Reborn As Super Heiress

Chapter 981: Chapter 977: Accidental Success

The middle-aged woman nodded, motioning to the middle-aged man, ”Hurry up then, we’re almost out of vinegar at the shop. You should quickly blend the vinegar.”

After saying this, the middle-aged woman’s gaze swept over Huo Sining, as if a bit puzzled, but she didn’t say anything more and turned to go inside the shop.

Huo Sining jumped down from the car, glanced at the small noodle shop a few times, which was less than fifty square meters. There were seven or eight tables, but each table was full of people, indicating that business was quite good.

Now Huo Sining understood what the middle-aged man meant by ruining a vat of vinegar. His shop was a noodle shop, selling Xi Shan noodles, and the people from Xishan loved vinegar. Eating noodles without adding vinegar was absolutely unacceptable.

No wonder the middle-aged man would go such a long way to purchase high-concentration acetic acid, presumably preparing to make edible vinegar himself.

Huo Sining was not unfamiliar with counterfeit vinegar. Although Xi Shan vinegar was famous, the commonly bought Xi Shan vinegar was actually synthetic vinegar. This meant it was a blended vinegar made by combining glacial acetic acid and brewed vinegar in a specific proportion.

To buy authentic brewed vinegar, one would have to visit the homes of those who specially make aged vinegar. This is the real pure handmade vinegar, absolutely without any food additives.

So seeing the middle-aged man buying glacial acetic acid to blend edible vinegar, Huo Sining wasn’t surprised. Such noodle shops were usually small businesses, and given the daily customer volume, the chances of using brewed vinegar were very slim.

Huo Sining wasn’t clear on the hazards of counterfeit vinegar. Being from Bashu and not fond of vinegar in her food, she wasn’t concerned about it. She was only concerned about the precious sword she dropped into the barrel of glacial acetic acid.

The middle-aged man had already unloaded the four large barrels of glacial acetic acid from the car. Only then did Huo Sining notice the yellow corrosion warning labels on each of the stainless steel barrels.

”Oh no!” A thought flashed in Huo Sining’s mind, and she suddenly realized that something was wrong.

The liquid in the barrel was glacial acetic acid, which is acetic acid. Although a weak acid, it can corrode metals. Her sword dropping into this barrel of acetic acid for so long, could it have already been corroded and dissolved?

Thinking of this possibility made Huo Sining panic, cold sweat beading on her forehead. She hurriedly ran over to the middle-aged man, anxiously yelling, ”Uncle, could you please quickly retrieve my item?”

The middle-aged man was quite agreeable. Seeing Huo Sining so anxious, he chuckled and brought a pipe to start transferring the vinegar from the stainless steel into another empty barrel.

Acetic acid is volatile, so when the liquid was poured out from the stainless steel, it flowed out with a gush. Soon, the air was filled with a strong and pungent acidic smell.

Huo Sining didn’t care about any of that. She covered her nose and kept a fixed gaze on the stainless steel barrel, only looking away when more than half of the liquid had been transferred out, revealing a white cloth package standing inverted in the barrel.

Upon seeing this, the middle-aged man put on rubber gloves and quickly fished the dripping wet package out of the barrel.

The middle-aged man was quite attentive. After retrieving the package, he swiftly rinsed it under a faucet until the high-concentration vinegar was thoroughly diluted and the pungent smell dissipated. Only then did he hand the package to Huo Sining.

The price of vinegar isn’t high. Each barrel weighed about fifty to sixty pounds, which Huo Sining estimated to be around three to five hundred yuan. She had already mentioned beforehand that she would compensate the middle-aged man for a barrel of vinegar, so she didn’t hesitate to take out five hundred yuan from her bag and hand it to the middle-aged man.

Upon seeing this, the middle-aged man turned red. He had only been joking with Huo Sining, but seeing her genuinely offering money, he felt embarrassed to take it, thinking it seemed a bit dishonest to bully a young girl like that.

But Huo Sining insisted, stuffing the money into the middle-aged man’s hand and continuously apologizing, ”Uncle, I’m really sorry, it’s all my fault for the trouble. Please take this money, otherwise, I’d truly feel uneasy.”

After some back and forth, the middle-aged man finally had no choice but to accept the money.

After receiving her package, Huo Sining didn’t care if it was still dripping, and after bidding farewell to the middle-aged man, hurriedly walked outside. Turning a corner, she quickly ran into an unoccupied alley.

Huo Sining could hardly contain herself. When she realized that acetic acid could corrode her sword, she regretted not stripping off the T-shirt in front of the middle-aged man. But she held back until she withdrew into the alley, where she no longer cared and directly tore open the package.

In her haste, Huo Sining heard a strange cracking sound. Just as she removed the T-shirt, chunks of copper rust fell loose along with the cotton cloth.

Huo Sining was instantly stupefied. The copper rust originally attached to the precious sword was corroded by the acetic acid. When she casually scraped it with her fingers, the rust fell off easily.

With a few more random scrapes, patches of rust fell off the sword without damaging it. Instead, it revealed the deep bronze hue beneath, with a sword aura emanating from it, rushing towards her face.

That was when Huo Sining understood the reason behind it. The sword wasn’t made of iron but Mystical Steel, in other words, Bronze.

This was an ancient sword, at least a thousand years old. Because it had been exposed to air for a long time, the bronze had chemically reacted with oxygen, creating an oxidation layer on the blade’s surface, forming a copper oxide shell.

Acetic acid is a weak acid; it can corrode metals like iron and zinc and react with copper oxide but cannot corrode copper because copper’s metal activity is weaker than iron and zinc. So when Huo Sining accidentally dropped the precious sword into the vinegar barrel, the copper oxide on the bronze sword reacted with the acetic acid, removing the rust and revealing the blade inside the bronze sword.

Huo Sining had originally planned to take the sword to Zhou Shitao, asking him to help remove the rust on the sword’s surface. Unexpectedly, things turned out fortuitously. She hurriedly used the old T-shirt to wipe the blade, and with each wipe, the patches of copper rust attached to the surface of the bronze sword came off instantly, even the earlier seen repair bronze patches on the blade also got wiped away.

When the bronze patch fell off, threads of golden light flickered at the sword’s center, where it had been covered by the bronze patch. Huo Sining instinctively looked at the glowing spot, only to be suddenly startled, almost dropping the sword hilt she was holding.