Chapter 290: Chapter 290: Descending to the Mortal Realm

The specific plan for the ten major pig farming bases in Dawn’s southern territory was being intensely discussed in the conference room led by Viscount Roster.

The ideas of several factions were constantly escalating through collision.

Who knows if it was an illusion, but Viscount Roster actually felt like establishing a few farms here was even more difficult than building an ultra-high-speed train covering the entire south.

Not far from here, in the Hill Lands Commonwealth, Nation of Mutuns, Foster Iron Mine.

Tech Church combat clerics wearing War Soldier exoskeletons constantly patrolled inside and outside the mining area. At some point, tons of cages had been placed at the mine entrance.

These cages looked like they were made of ordinary steel on the surface, but actually, they were mixed with lots of mithril. The cost was really high.

Even Lava General felt kind of bad about it.

But what good did feeling bad do?

Those worm monsters were just too powerful. Keeping them in stone cages or iron cages was totally useless. In just a few minutes, they could eat through a hole.

They could only search for things with stronger defense to make cages. In the end, they focused on mithril.

They didn’t need to make the entire cage from mithril either. They just needed to fuse mithril into hundred-refined steel, and basically these little things couldn’t break it.

Looking at the roughly three hundred worm monsters that had piled up, Lava General’s expression was somewhat relaxed yet somewhat serious.

The relaxed part was that the most important material for making cars was basically secured.

He’d successfully restocked in large quantities. Just raise them from now on.

But the serious part was that their speed of capturing these worm monsters still hadn’t decreased.

This meant that underground, there were still tons of worm monsters.

They hadn’t even captured a fraction of them.

Who knew when this would end!

The Church of Technology’s powerful logistics meant he could definitely afford to keep going, but even if they could afford it, the miners in the mining area couldn’t!

This continent needed tons of iron ore. This matter also had to be resolved.

Could they only use miners’ lives to wear them down?

Lava General sat there, looking at these worm monsters in front of him. "There’s another problem—how do we raise them?"

These things actually ate steel and stone as food. How do you confine them?

If they had to use mithril cages, there probably wasn’t any way to raise them in large batches.

Mithril was just too expensive.

But not being able to raise them on a large scale didn’t seem to fit the magic-tech philosophy. Magic-tech’s core was still about being able to mass-produce.

Just like their combat clerics—in just a few days, they’d built this team of thousands with almost identical combat power.

Quantity limited output. If output couldn’t increase, then it was useless.

He was already thinking about whether to pass this matter back to Roster territory. If they didn’t have a good solution, then they’d find a way to clear out all the people in the mine vein and directly use poisonous magic to eliminate all life in the mine, rather than keep consuming resources.

But this was ultimately a last resort.

Lava General was quite conflicted.

However, he didn’t notice that a cluster of data flew out from his ring, then transformed into two humanoid figures, with a book beside them too.

The three just stood there, quietly looking at the cages in front of them.

But Lava General, as the person in charge of the tech combat clerics and a legendary magician, didn’t notice anything at all.

"Kind of interesting."

"Interesting? I just think they’re kind of ugly, and they have no brains. No way to create any faith." The Goddess of Magic complained somewhat helplessly.

Although when she was in the divine realm, she already knew these things were ugly and probably had no intelligence, seeing them in person still felt different.

If she saw them when she was still mortal, she probably couldn’t help but directly throw a spell.

Even as a god, observing through divinity, she still felt these were just a pile of waste.

They wouldn’t produce even a thread of faith power. They were like having no brain, only instinct—calling them single-celled organisms or bacteria wouldn’t even be putting them down...

"But this is actually good. Having them raise these makes it much simpler to cultivate industrial raw materials."

Ren’s eyes gleamed, as if calculating something.

"But these things need mithril to contain them. The input cost is just too huge. If I were mortal, I probably couldn’t afford to raise them. At least, there’d be no way to raise them on a large scale... No, even mithril, this guy can eat. This guy actually eats ore as food. If you want the same thing, it’s kind of hard..."

"You’re overthinking it. This guy does eat soil and minerals for food, and eating different minerals produces different effects on it, but containing it is actually really simple. You just need to make a cage out of carbon."

Ren quickly got the answer he wanted and directly cut off Book. "If that doesn’t work, you can even make it straight out of wood. The effect won’t be worse than this mithril."

???

Book was completely dumbfounded.

Kind of unbelievable.

This guy ate ore for food, then you only needed wood to lock it up. So what did this Lava General guy specially make with mithril? Loneliness!?

Didn’t they think of other methods? They just kept strengthening hardness?

"Interesting life form."

The Goddess of Magic was a bit surprised. "But it does fit this kind of survival environment... It seems like it can also condense something inside its body."

"Right. After eating ore, it’s not completely absorbed. A lot condenses into more refined stones... How to put it—what goes in is iron ore, what comes out is refined iron. It’s just that this cycle is pretty long."

Ren seemed to think of something and felt somewhat helpless. "Actually, if these guys ate people or animals, they’d die pretty quickly. Their bodies can’t digest these things and also can’t expel them."

If you had to say, these guys were actually kind of like bees. The reason they attacked when encountering miners was just because they felt their lives were threatened. After attacking, they’d also die.

"In that case, they seem even more suitable for this magic-tech era."

The Goddess of Magic thought about a lot and finally came to this conclusion. "Do you need to tell your believers this information?"

"Let them explore on their own. When someone prays to ask me, I’ll say something."

Ren thought about it and didn’t plan to directly convey this information. As a god, he shouldn’t do such things, especially him as the God of Technology.

His core believers should have the desire to explore this world.

"Let’s go. We’ll enter the mining area, devour the faith of the Foster Iron Mine god, and transform this mine. If possible, we’ll also extract most of the ’worm’ monsters in this mining area."

Transforming the mining area to make it into a huge open-pit mine and speed up magic-tech industrialization was also one of Ren’s important purposes for this trip.