Expansion

After another couple minutes of flying, the drone I sent to find out where the scouting ship originated from has finally found its target. A large square shaped city sitting in a middle of a plain, surrounded by kilometers upon kilometers of farm land. The city is built like a fortress with five meter high and two meter thick walls. Streams of people are constantly filling in and out of the large city gates.

I'm impressed at mere the sight of the city. Although, this city is nothing compared to some planet wide superstructures we have on Old Earth, it is still a quite impressive sight for such a primitive world. Its thick walls make the blueprints of my own wall look pathetic. So pathetic in fact that I have decided to thicken up my own walls when I eventually build them.

Even with a causal glance of the city, I can already confirm some of my theories about the earth I'm currently on. First, humans are still just ordinary humans, albeit a bit shorter on average. Second, these guys are definitely not following the convention tech tree like we did, I see some things that belong a city couple eras up the tech tree. For example, there are city guards walking around on medieval style stone roads in full on power armor.

These guys must have discovered some alternate source of power to be able to run all these fancy machinery. I don't see how they can power these suits of armor using the material available to them currently, so there could be some unknown material that wasn't found on Old Earth available here. This could also explain the difference in gravity.

Other than the power armor, there are also many other glaring inconsistencies. The building heights are way too tall for a medieval city, there are many four to five-story buildings and even a stone tower stretching towering above the rest.

Wait a second, this seems a bit too familiar. Flying ships, medieval power armor, and perhaps a mage tower? What's next? People shooting fireballs out of their hand.

Just as that thought passed through my head, my drone floating far above the city was hit by something and promptly destroyed.

What! They manage to detect my drone! The done was floating so high up that it should be invisible to the naked eye. Yet they still manage to find and destroy it without a moment of warning. Not being able to freely spy on the natives is a massive blow to my plans.

Damn it, I quickly reviewed the footage before the drone's destruction and found nothing that would indicate it being detected. No way these primitive primates invented some type of radar system right?

With the drone destroyed, I started thinking of other plans to infiltrate the city. Meanwhile, my base development is still number one priority. By now my first deep drill has already been made and deployed. This is the first actual product manufactured by my brand-new production building, and let me tell you, I already cannot imagine living without it.

It will take a couple more hours for the drill to reach the ore veins, but the rock and dirt already dug up has almost paid back the cost. With this, it'll be worthwhile to start preparing a refinery. However, building a refinery in my current situation could prove to be difficult.

A refinery is a lot larger than a manufacturing building, and it needs a lot of vertical space. Something I sorely lack in order to stay hidden. This leaves me with only one option, downwards!

Yeah … this is going to take a while.

Once my second deep drill finishes, I think I'll make a second fabricator before starting on the refinery. This should allow me to work on two projects at once if I have enough materials to spare.

With the plans set, I slowly expanded my production and refining capabilities in peace while trying to remain as hidden as possible.

This peaceful period of expansion continued for a week or so before being disrupted by signs of movement in the city. By now, I have established a perimeter around the city with my drones. I may not be able to see much into the city, but I can see everything coming in and out of it.

At first, the only thing new entering the city was what looks like primitive trucks. Powered by unknown means, the trucks were slow and troublesome. They had 6 metal wheels that often got stuck on the dirt roads, requiring other trucks to tow them out. I thought they were just new trade caravans making a stop and quickly forgot about them. Then, a couple of days after the trucks arrived, I spot roughly 50,000 men marching in columns towards the city, which I have started to call North City.

This is the moment I realized that something was up. These movements seem to resemble awfully a lot like a mass mobilization before a war. The drones I have closest to the city showed an alarming amount of freshly harvest fields and land surrounding the city cleared to build tents. Let alone 50,000, the space cleared was enough to house a couple of hundred thousand men.

Shit, this was bad, really bad.

If I were to get discovered at this moment, I could be easily wiped out. The hundred odd combat drones I built are nothing in front of a 100,000 suicidal peasants. I immediately regretted not building all my stuff underground.

At the present moment, I have begun to excavate a large underground base to move in to. But the only thing finished right now is a storage depot filled with my combat drones and spare materials. I will have to do a rush job and move my facilities in as soon as possible.

I have made some big progress in all fields in the past week. First, I'm now the proud owner of five medium and one large size fabricators, medium size being the size of my first fabricator and large being simply a larger version capable of faster production.

Second, with two refineries built I now have an unprecedented amount of refined material available, which is part of the reason I started building the underground base.

Third, I have made some progress in the R&D department, I designed a micro drone that should be small enough to pass off as a fly and give me vision inside the city. I was going to test out the drone soon, but now seems like a bad time to have any accident happening.

Lastly, I finally got off my ass and conducted some test of this planet. Surprisingly, I found what appears to be a gasses exotic matter in the atmosphere. Exotic matters are extremely rare material that seemingly do not follow the same laws of physics as we do.

This is a poorly studied field of material science due to its rarity and newness. To think that there are ridicules amounts of it just floating around is unthinkable in the old universe. This new exotic might be the key ingredient for this world's technology.

But for now, I have got bigger problems to worry about than deciphering the native technology.