After the ambush by that strange black wolf, how could Zhang Che feel safe enough to remain here?
However, the problem was that he didn’t know how many of those creatures would be down in the dark area below if he chose to descend the mountain now.
His only choice was naturally to dig out a cave on this mountain top and bury himself inside the mountain. He shouldn’t have to worry about his safety then.
At Zhang Che’s order, the Purple Crystal Tortoise quickly went to work.
Zhang Che wasn’t idling around while waiting for the Purple Crystal Tortoise to dig out the cave, either. He directly took out a huge piece of exotic beast meat and had the Scarlet Flame Drake roast it before filling his protesting stomach.
During this entire process, he was on the lookout in his surroundings. Gods knew whether those strange spirits were interested in roasted meat; if a few of them really came charging at him, he’d have the Scarlet Flame Drake roast them to ashes while it was at it.
However, as things would have it, those creatures weren’t interested in meat at all, even if the fragrance of roasted meat spread out.
By the time Zhang Che ate his fill, the Purple Crystal Tortoise had finished digging out a huge cave from the top of the mountain. Zhang Che walked into the cave with his babies, then had the Purple Crystal Tortoise seal the entrance. Finally, a sense of security settled on his heart.
“Let’s just go to sleep; I’ll check out the surroundings tomorrow after the sun rises.”
Just as Zhang Che was about to take out his sleeping bag and slip into it, with the help of the illumination from the Scarlet Flame Drake, he suddenly noticed the cave wall seemed to have some starry objects reflecting a weak light. It would have been impossible to notice them if he hadn’t taken a good look at it.
“Hmm? What substance is this?” Zhang Che immediately grew curious. He forewent the idea of sleeping and walked over to the cave wall, staring at those starry dots.
There was very little of those substance, but they were distributed very evenly. Looking carefully, the several-square-meter-wide wall had a few dozen of them.
The lighting was slightly lacking. Thus, Zhang Che had the Scarlet Flame Drake come over. Using the light from its natural flames, he took a closer look at the wall, and finally confirmed that the starry dots spread on the rock wall were, in fact, grain-sized translucent crystals.
He took out the Mutated Puffersword and pried one of these grains out. Looking closely at the crystal grain in his palm, he felt that this thing looked somewhat familiar.
Naturally Zhang Che wasn’t the one feeling a sense of familiarity. It was his predecessor who had seen a photo of this substance, leaving memories of it behind.
Well, what was he waiting for? This was definitely another kind of rare mineral!
Zhang Che immediately tried hard to recall, and soon a hint of surprise flashed across his eyes.
Stellar Crystal! That was the name of this substance.
It didn’t have many applications, but it was very important.
Since the first discovery of the crystal in the beast world, the Alliance had discovered only one use for it. Using it in high-end electronics would at least double their functionality!
Let alone high-end products like satellites, even if you only used it on daily-use electronics, it would be extremely shocking to have its functionality doubled.
However, stellar crystals were extremely rare. The entire Mercury Alliance didn’t harvest much of from the beast world after all these years. The demand heavily outweighed the supply, and its price had reached a terrifying level, nearly ten times that of purple-gold crystals!
Zhang Che’s eyes immediately shone with a blinding golden light.
A rare mineral worth ten times as much as purple-gold crystal was found just like that after digging out a cave?
It was no wonder Huang Juyun said that resources were abundant in the secret world. The saying was true!
Zhang Che quickly summoned the Purple Crystal Tortoise again, and had it transform into a hardworking miner, scavenging for the stellar crystals in the mountain’s body.
The Purple Crystal Tortoise was indeed a model manual labor who worked without any complaints. Its purple figure immediately melded into the rock wall, and it collected every bit of the stellar crystals hidden in the mountain according to Zhang Che’s orders.
Zhang Che no longer felt sleepy at all now. He stood in the cave, pacing back and forth, unable to stop. He was unusually excited right now; how could he possibly calm down?
—
Time slowly passed by, and the Purple Crystal Tortoise had yet to surface from the rocks. This made Zhang Che smile even more widely.
The longer it took, wouldn’t that mean that there were even more stellar crystals?
That was a high-end currency! A top-grade resource that couldn’t be bought no matter how much was offered. Who could possibly loathe having too much of it?
—
After over two hours, the Purple Crystal Tortoise finally surfaced silently from the rock wall to the side and crawled over to Zhang Che. It opened its mouth and spat out a pile of dazzling white grains.
Oh, no, it should be a pile of tiny dazzling crystals.
“Woah, there’s really quite a lot of it!”
Zhang Che’s eyes narrowed into slits from over-smiling.
The pile of stellar crystals in front of him didn’t seem like much, but it was definitely over a cubic meter.
According to the information left behind in his prior memories, the density of stellar crystal was about twice that of water. In other words, this pile of stellar crystals weighed about two tons!
Converting them over, these were worth twenty tons of purple-gold crystals!
Mama mia! How much was twenty tons of purple-gold crystals worth in dollars?
Although Zhang Che’s mathematics were bad, he knew that it was definitely an astronomical sum that exceeded his imagination.
The market price of purple-gold crystal was already at about ten thousand dollars per gram!
“This happiness came too suddenly. What if I can’t sleep tonight?”
After Zhang Che had the Purple Crystal Tortoise stash the pile of stellar crystals away, he felt as if he was a single man about to crawl into the bed of an eighteen-year-old after a long dry spell. He was unusually excited; how could he feel even a hint of sleepiness?
In the end, he took the Mutated Puffersword and started practicing his swordsmanship in the cave, hoping to calm down.
It turned out that this method was really not bad. After practicing for about half an hour, Zhang Che gradually calmed down. He finally stopped his practice and found his way into the sleeping bag, falling asleep before he knew it.
—
In his dreams, Zhang Che found himself lying on a mountain of rice grains so wide that the ends couldn’t be seen… oh, no, it should be a mountain of stellar crystals where the ends couldn’t be seen. With a raise of his hands, a wide spread of glittering crystals scattered in the air, leaving him drunk with pleasure.
Of course, Zhang Che sobered up in the end… due to the alarm he set a few days ago, waking him up from his sweet, sweet dream.
“Damn it, why did it have to ring at this moment? Can’t it just let me-” Zhang Che was suddenly dumbstruck after opening his eyes very unwillingly.
All electronic products were unusable in the beast worlds. This was something humans realized very early on after their first entry into the beast world.
Soooo… why did the alarm on his personal terminal ring right on time?