Published: September 10, 2025
This is Satou. Some people find it strange when I say research costs money. Do they really think you can do research with just a pen and paper?
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"This is Satou. The void probe has been recovered."
'This is Saze of the Berinuan Clan. Is it possible to reuse the void probe?'
"Yes, only the Aether Drive is dented, but the mana collection branches are intact."
While communicating with a High Elf of the Berinuan Clan via the "infinite distance communication (world phone)" magic, which has no lag even over long distances, I finished repairing the void probe.
This void probe was launched under the leadership of the Berinuan Clan to investigate the jellyfish nests.
I was asked to investigate the missing void probe, and after using flashstride and visually deploying units to search, I found it caught in one of the debris clusters between the inner and outer planetary orbits.
Since I was already here, I built some void-compatible houses on a few pieces of debris using earth magic and installed teleportation imprint plates inside them.
Then I left one piece of debris and ejected the others at different speeds toward deep space.
This way, I should be able to come here without having to repeatedly deploy visual units.
After finishing these extra tasks, I charged the void probe with magic power and pushed it onto its planned trajectory.
"This is Satou. The void probe has been launched. I confirmed the beacon signal, so you should be able to receive it by tomorrow on your end."
'Thank you, Satou. Please stop by the Berinuan Forest once. We want to hold a feast in gratitude from the whole forest.'
"Thank you very much, Ms. Saze."
Apparently, research on preserved foods is popular among the Elves of the Berinuan Clan, so I plan to bring new products from the Echigoya Trading Company and enjoy various research discussions.
According to the map data, there are many large debris pieces near the current outer map edge, so I decided to check them out.
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"Oh wow, a mountain of treasure."
Most of the debris is rocky, but about thirty percent is made of iron ore. Some even seem to be pure iron chunks floating around.
Map exploration revealed mostly miscellaneous alloy lumps, but I also found marble boulders and gold nuggets.
It almost looks like someone refined them only to deliberately throw them into the void.
It's a bit suspicious, but since they're useful, I started storing debris along the route in my storage.
Each piece is about the size of a small island, so even just the iron chunks could make me rich.
—Danger sensed.
"Ugh, radioactive material?"
Surprised by the AR display, I used the spatial magic "space disintegration" to erase the radioactive chunks.
Although it could be used peacefully, nuclear material doesn't really fit in a fantasy world.
Mukuro said that the gods used miracles to turn all radioactive materials into lead, but it seems their miracles didn't reach this far into the void.
Besides, if needed, I can just create nuclear fusion magic with spatial or arcane magic.
By the way, cosmic rays are always present in the void, but since their density is low, wearing a spacesuit (astro suit) magic or a void suit works fine.
While wandering among the debris cluster, I found a particularly large iron chunk.
It’s sword-shaped, but no way could I swing such a huge sword. Even if I slashed, it would only matter against something as big as the moon.
I tried to store it in my storage and had no problem. My storage really seems to have infinite size.
I thought about using it as a base for a floating continent, but it’s too big.
Something a bit smaller would be better. Considering the damage if it fell, it might be better as a floating island rather than a floating continent.
After lowering the target size, more options appeared.
There was a huge hard quartz crystal, so I chose that as the candidate.
There were also chunks of harder aluminum oxide crystals (corundum) and silicate minerals (topaz), but since they were only about the size of an isolated island palace, I excluded them.