Che Zhen immediately turned.
Jiang Ye squinted and breathed, his brows twitching from time to time.
After a few minutes.
"Stop!" Jiang Ye suddenly raised his hand.
The fleet braked sharply in the air, hovering below the clouds.
"Let's drop a probe down, it should be diamond," Jiang Ye said. "The reserves are good, enough for a large mine."
Che Zhen turned his head to look at him in surprise, wanting to speak but stopping.
A captain's voice came through the communication channel, "The probe has been dropped."
Jiang Ye comfortably leaned back in his seat. "Continue flying."
"Which direction?" Che Zhen asked.
Jiang Ye smiled, brought his fingers together in the shape of a fish, and drew two circles in the air.
Che Zhen immediately understood, setting up a circular route, expanding outwards circle by circle.
Birong Star's mineral reserves were quite abundant. Over the next few hours, Jiang Ye would occasionally sit up straight, a look of careful consideration on his face, and then issue commands.
"Ten kilometers north... Stop! There should be copper and iron ore here, with moderate reserves. Drop another probe."
"Stop! Silver ore, small reserves. There might be some stones near the mine that can be used as building materials. Drop another probe, send the data to Director Xu. Mine it if it's suitable."
"East... further east... Forget it, the reserves are too small, it's meaningless."
"This mountain has something. Circle around, let me smell it... over a dozen types of ores, a large mountain range. Drop three probes at different locations."
"This location has iron and manganese ore, reserves are decent."
The soldiers in the cabin were all incredulous.
They could hear the commander speaking on the communication channel and were very shocked.
The soldiers checked that their microphones were off, then huddled together and spoke in low voices.
"Does the commander have special abilities? Can he smell ore?"
"Does ore have a smell? Why can't I smell it?"
"It does have a smell, but you have to dig through tens of meters of soil and stand in the mine shaft to smell it. The plane is so high, and there's a forest below. I don't know how the commander smells it. The rumors might be true, he really has special abilities."
"Awesome, I'm convinced!"
"It must be some kind of olfactory gene. The commander might have undergone some gene surgery to enhance this aspect."
"I want to have this surgery too. Once I can smell ore, I'll go to various planets as a geologist, stand on a mountaintop, sniff, point, and say there's ore here and there. Local mine owners would definitely shower me with money!"
"Dream on, if there were such good things, they wouldn't be for us."
"I heard there are such people who help others find ore on various planets and earn money. They are super-rich. They can earn hundreds of millions a day. But indeed, it's not for us. This kind of gene surgery definitely requires connections."
Jiang Ye stayed on Birong Star for a total of 24 hours, finished surveying the mines near the two camps, and headed back.
...
A week later.
Six mining sites were completed, and over three thousand human soldiers and eighteen thousand mechanical soldiers were converted into miners, excavating ore day and night.
The mining conditions on Birong Star were rudimentary. The dust from the major mining sites was like a fire, and the miners were all covered in black ash, as if they had crawled out from underground.
Wei Hongyang and Xu Yan jointly managed the mining sites. According to the pre-signed contracts, 30% of the ore profits went to Xu Yan, 10% to Wei Hongyang's troops, and the remaining 60% was allocated to Birong Star's military expenses.
Next to the mining sites were smelting plants, vast in scale, with rows of tall chimneys spewing black smoke like cumulonimbus clouds. Due to the rudimentary facilities, this black smoke caused severe industrial pollution. In addition, there was a massive amount of wastewater discharged into the river, all untreated heavy industrial wastewater. The entire river was demonized, displaying different eerie colors depending on the type of ore being smelted.
In addition to mining, large-scale forest burning and deforestation operations were also underway.
In just one week, over five thousand heavy incendiary bombs were dropped. The fire, fanned by the wind, burned hundreds of miles of Mir forest.
The flapping-wing aircraft also sprayed large quantities of biochemical agents, developed and produced by Jiang Ye Star's P5 laboratory, with Sawada Mariann as the project leader.
The agent included a targeted virus for the Mir organism's bor-tetrachain gene. This virus was named "Mir Nemesis," and it would invade the cells of most Mir plants, rapidly reproduce, causing the Mir plants to wither quickly and then spread to the surrounding areas.
Once the Mir plants were extinct, the Mir animals that depended on them would also become extinct, and the corresponding bacteria and fungi would be severely weakened.
During this process, there would inevitably be a large amount of collateral damage, and some native organisms would also perish due to environmental collapse.
Jiang Ye approved this plan. He also wanted to protect the native organisms, but his will was strong, yet his ability was insufficient.
Jiang Ye's only measure was to dispatch a thousand-person scientific expedition to search for native organisms in the forest that were not contaminated by the bor-tetrachain. Samples were collected and sealed to preserve the gene bank. If needed in the future, they could be directly created based on their genes. That was all he could do.
It was too expensive to build a gene bank on Birong Star, so all samples were sent back to Jiang Ye Star and temporarily stored in the biological laboratory warehouse. In just one week, a total of 480 species of plants, 112 species of insects, 67 species of small animals, and 10 species of large animals were collected, with the number of fungi being too numerous to count.
Camp Three was also completed, located on the edge of the desert, hence it was named Desert Camp Three.
The area near Desert Camp Three was desolate, with vast expanses of almost bone-white sand as far as the eye could see.
However, amidst the rolling white sand lay numerous withered plant branches.
When the cool night breeze blew, thousands of paper-like branches rustled, and faintly, one could hear the sound of people talking within the rustling, which was quite eerie.
The soldiers dug a simple excavation at the edge of the desert and found various plant seeds, insect eggs, and nests of eggs beneath the sand.
At first, everyone thought these were the remains of ancient organisms. The desert was not a desert in ancient times, and later, due to climate change, it became a dead land, leaving behind many unsprouted lives.
However, they then discovered living plant roots in the desert. The eggs were also proven to be viable for hatching.
Professors from Jiang Ye Star were sent to the site for exploration and quickly reached the opposite conclusion.
It was currently summer on Birong Star, with high temperatures and low rainfall in this desert.
But in winter, there would be more snowfall, and the temperature would drop to minus twenty to thirty degrees Celsius. At that time, the entire desert would undergo a drastic change, with countless plants growing explosively, and insect eggs and eggs hatching.
This was very similar to the winter on Jiang Ye Star, where more than half of Jiang Ye Star's land was barren in summer and lush in winter.
The nearby flora and fauna had cold-resistant genes but lacked the ability to survive in the height of summer.
Interestingly, the situation near Dense Forest Camp One was the exact opposite. When winter arrived, all plants would enter a state of dormancy, their leaves would fall, and animals would hibernate.
Jiang Ye had been curious about this phenomenon back then, but he was too busy and never delved into it. Now, encountering it again on Birong Star, his curiosity resurfaced.