Caravan

[Your suffering is the end of the world to you, but to others, it's just the evening breeze blowing past, the strange clanging of a trash can lid not properly closed.]

[The winter in the Great Wilderness is cold. You wear your father's ill-fitting cotton coat, stumbling along the snow line buried by wind and snow, disoriented and dazed.]

[This blizzard taught you a lesson: in the snowy plains of the Great Wilderness, the wind and snow will bury all traces of your passage. Here, you can only move forward.]

[The Aetherium Chip can barely help you resist the cold, but it cannot alleviate your hunger. Every step you take in the deep snow makes your body feel like it's filled with lead, making it difficult to move.]

[But just as you are about to fall, you are fortunate enough to encounter a caravan of trucks traveling through the Great Wilderness in the snowy plains. They also discover you and your sister, half-buried in the snow. After sizing up you and the baby in your arms for a while, the leader of the caravan doesn't intend to stop, but a middle-aged woman gives you a piece of bread.]

Bai Heng took the bread but didn't leave.

The caravan leader regarded him as an unreasonable little beggar and intended to drive him away.

Bai Heng bit his cold, dry lips:

"Can you take us in? I can work."

Upon hearing his words, the people in the caravan were taken aback.

Immediately, the caravan leader laughed first, and then all the members of the caravan laughed.

They seemed to find it very amusing. When the laughter subsided, the caravan leader raised his mustache and said to Bai Heng:

"Hey, kid, we are merchants, merchants, understand? Not philanthropists. After the natural disasters in the Great Wilderness, there are quite a few children like you. If we picked up a few every time we passed by, people might think we're child traffickers."

He laughed as he spoke:

"Besides, what kind of work can you do? We're not some bigwigs who need to be served. Letting you two stay in the caravan would just mean two more mouths to feed for no reason."

Listening to their laughter, Bai Heng lowered his head and asked softly:

"Do you need help with keeping warm?"

"Huh?" The caravan leader didn't understand what Bai Heng meant.

Bai Heng raised his head, took out an old metal component similar to a chip from his pocket, and pressed the button on the chip. A virtual display screen appeared in front of him.

He tapped the display screen a few times, and a faint red film gradually spread out.

The caravan leader frowned, feeling warmer, as if he were by a fireplace, but before he could speak, Bai Heng spoke first:

"This Aetherium Chip is password-protected. If you enter the wrong password, it will explode immediately. Of course, I can also detonate it myself."

Hearing this, the caravan leader frowned, pursed his lips, and said:

"Kid, I'm not interested in your Aetherium Chip... I just want to know, this thing is strictly controlled by the Punklorde Oasis Zone, why do you have one of these things?"

"My mother left it to me. She came from the Oasis Zone," Bai Heng replied calmly.

As the caravan leader said, Bai Heng had indeed rarely seen anything called an Aetherium Chip in the place where he lived, but he had seen many game cartridges, discarded arcade machines, and game consoles sent from the Oasis Zone.

Not only the children of the Oasis Zone, but even in the Great Wilderness, where material life was extremely scarce, the spiritual food called "video games" still permeated everyone's lives.

The Aetherium Chip left by his mother was obviously quite old; she had used it in the Oasis Zone.

The codes and programs that ran the Aetherium Chip were also taught to him by his mother from memory.

"I won't cause you any trouble, just need food."

Bai Heng demonstrated his value, and this value did indeed make the caravan leader feel tempted.

[The caravan leader agreed to let you and your sister stay in the caravan. The caravan also has milk powder as a commodity, which can feed Brownie.]

[At the age of six, you followed the caravan back and forth to various areas of the Great Wilderness. Sometimes, the caravan would also pass through Scrap Mountain and Neon City in the Oasis Zone. You gazed from afar at the towering buildings and the black drones patrolling the city, and you thought about entering this neon-lit city to inquire about your parents' whereabouts. But the people in the caravan told you that people from the wilderness area need identification to enter the city. And your current identity is that of a wandering orphan, an unregistered person, who cannot enter the Oasis Zone at all.]

[At the age of seven, you still lived with Brownie in the truck caravan. You carved out a small space in the truck's carriage, which was your home. Sometimes, when the caravan was stationed at Scrap Mountain and the Great Wilderness's strongholds, you would try to scavenge. If you were lucky, you could pick up a few broken dolls. After washing them clean, you would bring these old cloth dolls back to Brownie, who was learning to speak.]

[But you discovered that compared to these soft cloth dolls, she seemed to prefer lying on you, watching you beat those dazzling video games on an old game console. Even though she couldn't understand anything at that age.]

[At the age of eight, as you traveled with the caravan, you also often collected books about Aetherium Chips. Although you hadn't undergone systematic learning, you had learned many ways to use Aetherium Chips through practice during the trading process.]

[At the age of nine, you underestimated how fast Brownie was growing up. Clearly, four years ago, she was still a baby in swaddling clothes, but four years later, she had become a clever little girl. The only thing that hadn't changed was that she still liked to cling to you as much as she had four years ago.]

[Her soft silver hair had also grown to her waist during this time, but her hair was naturally a little curly. After you tied it into a ponytail, it looked like a silver single turbo no matter how you looked at it.]

[Children of this age can speak fluently, so they ask a lot of questions. Brownie was the same. She would often pester you and ask, "Brother, why is my hair silver and yours is black? Why is my hair a little curly, but your hair is straight?"]

[You simply told her that you had found her in a trash can.]

[As a result, Brownie was only sad for a short while. Then, she ran to the trash can every day to rummage through things. You noticed this change and curiously asked her what she was doing. Her answer was: "I also want a younger brother or sister."]

[At the age of ten, the government of the Punklorde Oasis Zone promulgated a new law. The law increased the tax levied on large caravans in the Great Wilderness, and the caravan, which had been living for five years, could no longer be maintained. In order not to embarrass the members of these caravans, you took the initiative to resign from the caravan leader and told him that you were going to the Oasis Zone, to that real hacker city.]