Listening to Aunt Tell Stories from Her Childhood (Asking for Monthly Tickets!)

Listening to Aunt Tell Stories from Her Childhood (Asking for Monthly Tickets!) Song Mingqian's eyes lit up. He hurriedly said, "Stop here! It looks like a camping site! This is a great spot!"

Xia Chujian: "..."

She gave Song Mingqian a curious look. "...What's camping?"

"You don't even know what camping is?! It's when a family brings tents and food, goes hiking and trekking, then finds a designated campsite to stay at and has a barbecue or something..."

Song Mingqian swallowed with a loud gulp.

Xia Chujian shrugged. "I don't get it. My family was poor. We could never afford something that extravagant."

"How is camping extravagant?!" Song Mingqian protested, only to be restrained from both sides by Li Fu and Ping Qiong.

Li Fu covered his mouth while Ping Qiong viciously twisted his thigh.

Among their squad, Xia Chujian's family had been in the worst circumstances, and they now understood why.

Wasn't Song Mingqian's remark rubbing salt in Xia Chujian's wounds?

Who talked like that? Only then did Song Mingqian come back to his senses. He made a couple of muffled, embarrassed noises and nodded frantically at Li Fu to show that he understood.

Li Fu slowly released him.

Song Mingqian awkwardly tried to make up for it. "...Well, camping is just poor people messing around. It has fuck-all to do with luxury!"

"We just find some random cave in the mountains and hunt some game for fun, that's all."

Xia Chujian burst out laughing and called him by his nickname. "All right, Song Mingqian, I was just teasing you... I do know what camping is."

She recalled how, before bed when she was little, her aunt—the only family she had to depend on—would tell her all sorts of strange and unusual stories.

Back then, aunt and niece had truly been poor, so poor that they could only afford two meals a day, breakfast and lunch.

They ate nothing for dinner, drank some water, and went to sleep.

Little Xia Chujian remembered how her growling stomach had made her so uncomfortable that she couldn't sleep, so her aunt would tell her strange stories.

For example, there was a story called "Three Golden Needles," about a spirited young man named Yang Guo who made reckless promises to a little girl named Guo Xiang, gave her three golden needles as a birthday gift, and utterly bewitched her.

Xia Chujian did not like those kinds of stories. What she liked most was hearing her aunt talk about her own childhood.

For instance, her aunt had come from a well-off family as a child.

She would vacation with her family and go camping with them. They would bring a delicious food called "ham sausage," and they could set up a stove outside to eat "hot pot."

Little Xia Chujian had listened as though she were hearing a celestial book. The more she listened, the hungrier she became, and the more she longed for that kind of life.

After growing up, she had searched Star Net for a long time but never found out what "ham sausage" was, much less seen anything called "hot pot."

When she asked her aunt, her aunt said she did not remember...

Now, she could earn enough to support herself and her aunt, and she even had the huge sum of Five Hundred Thousand Beichen Coin in her account.

They were no longer living as they had in her childhood, when they never knew where the next meal would come from and aunt and niece could only huddle together for warmth in winter.

Yet she would rather trade all of it for the healthy aunt who could gently tell her stories.

Even if that meant they could only eat two meals a day from then on, and could only curl up beneath a thin blanket, shivering through winter.

Xia Chujian took a deep breath and forced down the pain in her heart. Turning toward Song Mingqian in the back seat, she winked and said with a smile, "I was just teasing you! You actually took it seriously, Song Mingqian!"

Song Mingqian let out a strange cry. "You little brat, Little Chujian! You set me up!"

He ground his teeth and looked as if he were about to leap up and hit someone, making everyone roar with laughter.

Li Fu laughed so hard he nearly broke free of his seat belt.

Ping Qiong quickly grabbed Song Mingqian as well, lest he actually hit Xia Chujian.

Ye Shijie sat beside them with his arms folded and his eyes closed, apparently resting. He seemed not to have heard a thing, but the faint upward curl of his lips showed that he was not as detached as he appeared.

Amid the laughter and cheerful chatter in the Flying Vehicle, Xia Chujian steadily brought it to a stop in an open space beside the lake.

Dense evergreen trees stood on either side. She had no idea what kind of trees they were, but they remained green all year even in such bitter weather.

They were now covered in snow, their strange and unique forms resembling miniature landscapes carved from white jade and emerald.

The trees were so dense that only a thin layer of snow lay beneath them, along with a few sparse, yellowed blades of dead grass.

The group remained inside the Flying Vehicle, turning on its built-in lighting system and activating the automatic scanning system. It scanned the area within a ten-li radius, then fed the data into the Flying Vehicle's Super Optical Brain System to create a model.

After adjusting the automatic scanning system, Xia Chujian said regretfully, "What a pity. The magnetic field here is too strong. We can't connect to Star Net."

As its name implied, Star Net operated through Satellites. It was not limited to Guiyuan Star alone; it connected the entire Star Domain of the Beichen Empire.

Unless there was Magnetic Interference.

There was nothing they could do about that.

Their Flying Vehicle was from a combat series, so this possibility had been considered long ago. It had a Supercomputer System installed as a local host.

If they could not connect to Star Net, they could use it directly as a host.

"Everyone, give it a try. See whether you can connect your Smart Bracelets to the Flying Vehicle's Super Optical Brain System and set up a local area network." Ye Shijie was the first to begin adjusting his Smart Bracelet.

He had a Quantum Optical Brain, and so did the others. Only Xia Chujian did not, so everyone in the squad tacitly avoided mentioning Quantum Optical Brains and used Smart Bracelets to contact one another instead.

Li Fu, Song Mingqian, Ping Qiong, and Xia Chujian all began adjusting their Smart Bracelets.

They soon discovered that even connecting to the local computer from inside the Flying Vehicle was unstable.

"Don't bother. It doesn't look promising." Song Mingqian clicked his tongue. "The magnetic field here is really strong."

"Our Flying Vehicle's exterior already has a coating to prevent Magnetic Interference. With Small-Scale Controlled Nuclear Fusion powering it, there's no way the quality grade of that coating could be low."

"But look—we haven't even gone outside, and our Smart Bracelet connections only have one bar."

"Once we leave the Flying Vehicle, whether we can connect at all will be entirely up to luck."

Xia Chujian found that it was indeed true.

A Smart Bracelet's connection was divided into ten bars.

Ten bars meant full signal strength, the highest-grade connection.

One bar was the lowest-grade connection—the classic case of being connected, but not really connected.

Whether they could contact one another really would depend on luck.

Xia Chujian stopped fiddling with it.

She began using the Virtual Display Screen in front of her to observe the surroundings.

The open space they had selected was a suitable size, roughly one mu in area. Three sides were enclosed by tall trees, while the fourth faced the lake. It was quiet and well hidden.

The Flying Vehicle was parked near the lakeshore.

From up close, the lake water was a clear jade-green, with only tiny fragments of ice drifting across its surface.

Given that the temperature here was minus eighty degrees, there had to be something beneath the lake. Otherwise, it would not have remained unfrozen.

In the center of the clearing stood a ruggedly styled Small Wooden House.

It was a literal, genuine Small Wooden House.

Its outer walls were made from unevenly cut pieces of wood nailed together every which way. Those irregular shapes would be enough to drive anyone with obsessive-compulsive tendencies insane.

The wood blocks had clearly been there for many years. On the high-definition Virtual Display Screen, they showed an aged reddish-brown color and a natural luster, as if they had been varnished—or like jade that had developed a patina from being handled over time.

Xia Chujian murmured to herself, "This wooden house really has some history. Could it be an antique?"

"Huh? No way, right? According to Imperial law, all mineral deposits and ownerless cultural relics within the Beichen Empire's Star Domain belong to the Empire, and the Imperial Family gets thirty percent..." Song Mingqian muttered, but he could not wait to be the first to open the Flying Vehicle's translucent upper hatch and jump out.

Ping Qiong rose as well and smiled at Xia Chujian in the driver's seat up front. "Chujian, that's Song Mingqian's occupational habit. Do you know what he majored in at university?"

Xia Chujian calmly lowered the special glasses attached to her Helmet. Turning back with a smile, she said, "What major? Don't tell me it was a major in making money like crazy? Cai Jie, do you know?"

"If there were such a major, I'd fight tooth and nail to enroll!" Ping Qiong proudly puffed out her chest. "Let me tell you, Song Mingqian studied archaeological appraisal in university!"

"That's quite prestigious..." Xia Chujian was genuinely a little surprised.

Song Mingqian, Ping Qiong, and Xia Chujian shared one hobby: they all loved money.

But Song Mingqian had actually studied the obscure field of archaeological appraisal in university.

Under Beichen Empire law, ownerless cultural relics belonged to the Empire, with the Imperial Family taking thirty percent of the profits. For some particularly special relics, the Imperial Family even had priority rights.

So, in the Beichen Empire, working in archaeology was basically working for the Imperial Family and earning some hard-earned money.

No wonder Song Mingqian had become a Hunter.

Xia Chujian had never talked about herself with her teammates before. In the interests of fairness, they had not told her about themselves either.

Only now, when she had been honest with them for the first time, had they responded with honesty of their own.

It seemed that between people, sincerity really was exchanged for sincerity.

She treasured this friendship deeply.

Li Fu rose from the back seat and said to Xia Chujian, "We'll go down first and check the surrounding area. You stay in the Flying Vehicle on guard and provide long-range support."

Xia Chujian thought for a moment. "All right. Then I'll assemble my Judicator No. 7 Sniper Rifle first."

At the thought of Xia Chujian's bullet consumption, Ye Shijie's face darkened. He said in a muffled voice, "There's basically no one in this place. At most, there are some Alien Beasts. You're a sniper—if one shot can solve it, don't fire a second."

In the end, he was just disgusted by Xia Chujian wasting ammunition.

Before Xia Chujian could speak, Li Fu chuckled, secretly gave a Thumbs Up behind his back, and slipped out of the Flying Vehicle.

A man nearly two meters tall and built as thickly as a Brown Bear was surprisingly agile! Xia Chujian smiled faintly. She dragged her gun case out from beneath her seat and opened it, then casually said to Ye Shijie while assembling it, "Ye Dui, don't worry about ammunition. Really. I requested a lot of reserves this time—two hundred thousand machine-gun rounds alone."

"Two hundred thousand rounds?!" Ye Shijie nearly lost his breath.

He clutched his chest and thumped it twice. With his other hand pointing at Xia Chujian, his expression twisted with agitation. In the end, he said nothing at all and simply turned around and jumped out.

A new month—please send Monthly Tickets! And Recommendation Tickets and Xiaoxiang Tickets too. (#^.^#)