[201-400] THE MECH'S TOUCH

Chapter 305: Bone

The Mech Corps didn't have much time left before their 70-day deadline came to pass. The Gregarious Wrath took much more time to breach the outer core of the Glowing Planet. Thus, the military moved very quickly to confirm they reached the periphery of their goal.

From the outside, the outer portion of the core glowing in bright green. It consisted of a virtually single gigantic mass of growing green junk exotics with just a tiny speck of extremely rare exotic material interspersed in between.

Sadly for Ves, none of the trace exotics happened to be the substance the System sought for. Even if a single gram of certain exotics could be sold for ten billion credits in the open market, none of them possessed any traits that could truly make the impossible into reality.

"So this isn't the right substance either, huh?"

Ves threw away the latest sample excavated from the core. After it bounced on the deck, it ended up in the clutches of Lucky, who eagerly began to devour it. The cat had been in bliss ever since they breached the core.

Chief Petrisc oversaw the maintenance of the Gregarious Wrath's drill components. After burrowing thousands of kilometers into the ground, the drill urgently required maintenance. Ves had nothing to do at this time because he'd do more harm than good if he involved himself with drills.

"This is boring. When are we going to go deeper into the core?"

"The Wrath will move forward as soon as we know the core won't ruin it. The deeper we go, the denser the bedrock. We need to replace the regular drills with more expensive ones if we want to make any progress." An engineer replied besides him. "It's strange how most of the energy fields disappeared at this depth. It's as if the core is isolating us from the exotics up above."

Unlike other planets, particularly life-bearing ones, the Glowing Planet didn't feature magma or any form of liquids. After the planet's formation and its exile from its original star system, the magma had slowly cooled until it became fully solid. This gave the planet enough time to sink all of its heavier materials to the core of the planet.

The ore that the System demanded from Ves should also be found close to these depths. It would be impossible to reach the exact center with today's technology, but hopefully they'd reach close enough to start encountering the desired material.

"More tunneling and mining machines will arrive very soon to lend a hand. The core is largely uniform, but if we're lucky we might come across an easier side path. This entire planet is weird so who knows what's down there."

"We're also short on time." Ves added. "We only have less than twenty days to wrap up this expedition."

While he had faith that the Mech Corps would be able to hang on to the red zone, he had less faith in their ability to approach the inner core and reach the truly valuable substances that rested so deep. All of this was pretty much out of his expertise, so Ves had no choice but to stand aside and let the experts do their jobs.

He left the labs where the ores were analyzed after a time. Lucky didn't want to go, but the cat hadn't been allowed to roam on his own. "Stop being fussy. We still have plenty more days for you to chew on some ores."

Even as his cat yowled in protest, he carried Lucky back to his bunk and threw him on top of the bed. Ves followed suit and rested on its comfy surface while he rubbed his stomach.

Due to the unknown shielding effect, all of the energy fields no longer tried to disturb his body and his delicate internal energy cycle.

Over the past weeks, his body somehow accumulated what it had lost from the ghost. Ves hadn't expected his internal energy cycle to bounce back so fast. He wondered where the energy came from in the first place.