Gamers Are Fierce-Chapter 680 - 678 Equipment

The workshop floor split apart, forming countless tiny black cubes that spread around like waves.

Li Ang, who had been crouching, stood up and looked around.

All four walls of the Magic Box were retreating, while the ceiling rose upwards. The lights inside the workshop flickered, dust rained down continuously, and in the corners, scorching hot lava, red as fire, even began to gush out.

Chaichai clutched her owner's hand, feeling a bit anxious and ready to bolt from the workshop, which seemed on the verge of exploding.

Li Ang patted Chaichai's palm reassuringly and continued to calmly observe everything happening inside the Magic Box.

After a long moment, the shaking stopped, and the System's upgrade completion notification sounded in his ear.

The upgraded Alchemist's Workshop was no longer dark and cramped as before. The floor was now covered with unidentified clean white tiles. New, openable cross windows had been added to the walls. Long strip bulbs were embedded in the ceiling, and ventilation equipment with several layers of filters was installed in various corners. The Forging Furnace was a whole lot larger, its outer shell now adorned with ornate Baroque-style decorations. Even the previously exposed rough rivets and screws had been replaced with more aesthetically pleasing foliate ornaments.

"This is..."

Li Ang surveyed the Alchemy Workshop, which had expanded to more than five times its original size. Aside from the Forging Furnace, many new pieces of equipment had appeared. Due to the barriers between worlds, these pieces of equipment looked somewhat different from their Earthly counterparts. However, based on their placement and the instructional stickers, Li Ang could roughly infer their purpose. There was a central experiment bench, a wash stand, reagent racks, ventilated medicine cabinets, several safety storage cabinets designed to resist chemicals, rust, corrosion, and explosions, as well as drying cabinets, storage lockers, emergency sprinklers, and so on.

All in all, apart from the artistic style, it wasn't much different from a contemporary chemistry lab.

"All the storage cabinets are empty... except for this one."

Chaichai pulled open the cabinet doors one by one. From one, she took out a shining, silver, star-like piece of metal. She handed it to Li Ang and asked, "What's this?"

Li Ang weighed the metal in his hand, activated his Alchemy to investigate it, and murmured, "Xuanyuan Fourteen Antimony."

"What's that?"

Chaichai blinked. "Xuanyuan Sword? The Xuanyuan tribe? Eastern alchemy?"

Li Ang explained casually, "Xuanyuan Fourteen is the alpha star in the constellation Leo. It's a bright blue-white, oblate star, with an actual luminosity more than two hundred times that of the Sun.

"Sir Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientists in human history, was obsessed with alchemy. He spent more time on it than on gravity and left hundreds of pages of manuscripts related to alchemy, most of which were unfortunately lost in a fire. On one occasion, he accidentally produced a star-like chunk of antimony. Following the alchemists' tradition of correlating metals with celestial objects, he named it Xuanyuan Fourteen Antimony."

"Ah? So this piece... it wasn't left behind by Newton, was it?" Chaichai's eyes widened.

"How could that be?" Li Ang glanced at her. "The decorations on the outside of the Magic Box do not belong to any artistic style on Earth. Besides, Newton lived to the ripe old age of 85.

"He couldn't possibly have been a player, who typically have high mortality rates; therefore, it's unlikely he would have left antimony metal in this Magic Box.

"Moreover, the alchemy Newton studied was not the experiential alchemy seen as charlatanism by the public. Instead, it was based on Boyle's corpuscular philosophy, within a system of natural philosophy that was essentially a pre-science to modern chemistry.

"If he had been given a higher and broader platform, humans might already have flown out of the solar system by now."

"Oh, I see."

Chaichai nodded, slightly surprised. This was the first time Li Ang had shown such admiration, bordering on worship.

Perhaps the personal style of Sir Newton—with an intelligence surpassing all of humanity, viewing all others as idiots or slightly more competent idiots, capable of academic work as well as holding office, dark-hearted and ruthless in action (he once wrote an anonymous letter attacking his former confidant Leibniz)—was particularly attractive...

"The 'Damaged' prefix in the name of the Alchemist Magic Box Tool has now disappeared, and it has been upgraded to Perfect quality."

Li Ang stepped forward and tapped on the shell of the Forging Furnace. "The furnace has also been upgraded. It is now capable of forging equipment and tools of Excellent quality, and the required forging time has been significantly reduced. Consequently, the shop's fee standard will be further increased, and more orders can be completed in the future."

"Oh, oh."

Chaichai nodded. She hadn't been to the plaza and was unclear about the specific situation there, but that didn't prevent her from understanding the core message: Li Ang would be able to make more money in the future.

"In addition..."

Li Ang looked next to the Forging Furnace, where a similarly large, enclosed grinder was placed. Overall, it was a silver, square-shaped machine with an input port and an output port. On top were several buttons: 60-mesh crushing, 120-mesh pulverization, 300-mesh superfine pulverization, and 300-mesh+ ultrafine pulverization.

[Name: All-purpose Grinder]

[Type: Workshop Facility]

[Quality: Perfect]

[Special Effect: Fine Pulverization. Insert extraordinary items and choose the pulverization setting to extract materials containing extraordinary elements. These materials can then be inserted into the Forging Furnace for forging.]

[Usage Cost: 1,000 Game Coins per use]

[Note: Do not pour high-viscosity liquids such as asphalt, explosive materials, or radioactive waste into the input port.]

[Note: The quality of the All-purpose Grinder is determined by the Magic Box itself.]

[Note: Higher pulverization precision results in longer processing times, fewer extraordinary elements extracted, but higher concentration of those elements.]

"This equipment seems to complement the Forging Furnace. One is for pulverization and refining, the other for forging and creation," Li Ang remarked, glancing over the machine's specific description.

Commendably, the All-purpose Grinder didn't limit the quality of the extraordinary elements extracted. This meant that even if Perfect Level items were put into it, there was a high probability of obtaining materials of the same quality level—though no one would risk that right now.

He had several low-level items in his inventory, such as the Dusk Cloak, Face-Changing Mask, and Bloodworm Crowbar.

These pieces of equipment had helped him a lot before, but now he had replacements for all of them, rendering them of little use. He considered it a loss to auction them off in the marketplace; they were better off being ground down and reforged.

"Let's try it with the Face-Changing Mask later."

Li Ang patted the shell of the All-purpose Grinder and turned his head to look at two other new pieces of equipment.

[Name: Mechanical Workbench]

[Name: Chimeric Beast Assembly Bench]

The former occupied a huge area, consisting of components like an operating table, a workbench, a multifunctional lathe, and mechanical armor stands. It could analyze the structure of mechanical creations, provide blueprints, and allow the user to mass-produce them.

The latter was composed of several giant, hollow, cylindrical glass containers. It was able to analyze, splice, and embed different biological genes to create Chimera Synthetic Beasts.