Folklore and Strange Tales: At the Start, You Retrieve the Sea-Suppressing Black Iron

The temperature in Tieguai Li's basement was five or six degrees lower than outside. Cheng Xiaojin shivered when he pushed the door open and closed it behind him.

"Why are you dressed so lightly? It's the middle of autumn and you're still wearing just a single layer of clothing."

Without turning his head, Tieguai Li squatted in front of the worktable, with a palm-sized crucible in front of him. An asbestos board was placed under the crucible, and a small electric furnace next to it was burning red-hot.

"I'm poor, I haven't even had time to buy long johns yet."

"You're so poor, why would you spend 800 yuan on a lump of iron?"

Cheng Xiaojin approached the workbench and saw three pieces of iron of different sizes on the table. The largest piece had already been filed to reveal the rough outline of the blank.

"Where did this iron come from?"

"Scrap yard".

Tieguai Li picked up a piece of broken iron from the ground and handed it to him.

"Look at the cross-section of this Qing Dynasty iron pot fragment. It's completely different from modern industrial cast iron. The grains are coarser and the impurities are unevenly distributed. This is a characteristic of traditional smelting methods."

"Using this to make counterfeit products gives the base a sense of age. By testing the carbon content and impurity ratio of the iron material with instruments, you can tell it's old material just by comparing it with modern iron."

Cheng Xiaojin examined the broken piece of iron over and over twice before putting it back on the table.

"Just having the right iron material isn't enough, you also need to consider the shape."

"Nonsense, do you think I've been working for nothing for the past twenty years?"

Tieguai Li reached under the workbench and pulled out a cloth bag. He opened it and found a piece of white paper with a pencil sketch inside. The three views of the Zhenhai Iron were drawn on it with fine lines, and the dimensions and details were marked.

"Yesterday I went to Master Ma's place and touched the surface for half an hour. I memorized every line and every bump. I can draw it with my eyes closed."

Cheng Xiaojin looked at the blueprint and whistled.

"Wow, you're really something. With this skill, you could have made a fake imperial seal to fool the emperor back in the old days."

"Stop joking. I learned this skill in the army—repairing equipment. I don't take jobs making imperial seals."

Cheng Xiaojin rubbed his hands together and moved even closer.

"Then, how do you make it rusty? That rusty layer is the most crucial part. If Fatty Sun's bespectacled guy were to test it with an acid reagent and find that the rust layer is from the wrong era, he would be exposed on the spot."

Tieguai Li stood up, used his crutch to support himself on the ground, walked to the iron shelf, and pulled out a tin box from the second shelf and opened it.

It contained a grayish-brown powder. Cheng Xiaojin leaned closer and smelled it; it had a metallic rust smell mixed with the fishy smell of soil.

"What is this?"

"Rust powder scraped off the genuine product."

Tieguai Li pinched a pinch of rust powder and rubbed it between his fingertips.

"Yesterday at Master Ma's place, while you were chatting with him, I used a scraper to remove a small layer of rust from an inconspicuous spot on the bottom of the genuine product. It wasn't much, but it was enough."

"When did you make your move? I didn't see it."

"If you could see this, I might as well give up my skills."

Tieguai Li put the tin box back on the shelf, walked to the workbench, sat down, picked up a small file, and began to trim the edges of the rough blank.

"There are three steps to making rust, let me explain them to you in detail, and you can learn from them."

He spoke as he filed, the file making a hissing sound on the surface of the iron billet.

"The first step is called 'base preparation,' which involves sanding the surface of the iron billet with sandpaper to create micropores. The pores should be small enough to be invisible to the naked eye but visible under a magnifying glass. These micropores are for preventing rust."

"The second step is called rust removal. The genuine rust powder is mixed with diluted rice vinegar to form a paste, and then it is applied layer by layer into the micropores. After application, it is wrapped in cotton cloth and buried in the prepared soil."

"How to mix the soil?"

"Three parts loess, two parts river sand, one part horse manure, and half a bowl of aged vinegar. The horse manure provides ammonia, which accelerates the oxidation of iron, and the aged vinegar provides an acidic environment, which allows the rust layer to form a chemical bond with the surface of the iron."

Cheng Xiaojin was speechless with astonishment.

"Your recipe is just like the ingredient list that Tong Kexin uses to make braised pork, there are quite a lot of details."

"It's much more particular than making braised pork. If the cooking time for braised pork is slightly off, it just won't taste good. But if the cooking time is slightly off, it's the difference between the real thing and the fake."

Tieguai Li flipped the rough blank over and pointed to a dent.

"The most crucial step is the third one, called rust cultivation. After burying it in the soil, you can't rush it. Normally, it needs to be cultivated for more than three months to allow the rust fungus of the genuine product to grow together with the new rust on the surface of the fake product and become one. When you look at it with a magnifying glass, the texture and direction of the rust layer are exactly the same as those formed naturally."

"But we don't have three months."

"So I used a shortcut."

Tieguai Li took a sealed plastic bag out of the drawer, inside which were several dark lumps.

"This is old mud I dug from the base of the back wall of Baiyun Temple. That wall is at least two hundred years old. The microbial community in the mud is completely different from that of modern soil. Using this kind of old mud to rust in one week is equivalent to three months of ordinary soil."

Cheng Xiaojin stared at the bag of black mud and chuckled.

"You dug mud from the base of the wall of Baiyun Temple, and the Taoist priests didn't whip you with their whisks."

"I went there in the middle of the night; the Taoist priests were all asleep."

"You limp bastard climbed over the wall into Baiyun Temple in the middle of the night to dig mud."

"Who said you climbed over the wall? The back door wasn't locked. Seriously, why are you talking so much nonsense?"

Tieguai Li glanced at him, put the sealed bag aside, and continued to bury himself in filing the iron billet.

Cheng Xiaojin didn't interrupt anymore, and moved a folding chair to sit next to him and watch.

Tieguai Li's hands were very steady. The file moved slowly and evenly across the iron billet. The depth and angle of each cut were perfectly controlled. The metal powder fell finely onto the felt, like a layer of gray snow.

He worked for about forty minutes, then put down the file, picked up a piece of fine sandpaper, and began to sand.

"Do you know how many counterfeit goods I've made in my lifetime?"

"How many."

"Hey, to be honest, I can't remember exactly how many, but there must be at least a hundred."

Tieguai Li kept his head down as he polished the object, his voice muffled.

"I've made everything—copper, porcelain, wood, stone. There was a time when I was so broke I couldn't even afford to eat. I finished twelve fake antiques in a month, and my right hand cramped up from exhaustion, so I kept working with my left hand."

He paused and changed to a finer sandpaper.

"But there is one rule that I have never broken."

"What?"

"The counterfeit goods I make have never harmed honest people. They only deceive unscrupulous merchants who use money to inflate prices, and greedy people who want to get rich overnight by looking for bargains. When real poor people bring their ancestral heirlooms to me for repair, I don't charge them a penny."

Cheng Xiaojin hummed in agreement and tapped the armrest of the chair with his fingertips.

"We're the same in this respect. I've been running this stall for so long, and I've never cheated any elderly people who come to buy trinkets with their shopping baskets."

Suddenly, Tieguai Li threw away the sandpaper, leaned close to the bottom of the iron billet, and squinted at it for a long time.

"No, wait a minute."

He pulled a bottle of brown liquid from the tool rack, poured a few drops onto a piece of cotton, and carefully wiped another piece of iron next to the billet.

That was a genuine Zhenhai iron, placed in the corner of the workbench, about half an arm's length away from the rough blank of the fake one.

What are you doing?

"Don't speak."

Tieguai Li repeatedly rubbed a particularly thick rust layer on the bottom of the genuine article with cotton. The brown liquid slowly dissolved the rust on the surface, revealing the iron surface underneath.

He put on a magnifying glass and pressed his face almost against the metal surface.

Then his hand stopped.

"Xiao Jin, come here, look here."

Cheng Xiaojin bent down and peered through the gap left by Tieguai Li. He saw extremely fine engravings on the small piece of iron surface exposed at the bottom of the genuine article.

It's not a pattern, it's characters.

Tieguai Li used tweezers to hold a cotton ball and wiped the writing twice more, and the writing gradually became clearer.

The carving is so shallow and small that it is practically invisible without a magnifying glass.

Made in the 22nd year of the Yongle reign.

Cheng Xiaojin's heart suddenly skipped a beat.

He remembered that the signature in the lower right corner of the half-rubbing his father left at home before he disappeared was in the exact same handwriting.