Talent Carved into Their Bones

The construction site on the old sanatorium grounds.

Dust billowed everywhere, hammering rang without pause, and unloading clanged and crashed amid a scene of feverish activity.

The players seemed to possess endless strength and enthusiasm. They pushed carts scavenged from abandoned construction sites, hauling load after load of gravel to the cement kiln, crushing it with hammers, then pouring it into the kiln to be fired into crude cement.

Players crouched nearby worked the bellows with all their might, trying to make the fire inside burn hotter. Not far away, the charcoal kiln ran nonstop, and farther still were earthen kilns for smoking meat and racks for smoking fish. The rising smoke and clamor had even driven the birds from the trees.

Working together, the players poured the fired cement into sand and water, mixing it into thick cement slurry. Before long, they had laid the foundation for the first section of wall.

Wisps of blue smoke connected into one continuous haze.

The place resembled a newborn tribe, young and brimming with vitality.

After handing the construction site over to Spare Me, who had a civil engineering background, Old White and Fang Chang had begun researching "primitive steelmaking."

Meanwhile, Gale had improved the fish traps. Using mutant leech larvae as bait, catching a dozen or so fish a day was no problem. Whatever they could not finish eating was handed to Brother Scrambled Eggs to be made into dried fish.

The lake's aquatic life was even more abundant than he had imagined.

The only thing to watch out for was not putting too much bait in the traps or setting them too deep. Otherwise, the large fish they attracted could easily wreck the traps.

But those were minor issues.

Once they got the hang of it, they would gradually become proficient, and the process itself was full of fun.

The new players were the same.

They did not even need to deliberately seek anything out. Everything here was so novel to them, something they could hardly experience in modern society.

Many people sat in offices all day, repeating work that anyone could replace day after day, losing themselves amid trivial matters.

But this place was different.

That difference did not merely come from momentary novelty. It came from the satisfaction of realizing one's own worth.

A civil engineering grunt who had worked construction for five or six years without ever making management only had to shout, "I'm an engineer," here to be immediately treated as a big shot by the other players and entrusted with important tasks.

There were also workers who mixed cement and plastered walls on construction sites.

Most players were ordinary people. Their real-world jobs might not have been particularly eye-catching, but here, as long as they had a skill, even one that was not outstanding, they could earn the collective's recognition.

And thanks to every one of their efforts, the shelter's surface outpost was improving at a visible rate.

In Maslow's hierarchy of needs, this was the highest-level need. It transcended all base pleasures, and the spiritual joy it brought was incomparable to any other pleasure.

Most importantly, obtaining it did not require paying a great price. Even if their muscles ached from exhaustion, it was their in-game characters who were tired, and it would not affect their lives the next day.

On the contrary, going to bed early would leave them even more energetic the following day.

All of this was merely Chu Guang's wild speculation after returning to the outpost with his spoils and seeing the players working with such fervor.

Of course, he could not possibly know what the players were thinking.

To an Administrator, that sort of thing was neither important nor worth caring about.

As long as the number of reservations remained higher than the number of players on the list, there was no need to worry about a shortage of fresh little chives coming in to sweat.

Quit the game?

AFK?

As he had said before, please give your helmet and account to someone who needed them, and try a more primitive way of gaming.

Back to the point.

The haul from this outing was quite gratifying.

Two 5mm iron pipe rifles, sixty-two rounds of 5mm ammunition, and three backpacks they had not had time to search.

They had found all of it on the two raiders and the unlucky man they had chased to death.

Chu Guang was not someone who liked to waste things. That included the mutant hyena shot in the neck; he had brought it back too.

Taming did not affect its taste. In any case, to Chu Guang, they were all mutants.

After tossing the mutant hyena to Brother Scrambled Eggs, who was acting as the cook, Chu Guang began searching through the scavenged backpacks with Ye Shi and Garbage Lord.

"Matches, a compass, a map, and... a few pieces of jerky? Some plastic chips too? What's written on these things?"

Hearing Ye Shi mutter, Garbage Lord, whose claws were not very nimble, came over as well and pinched one up for a curious closer look.

"They kind of look like casino chips."

"Give me the plastic chips. I can use them."

Without changing expression, Chu Guang confiscated the twenty-odd white "plastic chips." They were useless to the players anyway.

Then he looked at the jerky Ye Shi was holding.

"...Forget about that jerky. I wouldn't recommend eating it."

Ye Shi, who had been about to take a bite, froze.

"Why?"

Chu Guang thought for a moment and put it tactfully.

"Raiders usually aren't very picky about what they eat. You have no way of knowing what kind of meat that is."

Garbage Lord had not caught on yet, but Ye Shi beside him had already thrown away the jerky and started gagging.

Even in a game, there were some settings he could not accept.

Seeing Ye Shi's reaction, Chu Guang suddenly became curious about what these players thought, so he turned to Garbage Lord and asked.

"What did killing someone feel like?"

Garbage Lord froze for a moment and scratched his head.

"I didn't notice..."

What was there to feel in a game? It was not as though he had never played bloodier games.

If anything, this game's blood effects were not particularly exaggerated, so he had barely noticed at the time.

But...

When he charged forward and drove his javelin into the last raider's chest, blood splashing over him, he had suddenly felt a craving to eat.

Like a biological instinct.

Chu Guang looked at this "lizardman" with some surprise. He had not expected this player to have such good psychological resilience.

Had the dream weakened the sensation of death?

Or did the players view this world through some kind of filter he did not understand?

He did not know.

After all, Chu Guang had not designed this device. He had never used the players' helmets, either, and had no idea whether the world they saw was exactly the same as the one he saw.

It seemed he would need to talk to the players more often in his role as a developer...

By five in the afternoon, the northern wall of the sanatorium had basically been repaired.

It had to be said, these players were practically geniuses.

Chu Guang even felt that he, the NPC, was unnecessary.

Some talents were not written on the attribute panel, but carved into their bones. Give them a patch of land, and by tomorrow they could turn it into a field.

Even if the server reset and the world ended tomorrow, they could rebuild this place brick by brick.

The treasures at the construction site were not just those bluish-gray stones, but also the mountain-like piles of cement blocks wrapped in burlap sacks.

Those things were too heavy for ordinary survivors to carry away, and they had no use for them anyway. Thus, they had remained untouched since the beginning of the nuclear war.

Although the cement had long since hardened and could no longer be mixed with sand to pour foundations, a change in perspective made it perfect for directly stacking into wall bricks.

At the very least, it was far more reliable than the pile of yellow mud bricks Old White had fired!

Under Spare Me's leadership, the players drove pine logs sawn into four- or five-meter lengths into the ground, piled cement blocks brought from the construction site between them, inserted rebar stolen from the site to secure them, and finally poured mixed calcium carbonate cement over everything.

Once the cement dried, a simple yet reliable concrete fortification was complete.

As for the inside of the wall, they used cement blocks and concrete debris to build a slope.

If they came under attack, the players inside the wall only needed to lie prone on the slope to use the cover and return fire against the attackers.

Considering that the outpost would expand further in the future, they could build another defensive fortification outside the stronghold, supplemented by sentry posts and watchtowers for vigilance.

"...The terrain throughout Wetland Park is relatively flat, and the sanatorium is surrounded by forested plains. There aren't any steep slopes that can serve as cover. I can cut down all the trees around here. That way, we'll spot anything approaching the outpost immediately!"

"Not bad, bro. What do you even do in real life?" Old White looked at the newly arrived player beside him in surprise.

He vaguely remembered the ID Spare Me, though only vaguely. He only recalled that the man had joined the group quite a while ago.

Who would have thought that such a small gaming group was hiding so many experts?

Spare Me smiled bashfully and said awkwardly.

"...I'm just a civil engineering grunt, a nobody at my company. I drink tea and read the paper all day. Barely anyone even gives me a second glance."

"No, no, you're really good! Honestly, I never thought we'd finish an entire wall today."

"You flatter me, really!"

It was already evening, and the sky was tinged with dusky yellow.

Brother Scrambled Eggs, acting as cook, set up a large pot in the open space before the sanatorium. He threw in the fish Gale had caught by the lake and made a pot of fresh fish soup with pine nuts.

The players sat directly on the ground, each with a bowl and a piece of smoked jerky. A sip of fish soup, a bite of meat—it had a unique flavor.

Of course.

Not everyone could accept that flavor.

For example, Teng Teng, sitting on the ground, was pinching her nose and staring miserably at the bowl in her hands.

"Ugh, it smells so fishy..."

Whether in the game or in real life, she was very sensitive to smells and simply could not accept such heavily flavored cooking.

Brother Scrambled Eggs, not far away, heard her and rolled his eyes.

"You think I wanted it like this? There isn't even any cooking wine here. I did my best."

His expression plainly said: eat it or don't.

"Just make do and eat it. You'll get hungry if you don't eat in this game," Ye Shi consoled her from nearby. "Why not pinch your nose and chug it? I can help."

Teng Teng scooted away.

"That won't be necessary."

Come to think of it, did NPCs need to eat too?

Teng Teng looked around and found the Administrator nearby.

However, he was not eating with the players. He only stayed for a while before hurrying off again.

When he returned, quite a few nearby players saw that his face was ashen, and he did not seem to be in a good mood.

A stir went through the players.

Noticing the situation in the distance, Old White grew curious. He set down his bowl and rose from the ground.

Walking over quickly, he grabbed Gale, who was relatively close, and asked.

"Brother, what happened?"

Gale's expression was grave as he said in a low voice.

"I heard..."

"Someone seems to have died."

Thanks to "Following Dreams" for the three Alliance Leader rewards~~~~~