Commanding Wind and Cloud

Qian Jin stood in front of the forging table and reached out his hand for the hammer placed beside it, just to feel that the gravity in the surroundings had changed heavily.

At one time...two times...five times...

What was this? Qian Jin lowered his head and had his eyeballs mostly roll out the sockets after seeing the source of the incremented gravity clearly. This... wasn’t this the magic conductor of the gravity controlling made by Akenash?

What? How could this object make its appearance here?

"Ignore it and go on with forging."

The calm yet imperative voice of Uncle Blake made Qian Jin realize immediately that this old blacksmith borrowed this magic conductor from Akenash for his sake.

All of a sudden, Qian Jin was overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude. He had been haunting in this Endless World daily over the past few days to get the sincerest and most meticulous guidance from the teachers. But he forgot the most important thing.

He just took all these blessings his teachers had given him without ever feeling grateful. He just took this place as a training site or a tool where he could increase his strength.

It had been years since he first came here. Qian Jin found that he had been asking for more and more from this place, but not for one second had he felt obliged to contribute to or show care toward his teachers. He took everything for granted.

"Dear uncle..."

For the first time in his life, Qian Jin turned down Uncle Blake’s request of forging. Instead, he carried the hammer and paced toward Blake, seeing which the latter flashed a look of curiosity from the original blank face.

"Dear uncle..." Qian Jin knelt down in front of Blake and looked him in the eyes, "Is there anything I could do for you? Where is it on earth? For what are you living here? You..."

"Go forge."

A subtle change was found in Blake’s composed way of speaking, which wouldn’t be noticed without close observation by Qian Jin.

Happiness. That was the special tone one had when he or she was feeling happy. Yet Blake spoke in an impatient way to cover up his true feelings.

Qian Jin was surprised as he looked at Blake for one second, then he turned away and walked toward the furnace with the blacksmith hammer in his hand. Now that Uncle Blake didn’t feel like telling him the truth, he should stop trying to find out the answer. However, Qian Jin made up his mind to ask the other teachers for the answer each time he came to the Endless World in the future.

Qian Jin felt ashamed of himself for not having ever thought about paying back the dedicated instruction these teachers provided him with. In this world, there were so few people who treated him kindly, whereas the teachers in the Endless World all treated him with warmth and sincerity. But he forgot to do the same to them.

Gravity knocked again. Qian Jin found that the five times increase in gravity didn’t pose as great challenge to his body and even though the warrior power rotation suffered a certain degree of sluggishness, the substantial rotation of the warrior power wasn’t truly affected. But the hammer in his hand...

Holy heavy! Qian Jin felt as if he was lifting an elephant. To try forging under such a state... he would be recurrently burnt out even if he had ten lives.

Uncle Blake didn’t want to alleviate the five-times gravity on the magic conductor, so Qian Jin had to activate the Forge Breathing Technique to wield the hammer with great pains. The burnt flame seemed harder to absorb as if something was laying on the tongue of the fire to stop its flowing heat from supplementing Qian Jin.

As the hammer hit the burnt metal and produced a line of resplendent sparks, Qian Jin felt inexplicably pain, which included not only the exhaustion of strength. To wield the hammer under the five-time-augmented gravity, the demand on controlling the strength increased more than ten times.

The hitting of the Fourth Hammering Technique of the Eighteen Blade Elevating Strikes had become distorted, yet the growth in proficiency was higher than ever before. To gain such a performance was no easy task in consideration of the increase in difficulty Qian Jin was faced with.

With just one hammering move, Qian Jin found the mistakes he made when practicing the Fourth Hammering of the Eighteen Blade Elevating Strikes which used to be hidden too cleverly to be discovered. With the increased gravity, to control such power became hard to sustain, and the mistakes were exposed alongside it.

So that was what it was. Carrying the forging hammer, Qian Jin started to recall what happened before he wielded this Fourth Hammering Technique and eventually got through it with the tacit help from uncle Blake, which was set not only for enhancing his strength, but also for uplifting his skills and manipulation of warrior power.

The second hammer...the third move...the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the tenth...the one hundredth...the three hundredth...Qian Jin started to feel tired. He was extremely worn and weary.

Previously at this stage, he had just consumed half of his stamina, entering the most excited state of mind where his limbs were fully stretched. But today, he had used up not only all his stamina but also the power emitted from the Forge Breathing Technique which was being consumed at a much faster rate than before.

To tell the truth, the five-times-augmented gravity didn’t hinder the rotation speed of the warrior power. However, maintaining such a high speed entailed much more warrior power volume than ever before. This was a loophole most warriors didn’t pay much attention to at the very beginning. But with time, the warrior power started to run out and the consumption speed increased.

That was the appalling part of the Kun-fighting Technique of the Qian Family, which also constituted an inseparable fragmentation of Qian Jin’s memory. Yet with time, such impression discolored. Now, standing on the eerie magic conductor, the past memory emerged in Qian Jin’s thoughts.

At first, the consumption of warrior power was stressed in a balance, but with time and the exhaustion of warrior power, such consumption accelerated from once to twice, to three times and even five times to maintain the high-speed rotation of the warrior power.

As the warrior power from dead reservoirs was used up, one had to activate the warrior power from live reservoirs to maintain the explosive force required by forging.

However, this consumption speed was even faster than what Qian Jin had imagined. The Wind and Cloud Warrior Power was nearly used up before he regained the power of the Heart of Earthy Fire. He had to immediately shift into the Forge Breathing Technique.

Several hours passed by in a blink. Qian Jin threw away the heavy forging hammer, slumped down on the ground and gasped harshly. The greater the Eighteen Blade Elevating Strikes’ power was, the larger the warrior power could be consumed. He was, after all, a warrior at the summit of Level 9 Demon Slayers, who grasped tremendous warrior power volume.

However, he felt ten times more fatigued than ever before after this time’s forging practice. Feeling it exhausting to sit on the ground, Qian Jin directly sprawled onto the floor to feel the haunting pains which felt like millions of worms surging through his meridians.

Were it not for his body’s tolerance for fatigue being honed long ago, Qian Jin doubted whether he would have been knocked out at this moment. He even felt that it was hard to breathe normally.

Rest. Rest. Rest.

As the warrior power and strength of Qian Jin were being regenerated gradually, he noticed that Blake was looking into his direction, so he swiftly rose up and walked toward Blake. "Uncle, is there anything you need?"

Blake pointed at the Heart of Earthy Fire of Qian Jin with his pipe and said faintly, "Feel it."

Feel? Feel what? Qian Jin frowned in doubt and started to feel the power emitted by the Heart of Earthy Fire by instinct. Within the swirling heat current inside his body, Qian Jin found that the icy-flame warrior power which had been consumed a lot was replenished on a large scale and was lifted to some extent as compared to before entering the Endless World.

"This..." Qian Jin looked at Blake in shock. He didn’t have the time to practice warrior power just now, how could he...

"The Heart of Earthy Fire is also called Source of All Fire." Blake took a sip of the pipe and exhaled a mouthful of blue smoke into the air. "The icy-flame is a variation of fire, whereas the Source of All Fire could absorb all flames. This icy flame will the improve by leaps and bound. Free yourself from the trouble of practicing and training it."

Source of All Fire? Qian Jin looked at the Heart of Earthy Fire which seemed to be sound asleep. It was not until this moment did he realize that his rummage for the cultivation method of this warrior power in Enlak’s warrior powerhouse was a total waste of time.

"In case you run into the fire-element warrior power in the future, activate the Forge Breathing Technique to absorb the flame into your body and you could snuff out the flame warrior power of your enemy," Blake said much more words than usual. "If your enemy is much stronger than you, you’d better not use it, or you will be stuffed to death."

Stuffed to death...Qian Jin grinned, as he was troubled by such a circumstance several days ago. "How about the demon beasts."

"It’s okay as long your enemy is of the fire element." Blake said in a nonchalantly way, "How could one forge a God-tier Weapon with the burning flame alone? The key lies in the blacksmith himself."

The blacksmith himself... Qian Jin savored Blake’s words and expressed sheer concordance with them. Were it not for the Heart of Earthy Fire, the possibilities for him successfully forging a soul weapon would be thousand times smaller.

the Heart of Earthy Fire. It was the Heart of Earthy Fire that lengthened his enduring capacity to the utmost extent and granted him uniquely unrivaled advantages in adjusting the flame temperature.

Yet Qian Jin had no awareness of this enormous advantage over many other blacksmiths until Uncle Blake pointed it out. With the icy flame warrior power, this advantage was expanded by some ten or a hundred times.

The success rate of making soul weapon achieved with and without icy flame warrior power was significantly different. The possibilities of making such a weapon with the ice-flame warrior power were much higher than before, despite that the success rate was limited to ten percent. But at least the time consumption in making top-tier warrior weapons would be largely reduced.

"Even if the flame isn’t complete by far..." Blake knocked the ground with his pipe, "you might be able to forge an Ultra Warrior Weapon with it."

Ultra-warrior weapon? Never had Qian Jin heard of such a strange word before. Actually, he had read a lot of the dossiers kept in Uncle Blake’s room, but never once had he encountered this word.

"How far is a warrior weapon from a soul weapon?"

Hearing the question Uncle Blake asked, Qian Jin really spend the time in thinking. The difference between a warrior weapon and a soul weapon was that of between the West Mountains in the Endless World and some anonymous hill in the Zence Empire.