Li Chen, He Ran, and Wu Ding soon returned to Crouching Tiger Hill.
By then, Crouching Tiger Hill had grown from a basin amid desolate wilderness into a steel jungle with a distinctly modern style.
High-rises of reinforced concrete radiated outward from Ironstone Tower at its center, packing an area ten li across with buildings.
Several li outside the urban district lay an industrial park dedicated to processing ores and manufacturing mechanical components. An endless stream of minerals was being excavated from the mines by the "Worker Bees" and turned into the various materials widely used throughout the region.
The most valuable of these was undoubtedly spirit iron ore, a material imbued with spiritual essence that possessed a trace of Supernatural Properties after being permeated by spiritual energy. It could be processed into various forms of black iron and blacksteel, serving as the principal material for two-star and even Three-Star Puppets.
Besides that, there was refined iron ore, which seemed to be of a lower grade but was actually quite useful. In this world, materials without spiritual essence were extremely difficult to use in Combat Puppets, yet Li Chen had cleverly put them to work in production-oriented Worker Bees, adding a great deal of labor to Crouching Tiger Hill.
This was a development in the same vein as the Puppet Cores he had created. Here, he made extensive use of the swarm intelligence provided by the Swarm of Bees Technique, managing it all through an intelligent program. This greatly increased the mines' degree of automation and intelligence, substantially boosting their production capacity.
This meant greater wealth, and greater wealth, in turn, allowed Li Chen to accumulate resources, bringing him into a virtuous cycle of rapid development.
Over those ten years, it was almost entirely through this craft that Li Chen