After a night of emergency repairs, the camp restored its most basic defense capabilities, and the gaps in the wall were temporarily blocked.
The trestle section on the east side of the port was cleared for the passage of small ships, and some of the remaining supplies were reclassified and moved to a safe area closer to the center of the camp.
Douglas organized several search teams to spread out along the direction of the passage. Their mission was to find the possible entrances and exits of the fire dragon, as well as the traces left by the orc army when they moved underground.
The search team conducted surveys along the surface trend in the direction of the passage and found three obvious collapse areas within a few miles of the camp.
The ground in those subsidence areas sinks downward at a slow speed, and the edges of the collapse show a shape different from ordinary geological subsidence - they are closer to a circle.
The edges are neat, and the interior is filled with loose gravel and fine sand, like some kind of hole that naturally collapsed after being hollowed out from below.
The farthest collapse area is located on the back of the ridge, facing an infrequently used valley. There is a wide crack in the rock formation at the bottom of the valley. The ground around the crack has been burned to a dark color, and the rock surface at the edge of the crack shows lighter-colored bedding formed by continuous high-temperature burning.
The crack is wide enough to allow a medium-sized adult dragon to pass sideways. The depth cannot be estimated directly from above, but there is continuously rising heat escaping from the edge of the crack, carrying a faint smell of sulfur.
After receiving the report from the search team, Douglas marked the location of the farthest crack on the map, then walked to the tent where Redd was, and reported the day's search progress to him.
Redd is looking at a preliminary reconstruction plan drawn from the ruins of Valyria city in the tent. It is a sketch that craftsmen have re-drawn in the past few days based on the remaining foundation directions and building outlines of the ruins.
Redd did not respond immediately after listening to Douglas's report. He moved his eyes away from the drawings on the table and looked in the direction outside the entrance of the tent, where he could see the outline of the ridge in the distance.
He has not yet decided whether to take people underground to hunt down the orcs.
Base repair and reconstruction are a higher priority, and the complexity of the underground space means that any depth will require an investment of more time and manpower.
He can transfer all these things, but the prerequisite is that he must ensure that the construction on the ground has a stable and uninterrupted cycle so that he can concentrate on dealing with underground problems.
At present, the orcs have withdrawn, and there are no signs of new attacks on the ground. He decided to complete the repair of the port and the wall first, and then re-evaluate the situation underground.
Douglas left the tent after receiving this reply and continued to arrange manpower and materials according to the original plan.
Redd sat back at the table, unfolded the reconstruction plan again, pressed the corners of the drawing with a paperweight picked up from the ruins of the port, and continued to browse the foundation locations and building distribution marked on it.
In the camp outside the tent, torches have been lit one by one at re-planned positions, the burned material storage area is being cleared, and the irreparable remnants are being transported to designated areas outside the camp to be processed uniformly.
Demon Dragon Corps returned to the resting area designated for them in the camp after completing their last patrol at night. King Ghidorah landed on the open space in the center of the camp. The three heads were facing different directions, quietly watching the surrounding movements in the night.
The orcs hiding underground temporarily lost their movement.
But Redd knows that they will not disappear. Those underground passages and fissures are slowly and continuously expanding. They are just waiting for the next opportunity.
He sat in front of the table covered with topographic maps in the tent and confirmed that there were no gaps in the camp's defense deployment that night.
Then he leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes, taking a short rest and preparing to face a series of repair work and new decisions tomorrow.
In the next few days, the camp recovered faster than Douglas originally expected.
Craftsmen started work on the two damaged areas of the port and the wall at the same time, replacing the burned and cracked support structures with newly arrived wood and stone. The broken sections of the port trestle were reconnected and paved with a layer of newly cut wooden boards.
The gap in the wall was refilled with rammed earth and gravel, and a newly dug drainage ditch was added on the outside to prevent water from eroding the wall foundation.
After cleaning up the remnants, several temporary storage points were rebuilt in the granary and material areas. The remaining materials were stored according to categories, marked and registered.
Douglas recorded the daily repair progress on the wooden sign, made a brief report to Redd in the evening, and then adjusted the focus of the next day's work according to Redd's instructions.
As the work on the surface is completed one by one, the search in the underground direction is also advancing simultaneously.
The search team expanded outward along the cracks and collapse areas, and gradually figured out the main path of the orcs' retreat - they connected the three collapse points on the outside of the camp and the large crack on the back of the distant ridge through several passages dug by earth snakes, forming a connection line from the vicinity of the camp to the deeper mine tunnels.
Those cracks and collapses are connected by underground passages, and their directions roughly follow a slope extending from the surface to the ground, diagonally through the rock formations outside the camp, and finally merge into the deep layers of the mine tunnel system.
After completing the preliminary mapping of the path, the search team extended the marked lines on the map to near the entrances of those mine tunnels, forming a rough connection map from the surface to the underground space network.
Redd went to see the crack on the back of the ridge in person one evening.
He stood on the edge of the crack and looked down at the direction of the passage below. Looking from above, the inner wall of the passage showed a complex surface that was a mixture of high-temperature burning and long-term dark coverage in the sun. It extended downward from the crack for about a few meters and then turned into a horizontal passage. The width gradually narrowed, making it impossible to continue observing from the outside.
King Ghidorah stood behind him, with its three heads facing the direction of the crack, but without making any attempt to enter. It knew better than anyone else that it could not pass through that narrow opening.
Ehm circled around the crack, then landed on a flat ground outside the crack, waiting for further instructions from Redd.
Redd stood by the crack for a while without making a decision to go underground.
He asked the search team to continue marking the fissures and collapse locations along the direction of the fissure, but not to go deep yet.
Those marked points were added to the underground network diagram on the map, making the structure of the underground direction clearer in his field of vision.
He brought the picture back to the tent, unfolded it again on the table, and compared the marked points with the location of the altar and the entrance to the mine that he had previously recorded.
The comparison results confirmed that several major channels extend deep from the vicinity of the camp and are connected to the deep mine tunnel area surrounded by volcanic rocks and with magma activity.