Red River Town, Where No Grain Grows

What Chu Guang hadn't expected was that the ox was carrying quite a few good things on its back.

For example, the five "Rider" revolving rifles placed right on top.

These things had a 7mm caliber, with two simple rifling grooves inside the barrel, allowing the bullets' trajectory spread to remain basically stable within fifty meters.

Its simple spring-loaded receiver structure was especially handy. Not only was it very easy to maintain, but it was also quite reliable in combat. Even if a jam or misfire occurred, there was no need to worry—just give the cylinder a light turn and keep firing.

Remove the barrel, and it could even be used as a pistol, though its accuracy would be entirely up to fate.

Of course, what satisfied Chu Guang most was its rate of fire.

Though it was semi-automatic, as long as one pulled the trigger fast enough, firing six rounds in a short time to create suppressive fire was no problem at all!

It was quite user-friendly, one might say.

Just as Chu Guang was considering whether to pick a rifle as "compensation," his gaze suddenly fell on the burlap sacks tied to either side of the two-headed ox.

He opened one and found it stuffed full of coins.

Some of the coins were brass-colored, while others were silvery white. He had no idea what material they were made from, but they had not rusted at all. The brass-colored coins appeared slightly smaller, while the silvery-white ones were a bit larger. Their denominations were marked 1 and 10 respectively.

"Pre-war currency? No..."

Picking up a coin, Chu Guang turned it over and quickly recognized the small line of Union language printed on the reverse—

Milky Way Arcade

Well, damn.

They were actually arcade tokens.

"Where did you get these?"

Tossing the coin back into the sack, Chu Guang looked the merchant surnamed Sun up and down and asked, noting the nervous expression on his face.

Hearing Chu Guang's question, Sun Shiqi answered honestly.

"I found these coins in the basement of an arcade. I figured they could be smelted down for some copper and steel, so I brought them along."

Most caravans rarely stopped to scavenge. Usually, they traded with local scavengers instead. It benefited both sides and avoided potential conflicts.

But nothing was absolute. Just as impoverished mercenaries occasionally moonlighted as raiders and robbed homes, merchants short on funds would naturally take risks and scavenge for themselves.

Like the merchant before him—he clearly had not been in this business long. For all Chu Guang knew, he had only recently scraped together enough money to buy the two-headed ox behind him.

"Are there more?" Chu Guang asked.

Sun Shiqi froze for a moment, then nodded instinctively.

"There seem to be two more cabinets' worth... enough to fill another four or five sacks like these."

"Good. I'll take them all."

Chu Guang removed the two sacks from the ox's back and looked at Sun Shiqi.

"Consider these two sacks and the coins inside compensation for us. When you come here next time, remember to bring all the remaining coins. Let me think... for every hundred kilograms of coins, I'll give you four kilograms of dried meat. How does that sound?"

A hundred kilograms was roughly one sack's worth, amounting to around thirty to forty thousand coins.

Business was about long-term profit. Chu Guang did not want to gouge him too badly, so he only took these two sacks. It just so happened that he had a use for them as well.

Besides...

Since he intended to let this man go, Chu Guang did not want to make his demand for weapons seem too obvious.

Apparently not expecting the man before him to be interested in such junk, Sun Shiqi's face was full of delight. Still, he did not dare show it too clearly and hurriedly nodded.

"No problem! As long as you need them, I'll definitely bring them all next time!"

He did not care what the man before him wanted those coins for. Maybe sentimentality? Maybe some other reason? These old Popsicles were hard to figure out in the first place.

He had originally planned to haul these coins to Boulder City and sell them as copper and steel, but they would not fetch many chips anyway.

If they could open up a shelter's market for him, there was no way this deal could be a loss!

And lightening his load in advance would make the rest of his journey easier as well.

Aside from the two sacks of coins, Chu Guang also kept the five revolving rifles he had picked out earlier and bought the two hundred 7mm rounds Sun Shiqi was carrying.

In exchange, he provided the merchant who had come from afar with a total of fifty kilograms of smoked meat and ten kilograms of smoked fish.

Though their first encounter had involved many misunderstandings, overall, the result left both sides quite satisfied.

Chu Guang obtained what he wanted, while the merchant surnamed Sun received the trading rights and food he needed.

Survivors living in Clear Spring City found it hard to imagine the situation in Red River Town. Though the two places were less than a hundred kilometers apart, the ecological environment there was entirely different.

According to Merchant Sun himself, there was a large-scale chemical industry complex and a landfill in the area.

Since no one had maintained those facilities after the war, their stockpiles had leaked, causing severe soil pollution. Heavy metal levels were especially excessive, and widespread desertification and soil compaction had still not been completely repaired by nature even now.

More than that, due to the fragile ecosystem, the local mutants consisted mainly of scavengers and arthropods.

This extreme situation meant that the local survivors had almost no arable land they could use, and it was difficult for them to sustain themselves through hunting.

Yet interestingly, the landfill—which had been protested by locals more than once before the war—had become the greatest source of wealth for local survivors in the two centuries since the nuclear war ended.

It contained nearly half a century's worth of garbage, and much of it had never been processed for degradation in time.

In the present-day wasteland era, the garbage buried there had formed "unnatural mineral deposits" in another sense, fueling the prosperity of local mining, archaeology, and trade.

"But what do you eat?" After hearing Sun Shiqi's description, Chu Guang could not help asking, "Do you rely entirely on imports?"

Wouldn't food prices soar through the roof?!

"Of course not entirely on imports. We don't have reindeer or hyenas, but plenty of mutated moles and rats are edible too. Besides that, we catch some less dangerous insects and turn them into protein extract to feed livestock, or make them into something like nutritional paste... like this stuff."

As he spoke, Sun Shiqi took out a sealed glass jar from the pack slung over the two-headed ox's back. It contained a pitch-black gelatinous substance.

It looked a little like herbal jelly.

Chu Guang had seen the stuff earlier while rummaging through the packs, but he had not understood what it was for and had ignored it.

He had not expected it to be food.

"What's this made of?"

Sun Shiqi grinned.

"Mutated cockroaches."

Chu Guang: "..."

Damn!

He felt that he would never be able to look at herbal jelly the same way again.

"Though it's protein and fat extracted from mutated cockroaches, after repeated steps like boiling, filtering, drying, grinding, soaking, and reducing, it actually has almost nothing to do with cockroaches anymore. It's packed with protein... Want some?"

Chu Guang replied with a straight face.

"No need."

He would rather starve to death than eat that stuff.

Still...

From the sound of it, the cost of this food seemed rather low?

Mutated cockroaches were common anywhere, and the cockroaches around Clear Spring City surely contained far less heavy metal than those in Red River Town.

If necessary, using this nutritional paste as emergency rations for the players seemed like a pretty good option too?

Chu Guang spent a long time pondering whether he ought to be a decent human being.

But just then, he suddenly thought of something else.

"Sounds like you know a lot about insects?"

Sun Shiqi immediately nodded.

"Of course. We deal with those things every day."

Chu Guang pressed on.

"Then do you have any way to deal with leeches?"

"Leeches?" Sun Shiqi paused. "You mean... those mutated leeches?"

"Mm."

Seeing Chu Guang nod, Sun Shiqi thought for a moment, his expression becoming somewhat troubled.

"Those things... are pretty rare in Red River Town. Maybe because we have more ants over there."

Chu Guang frowned.

"Ants?"

Sun Shiqi nodded and continued.

"Yeah. We have a mutant species called Ironback Ants. They're about as big as a thumb, and the largest can grow as big as a fist. Their shells are tough, they resist corrosion, and they'll eat almost anything. Most soft-bodied creatures are no match for them."

Chu Guang asked, "Could you bring me a few to look at next time?"

Sun Shiqi said with a smile, "No problem! Leave it to me!"

After completing the trade, the merchant named Sun did not stay long. Instead, he chose to continue on his way.

Chu Guang did not try to keep him. He merely warned him about the mutant camp near 76th Street and signs of raider activity north of Wetland Park, then wished him a safe journey.

The two-headed ox gradually disappeared into the woods.

The players who watched him leave were all talking among themselves.

"That guy really was a merchant!"

"Damn, good thing we didn't smash him."

"Would it really have mattered if we did? We could've kept all his stuff too."

"That's true, but what if merchants stop respawning once they die?"

"It's unlikely they'd stop respawning after death, but Winter Is Coming's expansion might really only have this one merchant. And didn't the devs say that Wasteland OL was supposed to create an economic system that fully reflected supply and demand? If that isn't just empty hype, then playing the long game is the right answer!"

"...That actually made some sense."

Ignoring the players' chatter, Chu Guang's mind was entirely focused on those two sacks of game coins.

He had a bold idea.

If plastic chips could serve as a general equivalent, why couldn't metal currency?

There were at least sixty or seventy thousand coins in those two sacks, and before long, that merchant surnamed Sun would be able to get him another huge batch.

For a population of fewer than five hundred, these coins would be more than enough!

The brass-colored coins would serve as copper coins, while the silver-white ones would serve as silver coins, at an exchange rate of ten to one.

As for the original Contribution Points, they would be folded into a new Honor system, which could be used to purchase identities, titles, and even private land.

At the same time, the mercenary, caravan, guild, and legion systems to be introduced in the future would also be tied to Contribution Points. Only players with sufficient contributions would be qualified to lead other players.

This would not only strengthen management, but also greatly restrict those players who liked stirring up trouble.

After all, the more valuable a player's account was, the more they would cherish their hard-won right to play the game. They would also be more inclined to put in more grinding and voluntarily maintain order within the game.

Causing trouble was fun.

And that was human nature.

Dragging two sacks weighing nearly a hundred kilograms each back to the shelter by himself, Chu Guang found an empty room without any activated cultivation pods and set the sacks down in a corner against the wall.

Then he returned to the residents' hall, switched on the computer, logged into the official website's backend, and began drafting a title.

Wasteland OL Closed Beta Alpha 0.3 Update Notice: Major Economic System Adjustments!

As he typed out that line, Chu Guang opened his document.

He had copied down quite a few brilliant ideas from the forums earlier.

Now was the perfect time to use them...