“This Ice-Fire Divine Forging Art… This technique has quite strict requirements. High comprehension of Ice-Fire laws, pure Black Phoenix bloodline, zero use of forging implements… however, it seems equally powerful. It will increase bloodline thickness if cultivated, releasing nine seals of the First Dao if cultivated to the apex! Not only this, this forging technique can refine higher grade equipment from lower rank material, even up to skipping entire ranks (eg. Refining low-grade Earth Rank items from low-grade Mortal Rank materials)!”

“Of course a huge flaw of this technique is that this technique cannot be used to forge equipment higher than Earth-grade! As for refining higher grade equipment from lower grade material, it highly depends upon the understanding of laws, formations and the material quality! However despite these flaws, simply the fact that it promises to increase bloodline thickness makes it necessary for me to train in this art! “ In the entire library, this art was the only art which promised to increase bloodline density! He suspected that there were more such arts, but they were likely in safekeeping and not open to the public.

“Well, there is no need to hold back, let’s begin forging!” All this art required was extremely large amount of spirit energy, and he had a formation for that.

Taking out the sturdy table, he placed the materials atop it. Finally, he controlled the materials with a battle spirit technique and produced a fire with a divine ability to purify and melt the materials. The melted materials were gathered into the form of a sword by the battle spirit technique. With a single thought, an engraving knife was carefully controlled to graft formations and decorations on the sword body. Finally, the iron was rapidly frozen to cool and harden it.

After picking up the sword, Heifeng Jiansui swung it around. After this, he gave it a single hard strike.

The sword shattered to pieces.

“While the sword should be quenched and tempered by the rapid cooling after heating, it actually produces minute cracks due to the temperature difference. This style of forging art seems hard to pick up, but the quality of the metal after I master it should be phenomenal.” After pondering on the nature of the forging technique, he took out materials to begin refining again.

+++

In total, it took a week for Heifeng Jiansui to forge a working sword with the Ice-Fire Divine Forging Art. While he couldn’t find information about quenching and tempering techniques in the Dark Phoenix Empire’s forging manuals, he realized that Shenhai Elder had handed him a spatial ring full of jade slips on forging. The manuals of the Shenhai Sect were more profound and had methods of cold forging as well, allowing Heifeng Jiansui to comprehend his mistakes and learn from them.

To gain proper experience in forging, Heifeng Jiansui gave up on mid-grade Mortal Rank materials and began from low-grade Common Rank materials. Step by step, he understood the proper path, finally reaching his level of manual forging, where he could refine mid-grade Mortal Rank swords with low-grade Mortal Rank materials.

After this, Heifeng Jiansui earnestly began forging!

His lowest grade missions were:

RANK E: Forge 10,000 mid–grade Mortal Rank swords & RANK D: Forge 5,000 mid–grade Mortal Rank sabers

Thus, he had to refine 15,000 mid-grade weapons. Delving into a refining frenzy, he forged swords and sabers from low-grade materials.

A week passed and Heifeng Jiansui had refined 3900 swords already. This was a ridiculously rapid pace, only made possible by the Ice-Fire Divine Forging Art. That day, when he was forging his 45th sword, he suddenly gained enlightenment and forged a high-grade Mortal sword from the low-rank Mortal Rank materials!

Heifeng Jiansui spent weeks trying to reproduce this miracle, however nothing succeeded… until one day when yet another high-grade Mortal sword was forged from lower materials! After some inferences from his earlier experiences, he succeeded in forging a high-grade Mortal sword once again. After this, it didn’t take too long for another high-grade Mortal sword to appear again.

After countless experiments, Heifeng Jiansui figured out a technique to refine high-grade Mortal swords from low-grade Mortal materials, but the technique had only 10% chances of success. In the end, when the forging of 10,000 swords and 5,000 sabers was completed, coincidentally around 505 high-grade swords and 259 sabers had been forged as well.

The E, D, C and B Ranked missions were completed in one fell stroke!