Carrying a Jurassic on me
Chapter 205 - 71: Opening of the Blacksmith Shop_1

Chapter 205: Chapter 71: Opening of the Blacksmith Shop_1

While cooking, Xu Xiaoyan couldn’t stop laughing at Yan Fei, leaving him quite flustered.

The main issue was that the cattle farm was too remote, making it an easy target for such obnoxious scammers. If it were on a bustling street filled with people, such a situation wouldn’t have happened.

However, as long as you run a business, there will always be problems. It’s simply unavoidable.

As the two chatted, Fang Xiaoqing came over carrying a rotten snake skin bag that seemed heavy. The poor girl didn’t have much strength and was dragging the bag to the door, the sounds of metal clanging from within it.

Marshalling all her strength to drag it to the entrance, Fang Xiaoqing tossed the bag and said, "The old man left, he threw this stuff outside our wall, I picked it up for you."

"What’s it good for? It’s just rusty scrap metal." Xu Xiaoyan casually remarked, then gave it some thought. "Wait, it can be useful! Yan Xiaofei, aren’t you a blacksmith? I remember your grandpa used to buy scrap iron, we can keep this for you to use! Weren’t you talking about opening up your family’s blacksmith shop again?"

Hearing these words, Yan Fei remained silent with a gloomy face. She clearly was mocking the words he had said before.

Who would buy handmade items now? He had so many ruined iron tools--weren’t they just unsold leftovers from before? If he could have sold them, he wouldn’t have so many left.

"What’s wrong? Don’t forget your grand ideals! Opening a blacksmith shop in the future...hahaha..." As soon as Fang Xiaoqing left, Xu Xiaoyan started making fun of Yan Fei again.

"I will do it, just wait! I will open the blacksmith shop eventually," Yan Fei stubbornly responded.

"Great! Then I’ll just wait for the day when you open your blacksmith shop, I can work the bellows for you," Xu Xiaoyan said playfully, wielding a stick as if it were a bellow handle.

"You just wait then..." Yan Fei responded, lowering his eyelid. "All you do is laugh. Quickly bring the food over."

During dinner, Yan Fei hardly spoke, seeming lost in thought.

Seeing his dazed look, Xu Xiaoyan asked, "What are you thinking about Yan Xiaofei, while eating?"

Lost in his thoughts, Yan Fei responded, "Blacksmithing..."

He genuinely wanted to learn blacksmithing.

In the afternoon, after observing the newly bought cows and finishing his homework under Xu Xiaoyan’s supervision, he went to the old house.

In the blacksmith section of the house, he carefully cleaned the blacksmithing tools, pulling each one out. Under the dim light, he stared at them for a long time, lost in a daze.

Then he started to play hide and seek with himself, appearing and disappearing in the room...

Every disappearance was accompanied by something being taken. First, it was the tongs, then the anvil for forging, the bellows, and the furnace. He had already taken many of the small and big hammers, but there were still some left. As for the half-barrel that was used for holding water during quenching, he took that, too.

After wiping his sweat, he stood in the emptied blacksmith shop, feeling a sense of sadness.

The once lively shop was now stripped bare by him.

As he was about to lock up, he spotted a white board propped behind the door, with its paint peeling off. When flipped over, the back of it had a few crooked black characters: Old Yan’s Blacksmith Shop.

He should take this, too!

In the Vegetable Garden Island, what was initially planned to be a leisure wooden house took a lot of time to be built. It barely saw use before being completely converted to a workspace, with a small area for a kitchen, and most of it serving as the blacksmith shop.

On the wall inside the wooden hut, there hung a worn-out black-and-white signboard, with five characters still visible. In the blink of an eye, Old Yan’s Blacksmith Shop had reopened on Vegetable Garden Island in the Dinosaur Era world.

Unfortunately, there would be no customers there for sure.

Thankfully, Yan Fei had no plans to forge items to sell. When Xu Xiaoyan teased him at noon, he had a realization: being a blacksmith was not a bad idea after all.

He was using up his tools too quickly. Whether it was the axe for chopping down trees or the various other cutting tools, he had almost exhausted the old stock. Tools would soon become a scarcity.

Given how quickly he damaged his tools, he probably couldn’t afford to keep buying new ones too. Besides, he had no special liking for factory-made items. He decided that the ones he could forge himself would be much sturdier, so he might as well make his own, now that he was already familiar with the process.

A benefit of the Dinosaur Era world was that fires burned exceptionally well. Usually, it made cooking very fast, and now it made blacksmithing fast as well. He didn’t even need to use a bellow; the vivid flame sufficed.

He threw a few rusty metal pieces into the furnace and soon, using a pair of tongs, pulled them out. He then started pounding with a hammer.

After pounding for a while, he inspected the metal piece and instantly became angry.

This was precisely the scrap that the old man discarded in the morning. When he saw the small metal pieces, he figured he could use it for practice. However, after hammering it, he realized it wasn’t iron at all.

No wonder it looked off! That reddish color wasn’t rust but red soil. Once he hammered off the mud and rust, it resembled copper but was softer, hence was clearly an alloy of copper and some other metal, making it infeasible to be forged.

Yan Fei quickly realized that this material must have been dug up from the ground by the old man. No wonder the scrap yards didn’t want it.

Sancha River Town had a long history. No one could tell exactly how long ago, but it was common to dig up square hole coins or similar items from the ground. Every family had several old items, the most common being tiny copper coins that the female students would use as shuttlecocks when they played games.

With this realization, Yan Fei decided to empty the entire bag. A ’whoosh’ and a whole pile of objects scattered on the ground.

The contents were similar to what Yan Fei had thrown into the furnace. Most were about the size of a small bar, some more resembling the shape of a knife, while a few others had light rust marks and barely recognizable characters once the dirty soil was removed. It only proved his speculation—these were indeed excavated from the ground.

That old man was such a swindler, useless even to deceive anyone!

Yan Fei glanced at them and didn’t bother to look further. He planned to buy some proper scrap iron tomorrow. Since the fire was already lit, he decided to salvage his old broken axes and knives to see if they could be repaired and used again.

He hammered tirelessly for half the night but didn’t manage to repair a single one.

It was pretty normal. He had merely watched before and occasionally swung the hammer as a child’s play. Repairing tools was more complicated than just hammering iron rods. Hoping to create a tool without practicing was merely daydreaming.

He didn’t worry about not being able to forge tools; he didn’t require them immediately.

He roamed the islands of the Vegetable Garden, Cow Breeding, and Toad preparing some big stones, then headed over to the lakeside of the circular island.

Staring at the gigantic python lazily sleeping under the moonlight by the lake, Yan Fei began his operation.