Chapter Twenty-Three: Drink More Hot Water

He took out the workbench, and simple wooden materials appeared in the room.
[Would you like to combine?]
After the prompt sounded, a wooden barrel and a heap of charcoal appeared at his feet.
Looking at the saltpeter and sulfur in his backpack, Mu Chen’s eyes shone—at last, the long-awaited “finished product” was about to become reality.
Thanks to the workbench, the process was simplified to its bare essentials, and with helpful prompts, even so, he still had to spend some time.
He took the necessary materials from his backpack.
The long table was now covered with saltpeter and sulfur, giving off a faint, peculiar odor.
“Synthesize!”
Inside the wooden barrel, a slowly accumulating black powder took shape.
All the black powder was fine and loose; generally, if he had egg whites, he could mix them in to bind the powder and grind it into grains the size of rice.
That way, there would be gaps between the particles, allowing the flames to pass through more quickly when ignited, making the explosion even more devastating.
Mu Chen reached into the black powder, squeezing a handful, feeling a difficult-to-describe sense of harvest. The corners of his lips curled upward, and his expression radiated excitement. “This barrel weighs fifty kilograms!”

[Fifty-plus kilograms of standard black powder. Though it hasn’t been refined for extra potency, this barrel alone could send the ‘big guy’ flying sky-high.]
Narrowing his eyes, he realized he had never seen the “big guy” itself, but right now, he almost wished he could confront it directly.
Such a sense of happiness, full of promise for the days ahead, left him deeply satisfied, but he kept his thoughts to himself.
Beside him, Mu Jiu'er watched the black powder in Mu Chen’s hands, hardly able to believe he had produced the finished product so quickly.
As the others looked on in confusion, he took some gravel and ropes from his backpack. After distributing the loose stones evenly, he pressed the powder down firmly inside, then used a wooden stick to poke holes, making it resemble the structure of honeycomb coal. He covered it with a lid to seal it.
He instructed Saad to tie it up again and again, leaving only a single hole at the bottom.
This was to strengthen its explosive power.
After everything was done, he fashioned a long fuse from more black powder.
Naturally, he couldn’t very well carry the barrel in one hand and ignite it with the other—no revolutionary, not even the Cubans, had ever been so reckless.
“Let’s call it Pineapple One!”
Gazing at the powder barrel, Mu Chen pondered. Too much here remained unknown; he couldn’t afford to experiment lightly, or he might attract even more mysterious entities.
So far, he knew of two unknown creatures nearby—besides the puppet-maker (as he called it, based on the recent prompt), there was also the shadow lurking at the grain depot.

[Really? When you’ve only just learned to walk, you’re already dreaming of flying. Add one hundred kilograms of black powder, and you can’t escape its control—unless you can contain it after it goes offline.]
“……”
“Containment?”
Those two words struck Mu Chen like a thunderbolt.
The origin of the eyeball remained a mystery.
Many of its effects were still locked behind question marks, but there was no doubt it offered great help for surviving in the red mist.
He recalled how, from the moment the eyeball appeared to the time he contained it, barely five minutes had passed. If he had failed to contain it in that time, the eyeball would have revived as a new lifeform.
Was this “puppet-maker” similar to the eyeball?
Just that, having not been contained after its birth, it revived?
With a rough answer forming in his mind, Mu Chen resolved to stay well away from the food processing plant in the future…