Chapter 66: Living Iron Extraction Device

Chapter 66: Chapter 66: Living Iron Extraction Device

Xiang Yi pulled out a dagger and handed it to Shi Tie, telling it to punch two holes in the thin wall ahead.

One hole was for the flashlight, the other for observation.

Through the wall, Xiang Yi spotted a hidden compartment.

The layout inside mirrored the hospital’s overall structure — same general arrangement, same kind of setup.

Medical equipment, beds, operating tables, the usual.

Except "the usual" was where things started to feel off.

Because crammed into a hidden compartment that couldn’t have been more than a hundred square meters were exactly forty operating tables.

Once he confirmed there was no immediate danger inside, Xiang Yi stepped back and let Shi Tie demolish the wall outright — tearing open a gap wide enough for it to squeeze through.

The moment he stepped into the compartment, his attention locked onto the operating tables.

They all appeared to be custom-built. Beyond the standard frame, each one was fitted with what looked like a dense array of restraint straps.

And covering the surface of every table were clusters of needles, packed tightly together.

If a normal person lay down on one of these, the needles would drive straight into their entire spine.

Dangling from the sides of each table were additional needle-tipped tubes, apparently designed to pierce other parts of the body as well.

Xiang Yi crouched and looked underneath. Just like the tubes hanging off the sides, the needles fixed into the tables were also connected to tubing that ran beneath.

And it wasn’t just one table — every single operating table in this hidden compartment had the same setup: needles and restraints, all of them.

Xiang Yi couldn’t help but frown.

He couldn’t imagine what kind of person would ever end up on one of these things.

This underground compartment looked like something a sadistic lunatic had built.

And those Shuffling Monsters he’d encountered three days ago — they had probably all come from right here.

The room gave him a strange feeling he couldn’t quite shake.

It wasn’t the operating tables specifically. The room itself was what unsettled him.

He couldn’t put his finger on why, so he turned his attention to the space itself.

Beyond the operating tables, there was one more piece of equipment in the compartment — something Xiang Yi had never seen before.

All the needle tubes running off the tables converged into this single machine.

Whether it was injecting something or drawing something out, he couldn’t tell.

Xiang Yi reached out and touched the strange device. Its panel materialized in front of him.

[Edge Company — Living Iron Extraction Device]

[Extraction Component: Edge Company Magnetic Living Iron Needle Array]

[Transport Structure: Edge Company Fluid Content Drainage Tubing]

[Production Unit: Edge Company Living Iron Microparticle Solidification Reactor]

[Structural Framework: Edge Company Small Fixed-Unit General-Purpose Frame]

[Additional Attachment: Edge Company Solid Abnormality Vitality Activation Unit]

"What the hell is this?"

The grim look on Xiang Yi’s face gave way to pure bewilderment. He thought he’d misread it.

Whatever the equipment paired with those operating tables was for, it didn’t seem to be about locking people up underground for some sick thrill. Reality was turning out to be something rather different from what he’d imagined.

"Living Iron extraction... they’re pulling Living Iron directly out of Abnormalities?"

Xiang Yi had known about Living Iron for a long time.

He still remembered clearly — the first time he’d found Living Iron Material was on the corpse of a Blood Crystal Worm. There’d only been a tiny trace of it.

He’d figured it was probably valuable, but since the yield was so small, he hadn’t paid it much attention.

It wasn’t until later, when an inexplicable clash between his Blood-colored Laser and some Shuffling Monsters caused Living Iron Material to accumulate, that he’d managed to scrape together roughly a kilogram of Living Iron.

Only then did he remember that Living Iron was supposed to be a unique enhancement material, so he’d made a point of collecting some.

But by that point, Dead Spirit Dust had already blanketed the abandoned city district, and he’d barely survived. After that, the whole thing had slipped his mind again.

After all, a little over a kilogram of the stuff was just a dull, unremarkable smudge of black — easy to forget.

It looked like he’d have to actually test Living Iron’s properties when he got back.

The fact that someone had gone to the trouble of engineering a machine like this — and building an entire hidden underground facility beneath a hospital — meant Living Iron had to be worth something serious.

And since what he was looking at was a device tied to Abnormalities, its value was almost certainly on par with the equipment back in Ning Ye’s research institute.

He’d wondered before whether extracting Living Iron from Abnormality corpses required mass culling — hunting them in huge numbers, stripping out the unwanted Abnormality Material, and slowly stockpiling what little Living Iron was left.

But apparently, someone had found a more ruthless solution: use a machine to drain the Living Iron straight out of living Abnormalities.

And the extraction was clearly designed to be sustainable. There was no other reason to go through all this trouble building something like this.

The yield per Abnormality might not be high, but volume could make up for that.

With that many operating tables down here, they’d probably been keeping forty Shuffling Monsters at a time.

Ning Ye had only said Dead Spirit Dust was difficult to fully contain — not that containment couldn’t be attempted.

Find a way to keep the Dead Spirit Dust confined to a space like this, keep the Shuffling Monsters alive and active, then drain the Living Iron on an ongoing basis.

That was far safer than mass-hunting Abnormalities, and it might even yield other Abnormality Materials as a bonus.

Now that was proper farming.

So the reason that Dead Spirit Dust incident had spread across the entire district — it must have been that small piece of Black Stone getting agitated by a fingernail scratch, which triggered a riot among the Shuffling Monsters held underground beneath the hospital.

All Xiang Yi could say was that Shi Tie had it coming. Always picking up random junk.

He didn’t dwell on the past. What mattered to him was the present and the future.

Now that he’d found this equipment, there was no way he was leaving it behind — and down the line, he could absolutely try his hand at farming Abnormalities himself.

He’d found Living Iron on both Blood Crystal Worms and Shuffling Monsters, which gave him good reason to think every type of Abnormality carried the material.

In other words, as long as he could reliably contain an Abnormality, he could try extracting Living Iron from it.

That said.

Xiang Yi’s gaze drifted back to the Living Iron Extraction Device’s panel.

The thing was broken.

The panel’s three-dimensional projection laid out the device’s internal structure in full detail.

His first impression was complexity — and that impression never changed the longer he looked.

Much of the engineering was unlike anything he’d ever seen. He couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

Fortunately, the panel had highlighted every damaged component.

The [Extraction Component] module was flagged with [Physical Structure Damaged].

The [Production Unit] module showed [Inert Dead Spirit Dust Buildup].

The Solid Abnormality Vitality Activation Unit under [Additional Attachment] had a [Activation Structure Missing] error.

Of these, [Physical Structure Damaged] and [Activation Structure Missing] were both beyond Xiang Yi’s ability to fix.

Repairing either would require a real understanding of the device’s engineering and the technical know-how to back it up.

The only fault he could actually handle was the [Inert Dead Spirit Dust Buildup] — that one he could clear with his own two hands.

But there was no rush. Before any repairs, he’d need to figure out how to move the device out of here in one piece.

He was still thinking through how to do that when something else occurred to him.

The device was broken now, but it had clearly been running at some point. What had been powering it?

The panel made it clear the Living Iron Extraction Device had no built-in power source, and the hospital had lost power long ago.

A generator?

That was exactly the kind of thing he needed to liven up his sewer base.

He examined the device’s structure carefully and quickly spotted a power cable hidden beneath the floor.

He followed it along until it led him to a small, closed-off room tucked into the corner of the hidden compartment.

Out of habit, Xiang Yi listened first, then knocked.

Once he was sure there was no movement inside, he opened the door.

Another powered-down device sat inside, similar in appearance to the Extraction Device but with a completely different panel readout.

[Edge Company — Living Iron Generator]

[Power Generation Unit: Edge Company High-Frequency Transformer]

[Energy Storage Structure: Edge Company Fluid Living Iron Battery]

[Conversion Module: Edge Company Solid-Electric Conversion Unit]

[Structural Framework: Edge Company Small Fixed-Unit General-Purpose Frame]