Chapter 252: Factory Core Obtained, Super Epic Map, Activate! 【component 028】
In the Sea of Depth, eerie undercurrents surged.
In Arakawa Village.
Shangshan Che, who had just opened his eyes, was dazed.
Ever since he had made some progress in his state of mind, such daze upon entering the Eternal World had become rare.
This was the first time in these past few days.
He slightly twitched his nose, but what Shangshan Che smelled was not the familiar mix of musty thatch and sulfur.
Instead, it was a stench mixed with thick engine oil smell and a bunch of other indefinable industrial odors.
“Urgh…”
Even Shangshan Che couldn’t help but feel nauseous for a moment.
After a few seconds, as Shangshan Che’s vision gradually cleared, he finally understood why the smell was so thick and pungent.
—Because he had appeared directly in an open-air sewage channel!
Shangshan Che looked down and saw oily blue-black sewage flowing gurglingly between his calves.
It flowed from the rumbling sounds, toward the silent Eternal World Land in the distance.
Looking up again, he could see that the sky above had been smogged into a colorful hue.
Enduring a subtle discomfort, Shangshan Che did not immediately climb out of this sewage channel dug deeper than his height.
The first thing he did was bend down to search for the missing shrine.
That’s right, the shrine.
Because if he had respawned in this sewage ditch, it meant the shrine must be nearby.
Shangshan Che plunged his hands into the sewage that was superstandard in heavy metals by millions of times and rummaged around.
After some groping, he indeed touched something angular.
Shangshan Che exerted a little force to pull it out and found it was indeed the shrine sunk at the bottom of the sewage channel.
However, under the day-and-night corrosion of the sewage, the originally rustic shrine had turned entirely blue-black, emanating a thick fermented sewage smell from inside and out.
Just placing it in front of him and examining it for half a second made Shangshan Che’s eyes sting.
“This shrine really can’t be kept…”
Holding his breath, Shangshan Che used Qi Barrier to wash the surface of the shrine— as for the interior that had already absorbed the flavor, he had no way.
After a simple “cleaning,” Shangshan Che used Qi Barrier to dig a pit in the earth and stone beside the sewage channel, embedded the shrine perfectly in it, and covered it with a layer of fine soil as camouflage.
“This way, there should be no worry about the shrine being washed away by the sewage.”
After doing this, Shangshan Che first used triple Qi Circulation to isolate himself from all external connections, then used Thousand Faces and Jade Heart Incantation to retract all outward Qi.
Only then did he silently probe his gaze from the upper end of this roughly two-meter-high sewage channel.
The expected crisscrossing industrial production lines did not appear, nor did the tall robots he had seen last time.
What presented itself to Shangshan Che’s eyes was only barren land to the extreme, where not even a single weed could grow.
But if viewed from a hundred meters in the air, one could see countless sewage channels of varying widths extending toward the infinite distance on this land.
The entire Arakawa Village had been razed flat, turned into sewage channels.
Sewage soaked the land.
This was the reason nothing grew.
“However.” Shangshan Che, after looking around, fixed his gaze on that one intact townhouse, “Good thing the shrine wasn’t washed dozens or hundreds of kilometers away by this sewage.”
Upon finding no presences within his vision and perception range, Shangshan Che walked out and used Qi Circulation to shake off all the sewage from his body.
He instinctively wanted to inhale the spiritual energy of the Eternal World, but soon coughed with a face ashen.
This damn factory had polluted the surrounding heaven and earth spiritual energy into full-component poison gas.
Shangshan Che looked toward the towering black steel forest two or three thousand meters away; with the Eye of Interpretation contracting, he saw dense machine laborers shuttling through it.
At such a great distance, these logistics sequences with almost no combat capability naturally could not detect his peeking.
【Logistics Sequence I（Half-Star）】, 【Logistics Sequence II（Half-Star）】, 【Logistics Sequence III（Half-Star）】.
Most machine laborers had one of these three labels above their heads.
As for the original crazy, exploited workers, they had all vanished without a trace, who knows where they were driven to.
Perhaps because the cost of labor and upkeep was too high to be worthwhile, they were humanely destroyed by the Factory Owner Z or something.
After thinking, Shangshan Che first went to the original blacksmith’s townhouse.
The townhouse and its surrounding fifty meters showed no changes, but even floating in, Shangshan Che found no traces of anyone having been there.
The racks that originally held many fine weapons, and the wooden platform seen upon entering the door where the blacksmith slept all day, were all covered in thick dust.
Walking further inside, one could see the field where Zashiki had once planted a patch of Spirit Grass.
But due to the sewage, these originally spiritual energy-rich fields had long deteriorated, and the Spirit Grass seedlings in them had all withered.
When Zashiki left Arakawa Village, besides harvesting one crop of Spirit Grass, she had actually also planted a bunch of seeds.
Spirit Grass’s vitality was quite tenacious; even without care, it could grow.
It just wouldn’t grow as vigorously as with careful tending.
But now, only a patch of dried, oil-stained muddy fragments remained.
Shangshan Che took out the Spirit Grass Zashiki had given him that day; due to the Storage Bag, it still maintained its freshest moment.
He lowered his eyes and sighed lightly,
“What a pity.”
Shangshan Che shook his head and no longer lingered.
He floated out of the townhouse, then landed on the ground, and walked silently toward the factory.
Within a kilometer of approaching the 【Logistics Sequence Factory】, one could find some 【Detection Sequence】 model machine dogs or robots slowly wandering.
These Detection Sequences were all Zero-Star, and their sizes were extremely small, the largest no more than twenty or thirty centimeters, the smallest machine insects even only one centimeter.
If ordinary demon supernatural phenomena approached, they would have been detected and alarmed long ago.
But under the disguise of Thousand Faces + Spirit Condensing Technique + Jade Heart Incantation + triple Qi Circulation, these Detection Sequences ignored Shangshan Che who was approaching the factory at a steady speed.
Within five hundred meters, the number of Detection Sequences increased sharply, and teams of organized combat sequences that Shangshan Che had faced many times were patrolling.
This security force was incomparably stricter than those wandering workers who still fought each other.
But for the current Shangshan Che, it was still useless.
These robots at most One-Star+ were fundamentally too weak; even if Shangshan Che stood in front of them, they couldn’t possibly detect him.
—This couldn’t be helped for these ordinary exploration and combat sequences.
—Now that Shangshan Che’s strength was already hard to match even among Three-and-a-Half Star, coming to this corner of Arakawa Village was really a big shot entering a beginner village.
So he continued forward.
Logistics Sequence Factory, within two hundred meters.
Dense One-Star and Two-Star combat sequences moved in a staggered manner, ensuring every corner had multiple gazes watching.
It could be called two steps one post, three steps one sentry.
But perhaps because this was only a logistics factory in a remote area, Shangshan Che didn’t see a single Three-Star or above combat sequence.
This scene made Shangshan Che’s heart itch.
Just a rough count, the number of these combat sequences was at least over five hundred.
If he hit them with one Five Thunder Technique to wipe them out…
Shangshan Che rubbed his hands excitedly, but after a brief hesitation, he gave up the idea.
—His purpose this time was for the “Factory Core”; he hadn’t even entered the factory gate yet.
Who knows if one Five Thunder Technique would make the factory shut the gates, secretly send away the core, or even spawn a Factory Owner Z directly.
Moreover, the Soul Ash exploded from these “XX Sequences” was pitifully little.
Forget it, forget it.
After convincing himself, Shangshan Che, who had used Thousand Faces to shrink himself, sneaked through the gaps between one combat sequence after another.
He entered the logistics factory that had been rumbling day and night without stop since its completion.
Clang clang clang…
Sizzle sizzle sizzle!
Boom! Boom!
Countless chaotic yet perfectly regular giant noises emanated simultaneously from various parts of the factory.
Shangshan Che could see one logistics sequence after another standing at their respective “workstations,” repeating identical actions at the same rate and same force.
The assembly line operated ceaselessly.
A block, a puddle, or a lump of material was transported in various ways to the front of the logistics sequences, onto their variously shaped “hands.”
Then processed perfectly in the same time, sent to the next procedure.
The entire factory operated with exquisite precision and order, like a compiled program.
“This kind of efficiency, even ten thousand more workers squeezed to insanity couldn’t achieve…”
Shangshan Che walked along the tens-of-centimeters-wide gaps in the roads, marveling inwardly.
Due to the overly massive density of logistics sequences and assembly lines inside the factory, even combat sequences had no footing.
No wonder the external defenses were so tight.
Following the assembly line where products gradually became more “primitive,” Shangshan Che gradually headed toward the core of the logistics factory.
At the same time, Shangshan Che, who had been looking around, discovered a strange phenomenon.
He remembered Katsumi saying—Logistics Sequence Factory was specialized in producing war resources to supply frontline troops, a modular specialized factory.
In other words, this place specialized in producing war-related materials or weapons.
But Shangshan Che figured he had walked half the distance, yet 80% of the assembly lines he saw were the same type, with only a bit producing various materials.
Most assembly lines were producing a small thing named 【Component·028】.
And the failure rate seemed high; all Component·028 he saw were discarded by the machines into the trash storage slot, then sent to the furnace to be turned to ash.
In that moment, Shangshan Che’s gaze swept over three square, palm-sized Component·028.
【Component·028（Completeness 97.99%）】.
【Component·028（Completeness 97.33%）】.
【Component·028（Completeness 98.45%）】.
Then, these components with nearly 100% completeness were sent back to be remade.
He suspected that only components with 100% completeness would be kept by these machines.
But making a component indistinguishable from the mold, how difficult was that?
“What the hell is this thing?”
Shangshan Che narrowed his eyes, suspecting it was another trick by the Factory Owner.
Devoting over half a factory’s production capacity to a palm-sized component must mean returns far beyond expectation.
Otherwise, these efficiency-obsessed Factory Owners wouldn’t bother.
Unfortunately, the factory was full of mindless robots acting purely by program, unable to be controlled by Soul Seal to spill clues.
Shangshan Che could only steal the highest completeness component he had seen from the storage slot.
【Component·028（Completeness 99.75%）】.
In the inferno-hot depths of the factory, Shangshan Che’s steps grew slower and more cautious.
The surrounding air temperature had already exceeded a hundred degrees, and to his delight, Two-and-a-Half Star combat sequence patrol teams appeared within vision.
This was good news, meaning he was not far from the real Factory Core.
At the circular end of the assembly line, Shangshan Che followed a narrow pipe to a high place and patiently observed the patrol teams’ movement patterns.
A full hour later, Shangshan Che figured out the pattern.
Every fifteen minutes, combat sequences of the same number would pass in front of him once.
Based on their movement speed and the map in Shangshan Che’s mind, circling should take less than ten minutes.
“So, these patrol teams go deeper halfway through.”
He judged in his mind and without a word jumped down, choosing to follow behind a combat sequence team.
The further they went, the higher the air temperature.
By the time Shangshan Che and the patrol team passed through the mechanism and descended to the underground below the factory, the surrounding temperature had soared to several hundred degrees.
Even with triple Qi Circulation isolation, his skin felt a slight heat.
Click clack click clack.
The combat sequences’ footsteps did not stop, crossing the highest temperature zone, ascending along the preset route to continue patrolling.
But Shangshan Che stopped.
He raised his head, staring at the giant light sphere suspended in midair by an invisible force field, which made even his Eye of Interpretation feel stinging heat.
Because his destination had arrived.
【Factory Core】
The distinct light gold label stood crookedly on the light sphere, part of it sunk into it.
Shangshan Che fell into thought.
How to take away this thing at least eight or nine meters in diameter with surface temperature probably thousands of degrees?
Directly storing it in the Storage Bag probably wouldn’t work, because this Factory Core was clearly fixed in midair.
After a long gaze, with crystalline tears forming at the corners of his eyes, Shangshan Che’s pupils suddenly contracted, discovering something inside the light sphere.
It seemed…
The Eye of Interpretation operated at full power, piercing through light brighter than a hundred flashbangs exploding at once, peering into its interior.
—At the very center of the light sphere, there was a basketball-sized deep blue sphere!
This 【Factory Core】 label was actually floating above this deep blue sphere.
No wonder the label was sunk into the light sphere… turns out this extremely hot light sphere was just the “light” part of the Factory Core’s glowing and heating.
Such a small sphere would be easy to collect.
But to reach beyond the light sphere’s range, his life would probably end here.
Shangshan Che smiled.
What’s a mere life?
One life gone, he still had another today!
Tomorrow two more!
Nothing else, Shangshan Che just had many lives!
With that thought, sensing the next patrol team hadn’t fully descended, Shangshan Che instantly acted.
The long-compressed Qi Barrier, spiritual power, and Lightning Magic erupted simultaneously in that instant!
Eightfold Fence made Shangshan Che’s figure vanish from the spot in a flash.
Endless purple-black lightning burst from around Shangshan Che, clashing against the light sphere representing extreme heat.
Amid the tearing melting pain from his physical body, Shangshan Che’s fingers finally touched the deep blue small sphere at the center, surprisingly cool to the touch.
At the same time, a piercing red alarm rang throughout the logistics factory!
Deafening!
The Ghost God’s majesty instantly crossed millions of miles, enveloping the entire factory.
Whoosh.
But Shangshan Che’s entire body had already been melted away by the extreme heat, disappearing along with the small sphere.
His last thought was,
—The Super Epic Map’s key, obtained!
