chapter 151
“For our current needs, we have three destinations. First is Titan’s Feast. It has decent resources for shipbuilding, quite close to a busy area for space monsters. Its only drawback is that it’s close to civilization,” FH explained as we started our meeting before going back into FTL.
“The second place is called the Five Rings. Less space monster activity, but it is the best in terms of access to shipbuilding materials.”
“Lastly, we have the Grand Graveyard. It’s extremely deep inside the Zone of Misery, far away from any civilization, surrounded by space monsters, and plenty of new portals that should be in our range. As for shipbuilding, it is the only place that deep in that has any decent facilities.”
“Why is it called the Grand Graveyard?” Sam asked.
“Because it’s most likely the biggest ship graveyard in the galaxy. After fighting with space monsters, some ships do manage to make it back there but are then abandoned and left in the system.”
“Well then, we know where we're going, don’t we?” Bob said, and absolutely everyone looked at me.
“What?”
“Captain, it’s obvious that we’re going there. I don’t think even if we tried, we could keep you away from a place like that,” Lola said with quite a bit of amusement in her tone.
I shrugged my shoulders. “Fin,e we will go to the Grand Graveyard,” I said, ignoring everyone’s chuckles.
“Understood, Captain. Now for some news I managed to pick up. The Elven Dominion approved the Duke’s war decoration.”
“Good. Then officially, my deal with him is over. We can put this behind us now. Please continue, FH.”
“The Dwarven Council, after quite a while arguing with each other, has broken into three separate councils. While there is not an official war declaration yet, there seems to be some contesting of assets.”
That was unfortunate to hear. I really hoped that they were going to get over their differences. But without outside pressure to make everyone cooperate, I could see why they wanted to go in different directions.
“It seems that there is more communication between our species, human, elven, and dwarven. While the wider galaxy still doesn’t know, I am pretty sure that at least some of the human authorities now know about the strange connection between our three races.”
“We will just have to wait and see what comes of it. If we want better information, we would need to make contact with the higher-ups of the elves or dwarves, but honestly, I do not want to make contact with them during this turbulent time,” I said to everyone.
In time, I hope we will find out what this connection between us actually is, but it isn’t a priority.
“The final important news I wanted to share—and everything else I learned will go into the database where you can look at it when you have time—is that Earth was attacked by an alien faction.”
Immediately, I sat up straighter.
“The ones in charge of the Solar System managed to defend it, but barely. They have stopped their isolation, with a few groups returning back to the Sol System to reinforce it further and to try figuring out if Earth could once again be restored to its previous state.”
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“Thank you, FH. Try to keep up the best you can with developments from Earth and humans as a whole. But once again, it’s not our concern for the moment. We have our destination, so you know what to do.”
When I finished speaking, the ship pulled forward. In less than ten minutes, we were back in FTL, now heading towards our destination.
Hours turned into days quite fast, as absolutely every one of us was incredibly busy. Most of my day was taken up by refining our current designs and coming up with new ones. I wanted to have the expertise needed to actually start upgrading the ship once we reached our destination.
The rest of the time I either helped the others with understanding their skills or did so myself with my own skills. The biggest breakthrough came when we finally figured out how we could improve our inventory skill.
Taking items in and out of our inventories didn’t improve anything; it seemed that the inventory skill needed us to push its limits in what was inside them, not how much and how often.
It was strange that that was the way it wanted to be improved. So, each one of us started to bend and push those limits, trying to store stuff that shouldn’t be able to be stored. Sometimes it was quite the puzzle trying to figure out how to make something be accepted by the inventory skill, but it was also a nice change of pace.
There were no convenient FTL currents to take us fast to our destination. That meant that our maximum speed was 58 light-years in 24 hours. That was still quite fast, but it still meant that our destination was months away.
Time sped by surprisingly fast, with only a week remaining. Each crew member, including FH, managed to fully start understanding their skills. Now it was only their own practice that could help them continue improving, which meant that my time as a teacher had come to an end. Now it was time for all of us to help each other continue to advance whenever some of us had some new insight.
From time to time I also helped Lola with the seed project. She had made quite a lot of progress, but it was still at an early stage. She had only a few days ago managed to make one of the simpler tree seeds.
Currently we were inside her lab as she was explaining to me how it all worked.
“So Lola, what you’re saying is it would take way too long to make individual seeds to produce the items we would want?”
“It’s unfortunate, but yes. It would still be good for more complex singular items that would otherwise be extremely hard to get, but we would not be mass-producing anything.”
That was truly unfortunate. I sat back, looking at the completed seed. There needed to be something we could do. I really wanted the ability to mass produce items that otherwise required a lot of complex and specific industrial capability.
I do not know how long I stayed like that, but eventually I remembered a fact about apples. Whenever you planted an apple seed, you wouldn’t get the same sort of apples from that grown seed. The only way to get the same type of apple sort was to graft branches from the original tree onto the new one.
Then there were carrots; you needed to buy seeds every year, or you needed to leave some carrots in the ground for a second year, because only then would they start producing seeds.
Many plants were more complex than just planting a seed and you getting seeds back by the end of their life cycle.
“Doesn’t this tree produce its own seeds after a while?”
“No, that’s turned off, as those seeds would grow randomly,” Lola answered, something I already suspected.
“We’re going to have to figure out how to make this in two stages. First, we need a seed that grows a bush or something like that, where each seed it produces is the one that makes the item we require. That way we can have something that constantly produces the seed we need, as long as we need them.”
Lola looked at me like I had gone crazy. “Captain, I barely know how to make this,” she said as she pointed towards the finished seed. “And now you want me to somehow figure out how to get seeds to make other seeds?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out together. Of course, I’m not even sure my knowledge is correct, but we’ll get FH to help us. For now, continue focusing on this stage of the project. Get as good as you can. We’ll soon reach our destination, after which we will be quite busy for a while.”
Sooner than I wanted, we dropped out of FTL. I would have wanted a few more months to refine the current designs I had, but I needed to remember that chasing perfection could only be done properly if you fully dedicate yourself to one thing. I did not have that opportunity, so I needed to accept the current state of the designs and be happy with it.
We were all in the command centre, every system ready for anything as we dropped out of FTL. The sensors immediately got to work, but already we could see the white star of this solar system.
It was quite a small one, and immediately errors were being thrown up as this sun didn’t line up with known physics. That was the thing with planets and suns in the red zones. Because of the excess mana, they sometimes took on weird properties.
This sun basically only had beneficial ones. Its Goldilocks zone was incredibly large, while the solar system itself was smaller than it should be. It only had one planet, and that was a gas giant near the end of the solar system. The rest of it was made up of multiple rings of asteroid belts.
The sun barely threw off any radiation. In fact, you didn’t even need any protection gear to survive in outer space, at least not from the radiation. Because of this, the millions upon millions of dead spaceship hulks were remarkably unharmed.
It seemed that most of them were spread in between the asteroids. There were also thousands upon thousands of active ships, some flying out of the system, some into it, but a lot seemed to be here, salvaging the wrecks inside the system.
There was one major population hub inside a large asteroid that was made into a space station. That would be our destination and also the place where we could verify with the Adventurers Guild that this wasn’t a rogue AI ship.
FH had already handled all the required communications, so we already had a flight path.
“Everyone, continue to be alert. This is no civilised place. While there are some rules, this is still quite a lawless place.” My words made everyone focus up, as I had seen them relax a bit too much.
One of my screens was entirely focused on the different wrecks our sensors had been able to properly identify. It was hard not to fully focus on it, to see what interesting things we might be able to find. There were some components that would be better found than purchased, so perhaps a salvaging trip before we start upgrading is in order.