"Foolish Boy, time to get to work."
Cheng Qi rose and patted his worn blue cloak. "I can picture exactly how meeting Hyena will go. Once he confirms I have the amorphous alloy, I'll count it as my loss if he wastes even one more word."
"Either..."
"He'll wave his hand, and his hidden accomplices will swarm out."
"Or he'll make it even simpler."
"He'll pull out a pistol and blow my head off on the spot."
Foolish Boy nodded solemnly at that, then stood and declared, "Then I'm not going."
"..."
"What I mean is, I need to gather enough combat gear within three hours."
An intense light flashed in Cheng Qi's eyes. "This meeting with Hyena will be the final showdown. There's no dodging it!"
"I was kidding!"
Foolish Boy straightened his two-meter-tall alloy body, looking imposing. "Tell me, how're we doing this?"
"North."
"112 kilometers."
Standing at the shack's entrance, Cheng Qi gazed into the distance. "I remember a military equipment factory dumping a huge load of trash there a year ago."
Cheng Qi patched up his black goggles again to protect against any glare he might encounter during flight.
Foolish Boy gingerly touched the jet-turbine flight shoes with his metal feet.
The flight shoes' outer armor reshaped itself again, fitting perfectly around Foolish Boy's feet. Foolish Boy was delighted. These shoes didn't discriminate between species.
The amorphous alloy and high-entropy alloy were packed into the storage compartment on Foolish Boy's back and brought along, just in case Hyena raided their home.
Boom!
Two blasts of air kicked up clouds of dust.
One man and one machine flew north.
Without the flight shoes, this short 110-kilometer journey through mountains of trash and rugged terrain would have taken at least seven days.
Thirty-five minutes later.
Cheng Qi and Foolish Boy hovered high in the air, staring down.
"This place..."
"Why does it look like this now?"
The scavengers designated this region the B11 Area. There wasn't a soul within fifty kilometers.
Cheng Qi hadn't remembered wrong.
A year ago, a starship belonging to a military equipment factory had indeed dumped roughly 3,000 tonnes of scrap here.
But now, the layer of trash covering the ground for several kilometers around had risen by dozens of meters.
At its very center stood an enormous mountain of garbage at least 600 meters high.
Over the past year, someone had dumped vast quantities of new trash here.
"Why did they have to cover this spot?"
"Is the stuff I need buried underneath?"
Cheng Qi felt his composure begin to crack. Looking down, he spotted numerous red crosses on the newly dumped trash. "And it's medical waste, too."
"We're short on time."
Cheng Qi clenched his fists slightly. "We'll just have to dig."
Countless broken metal containers and foul-smelling green liquids constantly underscored the ruin and hopelessness of this place.
Cheng Qi stood frowning at the foot of the garbage mountain.
Foolish Boy's arms transformed into hydraulic cutters, snipping through the tangled metal ahead. Then, exerting both arms, he tossed an enormous oil drum aside.
Beneath it, a dark iron plate appeared, its edges nowhere in sight.
Hiss!
Foolish Boy's arms changed form again, deploying a flame-cutting torch to cut an opening in the iron plate so they could keep digging downward.
"I'm worn out!"
"Good news!"
"I'm brimming with fighting spirit! I believe that if you give me two years, I'll definitely dig up those weapon wrecks!"
"Bad news!"
"By then, the grass on Cheng Qi's grave will probably be two meters tall."
"Just lovely!"
Cheng Qi was long accustomed to Foolish Boy's running commentary.
"Go, Foolish Boy! Best in the universe!"
Though he offered encouragement aloud, Cheng Qi's brow remained furrowed. He had just realized a problem.
Earth, this enormous garbage dump, was rich in resources, but excavation posed a major problem. Over the years, the trash here had piled up layer upon layer, and they could even encounter starship fragments weighing upwards of a thousand tonnes.
After all, activating the Standard Template Construct required having two technological devices of the same model on hand.
Such equipment wasn't scarce, but finding matching pieces was difficult.
That meant excavation would be a tremendous challenge.
"What's this?"
"A box of diapers, and used ones at that!"
"What's this?"
"A box of long, skinny balloons?"
"Why are there balloons in medical waste? And they're expired, too!"
At that moment, Foolish Boy looked very much like a junk collector. Whenever he unearthed something, he held it up for a careful inspection, then tossed it aside after deciding it was worthless. He was innocent, unaware of the truth of this world-he really was a junk collector.
"What's this?"
"A box of mechanical surgical gloves?"
Cheng Qi's eyes lit up. "Foolish Boy, keep those!"
[V-12 Surgical Assist Gloves] [Internal mechanical joints assist the doctor's fingers in performing highly precise movements.] [Similar technological devices detected] [Synthesize?]
Inside the battered iron box before him were forty-two crudely made, oversized gloves, their hydraulic tubes and alloy frames exposed.
No wonder they had been discarded. They were far too cumbersome for use in surgery.
They were probably products from two hundred years ago.
What would the Standard Template Construct synthesize?
Cheng Qi's eyes gleamed as he immediately began operating it. He slowly raised his right hand, and the Crystal Bracer shone blue.
[Disassemble into basic units] [Fuse and upgrade] [V-50 Surgical Assist Gloves] ×11! [More compact and lightweight. Fingertips can extend metal tendrils 0.3 millimeters in diameter to perform more precise surgical procedures.]
Cheng Qi shook his head. "That's not what I need."
[Disassemble into basic units] [Fuse and upgrade] [S-2 Surgical Assist Gloves] ×5! [Integrated micron-scale circuit etching and micro-power module technology. Fingertips can emit miniature vibrational force fields to move internal organs short distances without contact and break up blood clots, stones, and other foreign matter in the body.]
Cheng Qi shook his head again. "Still not what I need."
[Disassemble into basic units] [Fuse and upgrade] [S-55 Surgical Assist Gloves] ×2! [Integrated nanoscale circuit etching and ultra-micro-power module technology. Vibrational force field range expanded to a diameter of 2 meters. Added technology for controlling liquid flow direction.]
Cheng Qi's eyes widened slightly. "Now that's interesting."
[Similar technological devices detected] [Disassemble into basic units] [Fuse and upgrade] [0-0-1 Surgical Assist Gloves, Failed Prototype] ×1!
"Why did I get a failed prototype?!"
Cheng Qi's eyes went wide. All the original gloves had been used up.
Why had his final chance at fusion produced a result like this?
The Standard Template Construct couldn't make mistakes. Could the ultimate evolution of these surgical assist gloves really be a failed prototype?
When Cheng Qi read the gloves' description, he was stunned.
[0-5-1 Surgical Assist Gloves, Failed Prototype] [Technological development reached an impasse. Researchers employed extreme methods in an attempt to achieve a revolutionary upgrade, but the final product ran counter to its development objectives.] [Discarded file 0-5-1. Name redefined according to device functionality.] [Micro High-Power Gravitational Field Adjustment Gloves] [Once released, the gravitational field is violent and cannot be adjusted, causing all objects within an area of 40-70 square meters to levitate, with a risk of shattering.]
"So... it means they failed as a medical aid."
"But for me, this function..."
Cheng Qi sprang to his feet. "Isn't this practically a divine artifact?!"
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