Rotting kitchen waste clung to battered wood, stones, and bricks. Rusty iron frames lay exposed, every scrap of metal that could be pried loose already gone. Torn plastic bags in every color tangled together, occasionally wrapped around a few plastic bottles and shards of glass-all trash with next to no recycling value.
-No one had touched it.
The garbage mountain was big. Enormous.
Hardly anyone visited worthless stretches of trash like this one.
Song Xiaozhu breathed a sigh of relief before digging out her makeshift hoe. She swung it hard a few more times, uncovered yesterday's garbage cave, and stepped inside.
The garbage cave reeked so badly that Song Xiaozhu could barely keep her eyes open. Suppressing a cough, she summoned the "workbench."
The snow-white workbench stood in stark contrast to the sludge. After moving closer to it, Song Xiaozhu felt much better, both her eyes and her nose.
This snow-white "workbench" seemed to have purified a small area around it.
Song Xiaozhu looked at the pegboard above the workbench. All ten recipes in the first row had been unlocked: raw wood material, raw stone material, makeshift hoe, makeshift storage box, makeshift skinning knife, low-contamination water, makeshift axe, makeshift pickaxe, edible simple meal, and raw medicinal material.
She had also unlocked four achievements: Unlucky Player, Digger, Hunter, and Purifier.
Song Xiaozhu looked up at the detailed information at the very top again, at her precarious Quantum Coin balance...
Poor.
So poor.
Not only did she have no Quantum Coins, she had no raw crafting materials either!
Song Xiaozhu swung her big hoe and started digging for [raw materials]. She had unlocked so many recipes at once; she needed to make each finished product.
Without accounting for the success rate, a makeshift storage box required 20 [raw wood material] and 4 [raw stone material]. The makeshift axe was much simpler, requiring only one each of [raw wood material] and [raw stone material]. Then there was the edible simple meal, which required three portions of any ingredients.
Song Xiaozhu planned to synthesize an "edible simple meal" first.
Rotten ingredients were the last thing the garbage heap lacked. The makeup of this waste also revealed the living standards of Ink City's residents. As the saying went, "Wine and meat rot behind vermilion gates, while frozen bones lie by the roadside." In this wasteland world with its rigid class barriers, the gap in wealth between people would only be more extreme.
Song Xiaozhu unearthed a pile of rotten root vegetables. She could vaguely make out potatoes, sweet potatoes, and Chinese yams. One was as big as a pumpkin but purple-perhaps it was a pumpkin, only contaminated into looking like this.
Scavengers would never dare touch these rotten ingredients, let alone eat them. They would worry about getting sick just from holding them too long.
Song Xiaozhu placed these rotten ingredients on the "workbench," unable to help feeling uneasy. Could these things really be synthesized into an "edible simple meal"?
If this worked, then her days on this garbage mountain...
She really would have nothing to worry about!
Chapter 12
The requirement of three portions was easy enough to judge: she only had to fill the corresponding slots. Each slot could hold roughly two palm-sized moldy potatoes.
Song Xiaozhu selected the recipe, and the workbench began synthesizing. Before long, the white mist dispersed, and she heard a notification: "Synthesis failed."
Song Xiaozhu put in another three portions of rotten ingredients, only to receive another failure notification soon afterward...
After three consecutive failures, Song Xiaozhu stopped adding ingredients.
The garbage mountain had no shortage of rotten ingredients, but she kept feeling this was not a matter of luck. Rather...
Did "any ingredients" exclude rotten ingredients?
Did she have to use normal ingredients to synthesize it?
If so, the "edible simple meal" was less valuable.
She might complain about the taste of wild vegetable gruel, but she could not afford to waste more wild vegetable powder just for a slight improvement in flavor.
Song Xiaozhu pondered for a while, then her eyes suddenly lit up. She picked up six plastic bottles and ran to the wastewater ditch in the distance.
Facing the vivid green wastewater that gave off "toxic fumes," Song Xiaozhu pinched her nose and filled all six bottles.
The synthesis rate for "low-contamination water" had always been fairly high. It seemed this 60% success rate also had some connection to the corresponding raw materials.
Selecting the "edible simple meal" recipe again, Song Xiaozhu put in two portions of rotten ingredients, then added one portion of low-contamination water...
A notification sounded:
"Obtained 'edible simple meal' ×1. "Evaluation: low contamination. Recommended daily consumption: less than 1,000 g. "Effect upon use: edible. "Level 1 'Cook' achievement unlocked. Reward: 1 Quantum Coin."
It worked!
Song Xiaozhu could not help curling her lips into a smile. Cooking required water. Nothing wrong with that logic.
However, the low-contamination water had served a somewhat neutralizing role in this synthesis. The rotten ingredients most likely did not meet the standards, and only barely qualified after being washed by the low-contamination water.
Song Xiaozhu looked curiously at the "edible simple meal." Like the low-contamination water, it had been placed in a slot on the workbench and required a container to remove.
To the naked eye, this simple meal looked little different from wild vegetable gruel. It was another mush with unidentifiable ingredients, though its color was somewhat better. Rather than an unappetizing blue-green, it looked a little like purple rice porridge.
Song Xiaozhu found half a plastic bottle, rinsed it with "low-contamination water," and scooped out the "
Edible simple meal."
She held it carefully in her hands and leaned closer for a sniff. There was no strange smell.
But Song Xiaozhu was inside this garbage cave, where the stench was overpowering. Even if it did have a smell, the highly contaminated odors around her would have masked it.
Song Xiaozhu slowly drank a few mouthfuls. As long as the synthesis succeeded, she no longer worried about whether the rotten ingredients were poisonous.
Just like with the "low-contamination water," she only needed to limit her daily consumption.
One thousand grams was neither a lot nor a little.
Especially here, where clothing and food were scarce, it was enough to sustain life.
The "simple meal" had a thoroughly unremarkable mouthfeel. It was a little coarse, neither salty nor spicy nor sweet nor sour, dry and rather hard to swallow. It inevitably brought an idiom to mind-like chewing wax.