Cave Refuge-Chapter 222 - 221: Digging Three Feet Underground_1
Since there weren’t many survivors in this area and it was quite a distance from the City Center, not many people once frequented this place, thus Dong Tianyu took away everything that could be dismantled from the site using the principle of digging three feet down.
For items that were difficult to dismantle, he utilized the aggressive Formation outlined on his black vehicle to dismantle them destructively.
At first, the items he collected were quite common, items typical of a recycling depot.
However, when he was dismantling a small building next to the recycling depot’s office building, Dong Tianyu scanned the building with his Divine Sense to see if there were any valuable items inside, as was his usual practice.
But this scan turned up something unexpected. Beneath this ordinary two-story building, there was a gigantic underground warehouse.
Through the thick warehouse gates, his Divine Sense sensed neatly arranged blocks of precious metals.
Gold and silver, among other things, were piled haphazardly against the walls as if they were just junk, while in the center of the warehouse were a few cabinets made of lead plates.
Seeing this, Dong Tianyu deduced that the items stored in there were likely to be radioactive and highly valuable.
Looking at the gold and silver stacked up against the walls like bricks, despite being told by Ye Liuyun that technology existed to extract precious metals from garbage before catastrophe struck, Dong Tianyu could never have guessed that so much gold could be extracted.
Before the catastrophe, the active population of the Pengcheng urban area was about ten million, but about thirty million tons of household waste was produced each day.
Of course, this waste included construction and renovation debris, as well as waste from small private businesses.
Even if only one in ten million of these items contained precious metals that could be extracted, this would still amount to a significant profit.
Dong Tianyu had already come to understand the entire process of extraction while dismantling the valuable factory areas.
Because of the large quantities involved here, the garbage had to be re-sorted to separate the waste that could be refined for precious metals from that which could not.
First, valuable waste was ground into powder by a grinding machine, and then soaked and separated by chemical solution. After filtering out the worthless residue.
Through various chemical reactions, precious metals were separated from the chemical solution.
Although there weren’t many precious metals in each pool of chemical solution, the sheer volume of the waste made up for it.
Whilst the chemical solution used to separate the precious metals was not cheap, due to the large quantity, the entire process could still accumulate over fifty percent profit.
While this may seem like a good profit, it’s not something ordinary people can do.
For example, despite the well-known fact that gold and silver can be extracted from discarded electronics, on average, at least a dozen grams of gold can be extracted from every 120 consumed smartphones, but it is impossible for an ordinary person to get rich doing this.
The first step, collecting phones, is very difficult. I believe everyone has heard of the people who offer 10 dollars for a phone or exchange a basin for a phone wandering the streets. Their purpose in collecting phones is precisely this.
After collecting the phones, they dismantle them and pulverize the motherboards inside, then soak them in a chemical solution.
This step allows the precious metals to dissolve into the chemical solution.
Although an ordinary person could buy this kind of chemical solution, the price is high if the quantity is small.
After using the chemical solution to separate the precious metals, remove the precipitate from the solution, then add another chemical for reaction. Firstly, the gold elements in the solution are converted into sponge gold. Afterwards, the sponge gold is smelted to transform it into gold.
After the gold elements are removed, add a different reagent to the solution to continue separating other precious metals in the solution.
Continue this process until all the valuable metal elements have been separated. Only then is the process complete.
The whole procedure is quite simple, an ordinary person could master it after watching a few times.
However, if the quantity is low, hardly any money could be earned. Making money only becomes possible when it’s done in large quantities.
Over at the recycling station, the quantity of new garbage brought in daily is exceedingly large.
So even if only 1 gram of gold could be extracted from ten tons of garbage, about three hundred grams of gold could be extracted in a day.
Not to mention, other precious metals could also be extracted from the garbage, so this seemingly dirty and exhausting job could actually be quite profitable.
As science and technology continued to advance, the opportunities for garbage stations to make money became increasingly abundant.
Who would have thought that these ordinary jobs that most people disdain could be so profitable? No wonder the soon-to-be second-in-command’s first task upon parachuting into Pengcheng was to secure control over garbage recycling.
Alas, with the advent of the apocalypse, all their profitable under-the-table dealings vanished. He wondered if the second-in-command, who had moved to the Officials in Ancient Peng Square, was still alive. If so, did he still care about what was going on here?
Regardless, all the items in the underground warehouse now belonged to Dong Tianyu.
After emptying the underground warehouse, Dong Tianyu continued the cleanup operation according to the original plan.
It was likely that all the people who once lived and worked here had safely evacuated since Dong Tianyu had scanned numerous buildings with his Divine Sense and found no bodies of survivors.
The majority of what Dong Tianyu collected here were items that could be disassembled in his Cave mansion.
As for food or other necessities of life, after experiencing the flood and then the extreme heat, not to mention most of the packaging was already damaged, the things inside had long since spoiled. Even if the packaging had not been damaged, the contents would have expired after more than two years.
Therefore, finding usable supplies here was virtually impossible.
Although Dong Tianyu could collect objects into his Shadow Space as soon as he was near them, the operation was very simple. However, the area was vast, so the collection process was slow.
If it weren’t for the fact that Dong Tianyu wanted to accumulate disassembled materials for a speedy upgrade of his Cave mansion, he wouldn’t bother lingering in this place.
When the moonlight was shining on the earth, he finally managed, dig three feet like, to collect all the slightly valuable items into his Shadow Space.
Looking at the empty buildings, Dong Tianyu returned to the black vehicle without a backward glance. He did not rest in the section of the ripple number but directly returned to the Cave mansion.
After dumping all those miscellaneous things from the Shadow Space into the decomposition pit, the contents of the pit disappeared instantly.
The decomposition pit was basically just a big hole that Dong Tianyu had dug in the Cave mansion. It was mainly for convenience during the decomposition process, to easily distinguish the decomposed items, without having to bother determining the decomposition range. Since there was space in the Cave mansion right now, he simply dug a somewhat deep hole.
After Dong Tianyu had completely decomposed all the items he had unearthed from the recycling station in Xintian, he found that the progress of the Cave mansion’s upgrade had reached...
