Chapter 138: Chapter 124: So it’s 3!
"Agh." Long Yi disdainfully looked at the silver ’2’, muttering under his breath, "You’re ’2’, your whole family’s ’2’."
"So who’s first then?" Ai Lin was more curious to know.
"You can check for yourself within your bracelets." The old man said with a chuckle.
Ai Lin opened her bracelet and quickly found out who was first.
"Pure White Scales."
"What the hell kind of name is that? Is it a nickname? Like Iron Hand Lin En?" Long Yi couldn’t comprehend.
"It’s a team name!" Ai Lin explained.
In any world, going solo is absolutely undesirable. Even in the special operations of Long Yi’s previous life, those powerful special forces soldiers could never handle all situations single-handedly.
The same is true for Dragon Knights. Despite being powerful, the enemies they face are not weak ordinary soldiers, but the enemy’s Dragon Knights. Individual challenges are futile, and team operations are currently the main combat method.
The Dragon Knight Academy encourages everyone to form their own small battle teams, referred to as battle teams, with like-minded classmates. They will hone their teamwork over a considerable amount of time at the academy, creating synergy. After joining the army in the future, they will be assigned to the same legion as much as possible. This way, once they enter the battlefield, those battle teams that have been honed for several years will immediately become a usable force.
And Pure White Scales is one of them.
Long Yi opened Pure White Scales, finding out that it was a five-person team composed of three sixth graders and two fifth graders. Among various teams, five-person teams are the most common, and everyone performs their own skills, which can be considered a standard setup.
Long Yi looked at himself and surprisingly found out he was also in a battle team. The name of the team even called the Piggy Team!
What the hell!
Long Yi turned around and saw Bajie’s innocent face. Indeed, Bajie was still a young dragon and couldn’t speak, so how could he possibly create a battle team? Ai Lin, however, was smiling at him.
"I found the name Bajie to be really pleasing to the ear, so I used it as the team name." Ai Lin explained.
Long Yi felt like banging his head against Bajie’s body and dying. He named it Bajie because this stupid dragon was too fat! It had a special meaning!
Of course, Long Yi naturally didn’t bother explaining.
Well, let it be Bajie. After all, it was a cultured name given by Monk Tang.
Ranked number two, this halo immediately elicited many compliments from the surroundings. A bunch of people Long Yi didn’t even know came to congratulate him.
Remember, this mission totally represents one’s overall strength. Only by collecting more crystal cores could you attract more beasts to attack you. Yet, if you can’t defeat the beasts, you would be eliminated swiftly.
The three ninth-grade crystal cores didn’t shock people as much as the bag of eighth-grade crystal cores did. Being attacked by various eighth-grade beasts so many times, it didn’t look like the duo had been injured. Whether considering personal strength or family prowess, they must be several times stronger than others.
"Ah, what a pity. If you hadn’t turned those two ninth-grade crystal cores into a crystal core weapon, you’d definitely be first. You know, ninth-grade crystal cores can get you a lot of extra points." The old man lamented for Long Yi.
"I don’t care!" Long Yi replied casually. Rankings meant nothing to him.
At that moment, the ’2’ on Ai Lin’s bracelet suddenly changed to ’3’!
"Someone else made it!" The crowd stirred again.
Long Yi opened it to see. It was a team called ’Steel Blade’, but their score was just slightly higher than theirs.
There were only three people in the Steel Blade team, one of whom was a familiar face to Long Yi - Ai Lin’s second brother, Ais.
Originally, Ai Lin was a bit displeased, but seeing that it was her brother who stole the second place, Ai Lin immediately cheered up.
Long Yi was even more delighted.
Ais, dear Ais, you’re the second brother, and now you’ve taken second place again. It seems you indeed love being second, hahaha!
It was still the holiday period at the academy, so Wesley and the others had all gone home. Long Yi and Ai Lin had nowhere to go, so they decided to stay in the task hall and learn from the experience.
And so, until the final count ended, the Pure White Scales team held first place, the Steel Blade team took second, and the Bajie team of Long Yi and Ai Lin finished third.
"Congratulations!"
The elderly counter, who had been working all day, approached Long Yi and sincerely expressed his sentiment. He felt a bit guilty about the pettiness he had shown before.
"You’re too kind."
Long Yi didn’t really care about the rankings. If he did, he feared he could have surpassed the first place quite easily. In fact, once Long Yi recovered from his depression, they had been heading back. If they had ventured further, they certainly would have reaped more rewards.
But this didn’t matter.
The students started to scatter, and the old man sat in a corner of the hall with Long Yi, chatting away.
"Ah- glad to have garnered this many Crystal Cores, thanks to all of you students. The Crystal Core Research Institute will not have to worry about sourcing Crystal Cores for at least a year."
The old man said.
"How do you use these things?" Long Yi asked out of curiosity.
"Are you interested?" The old man asked with a grin.
"Of course I am. I am famously inquisitive." Long Yi blatantly lied.
"Haha, not many young people are interested in research these days. I wouldn’t have guessed looking at you." The old man laughed heartily, thrilled at the prospect of using the crystal cores for research.
"Just consider it chitchat. Go ahead." Long Yi didn’t deny it. He was genuinely interested. As for whether he could conduct research, that would need further deliberation.
"Good! Let me explain." The old man said.
The old man’s name was Ma Deburg. He was the Dean of the Crystal Core division at the Imperial New Energy Research Institute. The Empire invested heavily in new energy research each year - funding experiments of all kinds. But new energy development always has less output than input. Although the costs have been enormous in recent years, research results have been rather sparse.
Crystal Core consumption, in particular, accounted for nearly forty percent of all research funding.
Because the monsters-bearing Crystal Poison were infectious, theoretically, the monsters in this world could never be eradicated. All countries in the world hoped to change the direction of wars by harnessing the energy of Crystal Cores. But, so far, the most successful application of Crystal Cores has been in the form of Crystal Weapons. However, this application theoretically has no difference from how monsters use Crystal Cores and doesn’t leverage the full power of Crystal Cores.
In this world, the city of Darkness has mastered a set of technologies for using Crystal Cores. But they won’t provide these technologies to the human world—they won’t provide any tech. Scholars around the world have no clue how their Substitute Puppets, which can save lives, work. One research group opened up a puppet, only to find it was a solid wooden structure with nothing else inside.
That’s why countries around the world are so interested in Crystal Core technology. Some scholars believe that all of the city of Darkness’s technologies are based on Crystal Core technology. Studying it could usher in the next era.
This speculation isn’t baseless, as Crystal Cores are fundamentally from another plane. And anything that transcends planes tends to bring surprises beyond the understanding of this world.
The Crystal Core Institute, led by Ma Deburg, is ranked mid-level among the old empires in terms of technological expertise. The Yellow Dragon Empire, whose main force are the Earth Dragon Knights, is a front-runner among the empires for research. Legend has it that this nation managed to obtain leaked information from the city of Darkness.
Then, Ma Deburg gave Long Yi a simple explanation of how Crystal Core energy works and how to harness it controllably.
Essentially, a Crystal Core is like a storage battery. It absorbs energy into its tiny crystal lattice, which shatters to release energy when needed. The biggest challenge right now is that the shattering process is nearly uncontrollable. As soon as external forces trigger the shattering, the shattered lattice will release a vast amount of energy, destroying the adjacent lattices. In this chain reaction, the entire Crystal Core will explode violently within a short time.
This process sounded strikingly similar to nuclear fission, didn’t it?
Long Yi was dumbstruck.
Nuclear fission?
