"You have some ideas?"

The Melt Gold Hall disciple who had spoken shook his head like a pellet drum.

"I think my Little Hong is already peerlessly beautiful... Besides, if I married the Senior Sister and had kids, they’d probably starve to death..." 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

"..."

Inside the branch tunnel, Xu Yunfan abruptly stopped. He watched Yan Yuwei walk in with a solemn expression, a look of surprise on his face.

"What are you doing here?"

Yan Yuwei remained silent, her expression grim. She drew the two Iron Pickaxes strapped to her back and walked to Xu Yunfan’s other side.

"Hah!"

With a sharp exhale, the muscles in Yan Yuwei’s arms bulged. She swung her two Meteorite Iron Pickaxes in a cross-shaped strike, plowing a three-foot-deep crisscross trench into the red iron ore.

"Watch closely!"

Her lats flared like a falcon’s wings, and the dozen or so crisscrossing scars on her body writhed like churning earthworms as her muscles rippled.

Her arms swung in a full-moon arc. The instant her Mining Pickaxes made contact with the rock face, she suddenly released thirty percent of her force, her wrists twisting half a circle at an unnatural angle.

CLANG!

An entire block of Profound Iron Rock was shattered into a honeycomb of fragments.

Xu Yunfan was a little surprised.

This was the seventh stance of the Melting Gold and Forging Iron technique: Earth Dragon Flipping Over. It required one to channel Inch Force, unifying the waist and stance, into the pickaxe’s tip to create nine vibrations.

’Skin Cultivation Perfection?!’

He saw faint golden threads appearing on the surface of Yan Yuwei’s body. He could even sense faint wisps of Geng Metal Aura slowly seeping from the shattered ore into her flesh and blood.

"I didn’t expect you to have reached Skin Cultivation Perfection!"

Xu Yunfan was surprised, but a smile touched his lips. His spine suddenly arched backward, his heels crushing three igneous rocks underfoot. His Mining Pickaxe shot forward like a meteor, piercing a fissure in the ore vein before him.

KRRRACK!

With that single strike, he dragged out a nearly hundred-foot-long section of the red iron vein, hoisting it into the air.

A low rumble like thunder rolled in Xu Yunfan’s throat. His biceps swelled by two sizes, and the veins on his neck popped out like taut Iron Chains as he yanked his arm back forcefully.

BANG!

With a sharp crack, the massive chunk of ore he’d torn out shattered into a rain of stones, a testament to his trait that let him dig through earth as if it were mud.

Yan Yuwei’s pupils trembled. She truly hadn’t expected Xu Yunfan’s strike to create such a massive spectacle.

The tip of his pickaxe had landed perfectly on a nexus point of the ore vein, which was how he’d managed to rip out a nearly hundred-foot-long section.

Xu Yunfan lowered his Profound Steel Mining Pickaxe and turned to look at her. She was bare-chested, stripped down to a single pair of form-fitting Shark Skin shorts that revealed thighs as thick as water buckets. The corner of his eye twitched.

If not for Yan Yuwei’s delicate face, her body was truly more masculine than any man’s, showing no feminine features whatsoever.

And to top it off, Yan Yuwei had a particular fondness for shredding her clothes.

"How was that?"

"Hmph. All flash, no substance!"

Yan Yuwei suddenly spun and flung her pickaxes. The two Mining Pickaxes collided in mid-air, erupting with Thunder Fire.

Using the rebound force, she pounced like a lioness toward the depths of the ore vein. With a click of a mechanism on her Mining Pickaxe, its tip began to glow a molten gold.

"Eight hundred catties of Red-Veined Copper, get out here for this old lady!"

The entire mine tunnel trembled violently.

Xu Yunfan wiped the dust from the corner of his eye and suddenly stamped his foot forward. Not to be outdone, he swung his pickaxe, and the wind pressure it generated tore a trench in the tunnel ahead.

With a deafening CLANG, the red iron ore in the tunnel shattered, revealing lava that had been drawn up from below. The two Mining Pickaxes collided above the boiling magma.

Sparks rained down like a torrential storm.

Yan Yuwei’s Mining Pickaxe suddenly softened like a snake. Dragon Scale Patterns appeared on the body of the pickaxe, which was forged from Meteorite Iron.

The muscles in her forearms vibrated at a high frequency, each fiber emitting the clang of striking metal. "This isn’t how you dig ore in the Melt Gold Hall!"

Xu Yunfan raised an eyebrow slightly. He was about to speak when Yan Yuwei cut him off.

"Thirty years ago, when Elder Hall Master Chen split mountains and shattered stone..."

Yan Yuwei suddenly formed a knife-hand and carved a deep groove into the Profound Iron Rock. "...he relied on the Kung Fu of listening to the mountains to distinguish the veins."

The red copper rings on her earlobes suddenly hummed. She tapped her Mining Pickaxe on an inconspicuous rocky nodule, and the entire ore vein within the branch tunnel suddenly trembled with a dragon’s roar.

Xu Yunfan was slightly surprised. His skilled mining techniques didn’t include anything like this. Only his Celestial Craft Forging Technique had a skill for seeking gold and prospecting, but compared to Yan Yuwei’s nearly fifteen years of practice, each had their own merits.

’This woman is quite cunning,’ he thought. ’She must have been mapping out the location from the moment she walked in.’

Thick, sulfurous smoke spewed from cracks in the ground. Xu Yunfan silently shouldered his Profound Steel Mining Pickaxe.

"You’ve caused a cave-in in this branch vein. Just wait for your Hall Master to give you a dressing-down."

Yan Yuwei’s eye twitched. Seeing the mess she’d made, she didn’t dare be careless and immediately started mining to reinforce the tunnel.

Xu Yunfan chuckled softly. His Mining Pickaxe fell upon the hard ore, its tip sinking in as if into soft earth or tofu. The sight made Yan Yuwei’s heart skip a beat.

’That level of force control...’

"Who needs finesse for mining? If you’re tough enough, you can smash right through the planet’s core!"

Faced with Yan Yuwei’s provocation, Xu Yunfan naturally wouldn’t just stand by and do nothing.

A crimson storm erupted where their Mining Pickaxes had previously clashed.

The twelve Melt Gold Hall disciples who had followed them to watch the show fled with their hands over their heads. One unlucky soul was sent flying by the shockwave, slamming into the rock wall and leaving a human-shaped crater.

The copper hoop holding Yan Yuwei’s hair shattered with a bang. Her unbound hair flew about like a lioness’s mane. Seeing that the lava in front of her was about to pour out uncontrollably, she had no time to say anything more to Xu Yunfan. She suddenly dropped to one knee and plunged both pickaxes five feet into the rock floor.

"Rise!"

A thirty-foot-wide section of the ground bulged upward in response, blocking the back-flowing lava.

Xu Yunfan’s pupils reflected the pillar of lava shooting toward the ceiling and Yan Yuwei’s frantic efforts to dig up boulders to block it. A hint of schadenfreude flashed in his eyes.

He hesitated no longer. Ignoring Yan Yuwei’s frantic repairs, he sent his Mining Pickaxe plunging into an Earth Vein like a crimson dragon.

The instant your pickaxe head smashes into the rock wall, a tingling numbness like a fine electric current travels up from the web of your thumb. When your fingertips touch the ore, you seem to feel the entire mineral’s veining, allowing you to easily excavate a large chunk. Your Skilled Mining Skill Level has increased.

You used the Celestial Craft Forging Technique to distinguish the ore vein and perform Dragon-Seeking and Gold-Separating. Your Celestial Craft Forging Technique Skill Level has increased.

...

By the time Yan Yuwei finally finished repairing the damage to the tunnel, she saw Xu Yunfan mining with single-minded focus. She wanted to compete again, but she had no choice but to admit that she had still fallen short just now.

After a moment of silence, she stopped dwelling on it. Swinging her Iron Pickaxes like a windmill, she tried to catch up to Xu Yunfan’s pace.

Late into the night, the Profound Steel Mining Pickaxe in Xu Yunfan’s hands came to a sudden halt. As its tip broke open an egg-shaped rock, a crimson luster shone from within, bathing the tunnel in red light.

The roar of a collapsing vein echoed from the depths of the cave. Xu Yunfan wiped the iron filings from his face and stared at the fist-sized chunk of Refined Red-Veined Copper he had just unearthed.

Your Skilled Mining has reached the Great Success stage.

Mining 0/5000 (Great Success)

Effects: Seeking Dragon and Distinguishing Veins, Prospecting and Clarifying Land, Hands as Steady as a Mountain, Eyes of Piercing Insight, Digging Like the Wind, Fingers as Hard as Diamond.

(Frantically typing on the keyboard, three more Chapters to go before midnight.)