"One, two, three..."
Boom!
"One, two, three..."
Boom!
"One, two, three... hit it hard!"
Crash!
"Good! Well done!"
At the construction site in the Crouching Tiger Hill basin, more than a dozen builders were working together, each handling his own task as they cleared the grounds with fiery enthusiasm.
Li Chen stood on a high slope, looking down over the site. After a full day of work, nearly everything within a ten-li radius had been leveled.
The construction machines converted from Mecha were remarkably efficient at this work. Powerful and quick, they lacked heavy-duty armor and could hardly withstand attacks from Demon Beasts or Qi Refining cultivators, but dealing with ordinary rocks and vegetation was as easy as turning over a hand.
Before long, with several workers shouting in unison, the last house-sized boulder was smashed to pieces. The bear-shaped Mecha responsible for breaking rocks stopped to one side, its chest compartment opened, and a youthful-looking builder climbed out. He deftly began removing the impact hammer, preparing to replace it with a claw-shaped bucket.
On the other side, a beetle-shaped "earth hauler" over ten feet long crawled over with a rumble. Its operator was a broad-shouldered, thick-waisted middle-aged woman.
She was the wife of the site's Kitchen Worker and had learned a few tricks of the Mechanism-Performance Method in her younger days. Fighting with puppets was beyond her, but driving a cargo vehicle like this was a piece of cake.
Li Chen watched from above as everyone worked together to load piles of soil and waste onto it. Section after section was added to its cargo bed, and once more than a hundred tons had been loaded, the originally beetle-shaped "earth hauler" had become a centipede-like crawling Puppet over sixty feet long.
Its belly hugged the ground as its broad,