Gather Countless Resources

As always, my Minions would always be collecting resources, however, I'd like to speed up the process if I could. At the moment, I didn't really know how to gather rocks by myself. I guess I could pick them up off the ground but that would be so inefficient I might as well just sleep instead.

I could craft a pickaxe but I didn't know where to go to gather the rocks. My Scout Minions travelled the general area and informed me of a pretty big mountain just a few hundred metres from here. I assumed that if I just smacked the side of it, I would just gather it like how I gathered wood.

However, before I did that, I wanted to talk with Chloe.

"Chloe, how exactly does your ability work?"

"Huh? Ah, you want to know about my Excavator System."

"Yes."

"Basically, I just summon this machine and get it to mine down into the ground. I can upgrade it and stuff using tokens and it gets better and better."

"Can you specify what you want it to mine?"

"I can make it focus on a specific material, yes."

"Can you make it focus on just rocks?"

"You want it to focus on just rocks? What for?"

"For a weapon I want to craft."

"Ah, okay~ just for you."

"Thank you."

She appeared to be changing some settings before she made her way into the forest.

"I'll gather the resources now~"

"Okay."

Alright, now that Chloe was also gathering rocks, the process should be a little bit faster, in total I needed 100,000 rocks in order to craft enough {Ultra-hardened Stone}. I decided to write another line of code for my Minion Manager.

-

On.

if Miner Minion < 20 and rocks > 600,

craft Miner Minion

-

I decided to spend 10,000 of my future rocks on crafting Miner Minions before I started to save up for the craft. I still had no idea what the contract entailed but I decided that I would deal with that once I gathered a significant amount of rocks.

Now that I had resolved everything, for the time being, I decided to begin trekking into the forest and make my way to the mountain. The man was still here, however, so I wanted to make him do something useful at least.

Actually, scratch that.

I noticed that Bishop had returned from its Scouting Expedition.

[No settlement was detected in that direction.]

Oh my.

I made my way toward the man.

"You."

He looked up at me.

"Y-yeah?"

"Why is there no settlement where you said it was?"

He looked up at me in fear.

He must have been planning to rob us while we went out to fight the settlement or something or maybe he still had loyalties to the people he was a part of. Whatever the case, he wasn't useful to me anymore.

I summoned my {Silver Sword} from my inventory.

"Any last words?" I asked.

"N-no! Wait, there's a r-reason, I-I-"

I don't care.

In one swing, my blade fell through the air. He made one last beg but he was more of an annoyance than a helpful tool. The sun glimmered on the edge of my blade which was fit for an execution.

Good night.

The blade slashed through his body and he fell to the ground.

After a few seconds, the ground was stained with the deep red colour of blood.

As he died, all of the items in his inventory fell onto the ground.

Hm.

~

- {x124} wood

- {x70} leaves

- {x11} meat

- {x48} rocks

- {x1} map

- {x1} mana crystal

- {x2} grenade

~

He didn't have many items but a few things were of interest. First of all, he had a map, upon looking at it, I noticed that it showed quite a large part of the map, on it, there were also a few settlements labelled, I still wasn't sure if I could trust it though.

He also had a mana crystal which I didn't know what it did. I assumed that it was either a material used in crafting recipes or maybe a power source.

Finally, he had two grenades on his person. After inspecting them for a few seconds, they were like traditional military-style grenades. I wasn't exactly sure how he managed to get them as they didn't seem to fit with the theme of his system. My only thought was that someone else provided him with them. Maybe they were like a last-ditch weapon or something.

I was surprised that he didn't use them as I was about to kill him. I guess I must have caught him by too much surprise that he might have forgotten.

Now that all the problems had finally been dealt with, I could go and gather some resources. Beside me, I now had all three of my Elite Minions, Rook, Bishop and Knight. There were still a few hours until it became night so I definitely had time to spend.

I looked at the map and saw that the mountain I wanted to visit had already been drawn in. It matched up with where my Minion said it was so it seemed that the map could at least somewhat be trusted.

I crafted a {Silver Pickaxe} and began my trek towards the mountain. I made my way into the harsh dense forest and walked through the loose dirt and numerous tree branches. In just a few minutes, I managed to see the edge of the large mountain.

The number of trees lessened as I saw the great big mountain. It was covered in grass, like a field of green. I still had a little distance to go, up close, the mountain was really quite enormous. It towered into the light blue sky. The top of the mountain had patches of white, it was tall enough that snow had gathered near the top.

There was a small area where there was exposed stone. I made my way over and took my pickaxe out of my inventory. With two hands, I swung the pickaxe and smashed it into the side of the mountain, after doing so, my entire body felt the impact but there was no noticeable dent in the mountain. Even so, I was informed that I had gathered some rocks.

{+2 rocks}