A meteor streaked across the pitch-dark night sky, trailing brilliant light.

The key point that flashed into Shen Cong's mind was melting. An iron core was the heart of a carrier vehicle; someone else's carrier vehicle couldn't be alloyed, extended, or reshaped by him. The only way was to melt it into liquid, then divide it evenly into two portions.

Then work his craft on those two melted portions of iron core.

But this was a hassle too.

Steel's melting point was 1,353 degrees Celsius, and iron cores were mostly steel in composition, so it was much the same. That temperature was extremely high, and reaching it was no easy matter. In the past Shen Cong had always used arc welding to melt iron cores for alloy-devouring. Using arc welding to melt an entire enormous iron core down to molten liquid was plainly unrealistic.

Now he'd need a crucible and a high-temperature furnace.

The theoretical knowledge wasn't abstruse, and Shen Cong quickly worked out a plan.

The scheme he settled on was the rustic country method for casting aluminum pots: the high-temperature furnace to heat past 1,353 degrees, the crucible to melt the iron core. For furnace fuel, he could use coal — after the New Hefei and Huai'an City trade route opened up, a fair amount of Huainan coal had been hauled over.

Once it was melted into two equal portions of iron-core solution, he could then test the totem-processing effect.

No sooner thought than done.

Shen Cong soon headed back to Huai'an City, found a specialist, and consulted him on matters relating to high-temperature iron smelting — how to build the furnace, how to feed the coal, how to select the crucible, and so on — refining his smelting plan into something more complete.

The Eastern Theater Command had heat-resistant graphite crucibles, with smelting temperatures reaching 1,800 degrees, best suited for smelting iron cores.

He spent the money and bought three graphite crucibles outright — one large, two small.

The high-temperature furnace could be crudely fired from refractory clay; there was no need for long-term durability, so a…