Hel connected her consciousness to the little magister aboard the train.
The moment she stepped out of the station, her vision was filled with countless machines.
They were identical to the ones she had seen in the Desire Energy Base before — except now, they were scattered haphazardly across the ground or placed carelessly on metal racks, rather than being housed inside buildings.
When Hel turned around, she noticed that this station had only one passage — the one leading back to Biotic City.
Noticing Hel's confusion, little succubus Niv landed lightly on the small skeleton's bald head and explained:
"This city was specially built to supply energy to Biotic City. That's why there are no subway lines connecting it to other places.
In fact, there aren't many buildings here at all — or rather, the entire city is a single massive structure.
Aside from rows upon rows of racks filled with Desire Energy Extractors, there's only one other notable place: a Nutrient Reagent Synthesis Factory located in the southern part of the city.
Its main purpose is to provide the local elves with their most basic nutritional needs."
Niv led Hel forward as she explained.
After passing through a dense "steel forest" of tangled machinery, they finally arrived at the southern part of the city — the place Niv had mentioned.
Hel watched the machines at work. They produced a milky-white nutrient reagent using nothing but water and air.
Seeing this, Hel couldn't help but click her tongue in astonishment.
"I thought these nutrient reagents were made from cockroach meat or something, but they can make them from just water and air? So it's basically the real-life version of 'drinking the northwest wind.'"
"You could say that."
Niv waved her hand, and a mechanical octopus handed a bottle of the reagent to Hel.
"I heard this stuff tastes terrible — not only does it have no flavor, but its texture is awful. Eating it feels like swallowing a live slug.
So only places like the Desire Energy Factory still use it.
Even those tamed Snow Elves would revolt if you made them eat this every day."
"Is that so? Now I'm really curious what it tastes like."
Hel put the bottle into her space ring and transferred it to her main body.
Her real body popped open the bottle cap and stared at the contents inside — for a moment, she didn't even know how to start.
"Seriously… were the goblins who invented this stuff actual perverts? Just looking at it feels wrong."
"Huh? What's wrong with it?"
Niv blinked in confusion, tilting her head.
Even after all her time learning under Lily, she was still an innocent girl — she might've read about strange things, but she hadn't experienced them.
So her thoughts weren't nearly as filthy as Hel's.
"Ah, nothing."
Hel shook her head and didn't explain further. Instead, she looked thoughtfully at the reagent again.
Drawing on her knowledge of goblin technology, she quickly came up with a reasonable improvement plan.
"We could mix in some fruit juice and sugar, then dehydrate the liquid and compress it into tablets.
That way, we'd have a kind of portable field ration.
If a massive famine or war ever breaks out, I can use these to sustain the basic food supply in my territory.
Unlike here, the outside world has plenty of water resources, so mass production wouldn't be a problem."
Hel casually tossed the reagent bottle back into her storage ring and returned her consciousness to the little magister.
The nutrient production line was just a side benefit — the real prize lay with the elves.
At that moment, Niv suddenly tapped Hel's forehead and said:
"Master, Niv found something interesting in the work logs here.
That group of rebel elves from three thousand years ago — most of them have died of old age, but not all their corpses were processed."
Niv led Hel southwest, to a massive cube-shaped building.
As soon as they stepped inside, a chilling wind swept over them. Rows upon rows of elf corpses were piled up carelessly on the shelves.
"When elves die, their life essence is first extracted before the bodies are sent to the incinerators as fuel.
But the Life Essence Extractors here weren't powerful enough — and when so many elves died at once, the system couldn't keep up.
So most of the bodies were simply stored here."
"That's actually great news — a nice little surprise bonus," Hel said with a grin.
Looking at the mountain of corpses, she couldn't help feeling like she'd just stumbled across a fortune lying on the street.
Even though these bodies no longer had souls, they were still a valuable resource to her.
"Niv, how many bodies are left here?"
"About three hundred thousand first-tier corpses and over twenty thousand second-tier ones — most of them from the old rebel army."
"Good grief, that's a lot."
Hel's initial thrill of easy gain faded a little.
With such a huge number of corpses, processing them all would take a significant amount of time.
It reminded her unpleasantly of her past days of endless overtime.
"Niv, looks like we'll be staying here a few more days."
Hel sighed helplessly and summoned her main body over.
For this kind of tedious, large-scale work, it was far more efficient to use her real self.
After several days of tireless effort, Hel and Niv finally finished absorbing all the energy from the elves in the Desire Energy Factory — along with a new batch sent over from the Bioweapon Factory.
By then, every elf within Biotic City and its subordinate towns had been completely gathered up and absorbed by Hel.
The result was astounding:
— The Mechanical Elf Mother Tree bore 70 new fifth-tier fruits,— The Blood Elf Mother Tree gained 100 fifth-tier bodies ready for use.
In addition, Hel had stuffed everything salvageable from these cities into her undead space.
Her alchemical material stockpile now looked like a mountain range.
As for the elemental crystals — they formed actual hills.
Most of these were produced from the elves' remains. Even though edwina had long ceased her biological experiments and no longer needed the crystals, she had continued collecting them out of habit.
She had even converted empty residential buildings into warehouses just to store these materials.
Unfortunately for her, everything she built ended up becoming Hel's dowry.