Chapter 1440: The Four Prime Cores!

Translator: Exodus Tales  Editor: Exodus Tales

Xia Fan followed the smell to the lobby. The strange odor was coming from a sealed medium-sized chest in the middle of the area.

Curiously, the center of the lobby should have been where the most people were concentrated, but on the contrary, there weren’t many people there at all. It was probably because everyone thought that the valuable treasures were hidden in more secluded areas, rather than in such obvious places as this.

Alas, the chests were distributed randomly, and those putting the chests out had no idea what was inside them.

Xia Fan sniffed carefully. This scent was most likely that of an ancient kind of metal, neither the normal steel or trititanium alloy, nor was it the more valuable Keller Alloy. It was a special metal that Xia Fan had never encountered before.

In addition to the smell produced by the metal, there was a moldy scent produced from being stored in a place lacking airflow for a long time.

His experience told him that this wasn’t a smell that could be produced by being stored in a closed underground space for only one or two years. It required several hundred years, even a thousand years. Even the odor from the calcification of the stone walls had seeped into the metal.

There was no doubt that this was an ancient metal object made of an unknown alloy on par with Keller Alloy. But the amount of Keller Ore in the alloy was lower, 5% at most. The vast majority of metals were unidentifiable to Xia Fan.

After some thought, Xia Fan scanned the chest with his signaller.

The machine let out a clear beep. Xia Fan studied the screen, seeing the serial code of this chest and its bidding price.

At present, no one had bid on this chest!

Xia Fan wasn’t in a rush to bid. According to the rules of this activity, it was only the highest bid at the very end that mattered. Bidding multiple times before that was pointless. All it did was ensure that one’s bid was the highest ‘before’ the end of the bidding.

At that moment, Xia Fan heard the beep of a signaller scanning a chest from behind him.

Turning his head, he saw a fat old man from the Inner Territories, together with a young girl of seventeen or eighteen from the Outer Frontier.

The girl wore a miniskirt and was dressed in a flashy style. Although she had put on a lot of makeup, her skin was still darker than the skin of people from the Inner Territories, and her hands had calluses that exposed her impoverished background. She had lived a rough childhood, and it was only when she grew up to be beautiful that she gained a financial backer and was gradually able to enjoy a better quality of life.

It was very normal to see couples made up of men from the Inner Territories and women from the Outer Frontier. After all, the people of the Inner Territories had money, and the girls of the Frontier all considered it an honor to be a partner to a man from the Inner Territories.

These business people from the Inner Territories had also come here to have fun. Having wives and children in the Inner Territories and a pile of lovers in the Outer Frontier was standard procedure for these businessmen.

That was just how things were, given how cheap sex was in the Frontier. Tony had even said he could get them top-class Outer Frontier girls — twins even! — for a crazy night that would only cost one gold coin. As for more average girls, one just needed to take care of their room and board, along with giving them a little spending money.

Even a penniless loser would be welcomed in the Outer Frontier. This was nothing less than a paradise for men. Many people in the Inner Territories would work hard and save up for a whole year, and when their vacation days arrived, they would run off to the Outer Frontier for two weeks.

“There’s a treasure inside. My intuition has always been very right, so I can’t be wrong!” the young and thin Outer Frontier girl said to the chubby old man next to her.

The small hand holding her signaller was trembling. According to the rules, chests were divided into small chests, medium chests, large chests, and extra large chests. The starting bid was ten coins, and the price would only climb as more and more people bid.

For a poor Outer Frontier girl, this was an enormous amount of money!

The old man smiled sinisterly and pinched the girl’s butt, a bestial green light in his eyes. “If there really is a treasure inside, I’ll split it with you.”

“Is that true?”

“Have I ever lied to you?”

“You’re the best, Daddy!”

“What’s the rush?”

“Why don’t we…go to the restroom for a bit?” the girl asked flirtatiously.

Although she was young, she had been in this profession for some time already and had lost her bashfulness. She already knew how to tempt and satisfy men.

The girl took the old man by the arm and walked off to the restroom. Xia Fan didn’t need to see to know what they were going to do, for the smell of the hormones from the two of them had already revealed everything.

‘That old man is really quite the flirt, even letting that girl call him Daddy,’ Xia Fan thought to himself.

But she was bound to be disappointed today. Inside the chest was a piece of clothing made of flexible materials, probably a shirt. There was still the smell of new clothes on it. Xia Fan had figured that out long ago…

—

Leaving the lobby, Xia Fan headed to the second floor.

The Red Fort was built on a grandiose scale, with a large skywell and a covered walkway. The center of the second floor was where the skywell was located. The racks were arranged around it in a square. The number of chests here was only about three-quarters of those on the first floor.

Xia Fan continued to roam around the racks. He seemed to be looking, but he was actually relying on his sense of smell.

Xia Fan’s nose was more sensitive than a dog’s, without the slightest bit of exaggeration.

Odors were made up of molecules, and the Scent special ability could disassemble a smell into hundreds of millions of tiny molecules. This powerful means of molecular analysis was something that an ordinary person could not imagine.

For Xia Fan, one sniff meant that the information from billions of molecules was entering his brain!

“Could it be…” Xia Fan suddenly stopped next to an extra large chest. Xia Fan was a little familiar with the odor, but he couldn’t remember where it was from.

‘Could it be a mechanical core!?,’ Xia Fan realized in shock, the blood instantly rushing to his head.

‘Impossible! A mechanical core’s value can’t be measured in gold coins! A single mechanical core could get you half of an A-class habitable planet!

‘This odor is so similar to a mechanical core’s…

‘A mix of oil and ordinary trititanium alloy. It should be some sort of complex machine.

‘The smell is similar to a mechanical core inside a machine. In other words, this chest contains a machine, and in the machine is something similar to a core.

‘From the smell, the machine should be some sort of jet engine. Yes, a turbine engine requires magnetic oil to lubricate, so it should be a jet engine.

‘Did someone hide something similar to a mechanical core in a jet engine?

‘Heavens! How is this possible!?’

Xia Fan’s mind was working rapidly.

The item in the car was an engine used by hovercars, but inside the engine was a smell similar to that of a mechanical core!. Xia Fan was familiar with the smell because the Disaster also had a mechanical core.

But Xia Fan quickly determined that the thing couldn’t be a mechanical core, for its scent had some special molecules that a mechanical core did not.

There were four ancient and mysterious core systems in the Ashen Moon Universe: the mechanical core, the energy core, the impact core, and the defense core.

Of these, the mechanical core was the one that massively improved the performance of machines.

An old and shabby engine could be reborn after a mechanical core was installed into it. Its performance would be a hundred and fifty percent better, and its other characteristics, like heat dispersal, endurance, and overloading, would all be strengthened. It was no less than a mythical item.

The Disaster was an elite frigate made by the Sacred Federation’s Imperial Shipyards. It had an initial speed thirty-five percent faster than the standard frigate.

But as Xia Fan had managed to get his hands on a mechanical core, it had a starting speed three times faster than the standard!

The reason was none other than because the machines operated more smoothly, dispersed heat better, and used energy more efficiently.

The huge boost in efficiency was because of the mechanical core’s mystical power. The unique metal ball could reduce the wear and tear on machines and boost their heat dispersal as if by magic.

When an energy core was installed in a ship, a ship’s energy system would be strengthened. The energy supply would be endless, and the reactor would provide more engine power.

The impact core was used to boost weapons. Traditional ship-mounted lasers used huge amounts of energy. A normal ship that was firing its lasers repeatedly would run completely out of energy after only a few salvos.

Movie watchers often noticed that warships on the movie screens would often fire very slowly. Most of the time they used guided missiles or other energy-saving artillery attacks.

The reason was that lasers, while powerful, took such an absurd amount of power that just firing one could completely drain a ship of energy!

If a warship ran out of energy, it was in deep trouble. The shields would go out and the engine would run out of power, so the ship would become nothing more than a floating coffin. Unable to run, it would just serve as a giant target.

Thus, the warships of the Ashen Moon Universe were extremely cautious when using their lasers, only using them for offense when absolutely necessary.

But if one had an energy core and impact core, one would avoid all those problems!

The energy core would strengthen a ship’s energy system, while the impact core would reduce the energy usage. Their combined effect would raise the ship’s performance all-around.

The last type of core was the defense core. This thing primarily controlled the energy consumption of shields. Energy shields were composed of completely closed energy forcefields. They used energy to create an umbrella that would resist a deluge of attacks from the enemy, and were also one of the main energy consumers for a ship.

With a defense core, the energy shields would be stronger and use less energy!

A normal warship that was fitted with each of these four prime cores would have more than ten times its usual combat power. A frigate would be able to challenge much larger cruisers and destroyers with little problem!

Alas, the blueprints for the four prime cores had been lost long ago, and the Ashen Moon Universe could not create any one of them. The current cores were all left behind from ancient times.

As they were few in number, the cores only increased in price. A hundred years ago, one had to spend one billion dollars for a single core, but now it would cost five billion, and in another few years, it might cost ten billion!

After all, the cores were expendable items. A mechanical core would drop in performance after a few years of use. Unless one found the blueprints and started producing them again, the four cores would only continue to dwindle in number.

Xia Fan swallowed hard.

Through the scent molecules, Xia Fan was sure that there was a core in this chest. It definitely wasn’t a mechanical core, for Xia Fan knew what a mechanical core smelled like. But it should be one of the other three cores!

Xia Fan felt his heart beating faster. He already had a mechanical core, so if he had a second core, the Disaster would become a semi-divine ship!

No matter what, he had to get this chest!

With this thought in mind, Xia Fan acted like nothing was going on and used his signaller to scan the chest.

Beep!…