261: Chapter 262 Matryoshka Dolls

Mobius Prime, City No. 233.

After Penny Is My Wife logged in, he climbed out of the cultivation pod but didn't immediately rush to his plantation.

Instead, he navigated the streets with practiced ease and ran over to the private mechanical modification workshop of the amateur science master, Rocket Coal-Burner.

When Penny pushed open the factory door and arrived at Rocket Coal-Burner's exclusive studio.

This guy was slumped in his ergonomic chair as usual, facing a retro Earth-style computer screen, wearing headphones, and playing a game with intense focus.

In "warhammer 40k ol", a 100% realistic VR game, he wasn't out fighting monsters, but instead using a computer to play those outdated 2D video games.

This kind of Matryoshka-style abstract behavior was likely something only this tech geek could pull off across the entire server.

Meanwhile, inside the large, heavy processing workshop behind the transparent bulletproof glass door at the back of the studio.

A full 20 sturdy industrial robotic arms were sparking away, automatically cutting, welding, and assembling.

They were repairing and modifying a large tank that was stacked with layers of turrets, standing over ten meters tall, and resembling a moving metal hill!

This was none other than the giant armor that had shone brilliantly in the recent surface battle against the swarm—the Desert Ark.

To create this massive weapon, Penny, as a farming tycoon, had given all the astronomical amount of points he had saved up in his account to Rocket Coal-Burner as funding without reservation.

Rocket Coal-Burner didn't even turn his head when he heard the door open.

Seeing that it was his big benefactor, Penny, he chuckled twice: "The boss is here! Wait a moment, I'll be done soon! I'll be right there after I beat this boss!"

Penny was also curious and leaned over: "Why are you always playing a game within a game whenever I come to find you? What game is so fun that it makes you neglect the work of repairing the tank?"

Rocket Coal-Burner kept his eyes glued to the screen, his fingers flying across the keyboard: "Just a small RPG game I coded myself while I had nothing to do. It's just to pass the time."

Penny had just leaned his head over to look at the screen. In the frame, it was a very crude, pixelated RPG game full of mosaics.

At this moment, Rocket Coal-Burner was controlling a small character, dealing with a half-human, half-snake pixel monster girl boss in a maze.

Rocket Coal-Burner went through a bunch of flashy, nonsensical operations, randomly pressing auto-attack buttons. As a result, the character still failed to dodge the full-screen poison mist, its health bar hit zero, and it was killed instantly.

"Damn," Penny Is My Wife complained, "Your skills are just too trash. You couldn't even dodge a dodge skill that you could press with your eyes closed."

However, a scene appeared that Penny Is My Wife never expected.

Seeing his character killed, Rocket Coal-Burner didn't feel any frustration; on the contrary, he became visibly excited!

He turned around skillfully, pulled a large wad of toilet paper from the tissue box on the table, and then... started unbuckling his pants right there!

Meanwhile, the image on the computer screen switched seamlessly, displaying a defeat punishment animation that made one blush!

Completely different from the crude pixelated mosaic style from before, the modeling in this defeat animation was in an extremely dreamy, realistic style!

Every detail and light effect was realistic to the extreme; the scene could be described as restricted!

Watching this heaven-defying act where the other person completely ignored that a living person was standing right next to him and started skillfully doing his business while staring at the screen, Penny was completely dumbfounded.

During this minute that felt like a year, Penny stood stiffly in place, not moving an inch, not daring to breathe loudly, and not saying a word.

Until a minute later, as Rocket Coal-Burner shivered all over, let out a long sigh, and skillfully cleaned up the battlefield with the tissue.

Penny Is My Wife swallowed his saliva, silently took two steps back, and looked at him with the eyes one would use for a pervert.

"Phew..." Rocket Coal-Burner pulled up his pants, turned around, took out a cigarette, and lit it, his eyes becoming deep and wise.

"Alright." Rocket Coal-Burner adjusted his non-existent glasses, his tone instantly becoming professional, "Now, let's deeply discuss the phase two optimization and modification project for the Desert Ark large-scale war machine."

As everyone knows, after finishing such a task, a male will immediately enter a state of absolute rationality known as the sage mode.

In this state, the brain is emptied of all base desires, and IQ can briefly increase by 50% for half an hour!

Rocket Coal-Burner picked up the blueprints on the table and pointed to the workshop behind the glass door: "You previously fed back to me in the combat report. When this tank faces burrower worm attacks, the chassis armor is susceptible to piercing attacks. Also, melee weapons are very inefficient at clearing the jumpers attached to the vehicle body. Now, I have solved all these pain points!"

After speaking, he decisively pushed open the glass door and strode into the sparking modification workshop with Penny.

"First, the chassis system is completely upgraded!" Rocket Coal-Burner patted the sturdy lower part of the vehicle body, "I removed those tracks that easily got stuck on rocks and replaced them with a heavy hover chassis array. Not only has mobility improved, but the chassis armor has also been thickened threefold."

"And." Rocket Coal-Burner's eyes flashed with a fanatical light, "Since the boss has fully opened the purchase permissions for Mass-Energy Conversion Cannon, heavy incendiary ray guns, gravity cannons, and other black technology weapons in the system mall, the firepower of this war machine has now ushered in an epic, comprehensive qualitative upgrade!"

He pointed to the highest and most majestic main turret group on top of the tank: "Look there! Three triple-barreled Mass-Energy Conversion Cannon, six high-frequency gravity cannons! With long-range and short-range firepower coverage, a single salvo could almost instantly vaporize and kill most heavy vehicle units in the Empire faction!"

"On the sides of the vehicle body, I also added six heavy incendiary ray guns. Even if a large number of bug cannon fodder rush over, they can be instantly burned clean by this high-temperature ray. Finally, in the turret blind spots, there are eight automatic targeting laser cannons for blind spot cleaning. With this firepower, it's a mobile fortress!"

Subsequently, Rocket Coal-Burner proudly pointed to the very front of the tank, the huge metal ram that had just been welded on, shaped menacingly like a demon's horn: "Look at this too! When facing those heavy units with Void Shield. This ram is a modified physical decomposition field generator that I spent a lot of money on, the same model as those on Imperial Void Ships!"

"Even if the opponent drives an Imperial God-Machine over. As long as the speed is up, if it gets hit hard by this big thing, it definitely won't feel good!"

Looking at this tank modification plan that suffered from severe firepower overflow and "insufficient firepower phobia," Penny was very satisfied.

He originally wanted to reach out and pat the tech geek's shoulder to show encouragement, but his gaze swept over the hand that had just touched his crotch, and he ultimately restrained himself and withdrew his hand.

"Not bad, not bad! Perfect!" Penny nodded with satisfaction, then asked, "By the way, has the onboard auxiliary AI system that controls the whole vehicle undergone a bottom-layer upgrade?"

The reason this huge tank could be fully controlled by Penny alone in the cockpit before was because Rocket Coal-Burner had stuffed a self-developed onboard AI into the main control computer.

This AI was not code he hand-typed in this game, nor was it technology from the Warhammer World's Men of Iron.

Rather, it was a large model he spent a lot of money to get on Earth in the real world. Then, using system code loopholes, he compressed, distilled, and modified it, forcibly creating and adding the AI program into the game.

Most of the processing robotic arms in Rocket Coal-Burner's factory were also automatically controlled by subroutines of this AI. Of course, this real-world AI was miles behind Men of Iron from the Golden Age like 73 in terms of computing power; it had no autonomous consciousness and could only execute dead orders.

After reporting to Lin Li that there was no machine intelligence crisis, Lin Li also felt this lazy idea was quite hilarious and readily agreed to players using it on vehicles.

Rocket Coal-Burner picked up a silver metal ball, smooth on the surface and only the size of a basketball, from the workbench. "The onboard AI [Penny 2.0] you wanted is in this core."

Rocket Coal-Burner tossed it to Penny casually, "You can chat with her to relieve boredom when you have nothing to do. When the tank is assembled, if you want to drive this tank, just plug the cockpit's connection cable directly into the interface of this ball. However, the bottom-layer logic hasn't been compiled yet."

Penny Is My Wife caught the metal ball and pouted with some dissatisfaction: "This design is too perfunctory. Can't you make a holographic projection or a physical 2D humanoid girl shell?"

Rocket Coal-Burner rolled his eyes and ruthlessly shattered his fantasy: "Do you think I'm the dog game planner of this crappy game? You say you want a certain art style and I can just conjure it out of thin air? This game doesn't support me hand-crafting bionic skin! If you want a humanoid cyber maid, go find the Stone Men and figure it out yourself."

Penny Is My Wife was rebuffed and had to leave. After going out, Penny whistled. A chocobo ran over.

Penny climbed onto the chocobo, left the city, and arrived at the large plantation cluster located in the suburbs, which stretched as far as the eye could see.

Due to the bug plague not long ago, many farming players' crops were eaten and destroyed by those pioneer bugs. Although the total loss of points was not large, this made the group of farming players who treated their crops as their lives feel humiliated and very angry!

Consequently, many players learned from the pain and began to set up various insane defensive measures on the periphery of their plantations.

Some wealthy players spent a lot of money to hire a whole battalion of local natives as security guards; some firepower fanatics directly set up a large number of heavy bolter turret arrays on the field ridges, which were tighter than the defensive lines of military bases;

Even more players got a batch of crops from Stone Man Hong. In the periphery of the fields, they cultivated a large circle of various mutant plants with extremely strong aggression!

For example, man-eating flowers that could spray strong acid, thorn trees that could strangle prey with vines—all sorts of things, turning the farms into terrifying botanical gardens.

Of course, there were also many originally peace-loving life-skill players who were angered by the bugs. They began to put down their hoes, hone their combat skills, go directly to the front lines to improve their levels and abilities, and vowed to personally defend their vegetable gardens.

Penny Is My Wife rode the chocobo to his plantation. At the entrance of his plantation, there was a conspicuous wooden sign hanging, with words written in red paint: [High-quality fertile land for transfer, those interested bring points and private message. Contact Game ID: Penny Is My Wife]

Just at this moment, a harsh engine roar came from the wilderness in the distance. The good brother of the guild, [Dog Bro], drove an off-road vehicle, performed a handsome drift, and sped to the front of Penny.

"Yo! Penny! Checking on your land?" Dog Bro shouted at the top of his lungs, "Is your big desert tank repaired yet? Our guild's Void Ship is about to be assembled!"

Penny Is My Wife widened his eyes and asked incredulously: "Holy shit? So fast? I remember the forum saying that in the Warhammer Universe, if you want to hand-craft a Void Ship, even the smallest one, doesn't it take a long construction period of a year or six months?"

Dog Bro jumped off the off-road vehicle, patted the sand and dust off his body, and looked smug: "That's old news, brother! What era is it now? Are you still using the native's slow-working efficiency to measure our productivity? Do you know how terrifying the alliance's production capacity is now? This is called galaxy-wide industrial division of labor!"

Dog Bro counted on his fingers, excitedly calculating for Penny: "Over at the Gorgon Industrial World, there are ready-made heavy furnace factories. They work day and night, directly molding and producing the main keel and hull armor plates of the ship body;"

"Here on Mobius Prime, we have ready-made light industrial production lines. We directly produce life support equipment systems, living quarters, and other supporting cable systems; and there are a large number of NPCs with experience in maintaining and using Void Ships who can be hired as technicians."

"Then, we assemble and piece together the conventional engines in the orbit of the Prison Planet, which has a ready-made shipyard. Finally, we pull the empty shell back to the Outpost Planet, go to the boss to buy the most core weapon systems, Geller Field Generator, and Warp engine, and install them. Done! Isn't that basically finished?"

Dog Bro was spouting excitedly: "You have to know, when the industrial power of a vast galaxy is completely integrated, and the power of all capital is exerted in one place, the efficiency of assembly-line shipbuilding is terrifyingly fast!"

"Besides, to take a step back. The privateer Void Ship we are building is less than two kilometers long at most. Many non-critical components are still inventory items, pieced together like building blocks. Of course, it's fast!"

Penny Is My Wife swallowed his saliva: "Then what step has our spaceship been pieced together to now? Where is it parked?"

Dog Bro pointed to the sky: "The skeleton and life support system are all installed. Currently, it is parked at the low-orbit shipyard of the Outpost Planet for final painting."

"The others aren't idle either, Luluchiu has already taken people to contact those navigators; Lao Ba is posting small advertisements everywhere in the lower hive of Mobius Prime to recruit bottom-level crew members; Dai Dai Tape took public funds to find Ming Shen and ikun, those two big legion commanders, to order heavy firepower equipment."

"As for Dumpling, he is arguing on the forum with the leaders of several other big guilds, scrambling for the first exploration right of the safe Warp route!"

Dog Bro patted Penny's shoulder: "If everything goes smoothly, once the engines are installed and debugged, it will be able to fly in at most ten days or so. By then, we will also temporarily hire some high-combat-power players to board the ship. After all, for a guild like ours that leans towards life skills, our combat power is still a bit lacking."

Penny Is My Wife listened, his heart boiling with excitement: "Are there many player teams in the game right now, selling everything they have, preparing to run to outer star systems?"

"More than just many!" Dog Bro sighed, "Let me put it this way: as long as it's a guild or legion with some strength, they are basically frantically taking out loans to buy ships and recruiting troops. Especially those big legions at the top like the Scourge Legion, who aren't short of money; they have already quietly formed a fleet of frigates! By comparison, we are the only ones who are pitifully poor, having pawned the underwear of all our brothers just to scrape together such a small thing!"