Ultimate Gamer System: Factory Must Grow!-Chapter 70: Last of the three

"And that’s… copper done…"

Slumping down to the stones of the street, Theo breathed out a long sigh.

Even though all he did was figure out the best way to place the biggest possible number of miners on the relatively smaller vein, he only managed to place a total of nine of them.

’Well, iron is more useful than copper anyway… Or such would be the case if not for my need for bullets.’

While the output of nine copper miners would suffice for Theo’s needs for now, for the plans that were already hatching in his mind…?

For that, he would most likely have to venture out and seek another vein of the ore.

For now, however, Theo continued to just sit around, watching how the black smoke emerged from the smokestacks of the miners as they spat out more and more ore onto the belts, only for those to combine and then head directly for the smelter down the line.

Then, the deal was pretty much the same as with the iron, with the finished copper ingots spitting out into the final belts before making their way over the connecting shaft, all the way to where their belts ended, right where the connector shaft met with the wall of the production zone.

With that done, Theo dared not take a break, moving on to the last part of the current building phase, the one part he never really had to bother with before. Not with how easy it was for him to just excavate a huge chunk of stone from any part of the underground.

For the time being, Theo could just gather a copious amount of it, stuff it all into a storage unit, and then hook it up to the production, only to then be tasked with the job of restocking the storage every once in a while.

In a sense, it was the same as with the whole power setup, fully reliant on Theo going out of his way to keep a huge stockpile of wood and foliage for his machines to process into biofuel. Yet, contrary to fuel production… he didn’t really have to rely on this kind of temporary measure, not when he could easily detect a vein of richstone just a few hundred meters away!

And so, Theo put his production floor behind, digging through the underground layer of stone as he slowly progressed toward the last of the three most basic resources he could automate.

’At this point, I wonder,’ while excavating the tunnel was easy… Theo still had to take his time to walk through all the distance that separated him from the nearest richstone vein, giving him ample time to think, ’will I be able to access all the ores I might need in the future as easily?’

Normally, this would be a worry from a game-design perspective. After all, if even but a portion of his plans and projects were to properly bear fruit… then it wouldn’t be long before his factory would output more value than the rest of this world’s economy. It wouldn’t be long before his defenses reached the stage allowing him to conquer the world… without even moving away from his home all that much!

When it came to games, this would be an issue. After all, if all the challenges were to disappear, what would be there to keep the readers engaged?

But when it came to real life, where Theo’s system conveniently gave him powers that could quickly scale out of control?

’I guess this is my karma for living an honest life back on Earth, as opposed to taking the easy way out by selling drugs, scamming people, or posting nudes online…’

Theo’s thoughts continued to wander off in the most random of directions, only to then all vanish like a fart in the wind when he finally reached the vein…

Or rather, when his tunnel proved to pass either above… or below it.

"Right, the directions were always within a two-dimensional plane, huh?" Theo muttered, almost ready to start digging up and then down if the vein would continue to elude his attempts at finding it.

Yet, before he could start putting in effort, a simple solution to the problem appeared in his head.

’The direction to the ore shows as a ring around my hips, right?’ he thought to himself, only for his lips to stretch into a smirk unfit on the face of such an honest soul like himself. "Then all I need to do to make it all work is…"

Still grinning, Theo widened the current stretch of the underground passage he was in… only to lay down on the floor and then slowly roll around, all the while keeping a close look at where the ring of light around his hips would point.

"So it’s above…"

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Theo squinted his eyes a little bit.

Out of the two possibilities, above or below, he would feel much more comfortable just digging even further down, where there could be no potential dangers.

Or rather, where the dangers were something he could roughly foresee, from gas deposits ready to explode with the smallest spark, massive underground ravines only waiting for him to slip, or maybe even some underground monsters capable of burrowing into the rock itself.

When it came to digging up, however…

’First, never dig directly above your head,’ Theo thought, morphing his excavation tool into an L shape, leaving most of its volume in the space that he had already excavated, only marking a few meters up and above his head…

Only to then walk back right where he came from and only then fully press the button on his universal tool while twisting his wrist, confirming the selected excavation.

Then, rather than walking in right away, he took his time waiting, ready to seal the tunnel ahead at a moment’s notice, giving any potential dangers lurking above the time to descend and investigate the vanishing of the floor below their feet.

Only after taking long enough to ensure no danger lurked in the space he just excavated, Theo did push back to where the vein was supposed to be, only to then inspect a perfectly empty, safe, ordinary stone roof above his head.

"Well, at the very least, now I have enough leeway to just jump away in case something happens," he thought, morphing the desired shape of the excavation again, this time back into the same tunnel as usual.

By now, Theo was tired. All he wanted to do was get this last step of the progression done so that he would have all the resources necessary to craft everything there was to craft in his current recipe book. Especially those last few buildings that posed a challenge purely because of just how expensive they were.

Still, for that to happen, he had to get this deposit of richstone up and running! And for that sake, he pressed the button and confirmed the excavation…

Only to then finally spot a stone of a much denser texture than all the rock around… and then jump away when he saw movement while looking up.

’Wha…’

Jumping to the back, Theo narrowly managed to avoid a hit straight to his head. Thankfully, rather than a projectile, what nearly skewered him from head to toe…

Theo gulped his saliva, his eyes widened while his hands already moved to switch his universal tool from removal to building.

All of that because of the system prompt that appeared before Theo’s eyes as soon as he looked down at the projectile that nearly pinned him down into the rock.

[Voiderling’s leg]

Or, because of a bone-chilling cry that then came from the tunnel Theo had just excavated!