Chapter 57: Spirited Alloy

After the secret guards cleaned up the scene, Xu Zhao and his entourage took Tang Ziran and Liang Yue away from the remote small town.

Before leaving,
Xu Zhao glanced at the mailbox by the door of Tang Ziran's house, a thought stirring in his mind.

A wave of spiritual power surged through the air, crushing the iron mailbox and its contents into fine powder that drifted away with the wind.

The least important thing inside the mailbox was the continent-wide universal bank card, while the most important things, besides the letters themselves, were Tang Wulin's identity card.

Although such items could be reissued, the process was cumbersome, and minors required an accompanying guardian.

If Tang Wulin wanted to avoid being restricted everywhere due to a lack of an identity card, he would have no choice but to apply for orphan status with the federal government and find an elder to replace his adoptive parents as his new guardian.

So, what would Tang Wulin do? Who would he turn to?

Would it be Mang Tian?

Or perhaps Gu Yue would intervene, making one of the three beasts—Di Tian, ​​Bi Ji, or Zi Ji—Tang Wulin's temporary guardian?

After all, having her own subordinate become Tang Wulin's guardian would make it much easier to control this mobile source of the Golden Dragon King, and also help her win the bet against Na'er.

...

On the way back, Xu Zhao chose not to take the soul guidance train.

With Tang Wulin as a precedent, barring absolute necessity, he would never choose to ride such an accident-prone mode of transportation.

Although he wasn't Tang Wulin, what if he happened to run into the Holy Spirit Cult?

Moreover, having just killed two low-ranking members of the Holy Spirit Cult, his causal connection with the cult was deep for the time being, so it was better to play it safe recently.

Without taking the soul guidance train, by the time Xu Zhao returned to Mingdu, it was already the fourth day of the new semester.

As the class monitor, being absent without cause for the first three days of the semester would certainly have earned an ordinary person severe disciplinary action from the academy.

However, privileged classes existed everywhere, and Xu Zhao happened to belong to one.

At the Shrek Royal Soul Engineering Academy.

Upon advancing from the elementary department to the intermediate department, the two gifted classes, the Sun class and the Moon class, would undergo a re-ranking of their innate talents.

This comprehensive evaluation was based on multiple factors, including the students' soul power rank, martial soul quality, and sub-occupation rank.

In the new comprehensive ranking, the top thirty-six students entered the Sun class, while the bottom thirty-six entered the Moon class.

Additionally, the six students ranked thirty-seventh to forty-second were given a chance to challenge the top thirty-six students.

Succeeding in the challenge allowed them to take the opponent's rank.

In past elementary-to-intermediate transitions, four or five students from the Sun class would always be demoted to the Moon class.

Yet in Xu Zhao's cohort, all thirty-six students in the Sun class remained completely unchanged, with zero shifts in personnel.

Therefore, when Xu Zhao returned to the classroom and received the attendance sheet from the deputy monitor Xu Yucheng, the names on the roster were all familiar faces.

On the attendance sheet, aside from himself, the monitor, who had a three-day absence record, everyone else had maintained a perfect four-day attendance without a single day missed.

"Absent for three days..." Holding a pen, Xu Zhao didn't even blush or skip a beat as he placed neat red checkmarks in the boxes from September 1st to September 3rd under his own name column.

"Done, now it's full attendance."

When this attendance sheet was handed over to the head teacher Zhang Xuanfeng, the teacher glanced at it indifferently, stamped the sign-in sheet with his usual expression, handed it back to Xu Zhao the monitor, and casually asked:

"Classmate Xu Zhao, when do you plan to start crafting your battle armor?"

"That still needs to wait." Hearing this, Xu Zhao glanced back at Xu Yucheng and Xue Liushuang, saying:

"My blacksmith rank and Xiaoyue's mecha designer rank are both high enough, but the two of them are currently only tier-four mecha manufacturers. They can handle regular one-word battle armor, but for spirit-alloy one-word battle armor, we still need to wait until they raise their mecha manufacturing rank to tier five."

"So certain? Don't you want to try first?" Zhang Xuanfeng asked with a smile:

"Spirit-alloy one-word battle armor has never been attempted before. How do you know a tier-four mecha manufacturer won't work?"

"Then you can have Long Chen try it," Xu Zhao replied indifferently:

"After all, he also raised his mecha manufacturing rank to tier four some time ago."

"I'll casually provide a piece of spirit-alloy with a fusion rate of over ninety percent, along with a design blueprint for spirit-alloy one-word battle armor, as long as the academy reimburses me for the expenses."

Although Long Chen was only a Great Soul Master, his soul power was insufficient to sustain the creation of spirit-alloy.

However, through the development of sealed milk bottle technology—which had existed for ten thousand years—soul power could now be restored to soul masters without requiring their active absorption, perfectly solving Long Chen's deficiency in soul power.

"Generous!" Zhang Xuanfeng gave Xu Zhao a thumbs-up. "As expected of our academy's young divine craftsman, casually pulling out a piece of spirit-alloy with a fusion rate exceeding ninety percent."

The fusion rate of spirit-alloy, much like an exam graded out of one hundred, required at least a sixty percent fusion rate to be considered qualified spirit-alloy.

On this basis, for every five percent increase in the fusion rate, an additional different metal could be fused in the future.

The creation of a four-word battle armor required the fusion of at least six metals.

In other words, if one wanted the battle armor to have the potential to upgrade to a four-word battle armor, the fusion rate of the raw metal materials during the creation of the two-word battle armor needed to reach at least eighty percent.

Beyond six, the more metals fused, the greater the power of the four-word battle armor.

Yet as far as he knew, the four-word battle armors of all current four-word battle armor masters only fused six metals.

As for seven or more, they might exist, but Zhang Xuanfeng had never heard of them.

Spirit-alloy with a ninety percent fusion rate, plus the two base metals and the six fusible metals, totaled eight.

This was second only to divine-grade metal, which had a ninety-five percent fusion rate and could fuse nine metals.

A battle armor component crafted from spirit-alloy with such a high fusion rate entirely possessed the potential to be upgraded to a four-word battle armor.

Using it merely to experiment was undoubtedly far too extravagant.

This prompted Zhang Xuanfeng to ask curiously:

"Would it be convenient to tell me what your success rate is when forging spirit-alloy with a fusion rate exceeding ninety percent?"

In his view, to casually pull out a piece of spirit-alloy with over ninety percent fusion for an experiment meant the success rate had to be at least ten percent.

"Success rate? Not very high." Xu Zhao thought for a moment and gave a relatively precise figure:

"On average, out of every two forging attempts, I can forge one piece of spirit-alloy with a fusion rate exceeding ninety percent. You could say the success rate is about fifty percent."

"My teacher said I still need to push harder and raise the success rate a bit more."

"..." Zhang Xuanfeng fell silent for a moment.

A fifty percent success rate wasn't high? Is this what a divine craftsman demands of his disciples?

Finally, he sighed with emotion:

"Since ancient times, strict teachers produce brilliant students. That saying is truly not wrong!"