Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Fruits of Three Months' Labor

Compared to seawater, the rest of the sea dragon was far more difficult to handle, for most of its corpse had already turned to stone, making dissection anything but easy. Thus, Liu Zong’s next task was to slowly and painstakingly transform the sea dragon’s body, piece by piece.

His plan was simple: though he possessed both martial prowess and magical affinity, Liu Zong was no miner, nor did he wish to resort to brute force to break apart the corpse. Instead, he intended to convert portions of the body into usable materials bit by bit.

With ordinary corpses, Liu Zong would never use this method, for careless conversion could easily turn the entire body into resources meant for the undead. Yet with the petrified sea dragon, it did not matter. The creature was immense, and its muscles, skin, and bones had all become stone. Even if Liu Zong exerted himself fully, each transformation yielded only a stone block the size of a standard pillow. After three such conversions, his magical energy was nearly depleted and he needed to rest for an hour or two to recover.

To convert the entire sea dragon would take at least two months of ceaseless effort. Liu Zong was unconcerned by this; if he did not strive now, would he wait until old age to rue his inaction? With this resolve, he worked diligently every day, tirelessly turning the corpse into materials for the undead.

When his magic failed, he did not idle away the time, but classified the converted materials according to their attributes—skin, muscle, stone, and so forth. If he had spare time, he would organize the bones from the sea dragon’s back, attempting to piece together a complete skeleton.

Thus the days passed, one after another, without Liu Zong feeling the passage of time. When he finally finished the first phase of processing the sea dragon, three months had elapsed. During these three months, Liu Zong did not leave the school—not even the virtual space. When tired, he would nap in his two-square-meter room; when hungry, he ordered meals on the virtual network. If he encountered difficulties, he would ask questions on the school forum or seek answers in the virtual library.

Most of his time, though, was spent in the rented space, dealing with the sea dragon. Even his friends found it hard to get in touch with him.

Because of this, the sea dragon brought back had undergone its initial processing, dismantled by Liu Zong into various materials. The largest component was naturally its bones. Extracting the entire skeleton intact had cost Liu Zong considerable effort.

He then devoted himself to devising a way to assemble the skeleton without it collapsing. The finished sea dragon skeleton measured eighty-three meters in length, fifteen meters at its widest point, and about thirteen meters at its tallest. The joints were cleaned so the skeleton could twist as flexibly as the sea dragon once had.

Next were the materials derived from the dragon’s muscles, transformed into stone-like resources for the undead. Because the corpse was already petrified, it was impossible to separate tendons and blood vessels—they were fused together during the process. The resulting stones bore a black, rocky hue with traces of fleshy patterns. These were the most numerous, totaling nearly one hundred tons in weight.

Then came materials from the dragon’s skin. The petrified hide was too hard to produce large, complete pieces of leather, so it was cut into blocks about a square meter each—nearly a thousand such pieces.

The next major item was the internal organs, with the stomach being the most unusual. The sea dragon had undergone some mutation, resulting in four stomach chambers. Perhaps due to starvation, the stomach was somewhat shrunken, yet still retained a hint of vitality.

For this reason, Liu Zong refrained from converting the stomach entirely into undead materials. Instead, he slowly transformed each chamber into spaces for storing food, converting resources, absorbing energy, and cultivating poison gas.

His plan was to turn these four stomach pouches into future sources of energy and materials for the sea dragon.

Next was the processing of the lungs. Liu Zong dismantled them and inflated them, creating seven air sacs of varying sizes. The largest covered eighty-one square meters and stood three meters tall; three others covered forty-five square meters and were 2.3 meters high; the remaining three covered thirty square meters and stood two meters tall.

He intended to place these under the sea dragon’s breastbone, transforming them into internal chambers that, once the sea dragon became his city, could serve as foundations for various buildings.

The diaphragm of the lungs was highly elastic, so no matter how the sea dragon twisted, the chambers would not deform from pressure, making them ideal as internal walls for the chambers. Knowing this, Liu Zong refused to convert the lungs into ordinary materials.

The heart received similar treatment, though instead of dividing it, Liu Zong spent three days transforming it from the inside out into a heart-shaped dwelling. To call it a house would be imprecise; Liu Zong forcibly hollowed out the internal space, fashioned pillars from cardiac muscle, and made the heart resemble a small temple of only four square meters.

Beneath the heart, he left a shallow pool-like space, indicating the heart would serve as an energy distribution chamber.

The only organ treated differently was the brain. Beneath the sea dragon’s brain was a naturally formed space, and after extracting the brain, it yielded a fifty-five-square-meter chamber.

Instead of converting the brain into undead materials or chamber spaces as he did with the muscles and organs, Liu Zong transformed it into a paper-like material. This was ideal for necromancer spellbooks—a typical necromancer could only produce one sheet per brain, and a single book required at least a hundred brains.

Yet with the sea dragon’s enormous brain, the material produced would be enough for ten or more spellbooks, and since all came from one brain, the books would resonate, enhancing their collective magical effect.

As for intestines and other organs, Liu Zong did not bother to separate them. They were all converted along with the muscles. In contrast, the stones that had blocked the sea dragon were converted separately, yielding resources superior to those from muscle-transformed stone blocks.

Over the three months, Liu Zong also assembled three hundred complete skeletons, over seven hundred partial skeletons, nearly seven thousand intact skulls, and almost one hundred thousand bone fragments of various sizes.

All these items were gathered together, ready to be crafted into a tool that Liu Zong had only ever seen described in books.