Let MapleStory experience the Fourth Calamity

Chapter 24 A Failed Attempt

The cleanup of the area surrounding the shipwreck site is progressing at an exceptionally rapid pace, thanks to the potent stimulation of the rich, salty, and oily broth.

Dozens of lowly laborers, having drunk their fill of pork crackling and seaweed soup, unleashed astonishing productivity.

Like tireless worker ants, they quickly cleared and sorted the waist-high scrap steel plates, rotten wood, and piles of white seashells around the camp.

This once abandoned mudflat has finally been cleared out into a large, flat open space.

The prototype of "Pearl Harbour Pier 2," belonging to the players, is already faintly emerging on this dirty beach.

However, this frenzied infrastructure boom was forced to halt when it reached the core area of ​​the deep-water port.

Hearing the commotion ahead, the little snail immediately put down the broken wooden board it was drawing a plan on and went over.

Dozens of laborers stood in knee-deep black mud, clutching rough hemp ropes. The other end of the ropes was taut over a dark, hill-like patch of shadow.

It was the wreckage of a steel warship.

No one knows how many years it has been lying dormant here; the massive hull, which is tens of meters long, is mostly submerged in silt.

The surface of the warship was covered with dried barnacles and thick rust.

No matter how hard the laborers shouted and pulled, the steel behemoth weighing hundreds of tons remained completely still.

"I can't pull it! I can't pull it at all!" An elderly laborer collapsed in the mud, his hands marked with blood from the thick hemp rope, his eyes filled with despair. "This iron lump has taken root in the mud. Without a high-level mage's levitation spell, it's absolutely impossible to pull it out by hand!"

"It's taken root, damn it!"

He grabbed a bucket, ran through the crowd, and waded through the mud to the wreckage of the warship. He crouched down, pinched the mud at the bottom, and then looked up to estimate the tilt angle and depth of the wreckage.

He quickly drew several triangles and force arrows on the muddy ground, stood up, and patted the mud off his hands: "What kind of magic is this? It's simply that the negative pressure of the mud and its own weight have exceeded your pulling limit. Pulling it horizontally is definitely not going to work; you have to change the direction of the force."

The little snail stepped forward: "Is there a solution?"

"Lever principle plus fixed pulley system." He picked up a piece of charred charcoal while running away, and with a few strokes on the wooden board, he drew a square, multi-layered support structure. "This thing needs to be hoisted vertically, so first we need to break the suction force of the silt at the bottom. Give me some hands and iron, and I'll handcraft a simple truss crane on this muddy ground."

Little Snail slapped his thigh, immediately displaying the qualities of a group leader: "Big Goose! Keep simmering the soup and keep these NPCs calm! Agent, go to the high ground and keep an eye on Bolton's movements. The rest of you, follow Brother Bucket's orders!"

Under the command of "running away with buckets," the camp quickly entered a frenzied pre-industrialization phase.

Using the highly viscous refractory mud, discarded bricks, and thick iron sheets unique to the shipwreck area, the laborers built a simple earthen blast furnace, about two people high, in the center of the camp.

Iron Pot Stew Da Ne found several relatively intact animal hides and sewed them into a huge primitive bellows.

Several players, empowered by their abilities, took turns frantically pulling the bellows.

With a whooshing sound, the temperature inside the furnace rose steadily, and the flames gradually changed from dark red to a dazzling bright yellow.

Discarded iron swords, rusted steel pipes, and tattered armor salvaged from shipwrecks were continuously thrown into the furnace.

A few hours later, accompanied by the visual effect of the high temperature distorting the air, the first batch of red-hot molten iron slowly flowed out of the refractory trough.

The dazzling firelight pierced through the year-round gloom of the shipwreck area, illuminating the shocked faces of the surrounding NPC laborers in a bright red.

In the indigenous people's understanding, melting and reshaping steel was a skill possessed only by master blacksmiths or high-level magicians. Yet these outsiders accomplished this so-called "alchemy" using only a pile of mud and a broken bellows.

Molten iron was precisely introduced into the sand mold dug in advance on the bucket running track, and the casting of the load-bearing main shaft and rough connecting parts required for the crane began.

The cold, icy rain lashed against the scorching hot mold, sending up plumes of steam.

He grabbed the bucket and ran off, wiping the soot off his face, staring intently at the cooling casting.

He knew very well that this kind of pig iron, produced using traditional methods, had an extremely high carbon content and was full of impurities, making it very brittle. However, it was the best material they could obtain at this stage.

After cooling, dozens of laborers, under the direction of the leader who was carrying buckets and running away, used thick wooden stakes and newly cast iron load-bearing main shafts to erect a huge truss crane on the muddy beach.

Dozens of crudely made hemp ropes were twisted together into a main cable, which, through a cast iron pulley, hooked tightly onto the keel of the underwater warship wreckage.

"Turn the winch!" shouted the bucket-carrying runner from a high place.

A dozen or so laborers and the remaining players worked together, frantically pushing the human-powered winch.

The taut hemp rope main cable emitted a teeth-grinding scraping sound.

The cast iron fixed pulley and main load-bearing shaft began to deform slightly under the tension of enormous stress.

Huge bubbles rose from the water's surface, and the wreckage of the warship, which the husbands considered indestructible, began to stir in the silt, showing signs of actually loosening upwards.

"It moved! It really moved!" the workers shouted excitedly.

However, things did not go as planned.

Just as the wreckage of the warship was lifted half a meter, a deafening explosion, like a firecracker, rang out.

The pig iron spindle, forged using traditional methods, has finally reached its physical limits.

This brittle iron, full of impurities, simply cannot withstand the tensile stress of hundreds of tons and will break directly in the middle!

Without its load-bearing core, the taut cable instantly went out of control, lashing the nearby wooden frame like a violent whip.

The massive truss collapsed with a deafening roar, and the wreckage of the warship crashed back into the mud, splashing up a cloud of foul-smelling black water.

Everything was back to square one, and the laborers cried out and scattered in all directions.

He scrambled out of the muddy water, spitting out the sand in his mouth. Looking at the broken iron wreckage scattered everywhere, he gritted his teeth: "No way! The mechanical structure is fine, but the material strength is too weak. The scrap iron from this makeshift blast furnace is too brittle. We need to get special steel, or, according to the game's mechanics, materials with enchantment bonuses. Otherwise, the deep-water area of ​​Pearl Harbor Pier 2 is completely hopeless!"

Materials were the first major hurdle that heavy industry faced in its early stages.

Just when everyone was at a loss looking at the broken bearing and the atmosphere in the camp plummeted to freezing point.

Lynn, who had been silently watching everything from under the eaves of the dilapidated wooden house, suddenly narrowed his eyes.

Without warning, less than half a meter from Lynn's nose, the air suddenly twisted violently, and a blinding white light exploded with a bang!

"I'm dying to breathe!!!"

With a heart-wrenching howl, like a wild beast being unleashed, a powerful figure was forced out of the white light.

Lynn instinctively took half a step back, his brows furrowed as he stared at the suddenly appearing creature before him.

It's a whole roasted lamb that survived a full 48-hour "death cooling" period.

Because he died from drinking poisoned seawater on the beach last time, all the leather armor and weapons on the roasted whole lamb were gone.

Having been reborn, he was only wearing a white T-shirt and shorts provided by the Fourth Calamity System.

He was barefoot, and goosebumps rose on his skin from the cold wind.

The moment he opened his eyes, he saw Lynn standing right in front of him.

"Holy crap, that almost killed the GM!"

The whole roasted lamb suddenly braked, then completely disregarded etiquette, bypassed Lynn, and charged towards the center of the camp like a mad dog that had broken free.

"I finally made it through! Two days! Do you know what I went through these past two days?!"

The whole roasted lamb galloped along, roaring with a face full of grief and indignation, "I worked two days straight in real life and got yelled at by my boss three times! I see you guys in the group chat doing infrastructure and main quests every day, and I'm even counting down the respawn time in this crappy game while I'm slacking off at work!"

The laborers along the way were terrified by the man spouting nonsense and gave him a wide berth, their eyes filled with fear of these big-time out-of-town bosses.

The whole roasted lamb didn't care about the NPC's gaze at all. He had been eating takeout for two days in real life. As soon as he logged in and smelled the aroma, he immediately slid down to stop in front of the big iron pot of soup that was being cooked by the goose.

"This is the taste! Snails! Leave me some soup! Real-life takeout is worse than pig slop, I miss this virtual taste so much!"

The somber atmosphere in the camp, which had been dampened by the crane's failure, was instantly dispelled by the return of the streaking berserker.

Xiaoyu pointed at the dazzling pair of shorts on the roasted whole lamb and laughed so hard she couldn't stand up straight, while the little snail helplessly covered its face, feeling that these players' bottom line was constantly being refreshed.

In the shadows of the dilapidated cabin, Lynn calmly observed everything.

Although the return of the whole roasted lamb was a funny interlude, the situation where players were spawning right in front of each other just now served as a wake-up call for Lynn.

As the true mastermind behind this "game," he quickly began to plan the next version in his mind.

First, the respawn point must be located outside the area.

We absolutely cannot allow these uncontrollable fourth calamities to use our coordinates as their default spawn point anymore.

He didn't want to be knocked flying in the face by a naked player while he was sleeping or thinking.

But the question is, how exactly is a fixed resurrection circle made? What level of magical materials are needed? And how do you detach the system's anchor coordinates from yourself and transfer them there?

Lynn frowned slightly. He currently knew very little about the underlying logic of this otherworldly magic system, and had no clue what to do with creating magic circles.

It seems this plan will have to be put on hold for now. We'll have to wait until we make contact with the indigenous forces at the top of Pearl Harbor or find relevant information before we look for a way to establish a fixed respawn point.

Second, regarding the limitations on expanding the scale of summoning.

Lynn looked at the whole roasted lamb that was fighting with an NPC over a broken bowl to drink soup, and a thoughtful look flashed in his eyes.

In recent days, the system backend has accumulated a considerable number of energy points.

If he wanted, he could personally issue invitation codes and bring over dozens or even hundreds of players from Earth to forcibly fill the sunken area with sheer numbers.

But he couldn't do that; Lynn rationally suppressed the urge to massacre soldiers.

The economic ecosystem is too fragile.

Even if the team in the iron pot stews worked around the clock, simmering soup and boiling salt, the current resources could barely sustain the existing first-test players and a few dozen NPC laborers. If fifty lawless, resource-consuming enthusiasts like those roasting whole lambs were suddenly parachuted in, the fragile food chain that the camp had just established would completely collapse within a day.

Finally, and most importantly: the establishment of order.

These six players who participated in the first test were the spark at Pearl Harbour Pier 2.

We must wait until they all reach level 10 or 8, complete their first job advancement, possess sufficient combat power to protect themselves in this world, and establish a sound guild system and punishment mechanism on their own.

Only when the Little Snails can act as mentors to newcomers and suppress those newbies who try to cause trouble with their fists and rules will Lynn open the second closed beta and let in a batch of "locusts".

Otherwise, a group of uncontrolled, reckless low-level players running around naked and courting death would not only fail to help him overthrow Bolton's rule, but would also prematurely attract a full-scale siege by the upper echelons of Pearl Harbor's army.

You have to eat one bite at a time.

Lynn gazed intently at the massive shipwreck still stuck in the mud in the distance.

The most urgent task now is to solve the material shortage.

And this opportunity to break the deadlock seems to be quietly approaching in the thick fog, with the removal of the hidden sentries.