Is This Lousy System of Yours for Real?
[That night, you opened the Body Tempering Instruction.] [Artisan Spirit took effect.] [The passages that had remained hazy despite more than a decade of painstaking study suddenly became clear.] [Your ability to comprehend had changed. Or rather, you had gained enlightenment!] [The meaning of every word fit precisely into your understanding, and the broken threads began to join together, one section at a time.] [You spent the entire night working through the first three chapters from beginning to end.] [You gained more insight that night than you had in the previous decade and more combined.] [You forged iron by day and studied the Body Tempering Instruction by night.] [Artisan Spirit remained in effect.] [The quality of your ironwork kept improving, and Old Zhang began letting you take jobs on your own.] [Your monthly pay rose from thirty copper coins to eighty.] [Age thirty-eight, twenty years of work experience.] [Trait generated: I Don't Want to Work (D-rank)—whatever you do, your efficiency is halved.]
No swap.
[You could recite the first three chapters of the Body Tempering Instruction backward and forward.] [You began trying to use Artisan Spirit to fill in the missing portions of the fourth chapter.] [Progress was slow, but there was progress.] [Age thirty-nine, twenty-one years of work experience.] [Trait generated: Elevator Encounter (D-rank)—you always run into the person you least want to see, such as your boss or a creditor, in an enclosed space like an elevator.]
No swap.
[Old Zhang fell gravely ill, and afterward, his health began to decline.] [You kept the entire smithy running.] [The townspeople began calling you "Blacksmith Lu."] [You brought every piece of ironwork you forged to the utmost level of quality.] [Age forty, twenty-two years of work experience.] [Trait generated: Lunch Break (D-rank)—you can rest for half an hour each noon to recover your strength.]
No swap.
The system lived up to expectations, reliably producing D-rank traits.
Three years passed without a change to his core combination.
Salty Fish (S-rank), Artisan Spirit (Grade A), and Fall Guy (C-rank).
An iron triangle.
[Age forty-one, twenty-three years of work experience.] [Generating trait...] [Congratulations! Trait obtained: Cost Reduction and Efficiency Improvement (Grade A)—whatever you do, you can greatly reduce the cost of resources consumed while multiplying the final effect and success rate.]
Lu Ping's heart skipped a beat.
Another Grade A!
Cost Reduction and Efficiency Improvement.
Right now, all Lu Ping had was an incomplete manual, an iron hammer, and a body worn down by more than twenty years of labor.
This trait could not only greatly reduce resource consumption, but also multiply the effect and success rate.
Wasn't the reason poor people found it so hard to rise above their station that they had no chance to learn through trial and error?
One wrong step meant eternal damnation!
This trait directly reduced the risk of trial and error, as well as the cost of investment.
Both of those addressed his greatest shortcoming.
So which one should he swap out?
Artisan Spirit was out of the question.
Without it, work on completing the Body Tempering Instruction would grind to a halt.
Salty Fish was even more indispensable.
It was Lu Ping's mental firewall.
For more than twenty years, whenever he had faced that lousy book alone late at night and wanted to give up, the Salty Fish trait had been there to catch him.
Fall Guy.
Lu Ping looked at the trait.
Fall Guy had been welded to him since he started working in the kitchen at nineteen.
Eighteen years of taking the blame had indeed strengthened his physique considerably.
But now he was at the smithy, and Old Zhang didn't pass the blame. Fall Guy's negative effect had been greatly reduced, and its positive benefits had mostly stalled as well.
Swap.
[Fall Guy unequipped. Cost Reduction and Efficiency Improvement equipped.] [Currently equipped: Salty Fish (S-rank) / Artisan Spirit (Grade A) / Cost Reduction and Efficiency Improvement (Grade A).]
The three traits were arrayed against a white background.
Lu Ping looked them over.
Salty Fish kept his mindset rock steady.
Artisan Spirit brought his work to the utmost level of quality.
Cost Reduction and Efficiency Improvement got the most done for the least money.
Besides, Artisan Spirit seemed capable of counteracting Salty Fish's negative effect.
Nice!
Unfortunately, the lousy system wasn't smart enough and gave no explanation.
If Lu Ping had possessed these three traits in his previous life, he could at least have made it into middle management.
[Cost Reduction and Efficiency Improvement took effect immediately.] [You discovered that many high-grade materials could be replaced with the cheapest materials in the smithy.] [Using a special forging process on pig iron and quenching it in a liquid made from wild herbs that could be dug up by the roadside, you forged a dagger that was actually sharper than a top-grade dagger.] [Cost: two hundred copper coins.] [Effect: far surpassed that of a dagger with a market price of two taels of silver.]
Lu Ping was dumbfounded when he saw that passage.
A cost of two hundred copper coins for an effect worth two thousand.
Ten times the cost-effectiveness.
Moreover, product performance had a boundary effect.
Once performance reached that boundary, a one-percent improvement could raise the selling price by ten percent, twenty percent, or even fifty percent.
When he had been a corporate slave in his previous life, his boss had shouted about cost reduction and efficiency improvement every day until calluses had practically grown on his ears.
He hadn't expected that, after transmigrating, cost reduction and efficiency improvement would actually become his core competitive advantage.
[Age forty-two trait: Overtime to Sudden Death (D-rank)—after working overtime for a long period, there is a chance of sudden death.]
No swap.
[Age forty-three trait: Read Without Replying (D-rank)—you can selectively ignore any information.]
No swap.
[Age forty-four trait: Free Snacks (D-rank)—you can obtain a small amount of snacks each day.]
No swap.
The D-rank traits kept coming at a steady rate.
[Age forty-five trait: Friend of Women (Grade A)—the older sisters, sisters-in-law, aunties, and older ladies at your workplace will all have a higher opinion of you. Of course, whether that means romantic feelings is another matter. (Friend of Women has a greatly enhanced effect on emotionally unstable women.)]
Lu Ping paused when he saw Friend of Women.
Is this lousy system of yours for real?
Besides, how was this trait Grade A?
Lu Ping chose not to swap.
[You chose not to swap.] [Every day, you forged iron for four double-hours and cultivated for four double-hours.] [Artisan Spirit deepened your understanding of the Body Tempering Instruction.] [Cost Reduction and Efficiency Improvement let you toughen your body with the cheapest medicinal herbs.] [Your body was tougher than it had been at twenty.] [The paper window separating you from drawing Qi into your body was growing thinner and thinner.] [You could feel a faint force between heaven and earth brushing almost imperceptibly against your skin as you breathed. You couldn't grasp it, but you knew it was there.] [Age forty-six, twenty-eight years of work experience.] [Old Zhang died.] [That rough man who went bare-chested, had a booming voice and a violent temper, and would shove a bowl of food at you after cursing you out.] [The man who had still been willing to take you in, in this dog-eat-dog world.] [The smithy was inherited by Old Zhang's nephew, Zhang Xiaoliu.] [The gambler Zhang Xiaoliu owed the local strongman "Zhou Mazi" three hundred taels of silver.] [On the second day after inheriting the smithy, Zhang Xiaoliu took more than half the valuables in the shop to the gambling den to pay off his debt.] [On the third day, Zhou Mazi's men came knocking.] [One of Zhou Mazi's underlings stood at the entrance to the smithy. He was a burly bald man with a string of copper coins around his neck and a grass stem in his mouth. He looked at you no differently than he would look at a beast.] ["What Zhang Xiaoliu owes, the shop isn't enough to cover it. The people in the shop have to be thrown in too."] [Zhang Xiaoliu cowered behind the counter, his face pale and ashen, not daring to utter a word.] [The burly bald man walked toward you.] [You had no household registration; you were an unregistered resident.] [This was the secular world, and being unregistered meant you were in danger of becoming a slave again.] [Twenty-seven years had passed. From the Black Tiger Gang's mine to this smithy, you had spent twenty-seven years going in a circle, only to return to where you started.] [Options appeared.] [A: Pack up and flee under cover of night, taking the Body Tempering Instruction and the meager savings you had accumulated over the years, and resume your wandering.] [B: Use the Cost Reduction and Efficiency Improvement trait to forge a batch of fine ironware at an extremely low cost, sell it directly to Zhou Mazi, and use the profits to pay off Zhang Xiaoliu's debt and save the smithy.] [C: Go gambling with Zhang Xiaoliu. If you win, you'll turn things around; if you lose, you'll both be sold.]