Chapter 559: The Lost Land of Gold

The still air began to move, and Mu Sicheng watched as a huge storm rose from the ground, sucking in all the dust around him, and gritted his teeth as he tried to make a break for it, only to be stopped by Bai Liu's cold command in his headset: "Run, Mu Sicheng, you can't afford Armand's skill damage on your life. "

"You're our ace in the hole, run as hard as you can and live until the end when I, the tactician, let you die, got it?"

"Got it!" Mu Sicheng nodded, he took one more look at the hurricane, gave a toothy middle finger and turned to scamper away.

"Hang him up, get us into the mines, don't let him and Georgia do a skill reset on the same map, and control Armand, that's your main goal for this one."

Mu Sicheng leapt from a high building, narrowly avoiding the hurricane that brushed his legs, and wiped the blood from his mouth as he fell, smiling wickedly: "A piece of cake."

A hurricane of wind, with layers of metal chains wrapped tightly around it, pursued Mu Sicheng as he ran on.

Liu Jiayi, who was travelling at full speed, suddenly turned his head in a certain direction, his lips pursed: "There's a noise in that direction, it's ......"

"It's Mu Sicheng." Bai Liu calmly answered, "He's lured away Armand, our first head-to-head with Golden Dawn, and it's a war of attrition, so we'll have to hurry."

"That should be mine 13 just ahead." Muke glanced at the picture, looked up at Bai Liu, "Below the mine is the bulk of Georgia's force, are we still going to keep our tactics?"

"Well." Bai Liu looked up at everyone in a circle, " Georgia is a strong sub and it's a tight group, so our basic tactic is to play on separate sides, that is, one to one, each person tries to hold back one player to put distance between them and Georgia, so that Georgia can't sub them and reduce the other team's advantage."

"Here's the problem with that tactic though." Tang Erda frowned, "If it's just one stall, it's a total stalemate, then both sides want an ace in place to break the stalemate."

"I believe Captain Georgia thought the same as I did." Bai Liu smiled, "Except he had his ace on Armand and I had mine on Mu Sicheng."

"Next, let's see how they perform."

"Now." Bai Liu turned his head to the group of golden humanoid sculptures holding banners at the entrance to the mine, his tone calm, "Let us first enter the most valuable core of this land of gold."

"Get in the mine cart."

The mine car looks small, but it's still a good squeeze. Bai Liu Team Quan and Tang Erda sit at the front, wrenching down the bars, and the car surges forward.

Liu Jiayi took a look at the fully operational mine wagon and tsked twice: "What a decent man, this Captain Georgia, not even destroying the mine wagon."

"If Bai Liu had arrived first, he would have taken one of the mine cars himself and the other one he would have put a bunch of explosives underneath and blown it up as soon as he pulled the trigger, sending people to Team Quan to heaven."

" Georgia is a prince, it's normal to have a bit of aristocratic manners when it comes to competitions." Bai Liu spreads his hands innocently, "A commoner like me who is looking for value for money, of course I can only set up in all the places I can win, ah, due to my origins, there is no way out."

Liu Jiayi: "...... ==."

Why does this man always make underhanded tactics sound so unusual.

"But Georgia didn't do anything with the mine cart, probably partly out of the inertia of a decent man's mind, and partly because he didn't want to ruin the place." Bai Liu rubbed his chin, "This is his home country after all, and every blade of grass, every mine cart should be precious to him."

"It's certainly more likely to be."

Bai Liu smiles and says, "He thinks he's more likely to win by letting us into the mines, a map he knows better."

The car rattled along like a rollercoaster and after a few turns, finally entered the large core of the mine.

Even Muke, who has seen a lot of the world, was stunned the moment he entered the large mine, while Tang Erda and Liu Jiayi were stunned straight away, and Bai Liu, who was rarely able to maintain his composure, could not help but exclaim: "What an unimaginable size of mine."

A cave close to the size of three or four large stadiums spans the entire mountain, which has been cut open from the very top, with a large volcanic eruption-like opening running from the top to the bottom, and light shoots in beams from the top into the cave, which is criss-crossed by dozens of tracks that are not built into the mountain or some kind of surveillance foundation at all, but are steel cables suspended down from above the mountain, suspended rigidly up, so that these tracks are suspended in the air.

And on the four walls of the mine were many miners suspended in mid-air, wearing protective suits and working with excavating implements in their hands.

Or, more precisely, a gold sculpture in the style of a miner.

The miners seemed unaware that a plague was about to turn everyone into gold, and they were still working senselessly, some of them laughing and talking playfully to the miner next to him who was hanging to a position with him, and some of them with food in their hands to eat, which should have been his lunch, but had long since rotted.

Miners of all kinds are suspended in mid-air, framed in a moment of their lives, in the form of gold.

The four walls of the cave were covered in gold, not even ore, but gold, and they could imagine what a busy, bustling scene it was ten years ago when this was the land of gold - miners hanging down from the top of the mountain, mining and working all day long, mine cars The miners were running back and forth on the overhanging tracks, transporting the gold they had mined to the gold depot, and everyone's faces were full of smiles.

Rendered by the light of the sky falling from the summit, the gold miners' sculptures and the gold on the cave walls reflect a dazzling interplay of light that is magnificent.

"That would have been a very sudden change of heart." Muke quickly snapped back, "These miners hadn't come down from the situation of the operation and just hung on like that to be turned into gold."

"Those statues at the entrance, too." Liu Jiayi frowned back, "They look like they just came to protest Georgia's decision to hand over the mine to the Bureau of Heresy Processing right in front of the mine, turned into gold."

"But if it's some sort of change that turns people into gold in an instant ......" Bai Liu pondered, "it doesn't make sense with the animals there at the Gold Dispensary, the animals were there long after the Gold Dispensary closed The animals lived in it after it was closed for a long time, and slowly turned into gold."

"If what is turning the creature into gold is some sort of heresy, there should be another variable in the effect of this heresy on the creature that we don't know about."

"Personally, I'm leaning towards concentration." Bai Liu spreads his hands, "I initially speculated on the concentration of gold dust, the higher the concentration of gold dust, the faster it turns the creature into a sculpture, but once inside the mine, that speculation doesn't really hold up too well, as the concentration of gold dust here isn't actually as high as it is outside."

"So it's not supposed to be gold dust." Muke muses, "Is it possible that it is some sort of other stone dust similar to gold dust?"

"Like some kind of heretical dust?"

"It's possible." Bai Liu looked down the track where the mine car was travelling, "So something happened on the day of the protest that caused the dust from this heresy to spread and turn the people of this country into gold sculptures after they inhaled it."

"It's a bit strange. ......"

Bai Liu clicked on his system panel and lowered his eyes, "Same question as before, we should have reached the highest concentration of heretics, my lungs and body are in significant discomfort, but strangely enough, my life and mental values are normal and I don't show any drop."

"So how did this heretic influence people and turn these people into gold sculpted heretics, or monsters?"

"Want to try attacking the statues now?" Muke inquired, "You can unlock the monster book, it might have an explanation on it."

"It's better to go out and attack again." Tang Erda, who was sitting at the front of the mine cart, looked soberly ahead, "There are just too many gold sculptures here, and if it causes a chain reaction, we'll probably have a hard time escaping."

"And ......"

Tang Erda paused for a moment, "I've been through a lot of games and dealt with heretics a lot in reality, and I don't know if I'm wrong in my senses, but I don't sense heresy or monsters from these golden statues."

"There's nothing offensive about these sculptures ......."

"Yes." Bai Liu dragged his jaw in thought, "The monsters we've encountered in the game before have taken it upon themselves to attack us, the same way the sculptures, the mermaids in the town of Siren would take it upon themselves to attack the hatching players, but the sculptures here, they do seem a little too peaceful towards the players."

Tang Erda whispered a reminder, "But the processing bureau has also housed some less offensive heretics."

Bai Liu pondered slightly, "Not enough clues to draw a conclusion for now, let's move on down the road."

As the wheels of the mine wagon grunted and rolled, undulating through the treacherous cavern, the further in you went, the darker the light, the narrower the road, the greater the number of miners dangling from the walls, Tang Erda switched on the torch she had found in the mine wagon, tapped it and turned it on.

If it was the big cave outside that needed digging to see the gold, inside it was chiselling nuggets off the gold biscuit - the biscuit all around was so golden that nothing could be seen of the mineral soil, only the huge gold walls interspersed with the hard rock patterns that supported the whole cave.

"This is also ......" Liu Jiayi was staggered, "too much, right?"

"This level of gold minerals has lasted for a thousand years." Muke laments, "It's understandable why the people of the Gloren country were in that frame of mind."

"...... No wonder ......" Tang Erda lowered her voice to a whisper, "The Third Council was built at Georgia's own expense, to expand into the sea and guard a giant heresy under the sea, it cost a lot of money at the time, the financial side wouldn't report it, said Georgia overbuilt it, and Georgia paid for it themselves."

"It said it was gold that was given."

"Georgia was very generous with the money, and Su Yang complained to me for a while that the Bureau of Heresy was too strict with its finances, and that it could have been reported. Tang Erda said with a sigh of relief, "The Third Bureau is notoriously generous, and Georgia would pay for anything that could not be financed, and sometimes he would pay for hundreds of millions of dollars. "

"You could tell by the way he gave the money that he really didn't think there was anything to it." Tang Erda looks up at this mine of gold and sighs, "I've speculated before about what kind of birth would raise someone like Georgia who has no attachment to money and a lot of money reserves, and it turns out that's where he came from."

" Georgia such a literal money spinner."

Tang Erda gave Bai Liu a rare tease: "It's the opposite of you, White Tactician."

Bai Liu smiles disarmingly as he spreads his hands, "I'm a laid-off worker, I've earned every cent of my life, so it's a bit difficult to ask me to splash out, Captain Tang."

"But your Heresy Processing Authority finances are quite interesting, it feels like everything is stuck tight."

Speaking of which, Tang Erda held her forehead in pain and whispered, "Stop it, it's a demon department."

"It's not that they're bad people, they're not actually bad people, they're just very timid, like a bunch of hamsters who are terrified of the cold and want to stock up on food." Tang Erda sighed, "The way the Heretic Processing Bureau's finances work is that the Field Department collects heretics, then the Logistics Department takes in heretics, sorts them into categories, tallies them into files, categorises some of the safe rentable heretics, then the Ministry of Finance gives the go-ahead to rent heretics to countries around the world, making a profit from that, and the money earned keeps the Heretic Processing Bureau running. "

"But many high-risk heretics cannot be rented, not only can they not be rented, but they need some specific environments to house them, such as blood primroses, which have to be placed in a soil-free, bloodless and dry environment or they will spore, and the long-term maintenance of these environments also costs money."

"Not only that, but it costs different amounts of money to go out into the field and encounter heretics."

"Some heretics cost less to house." Tang Erda sighs helplessly, "but the overheads for some heretical internment are extremely large, such as the last Sunshine City, the largest sub-sea heresy Georgia took in, which would have cost billions, if not tens of billions, to take in, but had to be dealt with."

"There are some places where the officials are very good at talking and will reimburse us for a lot of the shelter costs, like Sunnyside where billions of dollars ended up being eaten up just because the officials reimbursed the lion's share, but there are some places where the officials don't care about the heretics and have to deal with them themselves by the heresy handling bureau, like Georgia's Under the Sea Heresy."

"Several of the heretics that have appeared recently have been heretics with high expenses, so that group at the Treasury will be particularly tight-fisted for fear that there won't be enough money when the next one comes out."

"I can understand Su Yang not liking the Ministry of Finance because it really is a bad department to talk to, but I can also understand the Ministry of Finance because the uncertainty of heresy is just too great."

"If you can really put an end to this era of heresy everywhere."

Tang Erda smiled helplessly at Bai Liu: "Those hamsters at the Treasury might hug your trouser leg and howl for daddy."

"I try to do my best." Bai Liu smiles.

Reality, on the Gulo Sea, branch of the Third Bureau of the Bureau of Heresy Handling.

Inside the island branch, in the processing centre of the underwater unmanned submarine reconnaissance department, a group of men sat sternly at the console, wearing signal receiving instrument helmets that covered half of his head, looking at the underwater detection radar signals coming from in front of the display and seriously reporting.

"Report sir, nothing close to Heretic 0073 at this time, end of report!"

A voice came over the headset, "Keep probing! Georgia, the captain has given orders to make sure no one gets within a kilometre of Heretic 0073 until he returns!"

The team straightened up, "Roger that!"

After the voice in his headset ended, the team member rubbed his eyes a little tiredly and he grabbed the coffee cup sitting next to the console to drink it down, only to realise that it was empty when he lifted it up.

"So tired." The team member next to him stretched his body and stretched, dragging his jaw to look at the display, "How much longer do we have to keep watch, it's been a day and a night."

"A teaser letter is just a teaser letter, is it worth the whole three bureaus raising a fuss?"

Although dedicated to his job, after reporting that team member heard this also echoed somewhat wearily, "...... Although Captain Georgia has his reasons for doing everything, I really don't know what to detect while I'm sitting here. "

"I don't know what it takes to steal a heresy that big at the bottom of the sea."

"Yeah." The team member spread his hands, his voice smiling inside his helmet, two sharp tiger teeth showing at the corners of his lips under his mask, "Been keeping watch here all day, and I don't know how to steal it."

"...... what...how did you steal it?!" Noticing something wrong with this team member, the team member who had finished reporting snapped out of his tired and slackened state, and he realised with a jolt that something was wrong with this team member - that this team member's posture was too slouchy and distinctly different from that of the well-trained Third Bureau team member, and that the board and strict uniform of the Third Bureau was somewhat ill-fitting on this team member's The cuffs and collar were unbuttoned and pulled up, turning him into a better-action outfit.

To top it all off, the guy had a little monkey logo next to the headset he was wearing - you don't get a logo that cartoonish in the third bureau!

"Who are you?!" The team member, full of fear, was about to radio in, and had just picked up the machine when the suspicious team member across the room raised his hand to punch him down on the neck, in a lazy tone, "Been waiting all day to finally learn how to read how this machine shows location."

"Thanks a lot, dedicated little brother."

A second before he fell unconscious to the ground, the team member saw with horror the other team members who were all on the ground outside.

The team member, or [Mu Sicheng], casually removed the mask from his head and set it aside, folding his feet over the console and leaning back in his chair, casually taking a sip from his coffee, his eyes half-closed as he looked at the display.

" Bai six is really going to get me in trouble ......"

"I can't believe I'm being asked to come to another timeline to steal such a big heresy, it's my official time off."

"Well, let's see exactly how extensive this heresy is ......" [Mu Sicheng] leaned forward and moved a few buttons on the console, an entire scan appeared on the display and he raised one eyebrow lightly. "Not bad for the biggest heretic of all."

He hooked his lips and his right hand turned into a monkey's paw piercing his white uniform glove, "Seeing as the theft was strong enough, let's ask for less overtime this time."