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Just one "Raw Wood Material" and one "Raw Stone Material" had kept her busy for nearly two hours. More than twenty... all right, that would be hard.

And then there were those two Quantum Coins.

She had no idea how to get them right now, either.

Song Xiaozhu gathered her thoughts and decided to make a simple hoe first.

With a hoe, she could get twice the results for half the effort, whether she was looking for scrap wood, scrap stone, plastic bottles, or broken glass.

She still needed to earn those fifty cents.

The wild vegetable gruel tasted awful, but it was filling. If she went without it tonight, she would be too hungry to sleep.

After failing to synthesize "Raw Stone Material" a hundred times, Song Xiaozhu finally obtained a piece on her 106th attempt.

Stones were the one thing the garbage mountain had in abundance, but picking them up and putting them down over a hundred times had left Song Xiaozhu too exhausted to lift her arms.

Panting slightly, she looked at the "Raw Stone Material" on the workbench. It, too, was a perfectly regular cube. The difference between it and the "Raw Wood Material" was that one was brown and the other silver-gray. Both had the same appraisal, and neither had any usage effects.

Song Xiaozhu placed the "Raw Wood Material" and "Raw Stone Material" side by side on the workbench and selected the recipe for "Simple Hoe."

She remembered the last line of the recipe: success rate: 60%.

With the "Level-One Unlucky Player" achievement hanging over her head, Song Xiaozhu could hardly avoid feeling nervous.

Soon, the notification sounded:

"Obtained 'Simple Hoe' ×1.

"Appraisal: a barely usable hoe."

"Usage effect: digging efficiency increased by 10%."

"Level-one 'Digger' achievement unlocked. Reward: 1 Quantum Coin."

Song Xiaozhu: "!"

This simple hoe even came with a stat bonus.

And she had unlocked another achievement, earning a Quantum Coin.

As the white mist dispersed, Song Xiaozhu looked closely. A hoe roughly the size of her palm lay on the workbench. Its shape was not much different from an ordinary hoe, but it was so small. How was she supposed to work with this?

Song Xiaozhu picked it up. The instant it left the workbench, it suddenly expanded with a whoosh, growing from palm-sized to nearly as tall as she was.

Now that was a normal length for a hoe-a good meter and sixty centimeters or more.

Song Xiaozhu had seen secondhand hoes at the recycling

station. Aside from being cleaner, the "Simple Hoe" before her was much like those at the recycling station, except theirs were iron hoes and hers was stone.

Song Xiaozhu's family had not been well-off, and she had worked in the fields with her parents as a child. She knew her way around farm tools.

With one swing of the hoe, a large pile of garbage loosened and rolled down the slope.

Song Xiaozhu did not really notice the supposed increase in digging efficiency. For one thing, she had nothing to compare it with, and for another, a 10% increase was not particularly noticeable.

As she brought the hoe down again and again, Song Xiaozhu deftly picked out anything she could exchange for money, then gathered the scraps of wood and stone into a pile off to the side.

With this simple hoe, she worked much faster. Had she dug through the garbage by hand, she could have worn blisters onto her fingers without opening up such a large "gap."

All this garbage had been transported out of the "Fortress." Even without being processed, it became compressed under the weight of the growing piles. Some large frames whose original forms were no longer recognizable were especially firmly embedded in the garbage, impossible to budge.

Many of those frames were iron. Unfortunately, Song Xiaozhu had no welding equipment. If she wanted to dig them out...

What she needed was not a hoe, but an excavator.

After working for quite a while, Song Xiaozhu had quite a haul.

It did not matter if the plastic bottles were flattened; that only made them easier for the recycling station to sort. Song Xiaozhu quickly collected thirty. She also found quite a few thin sheets of rusty iron, but unfortunately, they were too bulky to be worth as much effort as plastic bottles.

Once she had gathered roughly fifty cents' worth, she stopped digging.

By then, the sun was directly overhead. It was time for lunch.

Song Xiaozhu had no lunch.

The people in the scavenger community ate only twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening. They took no midday break, so there was no meal, either.

"Grrr."

Her stomach growled with hunger. There was plenty of rotten "food" in the dump, but Song Xiaozhu really did not dare eat it.

The pollution level here was high. Eating the wrong thing could mean dying of poisoning.

She did not want to die again.

Although the scraps beside her were enough to exchange for fifty cents, Song Xiaozhu did not dare return to the shack.

She had worked too efficiently today. If Old Man Bai asked, she would have trouble explaining.

And there was this hoe. She did not dare openly carry it back to the community, either. If she handled things badly, someone might murder her for her "wealth."

Song Xiaozhu was so hungry her stomach felt stuck to her spine. She summoned the "workbench" and curiously examined the five still-locked recipes in the first row, wondering whether any had to do with food.

Could rotten food be synthe-

sized?

If only she could synthesize rotten ingredients into "Raw Food Material," just as scrap wood could be synthesized into "Raw Wood Material."

An idea struck Song Xiaozhu. She placed a green-tinged potato on the workbench, and the notification sounded: "Corresponding recipe not unlocked. Proceed with random synthesis?"

The first half of this notification was crucial. "Corresponding recipe not unlocked" meant there was a recipe!

If this contaminated potato before her could be synthesized into "Raw Food Material," did that not mean there were cooking recipes, too?

Song Xiaozhu's eyes lit up with longing for food.

To her, any food tasted a hundred times better than wild vegetable gruel.

She looked at her sole Quantum Coin and calculated silently.

There were very few ways to obtain Quantum Coins. So far, she had only received them as rewards for triggering certain "achievements" during synthesis.

Level-one "Unlucky Player" required a hundred consecutive failures.

Level-one "Digger" had come from synthesizing the simple hoe.

As for what other achievements there might be, Song Xiaozhu had no idea. Based on her years of gaming experience, early achievements were generally easy to trigger. As long as she kept trying things, she would stumble upon some eventually.

Song Xiaozhu had originally planned to save this Quantum Coin to make a storage chest. Now, her gaze settled on the locked level-one recipes.