*FUUSH*
A dry wind.
*DRIP*
Hot weather.
*CAW*
*CAW*
*CAW*
And nothing except sand in sight.
"Hey, Hai..." A feminine but slightly tired voice resounded amidst the desert.
"Huh?" Accompanied right after by a male one.
"Didn't you have a better place to come?" Hong Li-Wei asked in exasperation while drily looking at the vastness of the desert.
"Well, I would have to come here sometime in the future anyway. So, might as well come here in advance to scout for some good spots." Hai answered her most likely rhetorical question while a smile adorned his lips.
Hong Li-Wei swung her head to the side and stared at him.
Dressed in light clothes, with a robe-like shirt open on the chest area, showing his muscular chest; white pants going till his ankles; simple brown sandals on both feet, and finally, the plain white mask on his face and the magic to difficulty recognition.
"And did this mean that you needed to drag me along?" She grumbled but aside from annoyance, didn't show anything else.
In the last few days, Hong Li-Wei has come to understand how emotionally scarred she was, and she couldn't say that she will be able to deal with it alone.
Thus, with some small talks with the other girls and the constant care from Hai, she decided to tag along even if she herself isn't feeling that inclined to.
This little trip of theirs might help her mind to cool down.
"Yes." Hai meanwhile, nodded.
"After all, I will be doing illegal things." He commented in an even tone.
"..." Hong Li-Wei's ears twitched and she put a hand on her forehead.
'Of course, you would. What have you ever done that was even legal?' She stifled a groan before pulling up her terminal in the shape of a phone.
"…" Hai maintained his carefree expression but he also paid close attention to her actions.
'It's too turbulent.' While small, she was showing signs of stress, anxiety and if stretching a bit, some early symptoms of mild paranoia.
His thoughts jolted the bunny woman up and she looked at him.
"What?" He asked while controlling his mana to make a simple aircraft.
Hong Li-Wei shook her head before a small weak smile stretched her lips.
"Nothing." Then as if a lie, the strength left her lips and the smile crumbled down back to her neutral face.
'It's a progress, I guess.' Hai concluded before finishing their means of transport.
It is something resembling an aircraft, but it would be more accurate to say that it is a metallic form that flies, since there are no engines or machinery in it.
"Now, shall we?" He motioned to the staircase in a gentlemanly manner.
Hong Li-Wei raised an eyebrow before smiling wryly and going in.
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"Found something yet, sweetie?" Hai asked while controlling the aircraft to fly at moderate speed.
Right now, they are flying over one of the many deserts present on the African Continent. Their localization would be around where Ethiopia's borders were previously located.
After the arrival of mana and the other races in the world, followed right after by the great war, such things as "borders" became way too blurry to even be something used nowadays since most of the "official" territories were citadel-like cities, all of them a fair distance from each other even if in the same province.
"Not yet." Hong Li-Wei answered while still maintaining her gaze fixed on her terminal and one hand tapping non-stop on a laptop on the side.
What she was doing is basically covering their location from the ever-present Nexus Net and its reach that englobed the whole world.
As Hai wants to be as stealthy as possible, he asked if she could mask their positions, since erasing them might be too hard of a task considering how they are moving practically non-stop.
"Huh." Hai hummed in response before going back to his task of controlling the aircraft and using his magical eyes to try to find something in the desert.
What he wants is pretty simple.
Hai wants a few ore reserves.
Something rather simple and with a medium degree of difficulty in obtaining with his connections.
However, the reason he is searching for one himself is, as he said: illegal reasons.
He will take advantage of the war ongoing and is going to sneak and run around doing (illegal) ore extraction.
Half of the reason he will be doing it is because of money. As much as he has a fortune of his own, that fortune is just enough for him and his girls to live by and take care of his companies. It's not nearly enough to do what he wants to do, which is expand his influence to a more global scale.
The other half is that it has to do with his experiment and plan for the world's will.
As Hai was silently scanning the ground, his eyes suddenly caught something shining in a normal dune of sand.
"Huh?" Focusing his vision, he noticed something strange. Whatever was shining wasn't really shining in the literal sense, it is his own senses that are making that spot shine because that light wasn't coming from something on the surface.
'This is a first.' A bit confused but intrigued by the phenomena, Hai lowered the aircraft a bit.
"?" Hong Li-Wei's ears perked up and she raised her head before casting a confused look at him, yet her hands never stopped moving.
"Don't worry, sweetie. I just saw something that I want to take a better look at." He commented before standing up.
Then, a hole opened right below him and in the next second, he was free-falling from 2KM or so from the ground.
Adjusting his posture, he bent his knees a bit and then positioned his feet.
*TAP*
Softly landing, he didn't even produce any shockwave or something like that. Hai then turned to look around and confirmed that this was just a dune, nothing else.
Then, he looked below, at the ground.
The thing shining there didn't disappear, it was there, and if his calculations were correct, it should be around 50 meters underground.
Raising his right hand while still looking down, his mana manifested outside his body and a metal drill-like machine appeared.
Holding the thing with his hand, he started it and sand flew high up in the air.
Protecting himself by coating his body with a layer of mana, Hai proceeded to dig in, literally.
Making a tunnel and maintaining it by using metal to support the sand around, Hai went on until he finally arrived at where the light originated from.
Canceling his magical eyes, he dispersed the drill in his hands and crouched down.
Making a metal glove on his hand, he molded it to have clawed fingers and then dug them at something on the ground.
*CRACK*
Clenching his hand, he heard a small cracking sound before he effortlessly pulled something.
Opening his palm and taking a better look, Hai widened his eyes a bit in surprise and disbelief.
The thing in his hands was a magical ore.
A magical iron ore.
"…" Wordlessly looking at the small piece of ore in his hands, he turned to look at where he picked it from and activated his magical eyes.
Then, he noticed that the light was still shining from where he picked it up.
'I did nothing to produce such a thing. Could it be a function that I still didn't know of?' He mused in his thoughts while pulling a lump of ore from where he took the piece.
Then, he noticed that the light stopped shining.
'I see…' His eyes flicked before he thought of something.
Looking around, there wasn't any other thing shining, everything looked normal, just like before.
Closing his eyes, he focused his mind on thinking.
'If I did nothing to produce such a result, then it most likely is the result of something I didn't know before. In other words, it happened because of something I did unconsciously, probably my subconscious.' As he pondered further, he got an inkling of what could have caused such a thing.
He focused again and started to think about magical tungsten.
Its form, shape, properties, formula, and so on.
A few seconds later when he opened his eyes, Hai noticed a few spots of lights shining far away from where he was. The lights were so weak that he might have missed them if he wasn't paying enough attention.
A smile bloomed on his lips.
'Bingo.'
His figure vanished and he landed outside the tunnel he dug.
Then, he jumped and entered the aircraft that was floating in the same position as when he left.
Entering the vehicle again, he turned to Hong Li-Wei who was lost in her own things.
"Sweetie, I think I found a way to speed things up." He stated while sitting back in his own chair.
Hong Li-Wei woke up from her daze and looked at him, prompting him to explain.
"Do you know of any place that is supposed to have good mineral sources?" The smile on his lips looked like one of a mischievous kid and the glint in his eyes resembled someone who just found something interesting.
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"Ok, you can stop here." Hong Li-Wei suddenly said while looking at a holographic map projected on her field of view by the lenses in her eyes.
Hai nodded before stopping the aircraft.
With his senses, he scanned the surroundings for any threats of presence, but ultimately found nothing.
"All right, let me take a look real quick." He whispered just loud enough for her to hear before looking at the floor.
As his neon blue eyes shone, his vision was drenched in darkness and then filled with blue, red, and yellow lights forming lines and symmetrical shapes.
Then, an ironic smile appeared on his lips.
He spotted several lights shining on the ground.
And another thing he noticed was that deeper underground there was also another one, however, this one was bigger and brighter than the ones he saw before.
"Ok, it's here. How are the documents?" He asked while still scanning the place and lowering the aircraft.
"Huh… It should take me another 1 hour and a half at the latest, but you can already start making the preparations." Hong Li-Wei answered while her head and ears swung slowly from side to side, a sign that she was immersed in her own world.
"Ok, then I will go out for a bit, call me if you need." He responded and exited the vehicle by the door this time.
Landing on the sand, he looked around and noticed that this time, there was some greenery around, something resembling a small oasis or a forest, and all around some rocks forming a wall with 3 meters in height, not that high, but still enough to make one think that this is a crater or something resembling one.
'Now, for the important things…' He started to walk around while taking note of some more miscellaneous things like the flora and fauna of the place to confirm that there wouldn't be the risk of his future workers being eaten alive.
30 minutes of inspection and Hai was sure that this place was relatively isolated as he didn't spot any signs of monsters' activity around.
As he was doing one last check on the ground to make sure it wasn't too hard to dig, his senses suddenly caught something flying his way.
Getting up, Hai dusted his hands on his knees and turned around just in time to see a black silhouette flying in the sky and coming straight to him in a diving motion.
As he didn't feel any threat from it, he waited to see what it was.
*BOOM*
The black silhouette crashed on the ground a few meters away from him and raised a cloud of dust and sand in the air.
Then, a pair of inorganic red eyes shone amidst all the dust and sand.
Hai raised an eyebrow.
The thing before him stretched its arm and swung it sideways, sending the cloud of dust away.
It was then that Hai finally took a proper look at the newcomer.
It was a robot.
A terminator-like robot.
Its red robotic eyes landed on Hai's figure and lingered on it for some seconds.
{Target found.}
As its strange voice echoed, several weapons be them rifles, snipers, bazookas, submachineguns, and so on appeared from its arms, back, legs, chest, head, and whatever place they could.
The thing resembled a hedgehog but with weapons instead of spikes.
Then, a low sound of radio waves made its way to Hai's ears.
"Armageddon." The robot suddenly spoke, this time it was an actual living being speaking, however, the voice was strange, most likely the effects of voice distortion.
"This is for my sister, you son of a b*tch." It was the last thing heard before a salvo of bullets was fired at Hai.
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A/N: Hello there, I hope you're having a wonderful day!
So, what do you guys think about this chapter? We are approaching the part of the novel where there will be more planning and some action in it, but it won't be as slow as it has been until now, so look forward to it.
Comment what you thought about this chapter. If you liked it or not, I want to read your opinions and interact more with you guys.
Another thing: Please give your feedbacks. I want to know what you guys think, if there are things that could be better or if I could have done something in a simpler manner. If you could also leave a review, that would help me to understand what you think about the novel in general, so it would be really helpful.
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That is all for today, thank you all for reading! 🍷😎