I looked at the bomb. There were four metal screws that held the top metal panel into the metal box. There was nothing else besides the wire that I could access. The hole for the wire was incredibly small, no way to see inside the metal box.

It was a tricky decision to make and a huge risk to take. I would have one chance and any risk mitigation I did had a risk of setting it off. I carefully touched the metal box, no reaction. I felt the seams at the top. They were incredibly small, like a hair width wide.

When you could purchase pre-built things from the store, you could get a lot of precision. I made a hole in the side of the cabin. After that I detached the wire from the doorknob. It wasn’t that hard, just a simple knotted loop. I was very careful not to tug on the wire in any way.

After that I stood a distance away and chucked some of the wreckage at the bomb through the hole I had made in the side of the cabin. It hit the box with a clang and no reaction. I did that two more times and still nothing.

I counted to one hundred and waited. I wasn’t about to get myself blown up by rushing and being stupid. Once I was done counting, I made my way back to the bomb. It had shifted on the floor slight, but that was it.

Unfortunately, I had no screwdriver to unscrew the top lid. I carefully grasped at the gap between the top and the sides. I slowly pulled the side panel while keeping another hand on top to keep the bomb steady. The metal bent fairly easily.

I slowly peeled back the metal side. I carefully pulled it down and got my first look inside the bomb. It was blinding to my Sense stat. The wire was tied to a crystal that was suspended over liquid that filled up the bottom of the container.

It didn’t take much effort to figure how it was set up. The metal container was set down. The liquid would be poured in. The crystal attached to the lid and tied off with the wire. The wire was then threaded through the hole to the doorknob. A simple tug would free the crystal and it would fall into the liquid.

That would probably trigger a reaction. There were no defining marks and it wasn’t something that I understood the base principles of either. The bomb Clarissa had given me was meant to work with priming and set off with a tether.

This bomb was purely mechanical in nature for the trigger mechanism. The liquid was clearly filled with energy. Probably the process to make crystal dust. The crystal was the real question. It was a point crystal, but it was deformed.

There was a hole through the center and it was donut shaped. The wire went through that hole. Probably something like Imbue Reform. The crystal was altered, making it unstable. It gets pulled into the liquid, which has a lot of energy.

It reminded me of how the crystal dust liquid glowed when I put in a lot of energy into it. Once the unstable crystal hit the liquid, they would both probably destabilize and explode. Not an annihilation effect, but a blast of energy.

I had no way to judge how big the blast radius would be. Well, that was wrong. I had seen the Ritualist’s crystals explode and several bombs. But if I had to guess, I would say at least 10 feet or 3 meters. More than enough to catch the person opening the door to the cabin.

It was quite crude. Since the liquid was probably made on the spot. The box nature would just contain the liquid. The lid was a bit clever with how the crystal was hung on the underside and could be pulled by the wire. It was very idiot proof and sturdy.

Hmm, it might even be a delayed reaction. Someone opens the door. A couple seconds go by and they enter the room. Since the wire would just yank the crystal into the liquid and then catch the hole. The box would be pulled. If someone yanked a door open quickly enough but not too hard, they might actually pin the crystal to the inside of the bomb just above the liquid.

That meant it probably activated the moment the crystal touched the liquid. I carefully picked it up and took it off the airboat and a good distance away from it. I then brought the bomb carefully back and threw it. I kicked off the ground and went backwards.

Two seconds later it exploded. Fire, noise, force, but very little smoke. About 20 feet or 6 meters was the blast radius. So quite strong. I kicked off the ground and went into the sky. Air Burst. Air Burst. I spun around, but there was no one I could spot nearby.

So much for having someone watch the bomb that had been planted or poking their head out from somewhere after it had gone off. I landed back on the ground and made my way back to the airboat.

I took a look over it carefully and considered if I could salvage anything off of it. The metal block that made the engine was massive. There was no obvious connection or hidden physical connection I could find between the engine and the controls.

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It all worked on energy manipulation. Where the bomb was a crude mechanical thing, the airboat was a masterpiece of the Almighty System. Like night and day. Trying to repurpose the engine would be impossible. My guess was that it would stop working, the moment I took the engine off.

I got off the airboat. There was nothing left for me here. I let out a long sigh. I didn’t want to deal with the headache I had now had to face. And I had to make a decision, I couldn’t just put things off.

“What now?” Bao Wang asked me.

“I am thinking. It isn’t simple,” I replied curtly. This completely messed up everything. All my plans. All those answers. Useless, gone. There was someone else out here who was targeting the Empire and they killed the Chief Diviner and didn’t capture him.

That was a big clue. Clarissa would have wanted a high value target like this. I wanted a target like this. I didn’t know anyone who didn’t. The crude bomb clearly showed that this was the result of a human and not something the Almighty System had done. I also wasn’t sold that it was the Empire.

“Nothing changes,” I finally said.

“What?” Bao Wang asked with a tinge of surprise.

“There are no more clues. If I find another bomb that is similar then I could back trace who made it, but they left over a day ago.” That was what was really killing me. If I had hurried up and didn’t get greedy for more, I could have gotten that notebook. That was life and a key component of success, timing. Timing was everything.

I had poor timing and someone had gotten ahead of me and ruined my plans. While they were on my list, I had no idea who they were. I could only wait until more information came my way.

“But we are just going to leave him?” Bao Wang asked me.

“I don’t do funerals. Now let’s get back to grinding. We can go another forty days before going to cash in the crystals.” What I wasn’t saying is that the Envoy would probably come out here and find the Chief Diviner dead and the airship wrecked.

It clearly had permanency like the carts. I didn’t want to send a message, but there was too much blood to hide. It would be better if it all disappeared now that I thought about the situation. Make the Envoy wonder where the Chief Diviner had run off to.

“Actually, I changed my mind. Everything gets melted. Acid Shot,” x50. I would also get to see how durable an airboat actually was. It hurt to watch something that could soar through the air melt away, but it was for the best.

“You had some plan with him?” I asked Bao Wang as I watched the pieces melt. After asking the question I quickly moved my hand, so I could observe him in slow motion. I could see the surprise on his face, and he tensed up.

“Just someone like me. Stuck in a bad spot, but no plans,” Bao Wang said. That was clearly a lie, but I didn’t call him on it. I had learned how airships worked and he hadn’t. They weren’t complicated, but I would take every advantage I could for when we went to the Forbidden City.

If things went to plan, he would never need to drive it at all. I could park it above the treasury and we could load it up there. As for running wild before escaping, I didn’t think that would happen. Eventually someone would clue in and send up the alarm.

It would be better to get away and not get left behind. Risking that many points was insanity if we managed to get them all.

It took four hours to melt everything since I had to wait for some of my energy to come back, but the engine block and control panel disappeared eventually. They had been quite stubborn and melted slowly. The majority of an airship would be kindling to a level 2 monster and the tougher portions could survive a few blows from a level 3. A level 4 monster would wreck the core components easily.

With the airboat and corpse gone, we began making our way back to the grind. We could stretch our supplies a bit and really rack up those points. I wanted to head back right away so I didn’t have to kill the monsters in our path once again.

That was the most annoying thing about traveling on foot, the low-level monsters that constantly kept attacking. To me the crystals were pointless with little they were worth, and the monsters were there just there to waste my time.

Bao Wang clearly was thinking things through as well. Whatever he had planned with the Chief Diviner was pointless now. Probably some information or the hope he could escape me. Bao Wang wasn’t going anywhere.

While I didn’t say he was my prisoner, he was my prisoner. He clearly was unhappy with his situation, but that was just too bad for him.

The fact that I had defeated the Envoy had most likely cemented in his mind that he couldn’t beat me and it was pointless to try. That meant his only option was betrayal. But there was no one to betray me too. Well, that wasn’t true anymore.

The Chief Diviner clearly wanted the crystals to fuel the airboat. Or the reserves might have been taken. Since the airboat had been coming from the Southwest I had assumed it was coming from the evil empire, since that was the direction of the Forbidden City.

Or they had loaded up crystal reserves in the hold, but the Envoy was burning up the crystals to travel as quickly as possible. By the Almighty System, if that was the case and they burnt almost 10 million crystals, the airboat was a point vortex just like I suspected.

Still, I would have wanted to have one regardless. It was far better than a cart. At least the float function appeared to be free. A person could sleep up in the air, safe from ground attacks. That would be a huge advantage while grinding. Also, a lot more points and supplies could be stored compared to a cart. There were also beds.

With its size, my guess it was the smallest of the possible airships. It made me wonder what the largest size airships would be like and how many points they consumed. My future self was already crying at the expenditure, I could tell.

There was also the fact that the Chief Diviner had some idea where he wanted to escape to. I doubted someone like that was planning to live in the wilderness and sneak into a city. There were third parties out there and they were causing trouble and somehow survived the evil empire.