Chapter 2

Song Xiaozhu was not discouraged. There were more than just plastic bottles here; there was also scrap glass, which fetched a higher price. And if she got incredibly lucky, she might find a discarded iron tool...

A mere fifty cents was nothing.

Under the blazing sun, Song Xiaozhu worked for an hour. A thin sheen of sweat beaded on her forehead, and her hands were covered in grime. She no longer needed to disguise herself deliberately. No one would imagine this filthy girl was Han-Tang's foremost heiress, who lived in the "Clouds."

Song Xiaozhu

took a wooden stick and rummaged through the garbage. The plastic bag beside her already held six plastic bottles. She was working faster than yesterday...

There was a thunk.

The wooden stick struck something hard.

Song Xiaozhu's eyes lit up. She hurriedly pushed aside the garbage that had rotted into sludge to see what it was...

A stone.

A hard, solid stone.

Song Xiaozhu pouted, jabbed the stone hard with her stick, and muttered, "What good are you? The two of you can't even make a hoe."

She had seen secondhand tools at the recycling station. If she had a stone hoe, she could get twice as much done with half the effort while searching through this garbage.

But even the cheapest of those battered secondhand tools cost five dollars.

"Ding."

"Workbench activated."

"Please insert the corresponding raw materials to synthesize."

A silvery-white "Workbench" abruptly appeared before Song Xiaozhu. It resembled a child's desk, no more than a meter wide, with a snowy-white surface and an upright pegboard above it. Weightless, illusory sheets of paper hung from the pegboard.

Song Xiaozhu reached out to touch one. The sheet immediately unfolded, and its contents appeared before her-

Recipe name: Simple Hoe.

Recipe level: 1.

Required materials: raw wood material ×1 + raw stone material ×1.

Success rate: 60%!

Chapter 2

Was this a case of getting exactly what she wished for?

Song Xiaozhu rubbed her eyes, worried that she had spent too long in the sun and was hallucinating.

The snowy-white Workbench, the unfolded "recipe," and that voice ringing directly inside her head: "Would you like to select the current recipe?"

It was not a hallucination.

There really was a "Workbench" in front of her.

Song Xiaozhu suppressed her delighted surprise and focused on the illusory "Workbench."

She could touch it. The snowy-white surface was slightly cool and hard to the touch, though she could not quite tell what it was made of. Many sheets of paper hung on the pegboard above it, with ten in the first row alone.

Of the ten sheets in the first row, three were white, and the remaining seven were gray.

One of the white sheets was the recipe for the "Simple Hoe." She touched the other two recipes as well and received their detailed information-

Recipe name: raw wood material.

Recipe level: 1.

Required materials: any wood.

Success rate: 1-99% (determined by material quality).

Recipe name: raw stone material.

Recipe level: 1.

Required materials: any stone.

Success rate: 1-99% (determined by material quality)

Both "raw wood material" and "raw stone material" were required to synthesize the Simple Hoe.

Song Xiaozhu then touched the gray sheets, and a notification sounded in her mind: "Insufficient Quantum Coins. Unable to unlock."

Above the pegboard was a blank rectangular area displaying the "Workbench's" basic information-

Damaged Item Synthesizer.

Level: 1.

Experience: 0.

Quantum Coins: 0.

Repair points: 0.

Unlocked recipes: Simple Hoe, raw wood material, raw stone material.

This Synthesizer was damaged.

Why was it damaged?

Had it had an owner before?

The memories of Li Siyuan that Song Xiaozhu had received were jumbled. Those fragments mostly involved eating, drinking, and having fun, with nothing related to a "Synthesizer."

She would set aside what she could not figure out for now. Having it was better than not.

Even if this Damaged Synthesizer could only produce a Simple Hoe, it would still be a huge help.

Song Xiaozhu looked around, planning to find somewhere more secluded to continue studying it.

As soon as she moved, this

"Workbench" moved along with her. At first, it followed beside her, then automatically shifted in front of her once she stood still.

Song Xiaozhu tried saying inwardly, Put away.

The "Workbench" vanished.

She examined her body and saw nothing unusual, so she tried saying again, "Appear."

The "Workbench" appeared out of thin air.

Putting it away and bringing it out was quite easy.

Song Xiaozhu looked at the three recipes again. Synthesizing a "Simple Hoe" required "raw wood material" and "raw stone material," while the raw-material requirements for those two recipes were quite broad. Any wood or stone would do. The success rate, however, was staggering.

-from one percent to ninety-nine percent.

Did that mean that if the raw materials were too low in quality, she could try her luck by throwing sheer quantities at it?

Garbage Mountain before her certainly had no shortage of scrap wood and stones.

There was a logging camp near the scavenger community. Strong, able-bodied residents of the community would work there, earning up to ten dollars a day, which was quite tempting.

With the logging camp supplying wood, these misshapen scraps had no value. The recycling station would not take them at all, and scavengers only picked up cleaner pieces to take home for firewood.

The wooden stick in Song Xiaozhu's hand, for instance, had been soaked in filthy water and rotted to the core. It was not even fit for firewood.

An idea struck her, and she placed the wooden stick on the "Workbench's" snowy-white surface. A notification sounded in her mind: "Please select a recipe."

Song Xiaozhu touched the "raw wood material" recipe.

She held her breath and watched intently. A gentle white mist enveloped the wooden stick, and when it dispersed, the surface was empty.

"Synthesis failed."

Song Xiaozhu was not surprised by the result. That wood had rotted to the core. How lucky would she have to be for even that to succeed?

What puzzled her was... where was the rotten stick?