Chapter 118: Either Perish or Take Flight

At 9:15 PM, in the dormitory living room, Lin Wang looked at the visibly exhausted Ren Zhong and offered a perfunctory show of concern, "Ren Zhong, are you alright?"

Ren Zhong managed a weak smile, "Thank you for your concern, Captain. I'm fine. Just a little unaccustomed to the excavation work on my first day. I'll be better tomorrow."

"Good, as long as you're okay. We've signed the contract, and there are only two paths: either finish the job on time and get paid, or die on the job. Although under normal circumstances, a Luoyan Excavator can withstand a Level 4 Ruin Beast and is relatively safe, no one can guarantee that there aren't Level 5 ones in the mining zone, or perhaps some extremely mutated Level 4s. One cannot let their guard down."

Ren Zhong nodded to show he understood: "Understood."

His tone was heavy.

When the shift ended at 9:00 PM, one Luoyan Excavator had returned using an automatic navigation system, assisted by a phantom particle communicator.

The excavator inside was already dead, his brain hollowed out by a Ruin Beast.

There were no wounds on the deceased’s body, yet he had been cooked from the inside out.

There was a hole the size of a fingernail on the outer shell of his excavator.

The creature that killed him was a tiny, mutated Level 4 Ruin Beast capable of instantly releasing terrifying high temperatures to melt metal, allowing it to sneak into the cabin and then into the inside of the deceased's combat suit.

The man had died a gruesome death.

Lin Wang assumed Ren Zhong’s heavy mood was due to witnessing a peer's death, so he patted his shoulder, "If you're tired, go get some rest. You performed well today."

"Yes."

Ren Zhong returned to his room and lay on the small sofa, closing his eyes to rest for a long while.

He had spent too much energy that afternoon detecting the electron cloud, leaving him little time to ponder the geomagnetic induction data. Now, he had to go through the data collected during the morning in his mind to form a preliminary regional outline.

He wasn't afraid of forgetting the outline. Although he dared not draw drafts by hand for fear of being monitored, he could enter the Slumber Space.

In fact, the interface in his Slumber Space had all kinds of functions, and with the computing power of his wrist-mounted secondary brain, creating tables and charts was a breeze, but the excavator’s data couldn't be imported.

As for relying purely on his brain to memorize the thousands of data points he saw that morning and then using brainwaves to input them into his wristwatch? Ren Zhong could only shrug and admit that his "eidetic memory" was just a figure of speech; he wasn't a human scanner capable of instantly memorizing such a massive amount of dry, tedious numerical information. Even a genius had to follow the laws of nature.

At 9:50 PM, Ren Zhong finished washing up early, lay in bed, and entered the Slumber Space through natural sleep.

He immediately opened the stock market and sold the block of blue-chip stocks he had bought on a whim the previous afternoon for about 30,000 points. With a gain of 15.4%, he made a profit of 4,636.96 points.

Just after the funds hit his account and while he was drawing in the 3D modeling software, a new notification arrived.

Ren Zhong checked it and beamed.

Lin Wang had sent him money.

A total of 6,725 points had arrived.

Of that, 225 points were what he had earned himself by painstakingly dismantling chips today. The other 6,500 points were his share of the 66,666.67 points distributed to the squad that day, out of the total million-point salary promised by the Chenhui Company.

Ren Zhong did the math.

Something was wrong; an entry was missing. But he couldn't very well ask.

However, Lin Wang sent him a message:

"The squad’s total harvest today was 75,000 points. I estimated your share for the search information to be 5,000 points. I’ve deducted this directly from the 270,000 points you owe me. This saves you the tax burden of a personal transfer for debt repayment. Now you only owe me 265,000."

Ren Zhong felt his teeth ache.

How slick!

How did you know I had absolutely no intention of paying you back?

Can you even do that?

Yu Junren exploits the professional teams, and now Lin Wang is forcibly withholding my money to turn me into his debt-slaving worker. It turns out I really am at the bottom of the food chain in the Chenhui Mining Zone.

But he didn't care much. He had never expected "kindness" from Lin Wang.

***

The time reached 10:00 PM sharp.

Ding-dong! Ding-dong!

Two consecutive notification sounds rang out almost simultaneously.

Ren Zhong clicked "hypnosis," entered the virtual reality training system, and sent a team invitation.

"Reading personal parameters..."

His figure gradually appeared on the vast training ground.

After his vision restored, a moment later, the beautiful and distinct figures of Ju Qingmeng and Ma Xiaoling appeared on his left and right.

When the two sparring partners first appeared, they looked like flickering, pixelated mosaics. Then, the resolution increased, the polygon count rose rapidly, until they appeared as complete, lifelike figures with no "uncanny valley" effect.

Ma Xiaoling: "Hurry up, Level 3 Hell difficulty. I'm in a rush. I have to go to war at five tomorrow morning."

Ju Qingmeng, however, asked: "How was today? Was it dangerous? Was the workload heavy? How do you feel?"

Ren Zhong smiled, "It’s alright. I gained a lot today; you could say it was an eye-opener."

For some reason, he suddenly wanted to build a photon imaging system and take a cell sample from Ju Qingmeng to see if the icosahedrons in her atoms looked the same. He was simply curious.

Ju Qingmeng: "Well, you still need to be careful. Enough talk, let's begin."

"Thank you both for your hard work."

A few minutes later, a full set of equipment—modeled after Lin Wang's Level 3 exoskeleton with several small improvements—stacked itself onto Ren Zhong.

A boundless, wave-like swarm of Level 3 Ruin Beasts appeared in the plaza.

Ren Zhong took a deep breath, gripped his dual guns, and charged in.

The road ahead was still very, very long. The finish line was not only beyond his sight but even beyond the boundaries of his imagination, yet his steps forward were steady, one by one.

I truly have no way back.

...

The thirty-eighth day.

Today was a particularly special day.

Yesterday, one of the 41 remaining excavators got lucky and found a small piece of source mineral. After handing it over to the Chenhui Company, this lucky person received a 100,000-point reward. She only had to pay a 10,000-point commission to the affiliated resource recycling company, leaving her with 90,000. While not exactly an overnight fortune, she was overjoyed and even treated all her colleagues to a delicious meal.

Today, the Mengdu Group's "Life-Buying" vehicle would appear outside the gates of Spark Town for the first time this year.

Before getting up this morning, Ren Zhong sent a message to Yu Jin, who had already put on a Level 1 wristwatch, urging him to keep a close watch on his mother's condition. Yu Jin thanked Ren Zhong for his concern and told him that he had already fully talked things through with his mother a few days ago.

It was also on this day, after completing his underground excavation work for the seventh time yesterday, that Ren Zhong finished mapping the entire magnetic field line network of the Chenhui Mining Zone on his wristwatch before getting up.

With this model, combined with his deep understanding of weak electromagnetic interactions on the planet, Ren Zhong deciphered the generation mechanism of the Chenhui Mining Zone.

This was indeed a planetary mining technology that surpassed Earth's scientific common sense. Over two hundred years, the Amethyst Mining Industry had used a technical means to more directly influence electromagnetic forces, slowly pulling a massive amount of metal elements, originally distributed randomly and sparsely within a radius of hundreds of kilometers, to this location, eventually aggregating them into this anomalous, massive mine mixed with ferrous, non-ferrous metals, and metallic compound ores.

It was also on this day that Ren Zhong nearly died.

He really had come that close.

He had missed one source mineral.

But he had gained two more!

He felt as if he had used up all his luck for the month.

Lin Wang's squad encountered a Level 5 Ruin Beast in the depths of the mining zone, known as a Mud Cave Leech.

When aggregated, its body was at least fifty meters long, indistinguishable from mud. It lurked at the edge of underground rivers, its body diffused into water-rich rocks and soil, with a diffusion radius of over eight hundred meters.

The first to run into the Level 5 Ruin Beast was the reckless Song Qianlian.

He drove his Luoyan Excavator directly into the diffused body of the Mud Cave Leech, waking the terrifying creature.

It then began to move, its body aggregating, while mud and sand infiltrated the transmission system of Song Qianlian's excavator, causing the rotation speed of his drill to slow down continuously.

Song Qianlian turned to escape while sending an alert to Pan Fenglian, who was closest to him, but it was already too late.

The excavator of Pan Fenglian, who was only a hundred meters away, also began to show signs of malfunction.

Of course, Ren Zhong didn't actually know these details. He had deduced them.

At the time, the person closest to Song Qianlian and Pan Fenglian was Ren Zhong, at a distance of about one kilometer.

Ren Zhong received a request for assistance from Pan Fenglian, asking him to advance at high speed along a planned route to scout a certain point on the 3D map.

Ren Zhong could not refuse the request and had to comply, subsequently plunging toward the location of the Mud Cave Leech's core with an even steadier and more ruthless posture.

Consequently, the Mud Cave Leech abandoned the other two targets, rapidly and fully aggregating its body, vowing to wrap Ren Zhong, along with his excavator, into its mass.

Pan Fenglian and Song Qianlian were able to escape thanks to Ren Zhong acting as bait.

Before running away, Pan Fenglian sent a message to Ren Zhong, feigning a warning and telling him to run. She claimed she had only sensed an anomaly earlier but was busy setting up explosive traps to ambush a common Level 4 Ruin Beast with Song Qianlian, never expecting a "big one" to be lurking there.

Ren Zhong was not stupid.

He saw through the dirty tricks of Pan Fenglian and the augmented soldier Song Qianlian completely. He knew even better that such a thing could not have happened without Lin Wang's tacit approval.

This was an act of complete betrayal.

Although he had been mentally prepared, knowing that the friendly relationship built on mutual interests was extremely fragile, his "honeymoon" with Lin Wang had ended ahead of schedule.

The fully aggregated Mud Cave Leech broke through the soil with irresistible force, lunging toward Ren Zhong's Luoyan Excavator. Its speed through the soil was 55 kilometers per hour, slightly faster than the Luoyan Excavator.

The red alarm in the cockpit was ear-piercing, and the blood-red border on the giant screen representing a high-risk state made one's blood boil with tension.

But Ren Zhong did not complain.

After observing the distance between himself and the Mud Cave Leech and calculating the location of the nearest Level 2 magnetic line node for both him and the enemy, he made a decision in an instant.

"Level 2" magnetic nodes were Ren Zhong's own classification. In the Chenhui Mining Zone, there was only one Level 1 magnetic node, the largest central node that radiated across the entire area. Below this central node were dozens of smaller nodes that existed by relying on the largest anti-radiation conical pillar, which Ren Zhong named Level 2.

Except for the central node, whose location Ren Zhong had only calculated but never visited, the places most likely to produce source minerals were precisely these dozens of Level 2 nodes.

Earlier that month, he had passed through that area and knew that the node's location had no Ruin Beasts lingering because the metal was too densely packed.

There were many coincidental factors, but this was the fact.

Therefore, according to the evolution laws of the mining field, the probability of a source mineral being there was greater than 80%.

He was advancing toward it at 50 kilometers per hour.

The Mud Cave Leech was chasing diagonally from over three hundred meters away at 55 kilometers per hour.

When he was caught up by the leech, both would arrive at the Level 2 node—where a source mineral might exist—at the same time.

Given a Ruin Beast's craving for source minerals and magnetic line nodes, it was highly likely that the leech would change its target.

Then, he would survive.

There's no time like the present.

It was time to act.

All in—either die or take flight!

That was the only way.