Chapter 102: Living Iron Extraction

Chapter 102: Chapter 102: Living Iron Extraction

"New colorless, transparent crystals — just like I predicted. Even when they’re full, they still won’t leave other corpses alone. I need to take some samples and run an analysis."

Ning Ye’s voice had a note of excitement in it. She seemed to have snapped back into her old rhythm and was already heading toward the equipment outside, ready to do something with the Blood Crystals.

Then she noticed that the device Xiang Yi had left at the lab — the one they’d hauled out from beneath the hospital — looked brand new. She turned to him and asked, "Did you actually get that thing fixed? You never did tell me what it does."

"Oh, that’s a Living Iron Extraction Device. I finished fixing it while you were gone. Want to take a look and see if it’s good to go?"

Xiang Yi noticed Ning Ye’s breathing seemed to catch slightly, and her hands stiffened on the equipment for just a moment.

"All those Shuffling Monsters under the hospital... a Living Iron Extraction Device... no wonder..."

"With those Blood Crystals, we should be able to set up a stable Living Iron Extraction Device matrix and get a steady output of Living Iron."

"The thing is, I’ve heard that extraction devices calculate their output based on an Abnormality’s Spiritual Fluctuation intensity and physical size. Aren’t Blood Crystal Worms a bit too small for that..."

Ning Ye had fully slipped into work mode. She was muttering a stream of figures and technical jargon that Xiang Yi couldn’t follow, her fingers flying across the equipment as she ran calculations.

Xiang Yi decided not to bother her. He unrolled his sleeping bag on the lab floor, found a quiet corner, and lay down.

Rest.

When Xiang Yi woke up.

Ning Ye looked like she was running on empty.

Probably because she’d spent four straight days out in the middle of nowhere, and the moment she got back, the Living Iron Extraction Device Xiang Yi had brought in had pulled her straight into a full day of work.

A device that looked like a laptop had appeared beside her, and she was typing something on it.

When she saw Xiang Yi wake up and walk over, she casually handed him a nutrition tube.

Strawberry flavor.

Xiang Yi munched on it while glancing at the laptop screen.

It was a document — a draft framework for a research paper on Blood Crystals:

Neonatal Stage: Upon receiving a blood stimulus, the Worm Eggs hatch. The larvae absorb blood along with small amounts of muscle and organ tissue, growing until they reach adulthood and entering the Reproductive Stage.

Reproductive Stage: Adult worms consume greater quantities of solid tissue. After digestion, the tissue is converted into blood-red crystalline matter. During this stage, the adults engage in mutual consumption of one another.

Hypothesis: This stage represents the mixing of genetic material between adults of different sexes.

Fatigue Stage: As the conversion of the host corpse nears completion, mutual consumption between adults ceases. The worms begin storing increased quantities of High-Quality Blood Crystals internally.

If excess food remains unconsumed during this stage, the Blood Crystal Worms convert the surplus into colorless, transparent crystals.

These crystals differ in properties from the blood-red variety. Their transparency grants superior optical clarity due to their lack of color, but they are extremely fragile and shatter with even the lightest contact.

Blood Crystal Worms themselves appear to possess a trait that prevents them from damaging these colorless transparent crystals. Future research should explore methods of hardening the transparent crystals.

Oviposition Stage: Once feeding is complete, the adult’s bodily tissue begins to solidify. Vital signs cease and the worm dies. The solidified remains transform into new Blood Crystal Worm Eggs.

It was fairly sparse — peppered throughout with Ning Ye’s own speculative notes — and clearly still just a rough skeleton.

But once the content was fleshed out, this research on Blood Crystals could easily fill several full papers.

Ning Ye looked at Xiang Yi and said, "I promised you before — your name will be on the papers. But right now that’s a bit tricky, so I’ll hold off on publishing for a while."

She closed the laptop and jerked her chin toward the containment rooms. "I’ve already moved the Living Iron Extraction Device into Containment Room 3, and I put one Blood Crystal Worm in with it."

"Has it started extracting Living Iron?"

"No. Ran into a problem..."

The two of them headed over to Containment Room 3.

Through the viewing panel, they could see the Blood Crystal Worm Ning Ye had placed inside launching itself all over the room in a frenzy.

A few robotic arms moved sluggishly nearby, trying to grab it, but they couldn’t come close to matching its speed.

A hint of embarrassment crossed Ning Ye’s tired face. "I accidentally released its restraints when I was swapping equipment between two of the containment rooms. That’s how we ended up with... this."

"The equipment in Room 3 is a step down from the first two rooms. To keep the precision up, the movement speed had to be dialed back, so it just can’t fully restrain a Blood Crystal Worm..."

"So you need me to go in there and catch it myself?" Xiang Yi asked. "Why didn’t you just kill this one and put a new one in? There are weapons in there, right?"

Ning Ye froze. A few seconds passed before her expression shifted into one of slow, dawning realization, and she quickly reached for the controls outside.

Xiang Yi followed up with another question: "Also, shouldn’t a containment setup like this have a Mind Pulse Generator ready to go?"

Ning Ye’s cheeks flushed with embarrassment. "Alright, alright, drop it — I forgot, okay?"

She hurriedly activated the Continuous Psychic Pulse Generator in Containment Room 3.

The Blood Crystal Worm instantly went into a frenzy, thrashing around the room with even greater violence — but within moments it went limp and collapsed to the floor.

The robotic arms extending from the containment room walls moved in, scooped it up, and pinned it against the surface.

Xiang Yi watched it all with genuine interest.

Ning Ye guided the robotic arms to pick up two spike-like tools and walked Xiang Yi through it as she worked: "Drive Spike No. 1 straight in, perpendicular, along the third segment. Then drive Spike No. 2 in horizontally. That severs the neural pathways completely."

The Blood Crystal Worm struggled with everything it had, but it couldn’t stop the spikes from being driven into its body.

The robotic arm released. The worm hit the floor with a wet thud.

Its lamprey-like mouthparts kept twitching spasmodically, but its body was nearly motionless — only the faintest baseline nerve responses kept it faintly writhing.

"That’s all it takes. Physical Abnormalities are just so much easier to deal with..."

Xiang Yi glanced at Ning Ye with mild surprise. "That fast? How many Blood Crystal Worms have you gone through to get that smooth?"

"Not that many. A hundred or so? I’ve lost count. Do you remember how many youtiao you had for breakfast?"

"..."

She’d dissected over a hundred Blood Crystal Worms in a single afternoon. As far as the worms were concerned, Ning Ye was a straight-up monster.

"Speaking of which, where did you get so many hatched Blood Crystal Worms?"

"While you were sleeping, I cleared out most of the Blood Crystals from Containment Room 1."

Ning Ye gestured toward several Silent Alloy Containment Boxes that had appeared in the corner of the lab. They looked packed to the brim with High-Quality Blood Crystals.

"And then someone dropped off a delivery for us. Raw meat."

"I tested it — raw meat does trigger Blood Crystal Worm Egg hatching, but it only produces the ordinary-quality Blood Crystals, and even those come out a little worse than the ones you gave me before. So I grabbed a few worms for experiments."

The robotic arms in Containment Room 3 went to work again, picking the worm up off the floor and pressing it flat against the wall.

Another arm drew out an extraction tube fitted with a needle from the Living Iron Extraction Device and pushed it into the wound left by the spikes.

The arm made a few adjustments along the wall surface, and a compact mechanical rig locked into place, pinning the Blood Crystal Worm completely against the wall.

The Living Iron Extraction Device had begun its extraction cycle.

Though it seemed a little slow.

The display on the extraction device read: current extraction rate — 0.05 grams per twenty-four hours.

If all of the device’s needles were put to use, Containment Room 3 could hold an entire wall of forty Blood Crystal Worms, bringing the daily output to roughly 2 grams.

Master Chang had mentioned the price of Living Iron at some point — eight thousand Federation Coins per gram, if he remembered right.

Sixteen thousand a day. Four hundred and eighty thousand a month.

As a one-time payout, it wouldn’t be much. But as a consistent income stream, that was genuinely solid.

A faint smile crept onto Xiang Yi’s face. He was satisfied. All that back-and-forth running across the southwest and southeast, getting beaten up by Master Chang just to scrape together the parts to fix the extraction device — it had been worth it.

That money could go toward buying some proper work equipment. Something like the workshop in Master Chang’s factory.

"Still feels like it could be more, though..."

People are never satisfied.

The current Living Iron output was more or less enough to cover Xiang Yi’s near-term needs, but he was already turning over ideas in his head for how to get more.

Ning Ye couldn’t help pushing back when she heard that. "You call this not enough? I risk my life out there every day and I don’t pull in anywhere near this much."

"Then why do you still go out and work as a Scavenger?"