Chapter 87: Chapter 84: The Paranoid Expert

Making his way towards the chief’s office, Ceres saw Captain Kai waiting outside talking to Rebecca. Captain Kai waved at Ceres before running up to him.

“I heard you’re looking for Zhang, let me bring you to him.” He beckoned Ceres to follow him, while Rebecca re-entered the office, not before giving Ceres an angry stare. The two of them walked through the town.

“Why does she have something against me? I don’t think I did anything to cross her at all.” Ceres couldn’t understand why Rebecca was so angry with him. Today was the first day they had met even.

“Don’t blame yourself, she’s like this to every surface dweller other than the instructor. Her parents died four years ago during one of the trade convoys to Rockhold City, it was attacked by looters from the surface.” Captain Kai replied.

Ceres could not really empathize that well, not having parents himself, but when he imagined Ann Lesion dying or his friends dying, he slightly understood where all the hate Rebecca had for him was coming from.

“By the way, I keep hearing about the trade convoy, but what do you trade?”

“We trade rare exotics and metal ore that we mine to the city for replacement electronics, some exosuit parts, food and air filters. In recent years, the environment has been getting more and more hostile, while the output of our mining is lower and lower due to casualties. This also means we have a distinct lack of food thanks to our trade value dropping as well.”

“I don’t see any miners or mining operation happening here however.”

“That’s what the expedition is for. We delve deeper than the corporate miners into unknown territory to try and find the rarest exotics. Not even Bee Strathon dares to go this deep without a guide, but we do what we must to survive. Due to the fall in output in recent years, this expedition will be the largest yet. It’s an attempt to reverse the declining trend. Hopefully your new metal made from mawsie armour would help protect us better and give us a fighting chance for the next expedition.”

Captain Kai finally stopped in front of a normal one-storey pre-fab house. All the houses in the town looked the same. Ceres did not blame the town – the original bunker was not designed for looks in the first place.

“This is it. I have to go train the guards; you should already know your way back to the workshop. Be careful, he might be a town elder but he’s a bit… paranoid. Here’s a radio in-case things escalate.”

Ceres nodded and took the mobile walkie-talkie, staring at it in curiosity due to it’s obvious age and old technology. As Captain Kai left, Ceres walked up to the front of the house. knocking on the door politely.

“Come in, it’s unlocked.” A voice came from beyond the door.

As he opened it, it was a simple living room with only the bare necessities, with a bed placed in the middle of the room. A simple table and chair made out of metal were the only other furnishings in the room, apart from the single ceiling lamp and a wheelchair.

The walls were empty, with no decorations nor windows. It felt more like a prison than a house.

On the bed, an old men laid, his breathing labored as he squinted at the door. “I already had my ration for today, why am I getting another batch? Wait, you’re not part of the town! Who are you! Why is a surface-dweller here?!”

The old man Zhang struggled as he tried to get up, while Ceres walked forward with his hands up, trying to explain himself.

“I’m with the town chief – I’m a surface dweller yes, but I’m here to help the town!”

As the old man tried to process the words, Ceres was slightly afraid that he might be slightly senile. He could sense the same type of dark, black hole emanating from the old man, though he noticed a slight speck of white mixed in-between, unlike the people he previously met that were chained up.

“I must be going crazy, why do I keep labelling people with colors?” Ceres thought to himself.

“Help the town? That’s a joke – the town chief is a surface dweller too and he’s destroying the town right now! In all my 72 years of living I’ve never experienced nor seen fasting this bad!” The old man Zhang finally sat up, where Ceres noticed the old man’s arms had been amputated from the elbows, with slight signs of burnt skin still fused to the arm.

“And why did he send my daughter away! She’s the only one in the whole damn town who can actually make the tools we need! If she dies, what happens next, huh? I know your type, surface dweller – you’re only here to exploit us! You don’t want us to be self-sufficient, you want us to keep us dying down here, slaving away to get your precious exotics that we’ll never be able to use!”

Ceres didn’t reply, sitting down on the spare chair as the old man Zhang kept ranting.

“Nobody in the town believes me when I said that the resources are dwindling and that we needed to stock up. Look! This is exactly what's happening now. Back in the past, we only had to fast maybe once every three to five years, but now we’re fasting every year! What next, permanent rationing? How can a human survive on just a single meal a day and mine enough rare exotics to trade when we’re being exploited!”

“That’s exactly why I’m here to help, I intend to create prosthetics for all of you to assist you in your daily lives. However, I need your help to manufacture the metal required, since your daughter Yan is away.” Ceres had already gathered that Yan was Zhang’s daughter based on what he said.

Zhang stopped ranting, his eyes squinting again at Ceres, analyzing his body. “Kid, bring your hands here and let me see them.”

“Are you not... paranoid that I’m a bad surface dweller out to kill the town?”

“Of course I’m paranoid! But what can a crippled old man like me do to stop you? If you wanted to, you could kill me straight away with your bare hands.”

Zhang wasn’t wrong – Ceres could probably kill everyone in this town barehanded with the unknown augmentations he received from the vat, except maybe Captain Kai. He was more surprised that Zhang could tell his combat prowess just by looking at him, so he walked over and stretched out his hands in front of Zhang.

“You fucking idiot, why do I want to see the top of your hand, let me see the palm!”

The old man began to inspect Ceres’s hand carefully, though Ceres was not entirely sure what he was looking for. “You… you’re an exosuit repairer?” Zhang asked.

Ceres was shocked. “How did you find out just by looking at my hand?”

Zhang smiled with a wide grin, the pride obviously getting to his hand. “I have my ways, kid. But I still think you’re a bad surface dweller!”

“Why?”

“Because you made one terrible lie – that you want to make prosthetics for us! There’s no proper metal or expertise in this town to actually make a prosthetic that can help us do our daily jobs! The prosthetic has to be able to withstand high temperatures, be hard enough to withstand the stress of the mining equipment and be durable enough to last. We don’t have the equipment nor the raw resources needed to make this, so I suspect you’re trying to extort us out of our rare exotics!”

“I’m not, I’m going to use the mawsie’s armour shell as the base metal for it. I’m sure it can survive lava since they regularly dip in it.”

Zhang giggled as though he was a kid who caught someone cheating. “There’s another lie! No one in the town, not even you can kill a mawsie one on one! The amount of effort needed to kill off one needs at least a team of four, and how are you even to going to gather the mawsies in order to make the prosthetics! There’s just not enough mawsies nearby! You’re probably going to suggest that we send more young people on a hunting expedition, where we will lose more resources and people while being reliant on you...”

“But I have more than a hundred mawsie corpses with me in the workshop right now.”

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The old man’s jaw dropped, completely stunned. He soon regained from his shock and smiled. “I almost fell for your lie. Do you think I don’t know how hard it is to kill a mawsie? Disabling it is one thing, but getting it to stop, that’s another thing. Not unless you had four energy cannons, but even the turret at the town gate has a heat limit.”

Ceres was starting to get a bit frustrated. “How about a bet, old man?”

“A bet?”

“Yeah, if you win, I’ll tell everyone the truth that I’m a bad surface dweller, but if I win, you help me out in making the prosthetics. Deal?”

“No.”

It was Ceres’s turn to be stunned. “What? Why not?”

“You’re a bad surface dweller! Why would you keep your promises! All surface dwellers are degenerates and have zero moral compass. My grandfather was right, all the surface dwellers are compulsive liars and cronies!”

Though Ceres was admittedly a bit angry at how paranoid and untrusting the old man was, he was a bit interested to hear about Zhang’s grandfather. If he recalled, the town was about 200 years old, so Zhang’s grandfather most likely had been one of the original people who came to this subterranean town.

“Why did your grandfather think that way?” Ceres tried to ask a leading question, hoping to get a history.

“Ah, don’t think I know what you’re doing! You’re trying to extract our family’s history and make it into a holo-drama to sell! Always exploiting us and treating us as dirt!”

Ceres sighed, finally resorting to a childish tactic he thought he would never use. “You really are afraid of losing the bet aren’t you?”

“What? No of course, I know for a fact that you’re a liar and a bad one. Anybody can see that clearly!”

“Then it should be an easy win for the bet for you!”

“Well I don’t like what's in it for me! Why do I care if you tell everyone that you’re a bad surface dweller, it’s like me running around telling people I’m Zhang! If you become my personal slave however and call me Master everyday, that’s more like it.” Zhang smiled with a wicked grin, thinking of all the terrible acts he could ask Ceres to perform.

“Ok deal.”

Zhang’s previously smiling face froze. He did not expect Ceres to agree so fast, which made him even more suspicious about the bet. Yet his pride kept his ego afloat. “Well, go on then, show me the hundred mawsie corpses. If you even can.” He struggled to move from his bed to the wheelchair, but Ceres moved over to help him into it, pushing him out of the house.

Along the way, Zhang kept gloating about how he was going to win the bet loudly, which attracted many of the townspeople around. Entertainment was sorely lacking, and those fasting had nothing better to do than to follow Ceres and Zhang around to the workshop.

Ceres felt his heart clench as those who he previously visualized as dark, black holes gathered together. The closer they reached him, the stronger the empty feeling in his heart expanded. Yet when he looked back at Zhang, he noticed that the white light that was previously a speck grew a little brighter.

“Boy, you better be prepared to become a slave and feed me every day. But don’t worry I will treat you nicely…” Zhang and Ceres finally reached the workshop, where Ceres revealed the hundred mawsie corpses stacked at the back. Zhang completely lost his momentum, while the townspeople who followed were shocked.

Most people in the town have heard of how strong Ceres was in fending off mawsies, but they never expected him to have killed this many. This was partly due to the instructor downplaying the scale of the mawsie horde to prevent widespread panic. Now that the truth has been revealed, the townspeople were slightly stunned.

“How could there have been this many mawsies near our town? We used to only get up to one or two once a month.”

“Aren’t we in danger? There are only four guards, and that’s not enough to take down a hundred mawsies! How are we going to defend ourselves?”

“Idiot, did you not see the new surface-dweller? He’s the reason they managed to push the horde back!”

The townspeople began to treat Ceres as a sort of warrior champion but were still afraid of him slightly. Him being a surface-dweller and having that sort of strength left everyone a bit terrified deep down. Ceres noticed it and sighed internally. How many betrayals did they experience to have this kind of attitude?

“So, old man. Ready to help me make some metal? You wouldn’t go back on a bet that you agreed to, right?” Ceres smiled.

Zhang coughed a little. “Of course! My family never goes back on their promises, not unlike bad surface dwellers. Tell me more about the prosthetic plan.”

Ceres began explaining the plan to Zhang, along with the other onlookers also gathering around. More and more townspeople were coming to watch, including children who stared and pointed at Ceres, having never really seen a tanned human before.

“In short, the plan can be summarized into this: we melt mawsie armour shells into usable metal using the electric arc furnace, put the refined metal into the metal 3D printer or moulds and create a prosthetic set and weapons eventually for everyone. However, the priority will first go to the guards in order for them to be adequately prepared.”

A wave of murmurs went through the crowd. Ceres slightly envied the sense of belonging everyone had in this town. Somehow, he could sense and feel that each town member was truly working for the better of the community. Even Zhang, though he was slightly crazy and paranoid, he was paranoid out of good intentions for the town.

“We’ll have to give it a test run first,” Zhang replied. “The electric arc furnace may not be able to reach the temperature required for melting the mawsie’s armour shell, and we’ll have to coordinate with Xi in the power plant on using the power grid.”

Ceres stared at Zhang blankly, a bit shocked that the previously crazy old man had such a rational thought process. Zhang caught Ceres’s stare and became indignant: “What are you looking at?! Didn’t you ask for my guidance?!”

“O-of course! With the completion of the prosthetics and weapons, future projects and workloads will be made easier too!” Ceres declared with confidence to the watching crowd.

The mood of the crowd significantly improved, knowing that there was hope around the corner. Some began to see Ceres as a genuine helper not unlike the instructor who arrived four years. Many still remained cautiously optimistic, while a minority remained distrustful and skeptical.

One of the skeptical ones was Rebecca, who snorted. “If it was that easy to make prosthetics, we would have solved this problem on our own a long time ago! How long will the project take?”

Ceres frowned. She was partly right. If he did not make them fast enough, it would be too late when the next mawsie horde attacks.

“One month,” Zhang resolutely announced, shocking even Ceres. “Don’t underestimate what I can do! Obtaining the mawsie armour is the hardest part of the process, which has already been solved. With the help of my new surface dweller helper, err... hmm… what’s your name again?”