bioinnovel Chapter 302 Dig!
Chapter 302 Dig!
Ang Tun did not leave.
His lips were blue from the cold, and his snot was frozen, but his eyes were fixed on Zhang Yan's back.
The young man, wearing a windbreaker, stood motionless in the howling wind, staring at the data on the control panel with an indifferent expression, as if he were looking at a menu.
Aren't you afraid of the cold?
Ang Tun stamped his foot again, swallowing the thought back.
Comparing this to the boss is meaningless.
Two hours later, the black scorpion burrowed to a depth of thirty-one meters.
The rock structure has changed—the permafrost has disappeared, replaced by a dark rock with extremely high density, with a texture between basalt and obsidian.
The efficiency of the high-frequency drill bit plummeted, with the progress dropping from 80 centimeters per minute to less than 10 centimeters per minute.
Zhang Yan adjusted the drilling angle and frequency.
Three hours.
Thirty-eight meters.
What did the drill bit hit?
A system notification popped up on the Black Scorpion's control panel.
[Edge of a void crystal ore body detected. Current depth: 38.7 meters. The ore body hardness exceeds the rated value of the Scorpion Drilling Pliers by 14%. Replacement of the work unit is recommended.]
Zhang Yan put away the Black Scorpion and put on the Xing Tian.
The heavy mech stood firm at the bottom of the depression, the eight-meter-tall steel giant making the surrounding rock walls look shorter.
He retracted the chainsaw sword from his left arm and replaced it with a precision mining module that he had temporarily taken out of his storage space.
A rotating grinding core, about the size of a bowl, with cutting teeth made of titanium carbide alloy inlaid on its outer edge.
Xing Tian knelt on one knee, aligned the grinding core with the drilling position, and slowly drilled deeper.
The cutting sound changed.
It was no longer the crisp sound of shattering gravel, but a dull, continuous friction sound, like fingernails scraping a blackboard, but a hundred times deeper.
Ang Tun's teeth ached, and he involuntarily covered his ears.
Forty-three meters.
Forty-six meters.
Forty-seven point three meters.
The grinding core suddenly lost resistance, and Zhang Yan's fingers paused on the control panel.
A system notification popped up.
[The void crystal ore body has been contacted.]
Zhang Yan manipulated Xing Tian to slowly retract the grinding core, then leaned down to look at the cave entrance.
At the bottom of the borehole, more than 30 meters deep, something was glowing under the light of the mining lamps.
It's not reflection, it's self-luminescence.
The dark purple hue carried an eerie shift that didn't belong to the visible spectrum, as if the light itself had slightly bent at that location.
Void Crystal.
The work that followed became more meticulous.
The structure of void crystals is extremely special—the description in the system, "microscopic singularity crystals remaining in the three-dimensional matter layer after the collapse of higher-dimensional space," is not an exaggeration.
There is a weak spatial disturbance field around this thing. Violent mining will cause the crystal structure to collapse and turn into a pile of useless purple powder.
Zhang Yan put away Xing Tian and went down into the cave himself.
He extended the robotic arm to its highest precision mode and lowered it inch by inch along the borehole wall.
Upon reaching the bottom, the temperature actually increased—not due to geothermal heat, but rather due to the weak thermal radiation generated by spatial disturbances around the Void Crystal.
The first void crystal was embedded in the dark rock, about the size of a thumbnail, with a surface so smooth that it didn't look like a natural mineral, but rather like a solidified purple droplet.
The precision knuckles of the machine arm peel away the rock around the crystal extremely slowly, with each cut not exceeding 0.05 millimeters.
It took nearly three hours just to remove this small piece.
Zhang Yan held the Void Crystal in his palm and felt an indescribable sensation—its weight and volume were completely disproportionate, eerily light, as if it did not exist entirely in three-dimensional space.
A system evaluation popped up.
[Void Crystal Acquisition Amount: The current total is approximately 11% of the demand for the Azure Dragon Space Folding Module. Insufficient.]
Eleven percent.
It's not even close.
Zhang Yan stored the crystal in his storage space and climbed up the borehole wall.
It was already dark.
The sky above the concave top turned a deep blue, with a few stars twinkling in the wind.
Angtun crouched on the edge of the depression, trembling all over, but he was still there.
"Boss...did you get it?"
Zhang Yan glanced at him.
"Not enough. We'll continue tomorrow."
The second day...the third day.
Zhang Yan's routine was simple: he would go down into the cave at dawn and come up at dusk.
The distribution of the void crystals was more dispersed than expected. The ore body was not a single piece, but rather scattered among the dark rocks. The largest was no bigger than a little finger, and the smallest was like a grain of rice.
Each one had to be carefully removed bit by bit using a multi-tool.
Over two and a half days, he worked back and forth at depths of 40 to 53 meters underground, drilling seven auxiliary holes in different directions.
Two layers of calluses have formed on my hands, and three percent of the delicate knuckles of the Thousand Machine Arm have been worn down.
Four o'clock in the afternoon on the third day.
When Zhang Yan climbed out of the last drill hole, the total amount of void crystals in his storage space had finally reached the target.
A system notification sounded in my mind.
[Void Crystal Harvesting Amount: 102%. This meets the manufacturing requirements for the Azure Dragon Space Folding Module. The host is advised to evacuate the current area as soon as possible.]
Zhang Yan stood at the bottom of the depression and stretched his stiff shoulders.
The wind is still the same wind, and the cold is still the same cold.
But the fatigue from not getting a good night's sleep for two and a half days was worse than the cold.
He took out his satellite phone.
"That's enough, prepare to leave."
Nie Qingcheng replied very quickly, as if she had been holding the phone the whole time.
"Is that really enough?"
"Um."
Your voice sounds tired.
"fine."
"You're lying to me."
Zhang Yan smiled but did not refute.
"We'll talk about it when we get back."
He put away his phone and was preparing to recall Xing Tian to do the final round of drilling and backfilling when he caught a glimpse of Ang Tun standing up straight at the edge of the depression.
It's not because of the cold.
Ang Tun's expression changed, and he stared at the north.
His hand unconsciously reached for his waist.
There were no guns there; he left his weapons in the car when he crossed the border.
Zhang Yan raised his head.
Motor noise.
It's not one car.
At least five vehicles sped over from the frozen wasteland to the north.
The roar of the engine carried far across the open terrain, mixed with the crunching sound of tires crushing the frozen ground.
Zhang Yan stood on the edge of the depression.
Six dark gray modified SUVs came from the north in a fan shape, moving very fast, clearly familiar with the terrain.
Searchlights were mounted on the roofs of the vehicles, and the outlines of heavy machine guns could be seen in the cargo beds of two of them.
The convoy stopped about 200 meters from the dent.
The car doors opened almost simultaneously.
More than thirty people jumped down, all dressed in black tactical gear, masks, goggles, and fully armed.
Rifles, submachine guns, two general-purpose machine guns, and someone was even carrying a barrel—
"That's an RPG." Ontun's voice trembled.
It's not cold.
Zhang Yan glanced at the equipment of the newcomer.
They weren't a regular army; their composition was too mixed.
However, the weapons were in very good condition, the night vision goggles were the latest model from the French-made TTL, and the tactical vest had no markings.
Mercenaries.
The top-tier kind.
A tall man stepped out from the middle of the group. He wasn't wearing a mask, revealing a sharply defined Slavic face with an old scar running across his chin.
He shouted a sentence in English.
The sound wasn't loud, but it carried clearly in the wind.
"People in the mine, hand over what you dug out, and you can leave."
Ang Tun couldn't understand E language, but he could understand the sound of the bolt being pulled back.
More than thirty guns were simultaneously aimed at the dent.
His legs went weak, and he slid down to the ground while holding onto the rock wall.
"Boss... this is fucking..."
Zhang Yan didn't look at him.
He looked at the leader opposite him.
Don't panic, don't get angry.
I simply made a simple judgment in my mind.
These people didn't just happen to be passing by.
"From the moment you arrived at the mining area"—Zhao Hong's intelligence was correct; there were illegal mining activities in this area.
He was being watched before he even arrived.
The other party waited for two and a half days for him to dig things out, and then came to steal them.
The leader shouted again.
"One last time. Ten seconds."
Zhang Yan raised his wrist and touched the activation button on the Thousand Machine Arm.
"What are you counting to, ten seconds?"
His voice wasn't loud, but it was clear in the gaps between the wind.
The leader frowned.
The next second, the ground in the center of the depression exploded.
It wasn't an explosion, it was heavy pressure.
The 87-ton dark gold steel behemoth was released directly from the storage space. The Tyrannosaurus Rex's feet shattered the frozen ground, and when it stood, its head exceeded the top of the rock wall at the edge of the depression. Its 12-meter-tall body cast a shadow that blotted out the sky under the searchlight.