Whatever schemes they were plotting, becoming stronger was the way to deal with it all.
However, there was one thing about the Dwarven Valley that left Li De rather displeased: the speed of mithril mining was far below his expectations.
Even after Valen, that grandmaster craftsman, had led the dwarven team to join in, there still wasn’t much improvement.
Every day, all the mining only produced enough mithril ore to refine about two pounds of pure mithril.
This fell far short of Li De’s envisioned target.
Mithril was extremely dense, just a fist-sized piece weighed about five pounds.
In other words, it took thousands of beastmen working like mad for two days to produce a single fist-sized chunk of mithril.
But after learning the details, he could only accept this reality with resignation.
The reason mithril was a national strategic resource, why a rich vein could provoke a war between two countries, was not only because of its unbelievably powerful properties, but also because of how exceedingly rare it was.
For an ordinary mithril vein, producing a single pound of mithril from one hundred tons of ore was already considered good.
And here in the Dwarven Valley, fifty tons of ore could yield two pounds of mithril, this was practically an ultra-rich deposit.
According to Valen’s estimates, the vein might contain tens of thousands of pounds of mithril.
That would be enough to forge over a thousand pieces of transcendent equipment.
However, the difficulty of mining it was proportional to its value. Mithril ore was incredibly hard and buried deep underground, so it could only be extracted by sheer brute force.
Even with thousands of beastmen, they could only mine about fifty tons of ore per day, so producing two pounds of mithril was already considered a high yield.
Li De was quite helpless about this and could only instruct Craig to rebuild the Lionmane Tribe as quickly as possible so they could recruit even more beastmen to dig.
Flap flap~
On the third floor of City Hall, Li De had finished his work and was sitting with his eyes closed, studying magic refinement, when the sound of bat wings interrupted his concentration.
Ever since returning from the Dwarven Valley, he had resumed his magical research, which had been delayed by all sorts of chaotic affairs.
Ever since he’d improved the Small Fireball spell, it was as if he’d forgotten the magic he once loved.
But he couldn’t help it, Dawn City, the Crimson Mage Tower, the Dark Pact, and now the Crimson Moon and the Dwarven Valley. He commanded so many forces that he had no choice but to split most of his attention among them.
No one could casually become a major power. For Dawn City to grow from 200 vampires to this scale required him to stay at the helm constantly.
It might look like he wasn’t buried in paperwork every day at City Hall, but what he had to monitor was no small thing.
So for a long time, he hadn’t had the luxury of secluding himself for ten or fifteen days straight to study magic obsessively.
But after being shaken by Kap in the Dwarven Valley, he decided to raise his mastery of magic again.
These days, whenever he had a spare moment, he began researching improvements to his next spell.
Now, being interrupted by the little bat, he had to stop refining the Large Fireball spell with some irritation in his chest.
Large Fireball, as a Tier 2 spell, had 200 magic nodes. Its complexity was more than ten times that of the 50 node Small Fireball. After several days of sporadic study, he still hadn’t figured out even the most basic functions of the nodes, which was rather frustrating.
He reached out his hand. The gray bat flew in through the half-open window, circled in the air a few times, and then obediently landed in his palm.
Opening the secret message capsule on its belly, his expression grew slightly serious.
After a moment, Li De raised an eyebrow, flipped the message closed, and tucked it into his desk drawer.
“The beastmen are invading again. Just as expected, if they invaded the border early last year, how could they possibly be absent this year?
The Barren Plains have such severe food shortages, if they don’t secure enough supplies before the Months of Deep Winter, they won’t survive the winter.”
Li De fell into thoughtful contemplation.
Dawn City’s City Hall had long since prepared contingency plans for a beastmen invasion, and even prepared plans in case the beastmen didn’t invade.
That wasn’t what worried him. What concerned him was the beastmen’s strange behavior, whether it was due to food shortages or some other reason.
For hundreds of years, the beastmen had never changed, but as soon as he entered Glory, or rather as soon as the players entered Glory, things began to shift.
He couldn’t convince himself that there was no connection.
But for now, he had no sources of reliable intelligence. Even Craig, a Level 16 wolfman, couldn’t reach deep enough into the Barren Plains to gather news from the beastmen’s royal court.
Fortunately, this development only brought benefits to Dawn City and no harm.
Without the beastmen invasions, Dawn City would have had to take tremendous risks to expand its population.
Humans were the dominant force on the Glory Main Plane, able to rise to supremacy among countless powerful races, there was nothing simple about them.
Unless he was absolutely desperate, Li De had no desire to directly clash with human armies.
This was where having a hidden base deep in the uncharted mountains was such an advantage.
No matter how fiercely the outside world tore itself apart, he could keep developing quietly, and still have the leisure to build a plumbing system.
Such an advantageous position was enough to make most factions drool with envy.
Li De shook his head, pulling his thoughts back. His eyes gradually grew bright.
“Better early than late, this Months of Deep Winter, Dawn City will pull off something big.”