Twilight City City, District 86.
Few people lived here. The elevation was around 800 meters, the land fertile and loose, and the soil rich in organic matter. Though it rained often, the climate was warm, and the terrain prevented water from collecting. Combined with the abundant sunlight, these conditions made District 86 Twilight City's main rubber-producing region.
At dusk, the vehicle traveled along a dirt road lined with rubber trees, startling great flocks of birds. After going deep into the forest, a manor appeared ahead. It looked somewhat dilapidated, but as the largest rubber-material rough-processing plant in District 86, its value was beyond the reach of ordinary merchants.
This was one of Grand Noble Luciwa's ancestral estates. He had brought Su Xiao here not to show off his heritage, but to obtain a rare raw material called "Purified Glue." The stuff was particularly interesting.
The rubber forest covered roughly 92,000 hectares. In such a vast forest, some trees inevitably mutated under the distorted sun's cumulative radiance. Most mutations were negative, but less than 0.1 percent were beneficial. Such rubber trees were called Treasure Trees.
Once one was discovered, every rubber tree within a thousand meters was felled. Apart from a limited number of flying birds, no creature was allowed to approach. Five teams of guards took turns watching it around the clock.
The rubber produced by these Treasure Trees was called "Concentrated Glue." It possessed astonishing adhesiveness, corrosion resistance, and resistance to decay. To put it simply, if two boards were joined with heated Concentrated Glue, the bonded area would be many times stronger than the original material.
This meant that Concentrated Glue had always been in short supply. Outsiders did not know that after collection, it underwent another extraction at the rubber estate. The extract was called Purified Glue,