Daily Quests

"A generator? What are you asking about that for?" In the real world, inside the Jinling University dining hall. Looking at Professor Yan Feng sitting across the dining table asking his sincere question, Professor Wang Haiyang set down his chopsticks. He did not know this Professor Yan very well. He only knew the man was with the Physics Department and around his own age, roughly thirty years old. Wang Haiyang could no longer remember when they had added each other on WeChat, and they had never chatted once since. As a member of the School of Engineering Management, he had virtually no professional overlap with him. Yet just today, he had suddenly received an invitation from this Professor Yan for lunch at the dining hall, saying there was a matter he wished to consult him on. Truth be told, seeing the word "consult," Professor Wang had assumed it concerned some research topic. He never expected that after arriving, he would be asked such an odd question. The conversation continued in a relaxed, casual atmosphere. Yan Feng explained, "...I've been reading a novel recently, an apocalypse-themed one. I wanted to know, if a similar situation really occurred, how would survivors solve the problem of electricity?" "Why take things in a novel so seriously? Just see where the author takes it and be done with it," Professor Wang Haiyang chuckled. "Still, your question is pretty interesting. An apocalypse... Well, that depends on what kind of apocalypse it is, and how many days it's been since the world ended." He enjoyed reading novels himself, though he preferred xianxia; he rarely touched post-apocalyptic stories. Come to think of it, he had never imagined a day would come where he sat with a university colleague having such a solemn discussion about the contents of a novel. "The setting is two hundred years after a nuclear war." "Two hundred years? A nuclear war?" Professor Wang Haiyang froze for a moment, hesitating. "Then I'm afraid it's going to be tricky. Unshielded electronic equipment would be ruined by electromagnetic pulses from the nuclear detonations. The more delicate the instrument, the less likely it is to survive." "Is there a way?" Yan Feng asked, his brows knit tight. "There are ways. For example, you can usually find backup diesel generators in typical residential properties or restaurants. They aren't particularly delicate equipment. But after two hundred years... they'd probably have been scavenged long ago. And even if they weren't, after going so long without maintenance, eighty percent of the internal parts would have aged and deteriorated. Fuel would be an issue too. Two hundred years after the apocalypse... you can hardly count on finding gasoline at a gas station." Wang Haiyang stroked his chin, mused for a moment, and continued. "Still, it's not entirely hopeless." "What way?" Yan Feng asked immediately. "Generally speaking, every car has an alternator that can be salvaged. As long as you can get the rotor spinning, it will produce a steady twelve volts of direct current. With a little repair, it should be usable. For small-scale power generation, like lighting, twelve volts is plenty. If you can find an inverter to convert the DC into two-hundred-and-forty-volt AC, that wouldn't be impossible either... Wait, is there really a need to take notes on this?" Watching Yan Feng pull out a small notebook and jot down notes with absolute gravity, Wang Haiyang looked thoroughly bewildered. Reading a novel... was there any need to take it this seriously? Yan Feng pushed up his glasses and said nonchalantly, "Don't mind me. Please continue." Wang Haiyang: "..." He had often heard people say the Physics Department was full of eccentrics, which he had always dismissed as a stereotype. Now, he was starting to believe it. ... The wasteland. Shelter 404. Chu Guang had slept right on the floor of the residents' hall, waking up at four in the morning. The moment he opened his eyes, a system notification popped up. [Congratulations to the host for unlocking the achievement: "Novice Guide" (Players logged continuous online time exceeding 8 hours on launch day).] [Reward: +10 Reward Points.] *A windfall like this?* He woke up to another blind box roll. Rubbing his sleepy eyes, Chu Guang opened the system and selected the "Manager's Allowance" subpage on the interface. After wavering briefly between the primary blind box worth one reward point and the intermediate blind box worth ten, Chu Guang ultimately pushed all his chips onto the intermediate blind box button, silently praying in his heart. *Please, I beg you.* *Whatever you do, don't give me another damn bottle of cough syrup!* A pale blue light flickered. Under Chu Guang's tense gaze, the alloy door on one side of the residents' hall opened, and a plastic-sealed syringe appeared on the platform. [Muscle Cell Reinforcement Injection. (Permanently increases muscle strength by a small margin. Usage interval: 24 hours. Diminishing returns with repeated use.)] "Permanently increases muscle strength?" Now this was good stuff! Without hesitation, Chu Guang tore open the outer packaging and removed the needle cap. Surprisingly, however, he saw no needle. How was he supposed to use this? Hesitating for a moment, Chu Guang pressed the tip of the syringe against his arm and clicked the button on the back that seemed to be a trigger. It felt as though something had stung his arm, and then... Nothing else followed. "That's it?" Chu Guang was a little dazed. He threw a few punches, but felt no obvious change in his body. Could it have expired? After all, this was something from two hundred years ago... Out of caution, Chu Guang went ahead and ran a medical checkup on himself. Only when he received the results were the doubts in his mind finally cleared up. [ ID: Chu Guang Gene Sequence: Manager Level: LV.5 —Base Attributes— Strength: 9 Agility: 6 Constitution: 7 Perception: 7 Intelligence: 6 ] "The gene development progress didn't change, but Strength and Constitution each went up by one point... Hiss, not bad at all!" Under normal circumstances, a twenty-year-old adult male without special training would typically have five points in Strength and Constitution, five being the baseline value for all attributes. In other words, that single point in Strength and Constitution was equivalent to twenty percent of a normal adult male's physical capacity. Chu Guang was now only one point of Strength away from having double the strength of a normal adult male. Looking at the updated attribute panel, Chu Guang was wondering whether to try a few push-ups to test it out when he suddenly noticed that new quests had appeared in the Manager's Log. Opening it, Chu Guang went completely still. Good grief. Before going to sleep yesterday, there had only been one incomplete side quest left, but today the number of unfinished quests had jumped straight to twenty-plus! The types of quests were all over the map. They ranged from relatively manageable tasks like "Hunt one mutant," "Hoard 5 tons of timber," and "Hoard 100 L of fresh water," all the way to tasks that were blatantly troublesome, such as "Repair the sanatorium outer wall" and "Repair the sanatorium second-floor walls." As for the rewards, they varied from a low of one point to a high of twenty points. All of these quests carried a unified tag: "Daily." "What does daily mean? Do they refresh every day?" Chu Guang could not resist muttering aloud. No one answered him, of course. The shelter system could not speak, Xiao Qi was outside standing guard at the sanatorium, and he was the only soul inside the entire shelter. Chu Guang calculated silently in his head. If he managed to finish all twenty quests, he would reap a total of 150 reward points. Naturally, at least three-quarters of those reward points would not come easy—certainly not something that could be settled in a day or two. Chu Guang sank into thought. If he had to do all these quests himself, he would surely work himself to death. But if he handed them off to the players, all it seemed to cost him was a handful of contribution points. With that thought, his mind instantly cleared. There was a marker in the desk drawer. Grabbing the pen, Chu Guang took the elevator straight up to the surface without another word. After searching around the sanatorium, he found a plastic board that the scavengers had not hauled off for firewood. Dusting off the plastic board, Chu Guang took the marker, drew two lines on it, wiped them away, and nodded with satisfaction. "Nice." Dry-erase. You're the one! Taking some time, Chu Guang picked out several quests from the Manager's Log that players had a realistic shot at completing and wrote them onto the plastic board. [Gather Timber (Requirement: usable as building material): 1 contribution point per meter.] [Locate Water Storage Containers (Material: plastic, metal. Shape: barrel, jug. Requirement: the bigger, the better!): 1–10 contribution points.] [Search for Recyclable Scrap: 1–? contribution points.] [...] "All set!" Checking the time, it was four-thirty in the morning, an hour and a half before the agreed-upon login time. Not one to sit idle, Chu Guang returned to the shelter, turned on the computer, and logged into the official website's backend to take a look. He found that the pre-registration count had actually climbed by another ten compared to last night. It was now at thirty-five. It seemed the discussion in the group yesterday had indeed driven some traffic, prompting ten fresh little leeks to raise their hands. Even so, Chu Guang figured the user potential of the Ox and Horse Club had probably been squeezed to its limit. After all, it was only a gaming group of around a hundred people, with active users you could count on one hand. It was entirely possible those thirty-five were all the living souls left in it. "Time to consider switching to another promotional method?" Running advertisements was not very realistic. Wasteland OL's official website had no domestic ICP registration; the server might not even be on Earth. Furthermore, another issue presented itself. Once traffic was pulled from a larger pool, a massive wave of "low-quality users"—troublemakers—would inevitably flood in. Those people might have clicked "yes" just for fun, or perhaps accidentally. Recruiting players like that would only bring trouble. "I have to raise the barrier to pre-registration..." Chu Guang pondered, making a mental note of it. Later, he would have Xiao Qi tweak the website again—for instance, moving the pre-registration option from the front page to a secondary page, and requiring account registration, a phone number, and a delivery address before one could sign up. Although the shelter system did not seem to need players to provide a delivery address, doing so would at least weed out a portion of the half-hearted players and "invalid registrations." Come to think of it, what if someone registered using multiple devices? Or used bots and virtual machines? After a moment's thought, Chu Guang dismissed the concern. Since the system could deliver helmets to users with pinpoint accuracy, it certainly had a way to verify the registrants' identities. Worrying about all this was merely borrowing trouble. "The new main quest hasn't triggered yet; the conditions probably haven't been met." "Leave the daily quests aside for now. The key is that remaining 'side quest'—requiring a ten-kilowatt generator." Electricity was a major issue. It would never do for the shelter to be in the future while the surface lived in a primitive society. To Chu Guang, who came from modern society, having no electricity was virtually no different from living in the Stone Age. "Better focus on figuring out how to solve this generator problem!"