Chereads / Project Overworld / Chapter 29 - Santa Maria

Chapter 29 - Santa Maria

Keith left the city just like he entered it in the first place, with his faithful bike.

Although this journey proved to be surprisingly interesting, Keith was eager to go back to his base and resume crafting.

After several days of pedaling through the landscape, he finally arrived at the spot where he burried his rover parts into. It was not much of a hassle to assemble it back and Keith luckily drove off towards the north west of the continent without being noticed. Though, at this point there would be no strong repercussion for him from being discovered riding a motorized vehicle.

Afterwards, Keith drove for a while before unfortunatelly running out of fuel. As the motor was made to be using refined petrol to run, Keith had to waste hours to build a new one that would be using charcoal to propel itself.

His journey had been slowed down significantly as a result, but he was not inconvenienced that much. He had already spent several weeks for this traveling purpose, so a few more hours of lagging behind did not mean much to him.

After finally making it to the cave where he stored his boat, Keith disassembled both the rover and the bike before pushing boat the onto water and rowing between the waves towards his main ship.

'Ah, the smell of salt and the touching swaying of the waves. I love the ocean.'

Back when he was visiting Midgard, Keith has been thinking of a name for his ship. In fact, this vehicle made him cross the ocean two times and was certainly going for its third trip not so long in the future. He was not that original with names, but he wanted to give it one nonetheless.

In the end, he opted for the 'Santa Maria' which was the name of the boat that led Christopher Columbus to the 'New World' which was baptized 'America' later on. Keith's journey and that of Columbus were pretty similar and Keith was also seemingly the first to discover the continent he established onto.

'The New World... Although I'm a pioneer, I didn't share my discoveries with the rest of the world. I will not go down in the history as Cristopher Columbus did in the past. Speaking of which, didn't these civilized players think of a name for their original continent? Well, they still don't know about any other continent, so I guess they don't need to think of a name for now.'

Back at his Santa Maria, Keith lashed up his wooden boat to the ship and climbed up the side ladder. Once on its main deck, he went for the usual inspection. He started off by checking the condition of the sails before going down the lower deck and starting off the engines.

'Well, time for the third ride.'

Crossing the ocean to his new home took him a little bit more than the reverse path simply because he did not want to waste his precious petrol and had to mostly use charcoal in its stead.

However, it only took him over two weeks before seeing the familiar coast on the horizon.

'I'm back, finally.'

Keith wanted to check his computer first. In fact, if it did work correctly he could have access to any data from its simple screen. However if it did not work as intended, then every other machine would have paused as well.

Keith tried to turn the lights on but it did not seem to work. Worried, he took a torch inside of his inventory and rushed to the ventilated room sheltering his machines. Fortunately, nothing seemed to have burned out and Keith let out a delighted sigh.

'I guess my engines ran out of power, as expected. No need to be alarmed.' Keith concluded.

After putting fuel back into the generators, Keith started to look at his computer's screen :

'Huh?! There's nothing? No data whatsoever?'

Keith restarted the computer several times, but to no avail. There was not a single information inside the memory of the computer that he was supposed to collect from the other machines.

Thus, and went outside to go and check the drills' system manually. However, every single one of them seemed to have accomplish their work to a certain extent. This did add to Keith's confusion a lot because he could not get why his computer had no access to these informations while it was the central unit that kept the drills activated.

'Hm.. What if I did something wrong with the data recovery? Has it to do with the power shortage?'

Keith thought about it for a while before concluding that he was not saving the data correctly and that the electricity blackout made it lose all the informations.

Anyways, it was not that difficult to modify and as long as his machines did their job while he was away, he was fine with it. After collecting data from all his machines, he concluded that his old generator burned out of fuel first around the week and a half mark and his second generator after the two week mark.

'This result is mediocre. I only got to process ores for less than half the time I was gone.'

Keith did some calculations before going on his journey towards the spawn city and, although the fuel reserve seemed to hold just enough to power the generators for a month, it certainly should not have lasted for only two weeks.

Keith concluded that the inconsitencies in each and every one of his automation process could have led to this result. In fact, the fuel he was refining from pretrol may not be as pure as he noted in his calculations. Then, the generators may have had less efficiency than he anticipated or may have lose efficiency as things progressed.

Anyways, Keith was disappointed by this incident and promised to himself that he would be upgrading all of his machines and processes in the future if he wanted to have a truly efficient and automatized base.

On a side note, he was finally starting to question his vision about the game. In fact, he though that the crafting system of Project Overworld would help him create the most efficient builds, but the facts before Keith's eyes showed that he may have been wrong since the beginning.

'I should put more into my creations in future, I relied too much on the system up until now.'