After Surviving the Apocalypse, I Built a City in Another World-Chapter 1868: A Few More Progress

A/N: Two chaps a day should resume tomorrow! Sorry! Was super stuck in the next war arc drafts, so didn’t have time to edit much xD

...

___

At this time, Vanessa stood outside the Post Office, wondering if she should send a message to her family. She was not allowed to make contact with them for another year or so, as per oath, but she truly wanted to go home!

She touched her stomach, which had now entered the second trimester. Unless she could find a way to make sure the Lord would be fine with acknowledging it, she did not want to give birth in this strange place!

What if he decided to kill them both? As much as she hated its father, she knew that this might be the first and last time she could give birth due to the pills’ side effects. She truly hoped to safely go into labor.

She recalled the oaths she took under that bastard. There could be a loophole she could exploit, but there was no way to know if it really was exploited until she did it. Vague oaths made for vague consequences, and everyone had Fargo to remember as a negative example.

She pursed her lips. Could she really risk years of bad luck in this trial?

As she pondered like this, she couldn’t help but recall the circumstances of her forced oath. At the time, she had to give away a lot of her knowledge.

They kept asking her about a Vision Stone, but she really had no idea. She just knew that Belize was hired through the Center, and that was it. She shook her head. That part of the nightmare had ended. She wondered when she would truly get past things.

Should she hire someone to send something for her, and then use code or vaguely hint about her identity? Or perhaps she should befriend a few merchants and get them to Limestone Valley, in which case they could naturally mention her as the referrer.

It would cost more, but that did not matter. By now, that bit of money was no longer a problem.

All her wealth was taken when she was kidnapped, but after the Cold Wave, she earned a bit of money.

She managed to earn a bit during the Fire Plague. Alterra had sent news that water elementalists were immune, so she took advantage of that by taking on some delivery jobs and healing jobs here and there.

This was a City and her being a healer and an elementalist was lucrative, but not that special, so she did not dare anchor on it to behave arrogantly.

She purposely refused to think about Alterra, no matter how shocked she was to know how far they had gone, even making deals with this City.

Then she Altrerra also sent inhibitors and the like, and the alchemists had to find a way to interpret them. She had been confined in the Lord’s palace when that bastard was alive, so her face wasn’t well known.

The administration was fine with any expert coming in as long as they signed the two-year oath not to release the formulas they learned elsewhere.

It was here that she earned a bit more, thanks to her medical knowledge.

It made her feel nauseous that she was so dependent on what that woman made, however. It made her hate herself, and it unconsciously made her scratch herself until she bled.

Before she could dwell anymore, a soft voice shouted from the side. "Auntie Vanessa!" the little girl said, naturally grabbing her hand. "I’ve been looking for you! Let’s go have lunch at home now, ne?"

...

Meanwhile, in Alterra, a few things changed. Well, many things changed in Alterra every day, but this one was relatively big, but something most people were unaware of.

Medusa, through the latest caravan, sent various documents with some interesting finds.

It was about the nuclear core in the Undead race.

Well, to call the undead a ’race’ was a bit misleading because, after some more study, Medusa had confirmed that they weren’t alive anymore. They no longer had sentience, which was also her go signal to experiment how she wanted.

The mad scientist in her still had morals, so she could only experiment on dead things.

Anyway, after several months of close studies with various undead specimens, Medusa submitted a detailed report. It was as thick as an academic book and was written by hand.

Laboriously reading through the book, the Ministers determined that Medusa would not only be rewarded with a good amount of contribution points, but she would also receive a typewriter!

Her handwriting was really... ineligible. Even the people with good eyesight had to narrow their eyes and tilt their heads in some parts.

They literally had to take time to decipher her words, as if they were written in another language.

Speaking of this, the typewriter had been perfected and was now for sale in the Specialty Store. Excluding the typewriters given to each minister, the admin offices, and Medusa received, the Specialty Store only had fifty copies released in this batch. All of them were bought almost immediately.

Anyway, the contents of Medusa’s book were really interesting. Apparently, like elementalists, there was a core inside the bodies of the Undead. She attached a few for study, and she wrapped them around impenetrable boxes (which were wrapped in plastic made from the petroleum from Dune Town).

She did send fair warnings that because she couldn’t check the alpha, gamma, etc radiation, she couldn’t exactly guarantee its safety. In the end, the items were transferred via a separate cart pulled by another cart.

The Research Center treated them as if they were volatile and radioactive at first. They stored it in one of the new warehouses in the outer wall that didn’t have anything yet while the team perfected the detector.

Detectors didn’t need radioactive materials to create, they just had to use a certain type of tube that emitted electrical pulses in reaction to the materials.

Interestingly, while the beads themselves were truly radioactive, the air around the beads was not.

This...was not possible in Terran. There, radioactive materials always emit ionizing radiation. Even the mildest isotope would leave detectable traces.

These current nuclear beads were not like this. The running theories were that the beads either decayed ultra-slowly, or that they could absorb their own nuclear emissions. Either way, this was revolutionary.

As for what it could be used for, exactly, they would still need to study it more.

They decided to create another branch of the Research Center, one that could handle more...volatile compounds. Although they had various safety measures in place, it was safer to create a facility dedicated to it.

Althea reread the book with sparkling eyes, putting aside the papers she was reading before this.

When Medusa’s book was forwarded to Althea, she had been finalizing some arrays that would help with the anonymity token.

It was naturally just cosmetic and wouldn’t change anything, of course. For example, if someone who wasn’t a Lord had this token and they added Lord as a title, the person wouldn’t magically become a Lord.

They would not magically gain a certain amount of money if they decided on the gold display, nor would they gain a profession or become elementalists just by listing it.

Obviously, this could also be misused to scam people, so they had to be careful about who would get these. Scamming enemies was fine, of course.

Anyway, she put it aside in favour of the new and therefore interesting research material, the nuclear core.

The foremost thought and research direction was...power source.

While their solar panels and wind turbines were sustainable and worked well, they were large. For items that would need a portable energy source, it could be the material they had been waiting for.

There were some things that they had been studying that could not be powered by batteries yet. They already had some minor versions of batteries in the research center, but these had limitations.

The research for batteries would never stop but it was good to have alternatives.

They just needed three things to make a battery. One was an anode, which was the reactive material or the thing that oxidised easily which was this world’s zinc and iron equivalent.

Another was the cathode, which was just the copper or graphite, and then the electrolyte, which was just acids or brine.

These three they already had long before and had been using in various small things like the solar panels with storage capacities.

However, the power these could store was very little for now. Probably just enough to power a little lamp or a portable little hand fan at most.

One reason was that the materials simply weren’t reacting as strongly as they hoped. Why? As always, it was because of the variable called aether. So, they had to be extra creative and a little lucky to make progress.

Looking at the greenish-looking core, Althea wondered if this was the item they needed.