The Mechanic [BL]

[15]

Chapter 15 – Garbage Processing Yard (1)

For the first time since the God Descent, Zhang Xun returned to his own room. The soft bed with an old, but clean cashmere blanket had always helped him fall asleep quickly, but that night he tossed and turned in the middle of the night before falling asleep.

When he woke up in the morning he chose a clean and tidy mechanic uniform, combed his hair carefully in front of the mirror, shaved the stubble on his chin and then clipped his usual unilateral microscopic mirror to his lapel. The windowsills of his room and the work table were littered with metal parts, mostly old parts that have been recovered from machines and some were even rusted. Every now and then when he wanted to relax he would cobble together gadgets from these parts.

For example, the few mosquito-like micro-robots currently flying beside his ears.

These mosquitoes were Zhang Xun's eyes, they could enter the ordinary world without a sound and collect data and information right under Eden's nose. Since he made them privately and they weren't registered in the list of machines in Lost Paradise, he could quietly make them slip into the backpacks or pockets of hunters to leave Lost Paradise's Herbert Barrier and go to the ordinary world to collect information, then follow the hunters back. To avoid the signal being intercepted by Eden there was no remote transmission function. Zhang Xun used these things to obtain a lot of the latest technical information from the ordinary world. That's why he was the best mechanic in Lost Paradise.

And now, he was going to use these little things for something more dangerous and against the laws of Lost Paradise: gather intelligence about the ten Chiefs.

No one knew about Zhang Xun's own little research because Zhang Xun knew what a serious violation it was. If his surveillance behaviour leaked out, he feared that he would be immediately dismissed as a mechanic, locked in a dungeon, or even silenced by the Round Table. But this kind of illegal behaviour that no one knew about made him feel a little excited.

He felt like some of the Chiefs had a strange attitude towards Adam and they also had strong hostility towards himself. But rationally speaking, they had already spent too much for the God Descent Plan so it was unreasonable to consider giving up now, and the hostility from the Sixth Chief, who only took office this year, was particularly inexplicable. Why did he want to replace him?

If Zhang Shuo wasn't his father, he feared he would have already been removed.

Zhang Xun felt that ha and Adam's position was too passive and he couldn't sit still, so he unleashed these tiny robots, shaped like mosquitoes, flies, ants, spiders and cockroaches, to discover the "super-daily" events in the Chiefs' lives.

The so-called super-daily events were different from the normal range of daily life after eliminating the meaningless repeated behaviours in a person's daily activity patterns. When he was a child, Zhang Xun had read that most people's daily activity patterns were as consistent and predictable as insects and only those occasional events that were beyond the norm were of great significance to a person's experience, behaviour changes and character formation.

Zhang Xun briefly tested the performance of the micro-robots, then opened the window and let them out. Then he hurried to the Lab with his tablet and toolbox.

Different from the quiet and almost deserted Lab from a few days ago, today's Lab was full of dozens of combat mechas waiting to be repaired and countless mechanics and researchers were assessing the battle damage. These mechas had all participated in the recent confrontation with the Coalition Forces and the old materials had become more rusty and mottled in the sunlight. In recent years, hunters had been bringing back fewer and fewer mechanical parts and many parts on the mechas were in urgent need of replacement and could only hang in place like a crumbling iron block. Soldiers who were willing to fly these things against the Coalition's latest AI drones obviously needed to have a lot of guts.