Wow! The item-dropping rate is really high!

Building a steel town was no easy feat, even though the town of Li Ming had a complete steel production factory and even the freedom to exploit the northern ore veins.

The limitations of their production capacity prevented them from quickly handcrafting an entire steel town, but the fact had already emerged that the intelligent mechanisms had contributed the most to the effort.

That's right, if you lack something, you go borrow it from the great mechanoids.

With the expertise of mechanoid creation in hand, as long as you bring the mechanoids back, they can become your own.

The rise of the town of Li Ming came at the expense of three Smart Machinery Factories being leveled to the ground.

Rose, who hadn't visited Li Ming for a long time, couldn't help but widen her eyes at the sight of such a grand steel metropolis standing amidst the wilderness.

"It's... changed so much!"

"The changes inside are even greater."

Bai E smiled as he greeted the hidden sentry on the outskirts of the town, who only relaxed the alertness of the many sentinels controlling the town's artillery batteries after recognizing Bai E.

If a stranger approached the city, they would definitely be interrogated by the artillery.

The motorcycle roared through the town's main streets, where remnants of the past had regained some of their pre-desolation luster.

Within the steel barriers, there still lay its tender internal structures.

The town's research and development department was located underground where they once combated those giant spiders. The vast subterranean space provided Helen with an ample experimental foundation, and its location, far from the main residential areas, ensured the townspeople wouldn't be too greatly affected by any tests.

Upon arrival with Rose, Bai E found Helen waiting quietly with several town participants.

And beside them, a humanoid mechanical creation, hollowed out in the middle with just a skeletal frame for its limbs and a bulky backpack, stood silently upon the earth.

Stepping off the motorcycle, Bai E approached the conspicuous mechanical creation, "Is this it?"

"Yes." Helen's palm gently caressed the mechanoid beside her, "This is just a preliminary experimental model. There are lots of optimizations to be made in structure and detail, but for the core parts, I've reached the limits of what can be seen in a short amount of time."

The core parts were two crafted items from the blueprints: the Energy Gathering Rifle and the Dynamic Source Sword.

In each of the humanoid mechanoid's mechanical hands, it held a weapon—one rifle, one sword—both absurdly large, seemingly unusable by ordinary humans.

They could only be wielded properly with the help of the mechanoid's grippers.

And because of this, the firearms occupied such an overwhelming proportion of the mechanism's structure that it looked as though the entire body existed solely for these two weapons.

In fact, that was indeed the case...

"I've tried my best to reduce the size of these two weapons, but given the current stage, I can only minimize the core components to this extent. That's why they may look... a bit large. To balance the weight of the two weapons and prevent the body from becoming unbalanced, I've added a jet system to the Miniature Power Furnace on the back. While it balances the weight, it also allows the body to achieve brief instances of levitation and rotation. That's the basic model thus far; you can give it a try."

Helen looked exhausted as she discussed the two core weapons.

Only once you truly handle them do you realize the difficulty of constructing such massive things. It's already tremendously challenging to stabilize such a large-scale Force Field Generator, and even the resultant creation is quite unstable.

Making it smaller is even more difficult, as it's impossible to compress it to fully fit a human body for use.

The weapons, now roughly twice the size of a normal person, are her final product... Rather than being intended for human use, they seem more apt for orcs.

Their stature would be just about right...

Helen, having said her piece, looked at Bai E with anticipation in her eyes.

Individual tests on the Energy Gathering Rifle and Dynamic Source Sword had encountered no problems, but this was the first time the two types of weapons would be tested outside of a laboratory setting, as a single combat unit integrated with the Miniature Power Furnace.

The coordination among the three systems and the stability of the entire structure were yet to be tested, and Helen was not utterly confident about it.

Seeing Helen's expression, Bai E curiously asked, "What's wrong? Haven't you tried it out?"

A peculiar look immediately crossed Helen's face, "We can't try it."

"Can't try it?"

"It's too heavy..."

Without auxiliary drive modules, even though the mechanical structure already transfers the body's weight through its skeleton to the ground beneath its feet, simply wanting to freely wield both weapons was impossible without Divine Power or the help of a few capable individuals.

Among the refugees from Grey Iron City in Li Ming, no such talents had emerged.

If they wanted to add auxiliary drive modules, they would have to inevitably increase the overall scale of the machine, affecting many aspects.

The Mechanical Court in Blackwater City actually has similar experience with small personal mecha that they could draw upon; however, because of previous energy technology limitations, the smallest mecha in the city was several meters tall.

Not to mention the addition of two new weapon systems and a new energy source, which necessitated many more changes. Even Helen couldn't offer a perfect solution for the time being.

And so, the current rudimentary machine was the first experimental model.