After Surviving the Apocalypse, I Built a City in Another World-Chapter 1806: Dune Town Refugees (Part 2)

After settling the refugees and assigning some tasks to the staff, Sinnan headed back home amidst the cold. He had snowshoes on so he didn’t fall into the snow.

He felt danger coming and walked aside, barely avoiding a cold snap passing by. "Frozen Snake!" he yelled, alerting the few guards walking around, so no one was victimized today (so far).

Sinnan heaved a deep breath and only felt relieved when he saw the door to his home. He opened the door and smiled lightly as the warmth greeted him.

His home had plenty of heating apparatus. He was not only the heir, but he also had a lot of first-come access to Alterra’s materials.

Whether it was the solar panels, the water purifiers, boxes of noodles, bitumen additives, and so on, they made his and his family’s life much more comfortable. He couldn’t help but compare their state to the previous Cold Wave, and the conditions could be said to be heaven and hell.

They even made him such a useful arm, so he could do daily tasks without a problem. People who did not know him before had no idea he lost an arm.

He might not be able to use it against mid to high-level monsters, but living normally was already achieved, which was more than enough.

Even now, as the cold wave went on, Alterra was still releasing news, innovations, and so on.

He heard that Alterra had also developed some plants that thrived in the cold and, with the input from wood elementalists, some were already growing outside of their greenhouses.

These plants were regenerative too, so even if they shriveled in warmer temperatures, they would flourish again in the succeeding Cold Waves, and would continue doing so until the root system completely perished.

If they spread these out, then there would be something to eat even if they did not have access to greenhouses.

His father had already queued for an order. Alterra wasn’t releasing it outside yet, but they’d want them after the cold, where they would be more affordable and would plant them in strategic places as an investment.

Alterra’s scientists were really out of this world. Literally.

Speaking of which, he happened to be living with one of its best scientists, Medusa.

She happened to have huge amounts of contribution points (in Alterra and in Dune Town), so she had plenty of luxury/comfy items in her space. She was probably the most comfortable one around, even more than the Lord. Knowing her, she probably never noticed this, though.

He headed to the basement where they placed her laboratory and, as always—despite being covered with a few layers of clothing and safety equipment — she was still researching.

"Medussa..." he said, voice gentle, looking at the bespectacled woman who didn’t even turn to him. "It’s cold, no one’s working."

He felt bad that she was working so hard. But then he saw the thing she was studying and sighed.

"My brain will freeze too if it stops working," she said, voice a-matter-of-fact, as always. "Besides, freezing is the best time to study corpses."

His eyes on her were soft, though his eyes twitched a bit when she looked at the undead body in front of her.

The room was not only protected by insulating materials, but also a lot of ’nuclear shields’ as they called it. Medussa said it was a complete overreaction, but the Elders insisted on it for safety. Hence, Sinnan could only follow if she were allowed to legally study such things.

She then revealed a small stone, sickly amber green in color. It looked a lot like those crystals, except it was slightly opaque and filled with greenish-yellow fog.

"I call it a nuclear core," she said. "I found it inside them.

"Unfortunately, it’s not found in all undead, but only a few." She only found the first one after her 10th dissection, and then a few more after that. If she were to make a statistic, it was less than a 30% chance of finding one amongst the undead.

The others also had some versions of it, but they were really small and all over their body, as if it would still take time for everything to congeal into a single piece.

As such, each Undead bodies had different concentrations of nuclear power in their bodies, and different concentrations of it. It was part of the fun, like solving similar puzzles but different cases each time, like Sudoku.

The research lab had helped her develop a radiation radar, also for safety, and that was how she found that some had little amounts of nuclear matter in their bodies, but high concentrations of it in a single spot. This alone interested the middle-aged scientist very much.

"What is it?"

"It is like the energy in their bodies, in time, congealed into this." In a sense, it had some similarities with the stone found in elementalists’ bodies (this was still something highly classified in Alterra, for obvious reasons, so she did not mention it to Sinnan).

Another difference was that the location of this nuclear core varied, unlike the elementalist core, which was placed in the navel area. This ran in the blood, so most of the nuclear cores she found were somewhere in or near the heart, though in some cases, it was in another part of the circulatory system.

In theory, it could be used for various things. For one, it could be used as an energy source, like how nuclear power plants worked back in Terran. Perhaps it could even be integrated into weapons and so on, though that was something that’d probably take a few years just to study.

That said, to extract this with current technology was impossible and very dangerous. As curious as Medusa was, she was not that careless. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have lived this long.

However, she had a feeling that if anyone could make use of such a thing, it could only be Alterra.

To purposely ’crack’ these things (figuratively and literally) would probably need some safety equipment. Fortunately, they had a branch in Alterra to handle materials like these.

That said... Medusa smiled, looking in the direction of the mountains. She’d better collect as much as she could before she returned home!