Conditions for an Airship to Advance into a Starship

If there really were over a hundred tons of Phantom Crystals deep within the star core below, it would be an enormous haul.

One ton was worth 5 strands of First-Rank Floating Continent Essence. A hundred tons meant 500 strands, or 5,000 strands of Zero-Rank Floating Continent Essence. No matter how one looked at it, that was an astonishing amount for a Psionic Shuttle.

With faint excitement, Song Chi put on his exoskeleton gear. Even so, once he left the shuttle, he still felt intensely uncomfortable. Ordinary Zero-Rank lifeforms found it difficult to adapt to the special environment of outer space. This was only manageable thanks to the exoskeleton armor and the boost from his Guidance Art level; otherwise, it would have been far worse.

He immediately stored the Cangqiong in his Kindle Ancestral Aperture, then swiftly led the remaining three Fire Sunflower Soldiers through the hole in the ground and into the core region of the fragment beneath their feet.

The fragment was only a few dozen meters across, so its core space was naturally small. The astonishingly long body of the Metal-Eating Vine piled in one corner made the already cramped space even more crowded.

Even if the Fierce Tiger Mining Vehicle could enter, it would have been difficult for it to operate. Not to mention that the mining vehicle was still inside the Cangqiong's cabin; to release it, he would first have to summon the seven-meter-long Cangqiong from his Kindle Ancestral Aperture between his brows. It was simply impossible.

Left with no other choice, Song Chi ordered the three Fire Sunflower Soldiers to take their specially made drilling shovels and begin further manual excavation and surveying.

Before long, several meters beneath the bottom of a small excavation pit, the Fire Sunflower Soldiers discovered a new ore deposit: Phantom Crystals.

Song Chi slapped his forehead and mentally marked down the mistake, reminding himself not to make such a rookie error again.

Earlier, to prevent the Metal-Eating Vine from having any tricks left up its sleeve—and because he himself could not remain exposed to the outer-space environment for long—he had only sent the Fire Sunflower Soldiers down to clear the place out. In fact, aside from that Life Crystal, they had also mined more than ten tons of ordinary Adamantine.

Because of that, he had only come in at the end to conduct a cursory inspection. After finding no omissions, he had left directly. Who would have thought that beneath those dozen-plus tons of Adamantine, at an even deeper level, there would be an even larger quantity of Phantom Crystals hidden away?

Had it not been for the survey instrument and the vehicle AI's later reminder, this batch of Phantom Crystals would clearly have slipped through his fingers.

The subsequent arrangements were naturally simple. With at least a hundred tons of Phantom Crystals, manual mining was impossible. Even by the return time more than ten hours later, they might not have extracted even half of it.

Song Chi had a solution. He did not linger in the core space, instead taking the three Fire Sunflower Soldiers back to the fragment's surface. There, he summoned the Cangqiong and the Fierce Tiger Mining Vehicle, then instructed the vehicle AI to dig straight downward.

Since the fragment's original core space was too small to summon the mining vehicle, why not simply open a larger entrance from the surface and enter through that?

Leaving that mining vehicle to work there, Song Chi piloted the Cangqiong back to the fragment where the first Fierce Tiger Mining Vehicle was located. After several hours, the thousand tons of Adamantine had already been mined. He loaded all the raw Adamantine ore into the Market Ruins batch by batch with the Cangqiong, then returned the way he came with the undamaged mining vehicle.

The second mining vehicle's work efficiency had now dropped sharply. Song Chi did not know whether it could finish mining those Phantom Crystals before tomorrow's return, so he felt safer replacing it with the undamaged vehicle.

The next day, half an hour before returning, Song Chi finally piloted the Cangqiong back. He had spent more than ten hours roaming the surrounding area with the damaged mining vehicle and had also gained minerals worth one or two hundred strands of Zero-Rank Floating Continent Essence.

After storing all 112 tons of mined Phantom Crystals in the Myriad Heavens Market, he began waiting quietly.

An hour later, outside East River District, Song Chi and Chen Lixia disembarked from their respective Kindling Starships.

Song Chao was currently using the family's Pentium Type III hovercar, so even if it was somewhat conspicuous, the two could only return in their own Kindling Starships. Calling a ride would have been too troublesome.

His mother, Chen Lixia, commanded a Void Energy Airship called the Dragonfly. It seemed to have advanced from a shuttle to an airship several decades ago. Its current level was stuck at lv19, just one step away from Second Rank.

However, that single level of difference might have seemed small, but the gap was like heaven and earth. This tiny one-level hurdle had blocked countless Kindling captains for their entire lives.

For a Void Energy Airship to advance into a Second-Rank Escort-Class Void Energy Starship, it required more than certain special resources. Its captain also had to personally kill alien civilization creatures above their own rank during extraterrestrial exploration and bathe in alien blood.

It was said that an airship's success rate when advancing into a starship was frighteningly low, with an initial chance of only 1%. Investing specific rare enhancement resources could raise that rate to around 10%. To raise it any further, one had to kill alien races during Alien Starfield Exploration and use their blood to cleanse the shuttle.

The more aliens killed, and the higher the rank of their blood, the greater the boost to the success rate.

"Mom, what is the Dragonfly's advancement success rate now?"

Chen Lixia pursed her lips and gave an answer that Song Chi found difficult to accept.

"24%."

"Less than a quarter? How can it be that low?"

Song Chi frowned. Advancing from Zero Rank to First Rank was manageable enough. As long as one had sufficient resources and was not terribly unlucky, one could basically advance successfully.

But advancing a Void Energy Airship into a Void Energy Starship was different. Once the advancement mission was initiated, there would only be one year to prepare.

During that year, the captain had to do everything possible to raise the success rate, whether by investing rare resources or entering alien starfields to hunt alien races. In any case, after one year, the airship would attempt its advancement. The higher its success rate, the greater its chance of advancing into a Second-Rank starship; conversely, the lower the rate, the smaller the chance.

Chen Lixia had initiated her advancement mission five months ago. Nearly half of the one-year period had already passed. Song Chi had originally thought that with his father's help, they should have been able to raise it above 30%, perhaps even 40%. After all, his father's starship had advanced to Second Rank more than a decade ago. Yet he had never expected it to be only 24%.

Chen Lixia rolled her eyes at her son.

"You think advancing a Void Energy Airship into a Void Energy Starship is that easy? If the success rate were so easy to raise, would Jiangyuan City's population of over twenty million, with tens of thousands of registered Kindling Starships, have only several dozen Second-Rank Void Energy Starships?"

Song Chi was momentarily speechless, but the concern in his eyes did not fade.

At this rate, unless some great opportunity arose, when the one-year preparation period ended, his mother's Dragonfly would likely have an advancement success rate of no more than around 30%.

For an ordinary Kindling captain, that success rate would naturally already be extremely high. But Song Chi still could not accept it.

There was a common understanding within Kindling Human Civilization: every Kindling Starship had only one chance at each advancement. There was no such thing as trying again after failure. Once an advancement failed, the Kindling Starship would sink completely.