Doing business for the first time

(Bonus update 3/11, with thanks to Nano Plague Swarm: Luo Yu for the donation.)

The pirate ship, a Cobra-class Destroyer that had been under pirate control, had undergone countless drastic modifications!

Large numbers of its internal compartments and decks had been torn out, rebuilt with sheet metal, then torn out and rebuilt again.

By now, the destroyer was packed with haphazardly built sheet-metal shacks. These were the pirates' homes.

Only after a thorough inspection did Li Qinwu discover that most of the pirate ship's Lances and Macro Cannons no longer worked. Those weapons had been destroyed centuries ago, and the pirates had retained only the bare minimum of armaments.

The warship's Void Shields and Plasma Engines were also in a terrible state of disrepair. The thing could still fly, but it definitely could not handle any serious combat duties.

The Tech-Priest told Li Qinwu that restoring the destroyer to its original combat capability would require taking it to an industrial planet for a massive overhaul lasting twenty years.

Li Qinwu did not have twenty years, nor did he have the money to overhaul the warship. He could not afford all that expensive equipment.

So he simply thought, I might as well convert this destroyer into a mobile raw-material production plant.

Li Qinwu's plan was for the Golden Road to handle precision manufacturing from then on—specifically, tasks such as making Lasguns and artillery.

The pirate ship would handle primary processing, such as smelting ore into iron or turning various substances into chemicals.

There were plenty of rare minerals in space, and Li Qinwu's Search-Shoot-Extract System recognized those minerals too.

Because the warship was so enormous and contained so many supplies, the system had simply divided the resources Li Qinwu could obtain into three categories.

The first category was called basic resources.