pjbooks Chapter 301 Ang Tun Appears Again!
Chapter 301 Ang Tun Appears Again!
At 2 a.m., the Land Cruiser stopped at the edge of a rocky wasteland.
Zhang Yan turned off the engine, and the moment the headlights went out, darkness pressed down on him like a physical entity.
In the distance, the wind howled as it swept across the frozen ground.
The outside temperature is -7 degrees Celsius.
He didn't get out of the car.
I leaned back in my seat, closed my eyes, and slept for four hours.
After daybreak, Zhang Yan turned on his satellite phone and sent a message.
"Twelve hours, normal."
Nie Qingcheng replied quickly: "Just woke up?"
"Um."
Have you eaten?
"Getting ready to eat braised beef."
"Pair it with that honey grapefruit tea, don't eat it on its own."
Zhang Yan tore open a box of braised beef, unscrewed a bottle of grapefruit tea, and sat in the driver's seat eating breakfast while looking out at the wasteland through the windshield.
The beef is cut thickly, and the braising sauce soaks into the fibers, making it delicious even when cold.
After finishing our meal, we continued driving.
The mining area appears as a small gray dot on satellite imagery, but it is actually a huge depression, spanning at least thirty kilometers in radius.
On the distant horizon, several abandoned drilling rigs can be seen, their rusty steel structures standing crookedly on the frozen ground, like skeletons forgotten for half a century.
Zhang Yan parked the car behind a wind-eroded rock embankment and got out.
The wind was stronger than he had expected.
The windproof jacket was flapping loudly in the wind, but the thermal underwear was effective, so it didn't feel too cold.
But the parts of my face and hands exposed to the air have started to feel numb.
As he was preparing to retrieve the detection equipment from the storage space, he caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye that shouldn't be there.
A military green jeep was parked behind another rocky embankment 300 meters away.
The car door was open, but there was no one inside.
Zhang Yan's hand froze in mid-air.
He wasn't nervous.
The system's passive scanning was constantly active, and it clearly detected carbon-based life signals within a two-kilometer radius—three people, all in the direction of the jeep, without approaching.
Footsteps.
The sound of gravel being crushed underfoot came from the right, getting closer and closer, mixed with the sound of someone cursing.
Not E is language.
It's Burmese.
Zhang Yan turned around.
A man wrapped in a military overcoat, his face red from the cold, emerged from behind the rocky embankment.
He was short, stout, and dark-skinned, with a long scar on his left cheek that stretched from his cheekbone to his chin.
If it weren't for the missing AK47, he would look exactly the same as he was dressed in the jungles of northern Myanmar last time.
Ang Tun.
Two men followed behind him, one carrying a bag and the other a thermos, both with their necks hunched and their eyes squinted into slits by the wind.
Ang Tun stopped the moment he saw Zhang Yan.
His eyes widened to a degree that shouldn't be seen in the second-in-command of an armed group in northern Myanmar.
"Boss...the boss?"
Zhang Yan looked at him.
What are you doing here?
Ang Tun reacted extremely quickly, rushing over in two or three steps, almost stumbling on the gravel ground.
The speed at which his expression switched from shock to ecstasy was comparable to turning the pages of a book.
"Boss! It really is you, boss!"
Zhang Yan took half a step back, avoiding his attempt to shake hands.
"I'm asking you, what are you doing here?"
Ang Tun rubbed his frozen hands, grinned, and revealed a set of not-so-straight teeth.
"Boss, didn't you leave me a satellite phone last time so I could report any unusual situations?"
"A while ago, my informant discovered that someone was illegally mining in Siberia. The energy readings weren't quite right, so I brought people to check it out."
"Finished watching?"
"Not yet!" Angtun rubbed his hands together faster. "This place is too big, it's freezing cold, and I didn't bring enough people. I was just about to call for reinforcements..."
He suddenly stopped, his gaze falling on Lu Xun behind Zhang Yan.
"Boss, are you here on business too?"
Zhang Yan ignored him and turned back to the car.
Ang Tun followed immediately, like a dog on a leash.
"Boss, I'll go with you! I'm fine! I'll just come along!"
"You have your own things to do."
"No rush, no rush!" Ang Tun patted his chest. "My business can be done anytime, it's nothing compared to the boss's business—"
Zhang Yan stopped and looked back at him.
Ang Tun immediately shut his mouth.
"Don't block the way."
"I absolutely won't block it!"
Zhang Yan, too lazy to say anything more, took out the Earth Vein Energy Detector from his storage space. It was a palm-sized metal disc, one of the auxiliary modules of the Heart of Heavenly Craftsmanship.
The disc lit up.
A faint blue light flickered on the holographic projection, pointing northeast, about twelve kilometers away, beneath the deep permafrost.
Zhang Yan put away the projector and got into the car.
The sound of the engine starting carried far across the empty wilderness.
In the rearview mirror, Ang Tun was frantically directing his two men to climb into the jeep.
A military green jeep followed, wobbling along.
The terrain of the mining area is more complex than it appears on satellite images.
The surface is covered with a layer of grayish-white permafrost crust, beneath which lies an alternating structure of gravel and permafrost layers.
Occasionally, one can see a few sinkholes with a diameter of three or four meters, and the soil at the edge has a faint, dark mineral luster.
The wind never stopped.
Guided by the system, Zhang Yan drove for nearly forty minutes before finally parking the car in front of a huge natural depression.
The depression, which looked as if it had been pushed open from the ground by something, was over fifty meters in diameter and had a layer of broken ice at the bottom.
The surrounding permafrost cross-section reveals layers of rock textures, among which several thin, hair-like purplish-black veins stand out against the grayish-white permafrost.
System prompt: The Void Crystal vein is approximately 40 to 60 meters deep and has an irregular distribution range. Precise location is required for directional mining.
Zhang Yan got out of the car and stood at the edge of the depression, looking down.
The wind blew up from the soles of my feet, carrying the chill from deep within the earth's crust.
A shiver came from behind me.
Ang Tun, wrapped in a military overcoat, stood three meters away, his lips blue.
"Boss... what good stuff could this place possibly have?"
Zhang Yan did not answer.
He jumped down into the depression, his boots shattering the thin ice at the bottom, and walked to the broken wall, reaching out to touch the few purplish-black veins.
A very subtle tremor came from my fingers.
It's not caused by temperature; it's the ore vein itself vibrating at an extremely low frequency, like some kind of underlying pulse in space.
found it.
Zhang Yan stood at the bottom of the depression, his gaze following the purplish-black veins deep into the rock wall.
The detector data is clear—the main body of the Void Crystal is located between 47 and 53 meters below our feet, distributed in irregular clusters, and the total amount is limited.
It's impossible to dig it out by hand.
The permafrost, which is over forty meters deep, has a hardness close to that of granite.
Zhang Yan retreated to the center of the depression, and after confirming that there were no satellite transit windows within a one-kilometer radius above his head, he summoned "Black Scorpion" from his storage space.
A three-meter-long bronze-colored mechanical scorpion silently appeared on the broken ice ground. The drilling tongs at its tail automatically unfolded, and the high-frequency vibrating drill bit at its end emitted a low buzzing sound in the cold air.
Three meters away, Ang Tun's legs almost gave way.
The last time he saw it was a white tiger, a metallic tiger.
This time, a giant scorpion suddenly appeared.
His mouth was open, and he let out a completely uncontrollable scream.
Zhang Yan didn't even turn his head.
He input the coordinate parameters on the control panel, aligned the Xuanxie drilling pliers with the vein location, and the high-frequency drill bit rotated to full speed, cutting into the permafrost layer.
Gravel flew everywhere.
The permafrost cracked like a shortbread in front of the high-frequency drill bit, and was peeled off layer by layer.
The black scorpion's six segments are firmly planted on the ground, and its entire body serves as a drilling platform with precision controlled to the millimeter level.
Angtun snapped out of his shock and huddled at the edge of the depression, watching the giant mechanical scorpion frantically burrow into the ground.
Gravel and clods of frozen soil kept popping out of the hole, making a clanging sound all around.
He wrapped his military overcoat tighter and stamped his feet.
It's eleven degrees below zero.
The wind blew into the depression from the northeast, drilling into the bones like a knife.
His two men couldn't take it anymore forty minutes ago and retreated back into the jeep to turn on the heater.