Units Sam 1 through 10 continued their search of the Ruins.
<...Still, where did they get the materials to build this many ships?> Sam 2 asked his partner, Sam 9.
<A good question....Either they mined them here or hauled them in from somewhere else. It has to be one or the other.>
<Mm.>
As they pressed on with their exploration, Sam 4 and Sam 5 stumbled upon something.
It was a magic circle.
It was etched into the floor of a vast, seemingly disused hangar deep within the facility.
<It's a teleportation magic circle....Let's report this to Laojun.>
"I see. It appears to be a two-way teleportation magic circle... It is separate from the one meant for Larva's return, and given its location, it was most likely used for material procurement."
Reaching that conclusion, Laojun set out to locate its corresponding counterpart.
"...If I send through something to act as a marker, I should be able to pinpoint the destination."
With that in mind, Laojun took a fragment of a magi-crystal, lightly altered it, and tuned it to emit mana waves for a brief period.
"Please place this upon the magic circle."
Laojun dispatched the fragment directly to Sam 1 via the transporter.
<Understood.>
To a unit of Sam 1's size, the fragment was as hefty as a pickling stone, but carrying it posed no real difficulty.
<Placing it now.>
Keeping a short distance from the teleportation magic circle, Sam 1 tossed the marker straight toward its center.
To an outside observer, it looked no different than a small pebble rolling across the floor.
The magic circle promptly teleported the "pebble" away to parts unknown...
On the receiving end, the marker materialized.
By their very nature, objects that arrive on teleportation magic circles remain sitting on them until removed by an external force. Otherwise, they would be instantly sent back, only to arrive at the far side and be returned yet again—trapped in an endless loop of back-and-forth transit.
However, if an object remained on the circle until something else was sent through, it would be caught up and returned alongside the new payload. In practical terms, this was how stray grains of sand and dust were handled.
"...Signal confirmed from the marker. The location is... Mount Nakyu? A plausible destination."
Mount Nakyu. It was the site of the Ruins originally discovered by Markitus—a former base belonging to the Progenitors. Currently, the facility was under the joint management of Deus Ex Machina and Nostalgia.
"Does this mean Larva was built at the Mount Nakyu base...?"
Laojun decided to conduct a thorough scan of the Mount Nakyu base using a Peeper.
"...I see. There appears to be a workshop or research lab here."
Behind one of the walls, a hidden chamber came to light.
It was utterly derelict, bearing no sign of recent activity.
"...Oh? What is this...?"
Scattered across the floor were components that looked like prototypes.
"Hmm. This part resembles Larva's head unit... It seems Larva was indeed manufactured here."
Beyond that, however, there were no further leads to be found.
"It appears the magi-crystals storing the memories of those five 'people' are not here."
Laojun had been half-certain of this the moment the location was identified as the Mount Nakyu ruins. After all, the place had once been Markitus's stronghold, and a general survey had already been carried out following his demise.
"Which means they must be at another facility..."
Laojun cross-referenced known sites.
Before long, a specific candidate surfaced.
Uchuto Island.
An abandoned base formerly used by Markitus was located there. It was the very place where two captured Quinta units, Melda and Lili, had once been imprisoned.
Following their rescue, only a perfunctory sweep had been conducted. At the time, the World Security Guard had set up an emergency Warp Gate on Uchuto Island, leading Laojun to defer a comprehensive survey for later.
"Given that the two units were captured and studied there, there is a strong possibility that the magi-crystals containing the memories of those five 'people' were kept at the same site."
Back then, Melda and Lili's control cores had been extracted from their chassis and stored in specialized containment vessels.
Deducing that the magi-crystals holding the five "people's" memories might be secured in similar containers, Laojun initiated a search using a Peeper.
One minute passed, then two.
Nothing.
Three minutes, then four.
There was no sign of them within the main facility.
"...Could there be a hidden storehouse or repository somewhere?"
Laojun redeployed the Peeper, methodically probing behind the walls and beneath the floorboards.
Using a Peeper's visual feed to see through solid matter was inherently time-consuming, and scanning opaque liquids was no different. While adjusting the mana wave frequency allowed the feed to pass right through solid barriers, tuning it too broadly would cause the target objects to turn transparent as well, defeating the entire purpose.
Consequently, searching within solid matter was an unavoidably painstaking process.
"...Found them."
Seven minutes into the sweep, Laojun detected a repository concealed inside one of the walls of the ruined research lab.
"Inside... there are nineteen magi-crystals. Five of them appear to have data written into them."
While the exact nature of the data remained unverified, the matching quantity strongly suggested these were the original memory stores of the five "people."
"The remainder are blank magi-crystals... I see. So this was where they sourced them."
A vein of magi-crystals seemed to run at a relatively shallow depth beneath Uchuto Island.
"Markitus likely mined the necessary volume of magi-crystals here, while establishing his primary base on the Pandor Continent."
Uchuto Island was too small to function as a viable military base. Furthermore, while rich in magi-crystals, it lacked metallic resources, which likely led to its eventual abandonment.
"After all, you cannot construct warships or golems without metal."
If materials had to be transported from an off-site dig, magi-crystals were far more compact and significantly easier to haul than massive quantities of ore.
"For now, I should deploy a marker here as well."
Should an investigation team be dispatched later, a marker would make the operation far smoother.
Laojun subsequently relayed the findings to Jin and the others.
"I see... So there's a magi-crystal vein on Uchuto Island....Though the quality isn't very high, is it?"
"Indeed, My Lord. A preliminary scan with the Peeper indicates that the vast majority are second-rate specimens."
"Right... I wonder if they used those lower-grade crystals to make the control cores for the five 'people.'"
"Yes, that seems very likely," Reinhard agreed.
"Still, that doesn't really tell us who those five 'people' actually are, does it?" Saki remarked, sounding a bit disappointed.
Reinhard offered his own thought in response. "I suppose our only option left is to carry out a more exhaustive investigation of the ruins at Mount Nakyu."
"Yeah, that's probably our best bet," Jin agreed.
"Understood," Laojun responded. "I will dispatch Laozi to the ruins at Mount Nakyu."
The decision to deploy its own personal mobile terminal made it abundantly clear just how seriously Laojun was taking the matter.