After listening to Combrona's introduction, Hops pondered for a while, then said, "Even if the Gold Coin Federation goes to civil war, they'd only fight along the border between the north and south. Our assignment is in the region near our Republic, and out in the wilderness at that... By rights, the risk shouldn't be too great, should it?"
He truly wanted to earn that travel allowance. Since the Gold Coin Federation was seeking outside assistance, there ought to be mineral veins in the area. In other words, as long as the survey team performed normally, the allowance worth five times their salary would probably be theirs.
As major field workers, exploration workers already earned relatively high wages. Being able to receive five times their normal pay was truly a substantial income.
It was like on Earth, where surveyors generally earned high salaries too—one of Sui Xiong's childhood neighbors had studied that profession and graduated two years before him. Not long before Sui Xiong transmigrated, he had been chatting with an elder from home on the phone when they happened to mention that older brother. The man's monthly take-home pay was already six thousand, more than twice what Sui Xiong earned as a warehouse manager.
Of course, Sui Xiong did not envy that older brother, because he also had income as an illustrator. As an illustrator doing fairly well for himself, he earned far more from that job than from warehouse management. If they compared their total incomes, that older brother would probably have had to spend the entire year sleeping rough and eating in the open to match him.
Still, if that older brother had gone somewhere as extremely harsh and dangerous as the Himalayas or Antarctica, his income would have surpassed Sui Xiong's again—those field assignments meant working