Chapter 29: Three Months of Effort
Compared to the seawater, the rest of the sea dragon's body was much harder to handle, as most of its corpse had already petrified. It wasn't like a normal corpse that could be easily dissected.
Thus, Leon's next task was to slowly transform the sea dragon's corpse bit by bit.
Leon had a simple idea. While he was attuned to both physical strength and magic, he wasn't a miner. He didn't want to, nor was he capable of, using brute force to destroy the sea dragon's body.
Leon intended to use a method to gradually convert parts of the corpse into materials, transforming the sea dragon's body piece by piece.
If it were an ordinary corpse, Leon wouldn't have used this method, as converting a corpse into materials could accidentally turn the entire body into resources for the undead.
But since the sea dragon had already petrified, it wasn't a problem. The sea dragon was enormous, and its muscles, skin, and bones had all petrified. Even with Leon's full effort, he could only transform a piece of stone the size of a regular pillow at a time. After three transformations, his magic would be almost completely drained, requiring at least one or two hours of rest to recover.
It would take at least two months of continuous effort, without rest, to transform the entire sea dragon.
However, Leon didn't mind this. After all, if he didn't work hard now, would he regret it when he got older?
With this mindset, Leon diligently worked every day, converting the sea dragon's corpse into undead materials bit by bit.
When he ran out of magic, he didn't just lie down and wait. Instead, he organized the materials he had transformed, sorting them into categories like skin, muscle, and stone.
When he had more time, he worked on the bones of the sea dragon, trying to see if he could piece together a complete skeleton.
Days passed one after another, and Leon hardly noticed the time slipping by. By the time he finished the first wave of processing the sea dragon, three full months had passed.
During these three months, Leon hadn't left the school at all, or rather, he hadn't left the virtual space. When he was tired, he would sleep in his two-square-meter room. When he was hungry, he ordered food through the virtual network. Whenever he encountered a problem, he either asked questions on the school forum or searched for books in the virtual library.
But most of the time, he stayed in his rented space, dealing with the sea dragon. Even his friends found it difficult to reach him.
Because of this, the sea dragon he had brought back was now fully processed, and Leon had dismantled it into various materials.
The largest piece, of course, was the sea dragon's bones. Leon had spent a considerable amount of effort to remove the entire skeleton intact.
Leon also put thought into how to piece the bones together and keep them from falling apart.
The skeleton he pieced together measured 83 meters in length, 15 meters at its widest point, and about 13 meters at its highest point. The joints between the bones were cleaned to ensure that the skeleton could flex and move as the sea dragon once did.
Next came the undead material derived from the sea dragon's muscles, which had been transformed into a stone-like substance. Since the sea dragon's body had already petrified, it was impossible to separate the tendons and blood vessels during the transformation process; they all fused together.
As a result, the transformed stone looked like black rock with some fleshy textures inside. This was the most abundant material, with a total weight close to 100 tons.
Then, there were the materials derived from the sea dragon's skin. Since the skin had also petrified and become hard, it couldn't be made into large, intact pieces of leather. Instead, it was cut into small pieces about one square meter each, resulting in nearly a thousand such pieces.
Another large component was the sea dragon's internal organs, with the most peculiar being the stomach. This sea dragon had undergone some form of mutation, which caused its stomach to change as well. It had four chambers.
Perhaps due to starvation, the stomach had shrunk somewhat, but it still retained a trace of vitality.
Because of this, Leon didn't convert the sea dragon's stomach into undead materials. Instead, he slowly undead-ified it, transforming the four stomach chambers into storage for food, materials, energy absorption, and poison cultivation.
Leon's plan was to make these four stomach chambers serve as the sea dragon's energy and material sources in the future.
Next was the processing of the lungs. Leon disassembled the sea dragon's lungs and inflated them, turning them into seven air sacs of varying sizes.
The largest one covered an area of 81 square meters and stood 3 meters tall. The next three covered an area of 45 square meters and stood 2.3 meters tall. The final three covered an area of 30 square meters and stood 2 meters tall.
Leon planned to place these air sacs under the sea dragon's rib cage and use them as storage chambers. When he eventually turned the sea dragon into his city, these chambers could serve as various construction sites.
Since the lung membranes were highly elastic, they wouldn't deform even when the sea dragon twisted and turned. This made them the best material for constructing the outer walls of internal chambers. Knowing this, Leon naturally wouldn't convert the sea dragon's lungs into ordinary materials.
The heart was treated similarly. However, instead of separating it for transformation, Leon spent three whole days converting the entire heart from the inside out into a heart-shaped house.
Calling it a house wasn't entirely accurate. Leon had forcibly hollowed out the inside of the heart and used the heart muscles to create pillars, making the whole heart resemble a small shrine with a floor area of just four square meters.
Additionally, Leon left a shallow, pool-like space directly beneath the heart, making it clear that the heart would serve as the energy distribution center in the future.
The only part treated differently was the brain. Beneath the sea dragon's brain was a natural space. After removing the brain tissue, what remained was a large space covering 55 square meters.
After extracting the brain, Leon didn't process it like the muscles or convert it into storage chambers like the heart and stomach. Instead, he turned it into a paper-like material.
This material was the best for undead mages to make magic books. Normally, a single brain could only be turned into one page, and it took at least a hundred brains to make a book.
However, Leon had the massive brain of a sea dragon. The resulting material could make at least ten magic books. Moreover, since they came from the same brain, the resonance between the books could enhance the overall effect of the entire set of magic books.
As for the intestines and other parts, Leon didn't specifically extract them; they were all lumped into the muscle material. On the other hand, the stone that had killed the sea dragon was separately transformed into a unique material, which was more useful than the stone derived from the muscles.
In addition, over the past three months, Leon had pieced together three hundred complete skeletons, more than seven hundred half-complete skeletons, nearly seven thousand intact skulls, and close to a hundred thousand assorted bone fragments.
Leon piled all of these together, preparing to create a tool he had only read about in books.