Chapter 97: Custom Blueprint

Red stared at the glowing text.

The ancient monsters of this continent had not just been wild animals. They were living vaults. The Pre-Calamity gods had shattered something incredibly dangerous, or perhaps someone, and fed the pieces to the most indestructible creatures on the planet to keep them separated.

The Void-Eater was not a glitch. It was ’The Hunger.’ And by killing the Hydra and cutting open the Leviathan, Red was actively digging up the pieces of its missing code.

Down in the crater, Gorak reached out toward the dark stone. The psychic hum was growing louder, tempting the Warlord to touch the spiraling scratches.

“Gorak!” Red’s voice exploded directly into the Warlord’s mind with terrifying force. “Do not touch that stone!”

Gorak froze instantly, his star-iron gauntlet hovering inches from the slab.

“Lord?” Gorak asked, his mental voice tight with sudden strain.

“It is radioactive evil,” Red commanded rapidly. “It will rot your mind just like the feral pilgrims. Step back. Order the Goliaths to carve out the entire section of bone around it. Do not let the stone touch your flesh.”

Gorak immediately stepped back, his breathing heavy. He looked over his shoulder at the Goliath Chief.

“Cut the bone around it,” Gorak ordered, his voice echoing with absolute authority. “We are taking the entire chunk. And nobody touches the black stone. That is a direct mandate from the Lord.”

Iron-Scale let out a shaky hiss. “What is it, Warlord?”

Gorak stared at the dark, light-absorbing rock. “I do not know. But the Lord fears it. And that means we treat it with absolute caution. That reminds me… you locked me up in the vault of whispers back bastion, remember? It looks different, but this thing gives the same feeling.”

Up in the Void, Red made the call. He did not have time to play with radioactive puzzle pieces.

“Bury it,” Red commanded. “Bury it deep in the ash, far away from the quarry. Then get back to the harvest.”

Gorak immediately relayed the order. The Crag-Goliaths carefully hauled the encased chunk of bone into the wasteland, and the expeditionary force returned to the grueling work of cutting the Leviathan.

The extraction continued steadily. The workers took organized shifts, rotating between operating the heavy saws and resting in the dirt. Occasionally, Goliath civilians from the nearby quarry city wandered up to the crater’s edge to watch the monumental effort.

The progress was painfully slow. Red watched the resource counter on his monitor trickle upward. At this rate, harvesting enough material for a continental highway would take years.

Red opened his terminal and scrolled through the [ ARCHITECTURE ] menu. He searched for a dedicated processing facility. Onyx Hall already had the Star-Iron Foundry to handle heavy metalwork. He needed a similar structure designed specifically to turn fossilized bone into usable road materials.

The System offered nothing. The base game had no prefabricated buildings for mass-scale bone refinement.

Red leaned back in his chair and stared at the glowing interface. His eyes caught a small, blank tab at the bottom of the menu.

[ ADD CUSTOM BLUEPRINT ]

An idea sparked.

Red held a PhD in Logistics. His skillset, however, ran much deeper than standard supply chain management. His entire life had been a brutal battle for survival in the real world. When he was young, the government exposed his parents as foreign spies and terrorists. That single revelation had turned his life into absolute hell.

He fought fiercely to get into a university. Despite maintaining the highest grades in his class, the discrimination was suffocating. He had no friends. The faculty refused to tutor him or answer his questions. He was entirely isolated.

Red knew the corporate world would treat him exactly the same way. A pristine logistics degree would not save him if companies refused to hire the son of terrorists. He needed to be undeniably useful. He turned to the internet and educated himself.

He spent his free time obsessively researching heavy industry. He studied mechanical engineering concepts. He watched thousands of hours of footage detailing massive manufacturing plants. He learned how continuous-process machinery linked together. He memorized the multi-stage refinement of crude oil into petrol, diesel, and kerosene. He studied how massive mining corporations crushed mountains of stone and used chemical treatments to extract gold and diamonds.

He understood exactly how to turn raw earth into a refined product.

Red pulled up the base template for the Star-Iron Foundry. He deleted the metal-smelting furnaces from the holographic grid and began to draft a completely new design.

He constructed a massive, multi-stage crushing facility in the software. He added heavy rotational grinding drums to pulverize the Leviathan bone into gravel. He routed internal plumbing to pump acidic swamp-ooze to break down the stubborn marrow. He mapped out an automated conveyor system to mix the treated bone-dust with heated ash. The final product would be an indestructible, fast-curing wasteland asphalt.

Red’s hands flew across the terminal. The System’s rendering engine worked furiously to keep up with his rapid modifications. He was bringing real-world industrial mechanics directly into the fantasy engine.

Red stared at the glowing wireframe of the Bone Refinery. It looked perfect on the screen. Massive grinding drums fed into chemical mixing vats, linked by automated conveyor belts to handle the extreme weight of the Leviathan.

However, a digital model was not reality.

Red hesitated, his hand hovering over the console.

He knew the theory behind continuous-process machinery. He understood the logistical flow of heavy extraction. But he had absolutely no practical experience. He had never poured concrete or calibrated industrial gears.

If his math was wrong, the grinding drums would jam and shatter. If he miscalculated the chemical reaction between the acidic swamp-ooze and the ancient marrow, the entire facility might explode and kill the expeditionary force.

“But manual labor would take too much time. I can’t afford to waste time like this. If I want to gain control over this entire continent, I have to take the risk.”

Red clicked the [ SUBMIT CUSTOM BLUEPRINT ] button.

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