Translator’s Notes: I would like to release more chapters to celebrate our 100th SRH chapter, but I have Qingming to attend this Saturday, so there’ll only be one extra chapter later this week.
P.S. ‘Aircraft’ shall be corrected to ‘spaceplane’. This does not include ‘fighter aircraft’.
Chapter 100: Red-And-Black Energy Deposit
This time, the Sixth Squad had even dispatched fighter aircrafts due to the importance of the energy ores. With spaceplanes and fighters in the air, those birds would not be able to circle above the skies and inform the red-and-black alien beasts to cooperate with them. The red-and-black alien beasts also stayed away and simply watched from a far distance, knowing that things would not end well if they charged forcefully this time.
Tang Qiuqiu followed behind Dias while holding a gun in her hand, but her eyes were staring curiously at the plants all around her. She had already seen these strange plants in pictures earlier, but it was a different feeling to see them with her own eyes. Mm, she should definitely
take more pictures as memento.
This area was the red-and-black alien beasts’ domain, but none of the beasts had acted rashly despite the stance the humans assumed. It was exactly because they were smarter than every other animals living here that they chose not to act carelessly in face of such odds.
Now that the threat from the two alien beasts were temporarily gone, Dias’ team would be able to spend more effort in finding the energy deposit. Even some technicians were sent to the field, and they would’ve sent in robots as well if it wasn’t for the fact that machines grew more disrupted the closer they were to the planet’s surface, experiencing some confusion in their programming. It was an expected result under high energy field, which was why the teams barely used any laser type weapons at all in the first place. In the end, the suggestion to employ robots was rejected, and they would have to search for the energy deposit through honest manual labor.
Still, even after the parameters were modified and the scanners optimised, they still could not point out an exact location. They only showed that there was an energy deposit somewhere. If the team was to excavate blindly, then they could use up all of the power source they brought with them and squeeze out every drop of their manpower, and still not see a speck of the energy deposit they sought for.
Eudy held up the scanner nonchalantly. Right now he was just holding the thing to put on the appearance that he was working. From the looks of it, the scanners modified by the technical team were completely useless. They could starve themselves searching and still not come up with any real results at all.
Dough lay well behaved on Eudy’s shoulders. It did not want to be left behind on the starship, and yet its nerves were lacking. It had stuck close to Eudy since the moment they left the spaceplane. Unlike the gray cat, it did not have the courage to roam carelessly about.
Eight hours later, Dias let out a sigh. There was still no progress to be made. If the situation continued, then they would have no choice but to ask permission to drill randomly.
Both fighter aircrafts and spaceplanes were very costly to pilot. If they could not find a power source, then they would lose out big time in this expedition. They still have quite a bit of time planned in Sector Z, and if they could not replenish their power supply and dug into their power reserves too soon, then they would soon be met with a most difficult situation.
Di di di——
The alarm sounded to indicate that an animal life form was heading their way swiftly. Previous experiences caused everyone in the vanguard team to reflexively fall into combat stance; throwing the scanners to the back of their minds and getting all the firepower in ready first. It endless waves of schemes and traps was waiting in front of them?was an understandable reaction, as the saying goes, once bitten twice shy. Who knows if there would be another round of traps and evil schemes waiting ahead of them?
“Wait a second, it’s just Wheeze!” Cillin motioned for the others to calm down, “It probably found the energy ores already.”
If the first half of the sentence caused the group’s nerves to loosen a little, then the latter half was without a doubt a bomb that grabbed all of their attention once more. They spent eight hours scanning everywhere with the scanner to record and upload precise data back to the starship, so that the scanners could be further upgraded with improved settings and parameter calculations. Moreover, they did all this on foot, had to stay vigilant against the flora and fauna, and pay attention to the tiniest changes on the scanner as well. It was quite literally a most exhaustive task. And yet, after all that, he’s saying that the cat who vanished from view the second the hatch was opened what the one who ultimately discovered the energy ore? If that really was the case, then they were practically idiots compared to the cat.
A gray shadow flashed by and jumped on top of Cillin’s shoulders. It was none other than the gray cat, Wheeze.
Cillin raised his hands and hovered it beside its mouth. Then, the gray cat spat out a red-and-black crystal about the size of a fingernail to his hand.
When he saw the crystal’s size, Cillin glanced at the gray cat with meaningful eyes. The gray cat turned away and stared innocently at the surrounding landscape.
Indeed, the gray cat had ‘eaten’ quite a bit before it had returned to them. Moreover, despite purposely biting off an egg-sized energy crystal as proof before it came over, because it had held the crystal in his mouth it unconsciously absorbed a portion of it until all that’s left was the fingernail-sized crystal.
When the gray cat spat out the tiny crystal, everyone’s gaze was focused on Cillin’s palm. Cillin handed over the crystal to Dias.
Dias carefully received the tiny red-and-black crystal. It was obviously red-and-black in color, and yet somehow, it was so bright that it was translucent, and so dark that it was deadly attractive.
Dias slowly approached the scanner with the red-and-black crystal, and when he was about five meters away, the scanner abruptly began to react abnormally. The closer he went, the more rapid and sharper the scanner’s beeping sound became. After a series of rapid high frequency noises, the scanner finally exploded. At this moment, Dias and the crystal was still three meters away from the scanner. There was no doubting the energy ores’ power to have caused such a tremendous impact in just less than two meters of distance.
“What a powerful energy field!” Everyone’s eyes lit up. They would need only a square meter of an energy ore of this quality to be able to cover all the energy they had depleted ever since they entered Sector Z.
“This reminded me of those red-and-black alien beasts, and the dark-colored hardened skin and bone plate at the front half of the horny skinned beasts’ body. Perhaps it is precisely these invisible high energy fields generated by the energy ores deep underground that stimulated the alien beasts to develop hardened skins without them knowing it. Their hardened skin had slowly grown complete over a long period of evolution.”
“Other than the animals, the plants inside the jungle are also unusually tough. Perhaps it really is because of this energy ore. If this assumption is true, then we have truly stumbled upon a treasure!” Dias said excitedly while staring at the red-and-black crystal in his hand.
Every appearance of a new type of high grade energy ore always set off a wave within the industry, and it would seem the Sixth Squad’s expedition this time was definitely not in vain. As long as they had this energy ore, even if they were to find nothing else during their time in Sector Z, it was more than enough for the Sixth Squad to stand tall and chin up among the Vanguard.
“You truly are our Squad’s darling, Wheeze! Haha!” Cary tossed the scanner aside and walked over to scratch the gray cat beneath its chin.
The gray cat looked like it was enjoying the gesture with narrowed eyes, but Cillin knew that it was simply because the cat was full and pondering about sleeping, and not because of Cary’s praise or chin scratch!
“Hey Wheeze, where did you find these things? Is it okay if you take us there to have a look?” Dias said to the gray cat in a friend-to-friend manner without any hint of a command behind his tone at all. He knew who special this cat was.
The gray cat swiped Cary’s hand away, cocked its head, scratched an itch with a hind limb, yawned, stuck out its butt and stretched its back, then smacked its lips before finally saying unhurriedly, “Sure.”
It jumped right down Cillin’s shoulders and began running towards a direction.
“Follow it quickly!”
Dias immediately extended a hoverboard to catch up with the cat, and the others followed suit and flew after it as well. Those that did not bring a hoverboard with that went back to the aircraft to follow those who were flying on hoverboards at the front.
The gray cat led the crowd through a series of zigzagging paths in the forest. The trees here were densely packed, and the tree trunks were only thicker than the next. The group could only squeeze through them, and those who were fat or with muscles that were too well developed might not even make their way in successfully. When Dias tried to cut off a few branches with his blade, he quickly realised that these trees were at least ten times harder than the ones they saw in the forest, even though they did not look much different from the other!
Dias did not order the men to begin logging en masse. His intention was to find the location of the energy ore first before dealing with the situation accordingly later.
Just when Dias felt that his bones were about to be deformed from compression, the gray cat turned around to look at him, “You can’t squeeze through anymore? That’s fine. This place is fine too. There are energy ores beneath this ground.”
After gasping twice for breath, Dias asked, “The energy ore starts… from here?”
The gray cat said with innocent eyes, “No, it starts from the spot where your muscular guys can’t squeeze through.”
Dias: “…”
Words could not describe the regret in Dias’ heart, and he was this close from vomiting blood from his mouth and collapsing. The spot the gray cat just mentioned was more than five hundred meters away from where they stood, so it meant that he had squeezed through the forest desperately to the point where his internal organs was almost deformed, only to be told then that more than five hundred meters of his efforts were all for nothing!
“Why didn’t you say it earlier?!” Dias seethed through his teeth.
“That’s because the quality of the energy ores over there aren’t good. The one I’m about to show you is better, although we still have to go a little deeper.” The gray cat said without any consciousness of its error at all.
Cillin could do nothing but shake his head at the side. This cat might look shrewd, but it was pretty dumb alright.