In reality, combat wasn’t the only problem he had to deal with.
Mining and resource gathering came with plenty of issues as well.
Materials mined with a Pickaxe could directly transform into “Cobblestone” and enter the inventory.
But once that “Cobblestone” was taken out of the inventory and placed on the ground, it would no longer revert to its original form.
It simply became a perfectly square stone block in the physical world.
And that stone block looked completely different from whatever it had originally been.
Based on Russell’s observations over the past two months, he had more or less figured out the principles governing the interaction between the MC System and this world.
Simply put, raw materials could become materials, but materials could not become raw materials.
And materials followed their own set of rules, completely separate from the rules governing raw materials.
Take the Cobblestone Generator in front of him as an example.
The fourteen blocks of Cobblestone used to build it were materials stored in Russell’s System Inventory.
But before they had been mined with a Pickaxe, those fourteen blocks had originally been entirely different substances.
Some had been shale, some granite, some basalt, and some had even been concrete.
Yet once they were harvested into materials, they all became Cobblestone.
Their previous distinctions vanished.
The process was mysterious, and Russell had no idea how it worked.
As the user, however, he didn’t need to understand the mechanism.
The important part came next.
When Lava and flowing water met, they produced stone.
That was an MC rule and the principle behind a Cobblestone Generator.
But it had absolutely nothing to do with real-world lava and water.
Although Russell had no way of obtaining genuine lava, water was everywhere in New Eridu.
When he first acquired a Lava Bucket, he had been curious about what would happen if he poured it into actual water.
The answer was: nothing.
Material Lava and real water produced no reaction whatsoever.
There wasn’t even any heat transfer.
What kind of principle governed this interaction, and what applications it might have, was probably enough material for ten research papers.
However, Material Lava could still burn people.
Because according to MC rules, any entity touching Lava would catch fire.
Humans were obviously considered entities.
Naturally, Ethereals were as well.
Moreover, once ignited, the burning effect would only end when the burn duration expired or when the target came into contact with water.
And that water wasn’t real water.
It had to be Material Water.
Thus, thanks to this nearly unavoidable burning effect that could only be countered through his own intervention, Russell naturally came up with the tactic of becoming a “fire mage wielding a Lava Bucket.”
Over the past two months, after entering Hollows numerous times and testing the strategy in actual combat, Russell had also discovered its weaknesses.
The first was that individual battles tended to take a long time.
The second was that it depended heavily on terrain.
After all, Lava only flowed within a radius of four meters.
A mere four meters wasn’t even enough for some Ethereals to complete a single leap.
As a result, constructing a defensible stronghold immediately upon entering a Hollow had become one of the survival lessons Russell had learned through experience.
As for why he didn’t simply put on Diamond Armor and fight the Ethereals head-on…
Because he couldn’t.
When playing the game, he had never thought much about it.
But after experiencing it himself, Russell discovered just how exhausting it was to wear a full set of Iron Armor.
If it were Diamond Armor instead, it might crush him on the spot.
At first, Russell had complained somewhat that the MC System hadn’t given him an exception.
Only items stored in the System Inventory were weightless.
But later, he realized that the arrangement actually made perfect sense.
After all, he still lived in a physical world.
Once an item was taken out and became a real object, regardless of its attributes, it naturally possessed a weight corresponding to its density and performance.
Take the stronghold he was constructing right now, for example.
Of course, calling it a stronghold was somewhat generous.
It was really just a stone coffin.
But one shouldn’t underestimate a stone coffin.
Within the MC System, a Creeper could probably blow this stone coffin to pieces.
In the physical world, however, what did a stone structure with one-meter-thick walls represent?
It was essentially a standard bomb shelter.
Even a five-hundred-pound demolition bomb might not be able to blast it open.
After realizing how valuable this Cobblestone box truly was, Russell no longer cared much whether he wore armor or not.
Besides, armor in the MC System wasn’t particularly stylish anyway.
Holding a Diamond Pickaxe, Russell spent roughly twenty minutes completing the stronghold.
He then dismantled the Cobblestone Generator and used Slabs to block the upper half of the two-block-wide entrance.
Under normal circumstances, anything entering would have to crawl through.
There was no helping it.
Ethereals weren’t constrained by the dimensions of two-block-tall or three-block-tall humans.
While a half-block barrier might not completely stop them, it could at least greatly limit their mobility.
After finishing everything, he sat down against the wall and began searching through the commission documents the middleman had sent him on his phone.
It was a photograph of a photograph.
The mission description was equally simple.
Written on a yellowed sticky note, the handwriting trembled slightly, yet every stroke had clearly been written with great care.
“Can you find my children?
Their names are Lin Xue and Lin Yuan.
Three years ago, they were conducting investigative work in the Northern Old Factory District of H-037.
After that, they never came out again.
If you can bring back their belongings, this old man would be eternally grateful.
— Lin Guodong.”
The note was attached to a faded photograph.
In the photo was a young man and woman wearing Investigator uniforms, standing before the entrance of a factory.
The girl smiled while making a V-sign.
The boy held a document case with a serious expression.
Russell stared at the photograph for a while.
He didn’t know what had happened to the siblings.
But he knew the old man.
The siblings’ facial features indeed resembled the elderly man by about thirty percent.
The fact that the man had spent three years continuously posting an unclaimed commission using money earned from collecting scrap…
To Russell, that persistence alone made the task worth completing.
The problem now was:
How was he supposed to find them?
H-037 wasn’t particularly large.
But that was only when compared to massive Hollows.
Its surface area was equivalent to two complete industrial parks.
However, once the corridors and layered spaces created by the Hollow’s internal topological distortions were taken into account, the actual space could easily be several times—or even dozens of times—larger than its surface area.
Finding remains from three years ago in a place that large was practically like searching for a needle in the ocean.
Russell’s original plan had been to spend three or four days searching section by section.
If the mapped area proved too vast, he could discuss additional compensation with the client or provide maps of the areas he had already searched to assist the next person willing to take the commission.
But now…
Russell narrowed his eyes slightly.
He thought of the group led by Tsukishiro Yanagi that he had encountered near the entrance.
If HAND’s arrival wasn’t merely a coincidence, then following them might yield unexpected discoveries.
“A bit troublesome.”
Russell put away his phone, stood up, and brushed the dust from his pant legs.
“But it’s the safest approach…
Hmm, I can’t rely entirely on them either.
I’ll still need to do plenty of searching myself.
I need to fill in more of the Map first.
If anything goes wrong, it’ll be easier to plan an evacuation route in advance.”