Cen Yue walked at the front with a sixth-rank blacksmith badge hanging from his chest, the other smiths following close behind.
Arthur and Mu Xi brought up the rear.
Mu Xi wore a third-rank badge. Arthur wore nothing at all.
And why would he? If he pinned on his fifth-rank badge, everyone would have their guard up from the start. Where was the fun in that?
"Arthur, I watched yesterday's match. You were incredible. Not even Shrek could touch you."
"Like you didn't already know what I was capable of."
The two of them chatted as they walked. Tang Wulin, nearby, caught someone singing Arthur's praises and immediately inserted himself into the conversation.
He had become Arthur's most devoted admirer.
It wasn't just the overwhelming strength. It was also the fact that back when Tang Wulin had been at his loneliest, Arthur had been there.
"Arthur, going one against seven yesterday was the coolest thing I've ever seen!" Tang Wulin wedged himself between the two of them, eyes practically glowing. "I wish I could have been up there with you."
"You will be someday." Arthur thought it over for a moment and decided to dangle the carrot a little. "Train hard. When the time comes, I'll take you to Shrek and we'll beat every last one of them."
The best way to conquer geniuses was to beat it into them.
"Really? I can do that too?" Tang Wulin's excitement was palpable, though what thrilled him wasn't the prospect of getting into Shrek, it was the idea of Arthur carrying him to victory.
He'd always held Shrek in a kind of reverence, but after watching yesterday's match, his awe had faded considerably. Shrek seemed perfectly beatable. Honestly, those students hadn't even lasted as long against their opponents as they had against Arthur.
Mu Xi watched the two of them bounce off each other and couldn't help a quiet laugh.
Zheng Tianlin, walking ahead of them, listened to all of this with a sourness settling in his chest. He'd had his eye on Mu Xi for a while now, but ever since Arthur showed up, she'd been orbiting him constantly.
And the infuriating part was that he genuinely couldn't compete with Arthur in any regard.
Zheng Tianlin's steps grew heavier. He couldn't resist glancing back. He caught the exact moment Mu Xi smiled at Arthur, admiration written openly across her face, while Arthur responded with nothing more than easy indifference.
Witnessing that made everything worse.
The competition venue was a gymnasium near the Eastsea Stadium. Inside, over a hundred state-of-the-art forging stations had been set up, considerably better equipped than any private workshop on the outside.
The spectator stands were sparsely filled, but the judges' platform seated a respectable number of heavy hitters from the forging world, all of them fifth-rank and above.
Fifth-rank was where you became someone worth knowing, and Arthur quietly counted himself among them.
The junior division went first. The rules were simple: complete one hundred forging cycles within the time limit. Fail to finish, and you were out.
The material delivered to the stations was Azure Pregnant Copper.
It was one of the most notoriously difficult rare metals to work with, and nobody had expected it to appear in the junior bracket.
"Begin!"
Azure Pregnant Copper required careful observation before the first strike. Most of the competitors held back and studied their material.
Tang Wulin, however, had somewhere else to be. He gave his head a quick shake, hoisted his Thousand Refined Silver Spirit Hammer, and got straight to work.
The thunderous bang, bang, bang rolled through the gymnasium. He was the first one swinging.
Up on the judges' platform, several veterans frowned. "That boy is being reckless. Azure Pregnant Copper demands observation first. I wonder who taught him."
Arthur, watching, got an idea. His eyes flicked sideways. He picked up his own forging hammer and brought it down with a full swing.
BOOM!
The impact shook the entire hall. The sheer force behind that single strike dwarfed even Tang Wulin's heavy hammer, sending a faint vibration through the surrounding stations. The sparse crowd in the stands erupted into startled murmurs.
"Is that someone with serious skill?"
"What is that kid doing? Just showing off?"
But in the next moment, Tang Wulin entered his zone. Both hammers flew with speed and power, the steady rhythm of his strikes filling the air. You could see he had already found his groove.
Arthur was something else entirely. Each of his strikes was staggering in force and entirely irregular in timing.
It was uncomfortable to watch from the stands. For the competitors, it was far worse.
Every blacksmith had their own forging rhythm. Once that rhythm was disrupted, concentration fell apart. That was precisely why a hundred smiths working simultaneously was already a test in itself.
But with Arthur pulling this, how was anyone supposed to hold their rhythm?
To the eye, every hammer strike Arthur made carried a suffocating weight to it, his cadence awkward and erratic, as though he were just idly beating on metal.
Which, truthfully, was exactly what he was doing. He was hammering entirely on impulse, whenever he felt like it.
"With this going on, the top finishers should almost all be from our Eastsea Blacksmith Association," Arthur thought to himself. That was the point.
To everyone being thrown off by him, he had only one thing to say: if you can't handle it, you need more practice.
Mu Xi and the rest of the Eastsea association members were completely undisturbed, each one focused on their own work.
They were used to it, really.
Back at the association, Arthur pulled this kind of thing all the time for no particular reason. This was actually on the gentler end.
As for Tang Wulin being equally unaffected, that simply came down to raw talent. The kid's concentration was exceptional.
"Outrageous!"
The faces of the veterans on the judges' platform had darkened. One spoke up with undisguised displeasure. "That boy is ruining the competition. Hammering with no rhyme or reason, purely to interfere with everyone else!"
Thud.
A solid fist came down on a wooden armrest. The man's face had gone red, his beard quivering with indignation as he jabbed a finger toward Arthur's station. "What kind of conduct is this? This is deliberate interference! The Eastsea Association is playing dirty!"
His own apprentice was standing in the middle of the floor, hammer frozen in midair, face drained of color. Arthur's unpredictable, hammering had rattled him to the core. The feel of the Azure Pregnant Copper he'd spent weeks studying had gone completely foreign, and he couldn't even find the courage to bring his hammer down.
Cen Yue stepped forward, his voice measured and firm. "Master Zhang, I must respectfully disagree."
"Forging requires an undivided mind. The ability to resist interference is part of a blacksmith's skill. Our association's members haven't broken any rules or cheated. They're working on their own merits. In what way does that constitute playing dirty?"
The retort left Master Zhang sputtering, but the sight of his apprentice floundering only made him more stubborn. "That isn't forging! That's flailing around at random! I'm filing a formal complaint with the Blacksmith Association headquarters!"
"I'm taking this to headquarters!"
Cen Yue gave a helpless shrug and stepped back.
Fine, go ahead.
It wasn't as though everyone didn't know that Zhen Hua was personally acquainted with Mu Chen, the president of the Eastsea Association.
Complaining to him would accomplish precisely nothing.
Zhen Hua: Arthur, what do you make of this?
Arthur: Who dares bring charges against this official?!
Even swinging purely on a whim, Arthur was still the first to finish.
"My apologies, everyone. If you can't hack it, practice more."
He dropped the remark, tossed the finished blank to the judge, and turned to leave. "Done. I'm off to eat. The soul master competition starts soon."
Eat?!
Tang Wulin's ears perked up from across the floor and he immediately began to panic.
He needed to eat too!
His appetite had shrunk after losing the Golden Dragon King, but his enthusiasm for meals had never wavered in the slightest.
Eating was one of life's great pleasures.
Lack of enthusiasm for meals was a character flaw.
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Tang Wulin's hammering went into overdrive. Food! Food!
The other competitors had barely drawn a breath of relief after Arthur stopped when Tang Wulin kicked into high gear and threw them all into disarray again.
"Another one from the Eastsea Association! Give it a rest!"
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~ Push the story forward with your Power Stones