Chapter Eighty-Nine: Radioactive Material

But that Moonshadow Lake place seems to be rather far from our country... Why would the nation suddenly be reporting news from there for no apparent reason?

The Black Dragon could not help but let its thoughts wander. As far as it knew, Moonshadow Lake lay roughly two thousand kilometers from the southwestern border of the Summer Kingdom. And the world beyond the borders was not like home: technology was underdeveloped, the movement of people was far less frequent, and news naturally spread without much speed.

An incident that happened on the twenty-sixth, more than two thousand kilometers away, was reported by the Summer Kingdom on the twenty-ninth. For the outside world, that kind of timeliness was already remarkably high. And the Foreign Ministry had even issued a special appeal on the matter... This meant the Summer Kingdom must have been watching that place for quite some time already.

Maybe the life springwater the nation collected was traded for from those two elf clans...

After mulling it over for a while, the Black Dragon began to suspect that the nation might be deliberately seeking to intervene in this conflict, using it as an opening for some strategic arrangement.

Direct military intervention was, of course, impossible. If they truly did that, would the Summer Kingdom not end up becoming the very thing it hated most?

Muttering to itself, the Black Dragon went on scrolling through the news.

"... According to a report from the New Summer News Agency on the twenty-ninth, the pilot vocational skills training school for indigenous peoples, founded by the First Construction Group, welcomed its first graduating class yesterday morning."

"Two hundred and fifty-eight minotaur students beamed as they received their graduation certificates from the school, and soon after signed labor contracts with First Construction Company for no less than six years."

"One minotaur student, in an interview, could not help shedding tears of excitement. He said that before this, he had been a wandering minotaur, living a life of constant displacement since childhood, accustomed to fear and uncertainty, barely able to keep himself alive from one day to the next. In his entire life, he had never eaten his fill more than a few times."

"It was only after meeting the people of the Summer Kingdom that his life finally turned around. It was the people of the Summer Kingdom who gave him his first full meal, and it was also the people of the Summer Kingdom who let him feel, for the first time, true equality and respect."

"Out of gratitude, he followed the staff's suggestion and entered the vocational training school to receive instruction, laying a solid foundation for his future work and life."

"The minotaur student sincerely stated that the food at the school was excellent, the teachers were very kind, and that these days spent in school were the most fulfilling period of his life..."

"Through constant study and reflection, he had finally found direction and motivation in life, and said that in the future he would surely work hard and realize the value of his life with his own hands."

"At the end, this minotaur student also took the initiative to mention his Summer-language name — Bull Hope."

A simple yet beautiful name, and one filled with profound meaning. The appearance of the people of the Summer Kingdom had not only filled his life with hope, but had also brought hope to the entire minotaur race.

"... Finally, let us sincerely wish this student, Bull Hope, a wonderful future."

"..."

The Black Dragon scratched its belly with a claw. Not because it itched, but because its stomach was full of things to complain about, and it truly did not know where to begin.

Training minotaurs in vocational skills and turning them into laborers... At first glance, the whole thing felt absurdly out of place. But on closer thought, well, damn it, it was actually rather scientific.

After all, in the outside world, minotaurs were far more physically robust than the people of the Summer Kingdom. Setting aside job skills and professional competence, one minotaur laborer was worth at least ten laborers from the Summer Kingdom!

They were simply born to do heavy work!

But the problem was that although minotaurs had some bovine blood in them, in terms of obedience and temperament, they were worlds apart from domesticated cattle.

If one were to speak plainly, the reputation of the minotaurs, and the makeup of their ancestors, was actually extremely poor. They could even be counted among the most savage, most hot-tempered warmongers of the beastfolk. To expect them to quietly and obediently become wage laborers was likely little different from wanting to scatter the ashes of the foreman, the overseer, and the manager alike!

Moreover, as one of the major dark and brutal forces among the beastfolk, the minotaurs clearly had powerful backing. Their ancestor, the Minotaur King Baphamend, was a mighty and mad abyssal demon lord!

The madness and belligerence buried in the minotaurs' bones were, to a great extent, influenced by that being. It was a dual contamination of bloodline and soul, not something so easy to remove.

So the Black Dragon could not understand why the minotaurs on television all looked so honest and stolid, like old oxen, completely unlike the image they had once had.

It did not dwell on that for long, and instead thought of another matter.

The main purpose of First Construction Company's recruitment and training of these minotaur warriors was to build a railway—

About one hundred and sixty kilometers northwest of the North Dragon River No. 2 trade port, there was a huge open-pit coal mine. By conservative estimate, its reserves were at least more than one billion tons, and the quality was excellent, with tremendous value for development!

To develop a coal deposit of that scale, a railway was obviously indispensable. And considering that the people of the Summer Kingdom were poorly suited to the conditions of the outside world, it was only natural that sturdy minotaurs, whose obedience now also seemed guaranteed, would be used as substitute labor.

What caught the Black Dragon's attention, of course, was not that. It was the fact that the outside world actually had coal mines!

In fact, not only coal mines, but according to geological survey reports, the outside world also possessed vast quantities of petroleum!

Petroleum is the blood of industry, and coal is the grain of industry; their importance to the Summer Kingdom needed no explanation.

As a populous and industrial nation, the Summer Kingdom imported more than five hundred million tons of petroleum and more than three hundred million tons of coal from abroad last year. But after crossing into this world, those import channels were naturally severed, and the shortage in energy was by no means small.

So after discovering that the outside world in fact contained abundant petroleum and coal that could be developed and used, the Summer Kingdom was so excited that it immediately drew up mining plans.

"I remember that petroleum seems to require a long geological evolution to form..."

The Black Dragon's small mind fell into deep thought.

"Does that mean this material world has existed for at least tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years?"

"And since it contains large amounts of petroleum and coal, that means the process by which it formed and evolved must have shared quite a few similarities with the natural world on our side of Earth."

"Although we can't observe the microscopic realm, judging from the results of many experiments conducted by the Summer Science Academy, the natural world outside the borders is still mainly composed of elements such as nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, silicon, and iron. Even elements with relatively high atomic numbers, like gold, are present as well."

"In that case, is it possible that the natural world outside the borders also contains naturally occurring radioactive elements?"

"Could it be that powerful extraordinary creatures like dragons, which are born with a dragon aura that continually radiates energy into their surroundings... are this way precisely because they contain some unknown high-energy radioactive substance within their bodies?"