abacus beads clacked again, accumulating costs like debts tallied before the King of Hell.

At last, his gaze fell upon the charcoal draft of the strange mask, and his movements slowed—hesitation creeping into the rhythm of his fingers.

"And this Yaksha faceplate..." His voice dropped, growing heavier.

"Since you ask for slanted breathing slits, a deep inner lining of hide, and an empty chamber to guide the breath, it cannot be patched together from lesser scraps or hammered from thin sheet. It must be forged whole from a single billet of dark mountain iron, lest it crack under force and split when struck. For that, forty taels."

With a sweep of his massive, scarred forearm, he reset the abacus in a cascade of clicking beads, then spoke the final number with the solemnity of a magistrate pronouncing sentence.

"In all, three hundred taels of fine silver." His single eye lifted from the abacus to fix on the three ingots gleaming atop the anvil.

"Before me lie three standard ingots, each weighing fifty taels." He paused, letting the shortfall hang in the smoky air between them.

"Venerable one, you have paid half."

Shi Yan neither blinked nor bargained.

Hmm... I do not know about the pricing, but from the words, it sounds reasonable, I think.

In the modern military, you didn't argue the price of a ballistic vest if it was going to save your life against shrapnel or a stray rifle round. The accountants could haggle over procurement costs all they wanted—but when you were boots-on-ground in hostile territory, gear was the difference between going home and going into a bag.

The price of a second life was unmeasurable.

Besides, the amount of silver the Cloud-Mirror elites had been carrying on them was absurd. Sect disciples walked around laden with wealth like mobile treasuries, their spatial pouches stuffed with currency meant to smooth their way through the mortal world. Three hundred taels was enough to sustain a mortal household for ten years—buy land, livestock, seed for planting, and still have silver left to pass down to the next generation.

But to a cultivator—or a man who made a habit of stripping dead cultivators of their wealth—it was almost negligible. Pocket change. The cost of convenience.

Shi Yan drew out the rest from within his cloak, his gloved hand emerging with three more ingots gripped in his fingers.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

Three more fifty-tael ingots fell upon the anvil in swift succession, their ringing weight cutting through the furnace roar like struck bells in a monastery courtyard. Each impact sent a clear note reverberating through the forge, the metal singing against metal. The pile of silver gleamed in the firelight, a small fortune casually delivered.

"Three hundred," Shi Yan said flatly, as though settling the price of a plain bowl of rice at a roadside stall. His tone carried no pride, no ostentation—merely the acknowledgment of a transaction concluded.

"If the journey requires more silver, say it now."

The blacksmith stared, his single eye widening fractionally before his scarred features settled into an expression caught between shock and cautious respect.

He had long since assumed that any cultivator who came seeking such an eccentric and heavily altered harness would press down with rank and aura alike, forcing a lower price through naked strength. Demand discounts. Threaten consequences if the work displeased them. Such was the rule in the Outer Wards: the mighty took, the lesser endured, and craftsmen learned to bow their heads and accept whatever scraps of payment the Immortals deigned to offer.

Yet the Immortal before him had paid the full amount without so much as wrinkling a brow. No haggling. No veiled threats. No casual display of spiritual pressure to remind the blacksmith of his place in the world's hierarchy.

Just silver. Clean and simple.

"No more, Venerable," the blacksmith said at last, and despite himself—despite the caution any mortal learned when dealing with cultivators—his scarred lips pulled back into something that almost resembled a smile. How could he not? Not only was this a challenge worthy of his skills, this Immortal was also generous. Fair.

"The price is set, and the silver speaks clearly."

He gathered the ingots with both hands, their weight substantial even for his massive frame, and placed them within the iron lockbox beneath the anvil. The lid closed with a heavy thunk, and he secured it with a rusted iron lock before straightening. Then he bowed his scarred head with solemn respect, ash falling from his beard like snow from winter branches.

"The silver is complete. But such work cannot be rushed," the blacksmith said, his tone taking on the gravity of professional obligation.

"The armor must be altered—each plate fitted and riveted, the inner layers stitched and set with precision so they do not shift in combat. The faceplate must be cast and tempered, quenched in ice-water to harden the iron without making it brittle, then ground smooth on the inside so it does not chafe the skin raw."

His thick fingers drummed once against the workbench, a unconscious gesture of calculation.

"If the Venerable does not disdain a brief wait, return at dusk when the red sun touches the western wall, and this lowly mortal will place the finished piece into your hands—fully assembled, tested for balance, and ready to drink blood."

"I will remain," Shi Yan replied, his voice carrying the finality of settled stone.

He did not trust the inns of this city. Not after the Cloud-Mirror Sect's disciples had demonstrated their reach, their coordination, their willingness to hunt him through populated areas without hesitation. Nor was he about to leave behind a custom-made set of protective gear—armor designed specifically for his fighting style, his abilities, his survival—while a full sect of elites prowled the dark, searching for him with eyes sharpened by vengeance and the promise of rewards.

And I'm too lazy to go back to the inn and then return again.

The simple truth settled in his mind with practical weight. Why waste energy on unnecessary movement? The forge was defensible, warm, and offered clear sightlines. Better to stay.

On the other hand, the blacksmith gave a faint nod, his single eye narrowing slightly as if he understood at once—recognized the calculation of a man who valued position and preparedness over comfort.

"As the Venerable wishes." He turned his massive, scarred head toward the darkness at the back of the forge, where shadows pooled thick beyond the furnace's reach, and barked in a voice like grinding millstones, "Ah-Lin! Move yourself! Bring a seat, and steep a pot of bitter-leaf for the honored guest!"