⛏️Chapter 36: The Ore Eater
🌍 January 3rd, 97 BCE — Deep Winter ❄️
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In the Batcave's bright glow, Junjie spread a sheet of parchment across the drafting table, guiding his quill in sharp, deliberate strokes. The drawing that emerged was all angles and iron jaws—struts like claws, a gaping maw where cutters and scoops would mount.
"It is a monster," Nano's voice replied, calm and certain. "A machine that devours ore. It must carry its own tools, strip a mountainside, and haul the burden home. Gentle shapes will not serve."
And she wasn't alone. When Junjie's draft reached the workshops, men and women whispered as they passed it. The four drill heads became gnashing teeth, the twin cockpits gleamed like glaring eyes. The articulated arms, each joint marked with rivets and clamps, seemed claws reaching to tear. To Junjie, it was ore scoops, cutting heads, reinforced struts, and cabins for operators. But to the villagers, who lived with gods and demons in every tale, the drawing was nothing less than a beast of iron, waiting to be born.
The villagers threw themselves into the work, following Junjie's blocky diagrams with pride. From sand-cast molds came long iron beams that, once cooled and riveted, rose into the squared skeleton of the beast itself. They forged the cockpit frames—two heavy lids of iron struts banded with glass panes from the workshop, hinged so they could swing open like jaws. In the foundries, they poured molten metal into great tubular molds that would become the housings for the drills, and hammered out smaller castings by the dozen: gears, brackets, clamps, and shafts. Tamra and Jinhai hauled the rough drill housings onto the Fabricator's infeed, sweat streaking their faces as the belts pulled the castings inside. When the outfeed gate opened, the tubes gleamed smooth, edges squared and true. Jinhai whistled. "If that's not god-work, I don't know what is." Master Goren only nodded, brushing a hand over the finish. "A true edge. Strong enough to bite stone." One apprentice whispered as the frame took shape, "We're building a demon." Junjie overheard and, without looking up, said, "No. You're building a miner. The gods dress miners in armor so they can fight the mountain."
When the last wagdrive_link
Too bad Webnovel doesn't let me embed pictures in here like other sites do. 😉
Its propulsion came from tiltable electric torque fans, positioned along the belly and sides, allowing it to maneuver vertically like a dragonfly. Gyroscopic stabilizers kept it balanced in the unpredictable mountain winds, while atmospheric sensors fed data into Ghost Mind for real-time altitude control.
Power, as always, came from a compact Nano-Fuel Reactor, no larger than a barrel but capable of running all systems indefinitely with a steady feed of waste and slag. Nano had even refined the reactor with a secondary output to power a heavy-duty ore drill, mounted like a fang beneath the nose.
Most ingenious of all were the extra anti-gravity plates along the ship's undercarriage. These allowed the craft to hover at odd angles, even sideways if needed, bracing itself against mountain faces to drill into walls or overhangs that would be impossible to reach on foot.
Four High-power drills with integrated conveyor systems could plunge deep into exposed ore veins, chew through bedrock, and deposit chunks of raw material directly into the vessel's cargo hold.
⚙️ Integrated Sorting System
The drill heads weren't just for boring through mountain rock — it was part of a modular extraction rig equipped with real-time material separation. As the high-torque drill chewed through stone, a smart conveyor funneled the rubble through a multi-stage sorting system mounted just behind the intake.
Magnetic filtration units pulled ferrous ores from the stream, isolating iron, nickel, cobalt, and trace rare earths.
Spectro-visual analyzers, using Nano-designed compact sensors, scanned non-ferrous material by light signature, density, and heat conductivity — targeting copper, tin, silver, etc.
Unwanted stone was automatically ejected down a chute and dumped back at the dig site, sometimes even used to backfill and stabilize the area.
Gravity-assist spiral sifters separated dust, gravel, and slurry from solid ore.
The final result? Only concentrated ore made it into the cargo hold — dramatically increasing payload efficiency and reducing strain on the lift systems.
⚒️ Forging the Future
Only when the assembly was complete did Nano's swarms seep through the joints, knitting every seam tighter than bolts alone could hold. The villagers never saw it, but they felt the difference: the great frame no longer rattled under the hammer, but hummed with a strange solidity, as if the iron had remembered it was stone.
The valley outside had turned to spring. Seed planters creaked across the thawing fields, scattering grain with iron precision, while villagers spoke more of drills than plows. The seasons still rolled on, but the rhythm of life was no longer measured only by planting and harvest. A new measure had been born — the roar of a machine that could feed on mountains.
The first mission was a success. Junjie and a young technician named Laon flew the Ore-Eater out at dawn, disappearing behind a snowy ridge in less than ten minutes. By nightfall, they were back, the belly of the beast groaning under the weight of freshly mined copper.
More flights followed. As the mines yielded up their wealth, the valley smelters groaned to life.
To keep up with the new influx of ore, Junjie oversaw the construction of a blast furnace near the main forge site. Built from firebrick and heat-resistant clay, reinforced with bands of black iron, it stood three stories tall and glowed like a volcano at night.
Ore was loaded from the top and combined with limestone and charcoal. The intense heat melted away impurities, producing puddles of molten metal that poured from the base like lava into casting channels. Nearby, an alloying station was set up, where trace elements could be added and stirred in by magnetized rods.
Sparks lit up the forge yard day and night, hammering the raw essence of mountains into tools, beams, rails, and machine parts.
The Sky Has a New Predator. The Ore-Eater quickly became more than a machine. It became a symbol. Farmers stopped their plows to watch it rise from the valley floor. Children carved crude versions of it from wood and tied them to a string. Even the elders, skeptical at first, now nodded in solemn approval when they saw its terrible silhouette skimming across the treetops.
They had conquered the skies. And now, with fire and flight, they were conquering the earth as well. The mountains would never be the same.