The labor of cutting into mountains and mining ore was nowhere near as thrilling as cultivators exploring secret realms and cave abodes or battling Demons and Nature Spirits, but it, too, bustled with fervor and held an indescribable allure.
All of that came from watching wealth grow before one's very eyes.
Li Chen's Puppet Chassis stayed there for several days, watching furnace after furnace of ore being smelted. The copper was extracted, then forged on the spot into ingots weighing a hundred jin apiece and carried into temporary storage.
Once a storage unit was full, several Worker Bee Puppets lifted it together and carried it into the warehouse inside the Magic Cube Maze.
In this world, ordinary materials containing no spiritual essence were astonishingly cheap. A hundred-jin ingot cost no more than a meal of meat, but that hardly mattered when Li Chen was mining in such quantities, with his stock growing by a considerable amount almost every day.
One Worker Bee Puppet working normally could produce roughly a tonne of copper, worth around two hundred Talisman Coins. A hundred and twenty of them meant over twenty thousand Talisman Coins.
Among the output was also Crimson Fire Copper containing crimson flame baleful intent, a common low-grade spirit material worth around ten Talisman Coins per jin.
However, the yield of Crimson Fire Copper was low. Only small amounts could be extracted during mining, amounting to several hundred jin a day.
There were also equally scarce deposits of refined gold and fire silver here, found entirely by chance, with no fixed yield.
Still, after mining at full throttle for over a month, Li Chen successfully extracted minerals worth a million Talisman Coins.
After deducting costs such as the spirit stones consumed in production, damaged Puppet parts, and the months spent traveling without