After Surviving the Apocalypse, I Built a City in Another World novel Chapter 1893

Chapter 1893: Rock Salt Incident (Part 2)

Bit by bit, the group would head closer to the salt mines while they trained, arriving there in a few hours.

Mao was at the back while riding his giant panda. It was now lumbering along the forest, and if it led the way, it was estimated that the travel time would be twice as long.

Eventually, they reached the mines, and the miners and citizens headed in to start mining with their special pickaxes. Since this resource-gathering mission was technically independent of the territory, each piece of equipment was a miner’s personal investment. The quality depended on the weaponsmith whom they had commissioned to make it.

The guards and hired mercenaries, on the other hand, spread out to guard the edges, with one or two walking around in case a beast passed through.

Pang was rolling around the perimeters too, and ran over monsters he could handle and then rolled away from monsters that he could not.

In the latter case, Mao would detect the danger, and earth spikes would appear. Even if it didn’t kill the monster within a few shots, the panda would be there to finish it off, thus gaining the experience points.

Mao had a lot of shortcomings, but he really doted a lot on his own people.

The mining sessions would usually be finished within two to three days, primarily because the ores would’ve filled up each miner’s space as well as a few small carriages they took along with them.

For better or for worse, humans had better physiques when they adjusted to this world, but even the rock salts also had better ’physiques’ and were far more difficult to mine than those in Terran.

For example, brute force might not be enough to gather them if one were below level 15. One would need to gather a bit of aether, too. It could be treated as training, in a sense.

People also didn’t want to camp for too long, especially when they were not even that far away from Alterra. Some of them would even go back to sleep and just return when the sun went up, though there were naturally some cost implications.

The mining session was just as usual for the first day. People mined, camped, trained, and chatted.

However, after a while, Bento, a materials engineer who happened to be in this batch of miners (he was one of the repeat miners, due to his profession), approached Mao.

He pulled the soldier aside, and he had a solemn expression on his face. Knowing this guy’s gregarious personality, this expression made Mao a little surprised. "What is it?"

Bento went directly to the point as soon as they got out of earshot. "Mao, the Rock Mines are dwindling."

"What?"

The rock salt mines were, at this time, their only decent source of salt! There were also a few salt mines in the desert, but those were just enough to serve the local population, so they wouldn’t be willing to sell them for a low price.

Did that mean the supply would dwindle, it would get more expensive, and their food would be less tasty?!

Mao’s stomach stumbled in dread. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

"How long do we have?"

"With the current consumption, about two to three years at best," he said. "I can be wrong, and we can be lucky enough to find more underneath, but it’s not too likely to completely depend on."

Sadly, it was so far away that the majority of the aborigines in their region didn’t even know what a sea was!! That was really telling of how far that was.

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