Steel steam and flame

The Thorny Bird Training Ground is a city composed of strange people. It is different from the military school in Cassia's memory. It is more like a super-large airport or station in the ordinary world. Many of the infrastructures in daily life are no longer under the full control of the Logistics Department. Take over the management and apply if you need it within the limited quota. Instead, it operates in the form of a store, relying on the replacement points of money and various resources.

There are many highly professional pharmacy shops here, as well as very formal weapon shops and cold weapon workshops, all of which provide customization and modification services. However, customized and modified weapons cannot be brought to your dormitory. They need to be recorded in the training ground. In addition to being used in the corresponding training ground, you can only spend some money to store them in an institution or organization that helps temporarily store items. The store is in.

What Cassia asked Sicia to buy were all common items, such as medical cotton cloth and hemostatic agents. Paper and pens were also on the purchase list. As for books, as early as the first day, the two of them had been to Thorn Bird's library and borrowed a lot of professional books.

We passed many weapons shops on the way, and business ushered in the first peak season of winter. The tasks after the adaptation period are the most important thing for every new member. Although Thornbird will provide many types of standard weapons, they can be compared with customized and modified weapons. The quality and stability, and the feel that many people like, etc. , all fall behind a certain gap.

There was a long queue in the waiting area, and various makeshift promotional posters were hung around the building. There are even many shop assistants standing by the shop. When they see the members passing by, they will come up to promote it and explain what discounts are available for customization and modification in the past few days.

Such stores will also sell finished weapons and high-quality ammunition, and their quality must be unquestionable. After all, they must be supervised by the Thorny Bird Training Ground, and they will not and dare not make shoddy products.

After passing these stores, Cassia asked Sicia to ask for an introduction to each store to briefly understand the situation.

In the introduction materials, there are some eye-catching test data behind each product. Through the data, it can be judged that their quality indeed exceeds Cassia's usual judgment standard-the specifications of imperial standard weapons.

Various types of pistols, muskets, rapid-fire machine guns, light and heavy sniper firearms, reinforced steel-cased bombs, etc., and even heavy machine guns and individual combat artillery, are all included in the product catalog. Cassia also saw a triple-barreled machine gun, so much so that at the end of the introduction materials of several stores, weapons corresponding to the machine gun with a caliber of more than 20 mm were listed, as well as armored vehicles covered with a layer of ordinary limo skin. !

Regardless of the money and resource exchange points used to purchase them, Cassia had a feeling that she didn't know how to describe by selling these things directly to members of the training ground. I don’t know if this is because the training ground really wants to provide the best and highest quality equipment for the students, or if they treat the students as consumers in another sense.

In addition, combat uniforms and auxiliary items with various functions, such as clothes with automatic mimicry functions or stimulant drugs, are also common products. In addition to standard finished products, cold weapons also have eye-catching tactical knives and other items that merchants focus on introducing.

But Cassia regarded it as a bad idea. In Cassia's eyes, tactical knives with other colors besides black or gray are all manifestations of fear that the enemy's eyesight is poor and they cannot capture their trajectory well. There are also things worthy of praise. In addition to the rich styles, the cutting angle and materials can also touch the lowest level of a group of mechanics in the dark world.

These shops have their own or hired mechanics, but if they need to make corresponding items, money is one thing and time is another.

"Do we need it?" On the way back to the dormitory, Xixia asked while flipping through it, her eyes always shining.

Cassia could feel Sisia's excitement. After all, as someone who doesn't understand art paintings, when he saw the various customized and modified weapons in the introduction materials, he couldn't help but think that apart from being used in combat, there was no problem with them being used as collections for the rich.

High quality beauty indeed!

"Needed, but not considered now." The introduction materials include revolvers with calibers ranging from ten millimeters to sixteen millimeters, with different specifications and styles, and corresponding accessories and ammunition are provided. Cassia's heart was not moved, but when she saw the familiar weapons, she could feel that she in the spiritual world suddenly regained her sense of reality.

As long as the workmanship and ammunition quality meet the requirements, Cassia can completely use the revolver as a sniper rifle. It has both accuracy and great power, so it will definitely be his first choice. His understanding of the help and impact of weapons and equipment on combat must be much better than that of Xixia.

The preparation for the experiment does not end with these items. The preparation of information actually started a long time ago. Cassia has repeatedly confirmed it in recent days. Among them was Cassia's idea of ​​​​analyzing the Flame Alliance's sacrificial ritual.

From the Southern Forest incident to this point, the span of more than two years is no longer something that Cassia needs to regret. But the details of the intermediate process were what he had always wanted to analyze clearly.

Cassia believes that the sacrificial ceremony is an important preparation for the Flame Alliance for the coming of the six red stars. In addition, he was also afraid that his current state would be another whirlpool that he did not understand yet. Will other things be involved, especially the new World Tree?

According to Sisia's description of the process of the sacrificial ceremony, Cassia got a lot of information. But not many of them can be sorted out into usable clues. It has to be said that as a large country's preparations, its confidentiality methods are not perfect and there are no loopholes to follow, but it does not matter if it persists for several years and waits until the information gradually loses value over time.

"Before the ceremony started, everyone took the airship. Looking back now, there was definitely a large amount of anesthetics in the air circulation system, which made everyone involved unconscious. Afterwards, I asked other participants and the situation was basically the same. ." Sisia said what she thought was the key point.

When he returned after the ceremony, the situation was not much different from before the ceremony began. After waking up, he was on the airship and in his own room, as if he had never left at all, or had never left in the first place.

The information Cassia got from it can only be that some prerequisites are needed for the sacrificial ritual to be carried out. And a huge field is one of them. And this place should be fixed and you need to go there by yourself and cannot move. Likewise, one of the conditions is that it is very large and can accommodate several airships to enter directly.

Cassia thought it would be inside the mountain or a huge cavity structure under the ground. As for its specific location, the vast ancient forest in the southern forest has always been his first consideration.

In addition, Cassia also forced Sicia to keep recalling the detailed process of the ceremony. However, the information extracted from Xicia's several answers is roughly the same. There is nothing that can be called a clue. We can only know what kind of process it is.

From the beginning, Cassia believed that the so-called sacrificial ritual was actually the use of some method to stimulate the reappearance of dreams like during surgery. This is similar to the way he knows to become a Stranger in the Flame Alliance - relying on second-type creatures, or powerful second-type creatures, for unconscious spiritual promotion and transformation, rather than the Empire's Artificial surgery.

Starting from this idea, Cassia, who had experienced several dreams and visions, discovered something after thinking carefully.

The essence of sacrificial rituals is probably to come into contact with the spiritual world of something. Sisia said that one or two years before the ceremony started, they started corresponding training, and were also forced to eat some unknown fruits. It is said to increase affinity, or something else.

At first, Cassia's suspicion was the new World Tree. But as his thinking continued, he realized that the will of the new world tree might have many limitations, and it could not perform such a ceremony where the news would spread.

And after analyzing the situation dictated by Sisia, Cassia finally set her target on the World Tree in ancient history.

Because of the so-called analysis, in addition to obtaining information from Sisia, Kasia's current spiritual body is also one of the necessary information.

"My ability to survive mentally and physically must have something to do with the World Tree. But the current new World Tree is still the one that has fallen in ancient history, and I can't make a decisive judgment now."

"In addition, Sicia said that she woke up during the ceremony. But she was surrounded by a dark space without any light. She tried exploring, but there seemed to be no end, and the surroundings did not change. Until the end of the ceremony, this situation did not change. Then it ends." Treating it as the key point, talking carefully with Sicia, and repeatedly confirming it, an idea took the basic shape in Kasia's mental body.

Cassia believes that this idea is not unfounded and the possibility is very high.

"Could the dark space without light in Sicia's mouth be her spiritual world? It is precisely because there is nothing that it is dark. At the same time, because of a certain relationship, my own spiritual body came This space, then... was like a matryoshka doll. It cannot be said to be an invasion, but it should be that such a space happened to exist, so my spiritual world sensed it, so I came in here, temporarily preserved and survived—— Furthermore, my spiritual body was able to survive because the spiritual world was not completely destroyed.”