Studying at Western University starts with a knife-forging competition

The third venue is about a ten-minute drive west of Clemson, on the school side.

Matt's navigation led them onto a two-lane highway, where small processing plants and warehouses converted from old factory buildings gradually appeared along the roadside, their exterior walls painted with faded slogan paint in the rough, decades-old typeface.

Several buildings have walls covered in ivy, the gray concrete and dark green leaves intertwined, looking as if they've been rooted here for at least twenty or thirty years.

"This area is interesting." Matt slowed down and pointed to a sign on the side of the road.

The sign features a hand holding a gear painted in white, with the words "Unity, Work, Community" written next to it.

"Look at those—union signs. There seems to be some kind of community union around here."

Lin Yuan noticed that the cars parked on the roadside had changed—they were no longer family sedans, but pickup trucks, vans, and several jeeps with their chassis covered in dry mud.

Several middle-aged men in overalls were setting up temporary scaffolding with wooden planks in a parking lot. When Matt's car drove by, they stopped and turned their heads to look.

That kind of gaze is different from Lei's—Lei's eyes are giving you an assessment, while these people's eyes are taking notes on you, recording your license plate, car model, and the time of your visit.

The agent was waiting at the entrance of the third venue.

This time it wasn't David in a suit and tie, but a middle-aged woman in her early fifties wearing a dark gray polo shirt, with short brown hair, frameless glasses, and holding a flip-top writing pad.

Standing next to her was a burly man, around sixty years old, with a neatly trimmed white beard. He wore a faded khaki shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, revealing an old scar on his forearm that stretched from his wrist bone to his elbow joint.

"Mr. Lin? Mr. Wayne?" The female agent extended her hand and shook hands with Lin Yuan. "I'm Carol. This is Pat Macaulay, the convener of the local union. He heard that some newcomers were coming to see the venue, so he came over to say hello."

Pat's hands were strong, with thick calluses on his palms and knuckles, just like the hands of the old blacksmiths Lin Yuan had seen at the Longquan factory.

"You want to do forging?" Pat asked bluntly. His voice wasn't loud, but it had a penetrating quality honed from years of working alongside machines in factory workshops, and it could be heard clearly in the quiet parking lot.

"Yes. Metal forging, knives," Lin Yuan said.

Pat nodded, his expression unchanged, and simply pointed with his thumb to the old factory behind him. "Let's go in and take a look."

Carol opened the iron gate. This factory was completely different from the abandoned warehouses she had seen before.

The door hinges made no sound when the iron gate was pushed open, and the slide rails had been newly replaced. The interior ceiling height was similar to that of the previous abandoned warehouse, but the floor had been renovated, with yellow zoning lines drawn on the smooth cement floor.

Along one side of the wall are several rows of old steel-framed workbenches, covered with a thin layer of ash, but the structure is intact and there is no rust.

The ceiling lights were a row of industrial-grade fluorescent tubes, and the distribution box was mounted on the right-hand side of the entrance; it looked brand new. Carroll pulled the switch, and the overhead lights lit up one by one, providing even illumination without any buzzing sound.

At the far end of the factory was a wall made of corrugated steel sheets, with a standard sliding door at the top. Pat walked over and pushed the door open, revealing a two-story office area.

Downstairs is an open space with several old desks and filing cabinets against the wall. Upstairs, an iron ladder leads to two small rest rooms with windows offering a direct view of the entire factory.

"The downstairs used to be the foreman's office, and the upstairs was where the night shift workers rested," Pat's voice came from the doorway. "Both floors have water and electricity, and the toilets are downstairs. The wiring was renovated two years ago, and the air conditioning system works."

Lin Yuan stopped in the middle of the factory and slowly turned around. The 300 square meters was more spacious than he had expected—the forging furnace could be placed against the wall, the power hammer was placed in the middle, the belt sander and bench drill were against the other wall, the quenching tank was next to the fire hydrant, and the anvil was in a separate corner.

He had already started to plan the layout in his mind: the anvil on the left, the material rack against the back wall, the finished product rack next to the changing room, and the belt sander and bench drill against the other wall.

It's a ten-minute drive from the school, which means he can use his break time to rush over and oversee a batch of annealing. Classes end at 2:30 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and it takes him fifteen minutes to drive over. The time it takes for a piece of billet to be properly heated in the annealing furnace is just enough for him to make a round trip.

"What about the rent?" Lin Yuan asked.

This time, Pat didn't answer for him. Carol flipped over the whiteboard she was holding, glanced at it, and stated the rent figure in a steady tone. Compared to the previous shopping street, this price was indeed considerably higher—after all, the area was several times larger, and the location was closer to the school.

However, she clearly did not raise the base price just because Lin Yuan and Matt looked like students. The rental data she quoted was clear and organized, with every expense listed in detail.

"This is a reference rent price coordinated by the community union," Carroll said. "Most of the properties in this area are old factory buildings, and the union intervenes in the rent negotiations to prevent landlords from raising prices when new tenants move in."

Pat stood beside her expressionless as she said this, his arms crossed, clearly having no objection to the statement.

"What are the conditions?" Lin Yuan asked. He looked at Pat, not at Carol.

Pat didn't avoid his gaze: "It's not complicated. Most of the factories, warehouses, and processing workshops in this area have agreements with our union. The agreements are very simple: if the tenant of a property rented out by the landlord is a factory or processing workshop, the union will not interfere with the rent or the business operations."

However, there is one condition: if the tenant needs to hire workers, they should prioritize hiring from the local union's list.

If you don't hire anyone, then you'll have to pay a monthly auxiliary fee as part of the community fund—not much, just enough to maintain public facilities, like the road in front and the streetlights in the parking lot. The union will handle this maintenance themselves; you don't need to apply to the municipality.

Lin Yuan thought for a moment and asked, "Approximately how much is the auxiliary management fee?"

"Five hundred a month is cheaper than a month's commercial insurance in the business district."

Matt then interjected, "We might actually need someone to help out, to keep watch over the place, and do some odd jobs."

Lin Yuan glanced at him. Matt winked at him.

"In that case, the co-management fee can be waived. One position can cover it." Pat put his hand down after saying that. He looked at Matt and then at Lin Yuan, as if he was re-evaluating the two young men. He probably originally thought that Lin Yuan and his partner were just running a small studio and couldn't afford to hire employees, but Matt's words made him change his mind.

However, he immediately added—not in a condescending tone, but more like reiterating the old rules of union work over the years, "But—if you need more manpower in the future, you can't just hire one person."

We have to prioritize hiring local workers, as required by the union. I didn't set the rules; that's just how the community union operates.

After he finished speaking, he pointed to the parking lot outside the community and said, "These are all union members, and the shelves in the factory were all repaired out of their own pockets."

Lin Yuan followed him back to the parking lot. The people who had been setting up the scaffolding were finishing up.

Pat led Lin Yuan to an old Jeep. The back seat of the Jeep was piled with various tools, and the body of the vehicle was covered with lists taped together—parts lists, material lists, work orders, each one filled with writing.

"You can't see what this community used to be like. In the 1990s, this was a supporting supply chain for a machinery processing plant, with more than a dozen factories upstream and downstream."

Later, the factory moved to Mexico, and half of the factory was empty. The remaining people formed a union in the local community and survived by taking on sporadic processing orders. They survived for almost thirty years. "Pat said he peeled a printed list off the whiteboard and handed it to Lin Yuan. "You said you needed someone to do the work—here are a few people."

They are all registered with the local union, qualified, licensed, and have recommenders. They offer good service, but their prices won't be low.

You can choose yourselves. If you want something cheap, call the short-term job agency in town. Don't waste your time with me.

Lin Yuan took the list, glanced at it, folded it, and put it in his pocket: "We haven't signed a lease yet."

"That's your business. I'm just giving you the list first. We'll talk about it after the rental is done."

"Understood." Lin Yuan shook hands with Pat. "I'll give you an answer by next week."

Pat didn't say anything like "We hope you'll come," nor did he say "Outsiders aren't welcome here."

He simply looked into Lin Yuan's eyes, paused for a moment, then nodded—a small but earnest nod—and turned to walk towards the other side of the parking lot. After a few steps, he stopped again, turned back, and said, "You also come from a factory background, right?"

This is not a question.

How did you figure that out?

"Look at what you were looking at when you were standing in the middle of the factory—the location of the electrical distribution box, the floor load-bearing capacity, and the direction of the ventilation ducts." Pat rubbed the old scar on his forearm. "People who don't understand factories only look at the area, while people who do understand factories look at the zoning. The way you walked around there just now, you had already mentally arranged the forge and anvil."

This habit—it wasn't learned, it was instilled in me from a young age in the factory.

He left after he finished speaking.

Carroll helped them relock the factory's iron gate and put the key into the key pouch on his waist.

After confirming that no one else was eavesdropping, she lowered her voice and said to Lin Yuan, "You can think about Patti's request when you get back. The union just wants to give the young people in the community a job; they're not trying to cause you any trouble."

Lin Yuan nodded without saying anything more.

Once the car was on the main road, Matt turned the volume back up. The classical rock music on the car stereo turned into folk music, the lead singer's hoarse voice repeating the same chord. Several middle-aged men in work clothes had finished work and were sitting on a bench drinking canned cola. The old Jeep was still parked by the parking lot, the various expense reports pasted on its body fluttering in the afterglow.

"The third one." Matt, his hand on the steering wheel, tilted his head to look at Lin Yuan. "What do you think?"

"The conditions are the most complicated, but the location itself is the best. It's big enough that the structure doesn't need major changes, and the two-story office area can be used directly—saving on renovation costs and time spent driving back to the dormitory after working late into the night. The location is close to the school—that's the most crucial point. I still have two years of school to complete, and I can't afford to drive forty kilometers on the provincial highway every day. Although the rent is expensive, the savings in renovation costs and time make it more cost-effective than the second option."

"Is that union reliable?"

"There's nothing wrong with Pat himself," Lin Yuan said, "but you interrupted him too quickly."

"Because you really need someone," Matt said, unusually serious this time, not just arguing. "Think about it—we both have classes. I have two days a week, you have four."

You'll spend the rest of your time in the workshop, but you can't possibly finish Doug's knife in a day. Annealing, quenching, tempering—there's a lot of waiting time in between, and you don't have time to keep an eye on it the whole time. Having someone watch over the place for you, someone who can handle emergencies, at least ensures that no one comes in at night and puts out the forge.

"That makes sense, but that doesn't mean just anyone can be let in," Lin Yuan said. "I don't necessarily agree with all the names Pat gave us. Managing a venue isn't just physical labor—the person needs to understand basic equipment safety and can't just walk away when the forge is running."

What's a normal temperature for the tempering furnace? We need to know how to reset any tripped circuit breaker in the distribution box. And our hands must be clean—the workshop will be storing precious metals, finished knives, and handling cash transactions; shoving in someone with dirty hands is easier than hiring a thief.

"So what are your plans?"

"Sign the lease next week, then call in everyone on Pat's list for interviews one by one." Lin Yuan leaned back in the passenger seat, gently tapping the interior door panel with his fingers. "I'll see how they perform first."