After the Demon Eye IV left the airspace above his territory, it trailed a signal relay chain composed of ten Demon Eye IIIs.
It left one behind every 100 kilometers. Like a string of invisible beads, they relayed the high-altitude intelligence data back to the workshop.
The signal inevitably weakened slightly as the distance increased, but thanks to a redundancy check mechanism, the visual feed remained clear.
There were no surprises for the first five hundred kilometers. The desolate Black Stone Gobi stretched westward, occasionally interrupted by a few extinct volcanoes. The ground was covered in cracked rock, and thermal radiation signals were sparse, showing only scattered traces of Magical Beast activity.
A group of lizard-like Magical Beasts lay beside a geothermal fissure, resembling a pile of gray stones.
Further west, at the foot of a mine, densely packed black carapaces swarmed in and out of the entrance.
