Hearing [Lingtian First-String] agree, Li Lanfeng was exhilarated. He breathed in deeply, trying to calm himself. This time, he must definitely perform well and not disgrace his rabbit. Li Lanfeng knew well that in order for him to find secure footing within the rabbit"s team, relying purely on the friendship between himself and the rabbit would not be enough.

Li Lanfeng operated his mecha to dash out onto the sands, landing in the endless desert which had already swallowed many mecha. Very quickly, the shifting sand beneath his feet had sucked in both of his mecha"s legs. His mecha began sinking down at a rapid pace — at this speed, his entire mecha might be completely buried a minute later.

"The default desert-mode setting of the mecha does not match up to the real conditions. The buoyancy difference is extremely large. The settings need to be altered. Change it to twenty. No. Thirty. Still not enough. Forty, that"s a little too much ... correction. It should be 37 or 38. Confirmed as 38. Original mecha traction setting lacking. Compensation coefficient at 10 results in sluggishness. Change coefficient to 9, success. There is an error with the original granular load 1 . Increase load value to 20. Still wrong, increase to 25? Adjusted to 24, confirmed ..." In the party comms, [Self-Defined Destiny]"s rapid-fire speech came through clearly, along with the faint sound of fingers moving at super high control speeds.

This gave all the other members of Ling Lan"s party a shock; they knew what this represented. Setting aside the brash and forthright Qi Long whose control was coa.r.s.e and based solely on his instinct, even Han Jijyun with his formidable calculation skills could not collect on-scene data and perform such accurate corrections in such a short amount of time. Those rapid tapping sounds and swishing noises also meant that the other"s finger-speed had currently achieved a frightening level.

This caused Qi Long and the others to begin taking [Self-Defined Destiny], this person who had just joined them, seriously. Although they would never doubt Boss Lan"s judgment, without experiencing it first-hand, they would never have known that this seemingly friendly and humble [Self-Defined Destiny] was also a control prodigy. As expected, those who Boss Lan took a shine to would never be simple.

Still, after that first jolt of surprise, Qi Long and the others quickly calmed down. Without waiting for Ling Lan to give the order, they immediately began adjusting the settings of their mecha according to [Self-Defined Destiny]"s calculated adjustments. After applying all those settings, Li Lanfeng"s mecha had already pulled both his feet out from the shifting sands to stand up properly. He was now standing on the sands like it was solid ground and was waiting for them to come to him. This proved that those settings of his were absolutely correct.

This scene also caused those mecha still struggling with the sand to stare, gobsmacked, but they soon figured things out and began manually adjusting their mecha settings as well. Still, the process was not as easy as they had a.s.sumed. Manual adjustment of settings required one to know all the settings of a mecha like the palm of one"s hand; if one only had a half-baked understanding of the settings, they would never be able to accomplish it to the degree that Li Lanfeng had.

"Alright, let"s move." Seeing this, Ling Lan no longer hesitated, instantly giving out the order.

Following this cry, the eight mecha remaining on the platform shot out like cannonb.a.l.l.s to land gracefully in the desert. After reuniting with [Self-Defined Destiny], they ventured off swiftly into the depths of the desert.

This scene was captured by the surveillance system of the starship and was swiftly transmitted to the starship"s control room. The adjutant in the control room saw the performance of this team and a slight smile appeared on his face as he said, "Looks like it"s not all trash. This team is still somewhat presentable, especially this mecha ..." The one he was pointing at was precisely the first one to go out into the desert to feel out the conditions, [Self-Defined Destiny].

"That"s why I said that civilian mecha operators may not be completely worthless," responded the commander with a serious expression, "Still, I keep feeling that the reclamation efforts this time won"t go smoothly ..."

The adjutant was taken aback. "Are you saying ..."

"I just received a notification from the mainframe saying that not too far from us, there"s something strange with planet X193. It"s investigating what"s going on right now. Once it has concrete news, it"ll contact us again." The commander"s brow was deeply furrowed. He had been studying all this time to try and figure out a way for them to get close to the base camp of the Swift Dragons, but all his mental efforts had been useless. He could only wait pa.s.sively for the notification from the mainframe — this made the commander who liked to have everything within his control uneasy; he did not like this feeling of having his actions dictated by someone else.

"It looks like the mainframe is very afraid that there will be further issues this time ..." The adjutant"s eyes narrowed as if thinking of something.

"So we can only wait pa.s.sively for the mainframe"s notification now ..." said the commander with a sigh. He was feeling increasingly uncertain about his mission.

********

Seven days went by swiftly. Within these seven days, nothing much happened to Ling Lan"s party. As Ling Lan was not here to cultivate the planet in search of wealth, she did not split her party into smaller exploration teams and spread them out as the other expedition teams did. The nine people of her party broke into three smaller teams and stayed in a triangular formation. All of them moved together within the same district, often checking in with one another. Even if there were some expedition teams who harboured ill intent, when they saw how many members Ling Lan"s party had and how the party was in a triangular formation equally capable of offence or defence, they did not dare to act impulsively.

The triangular formation was actually a basic Federation mecha formation — it was typically formed by three mecha teams at three points of a triangle moving as one. This type of formation allowed any one of the component mecha teams to become the arrowhead of the entire team; it was one of the most commonly used formations by the Federation mecha forces.

Even so, the luck of Ling Lan"s party was still pretty decent. Although they did not search a large area, they still managed to find some rare metals, as well as some unidentified minerals. They secretly noted all these. They would only need to pa.s.s this info on to the registration staff on the starship, and even if it did not yield a large sum in return, the reward would certainly be enough to supply enough power for their mecha for several months.

Speaking of which, we should now talk about the usage of power in Mecha World and the various ways to obtain power. An active mecha, even if its user did not log in to operate it, would still have a basic amount of power drain. Thus, every mecha operator would have the daily pressure of collecting power. Power could be obtained by completing missions or foraging in the wilderness, and it could also be purchased with credits in the power stores of Mecha World.

Therefore, if they had not saved up enough power sources, mecha operators who had not logged in for long periods of time may very likely find that their mecha could no longer be activated for use the next time they logged in. Replenishing power which had been lost was even more expensive than stocking up to begin with. Thus, in Mecha World, the average mecha operator would normally only have one active mecha. Those operators who were slightly stronger would at most have one spare reserve mecha, because just one more mecha was beyond the means of the average mecha operator to support. The only exceptions were those people with great ability or those who had an abundance of credits.

This was also why many mecha operators would do away with those mecha they had replaced, trading them for some power supplies to keep. This was also why when Li Lanfeng had only redeemed another mecha when he was about to advance to intermediate mecha; a normal mecha operator just could not keep all the mecha they had ever redeemed on them.

The reason the conditions were so strict was out of fear that the mecha operators would not be able to focus fully on training with the mecha they had in their hands. Mind you, the further things progressed, the finer the distinction of mecha categorisation became. For example, for intermediate mecha, just humanoid mecha alone had 5 types, and by the time it came to advanced mecha, there were 8 types of humanoid mecha. If operators could not concentrate on training with one mecha, even the most prodigious mecha operator would end up mediocre because of this. Thus, Mecha World had no choice but to use material pressure to forcefully eliminate the distraction for the mecha operators, making them calm down and train hard in the control skills for one mecha ...

Consequently, in Mecha World, every mecha operator would have headaches over power supplies — Ling Lan and her party were no exception. They could come out and do missions for so long all thanks to Lin Zhong-qing, who had done his duty as support logistician to conserve power all this time. However, this would only support them for another half a month at most, so any gains here would be a great boon overall.

Just as they were planning to move on to the next district, they received an emergency alert from the military vessel"s control centre. The alert stated that all the mecha operators were expected to rush back to the transport ship within 3 days because the transport ship would be leaving X192 at 12 noon sharp three days later. As for the reason why, the military vessel"s side simply said that there would be a violent elemental energy turbulence on planet X192 three days later. This turbulence may very well destroy any and all mecha still remaining on the planet at that time.

After discussing it over, Ling Lan"s party decided to continue foraging for one more day before rushing back. Although they were only a day"s journey away from the transport ship, Ling Lan did not like to cut things so close — she liked leaving some room for error in all things.

A day"s time pa.s.sed quickly. After some minor organising of the resources they had gathered and recharging the power of their mecha, they operated their mecha to move towards the transport ship at full speed. But halfway through their journey, an accident occurred before their eyes.

There was a loud "BOOM" — straight ahead on the path Ling Lan"s party was travelling on, the sound of a violent explosion rang out. This sound was clearly the result of a mecha using a cannon-type firearm.

"Razor, lead your team over to take a look." Ling Lan frowned lightly. Using a cannon-type firearm on this planet was undoubtedly a very dangerous act. The atmosphere already contained hydrogen and chlorine; adding high heat would very easily result in self-destruction. If triggered by a cannon-type firearm, there was a high chance of a chain reaction occurring, which could easily endanger the safety of her party if they were unlucky. In order to obtain a clear picture of the situation, Ling Lan instructed Luo Lang"s team, which was currently the arrowhead of their formation, to go check things out.

Luo Lang"s small team consisted of Luo Lang, Xie Yi, and Li Shiyu, with Luo Lang as the interim head. Receiving his orders, Luo Lang led Xie Yi and Li Shiyu in a quick sprint forwards.

Not long after, Ling Lan and the others received a shared video channel from Luo Lang"s team. It turned out that about 1 kilometre ahead of them, there was a mecha team of 15 people who were currently launching a series of violent attacks at a small mecha team of only 5 people.

If they guessed correctly, this should be a robbery in progress. This was a common scene during planetary reclamation events — some large expedition teams with bad reputations just loved to do such things, because robbing others at this time was much more profitable than foraging for themselves.

It looked like that team of five was also the gutsy type, otherwise a fight would not have broken out. Many smaller mecha teams would choose to give up a large portion of their resources when faced with such unbeatable odds, choosing the option of safe return. But this team had not chosen to give in — despite seeing that they would never be able to survive, they had actually taken the initiative to launch a blast cannon 2 . They were obviously trying to kill their opponents in a kamikaze attack, but their luck did not seem to be very good. The firearm had not ignited the elements within the air, so they were now being oppressed and beaten — it would not be long before they were completely annihilated.