"Son of a bitch!"
The alloy door rattled. Looking at what lay on the conveyor belt, Chu Guang couldn't help but curse under his breath.
Out of thirty-three Basic Blind Boxes, he had actually opened twenty-two lollipops. His nose nearly twisted out of joint from sheer frustration.
Fortunately, about half of the lollipops provided buffs. His little players would probably pay good money for them, so while it was a loss, it wasn't a total wash.
Aside from those, there were reserve rations: three cans of meat, two cups of instant noodles, a pack of compressed biscuits, along with two bottles of soy sauce and two bottles of vinegar.
To be frank, ever since the Pioneer had arrived, Chu Guang hadn't been nearly as interested in the food items pulled from the blind boxes.
Did he still need to eat canned rations?
With that bunch of silly players around, if he craved something, all he had to do was drop a not-so-subtle hint.
The only thing that made his eyes light up was a vacuum-sealed, palm-sized transparent packet tucked at the very back.
Inside, it looked like... seeds?
"What on earth is this?"
Chu Guang picked up the packet. As he examined it curiously in his hand for a moment, a pale-blue tag floated up beside it.
[Type β-712 Cotton Seeds: As the name implies, these seeds grow cotton. Genetically engineered for high individual plant yields and a shorter growth cycle. Traditional soil cultivation cannot fully exploit its genetic improvements; concentrated hydroponic or soilless cultivation is recommended to ensure seed purity.]
Well, cotton seeds then.
Though whether this could be counted as food was questionable, cotton seeds were nonetheless extremely useful for Shelter 404.
He had heard that cotton could be harvested once a year and took several months to mature.
Unsure how long these seeds drawn from the blind box would take to grow, Chu Guang figured he would find a player who loved farming and toss the seeds to them to experiment.
Although the outpost now had devil silk, cotton still had an irreplaceable role in terms of thermal retention and cost efficiency.
In particular, cotton produced large, stable yields and had versatile applications, serving both as textile fabric and as stuffing.
Without the ability to manufacture synthetic fibers on a large scale, having cotton would at least resolve a portion of the players' clothing needs.
After all, the number of bluecoats was limited; the players couldn't wear them around the clock.
When hunting or going out on missions, the vast majority of players swapped their clothes whenever they changed their gear anyway.
"Speaking of which, I wonder if the Intermediate Blind Boxes can yield living creatures."
He had opened so many cans of pork. It would be amazing if he could pull a live pig one of these days.
If not a pig, chickens and ducks would do just as well.
While he got to drink milk on occasion, Chu Guang hadn't eaten chicken eggs in a very long time.
If wild bird eggs didn't count, that is.
...
Around five in the afternoon.
The marines led by Lu Yang returned from the south, arriving at the outpost almost simultaneously with the two light trucks escorting the CNC machine tool.
Along with their arrival came good news: the fuel rod had been found.
Clad in power armor, Lu Yang walked over to Chu Guang. Tapping the side of his helmet with an index finger, he retracted his faceplate and said with a hearty laugh,
"...Thanks to the guide you recommended, we finally found the fuel rod we needed. It still has ninety-three percent energy remaining—quite substantial, enough to last a very long time!"
To be honest, while this was fantastic news for the Pioneer, it wasn't necessarily something for Chu Guang to celebrate.
After all, to Shelter 404 right now, the Pioneer was a massive thigh to cling to. In theory, the longer they stayed, the more advantageous it was for him.
Even so, seeing the bright, hearty smile on Captain Lu's face, Chu Guang felt genuinely happy for him.
"Congratulations! After searching for so long, you finally got it."
"Yeah, it really wasn't easy." Lu Yang sighed with emotion, his tone complicated. "We thought we'd find one in two or three days at most. We never expected it to drag out this long."
In fact, about three days ago, they had already located a pre-war carbon dioxide scrubber on the twenty-fifth floor of a hotel.
Regrettably, when they painstakingly secured the objective, they discovered someone had beaten them to it many years earlier.
Not only was the fuel rod that should have been plugged into the generator long gone, but even the recyclable materials inside had been completely looted.
All indications showed that somewhere between Year 0 and Year 10 of the Wasteland Era, a group of survivors had lived there. They had stayed temporarily in the hotel, relying on the glucose, starch, and other resources produced by the carbon dioxide scrubber to survive a grueling stretch of time.
After the scrubber ceased operation because the carbon dioxide concentration dropped below the threshold, they pulled the fuel rod from the backup generator to power the hotel's facilities, ultimately departing once the fuel was thoroughly exhausted, their fates unknown.
This was only normal.
After all, it was now Year 211 of the Wasteland Era. The scrap they could scavenge was nothing more than what others had picked over, overlooked, or lacked the strength and means to salvage at the time.
Surviving in this world required a bit of luck.
Let alone scavenging for scrap.
Chu Guang asked, "Are you leaving soon?"
Lu Yang nodded.
"Yeah. We've stayed here for nearly half a month. Now our damaged equipment is repaired, the fuel rod is secured, and our resource reserves are topped off... It's time to hit the road again."
All good banquets had to come to an end. The Pioneer hadn't traveled all this way across vast distances just to run a charity; they had a more important mission to accomplish.
With nuclear fuel and abundant resources, they would likely be able to cover a very long distance on this leg.
If things went favorably, they probably wouldn't even need to stop for the second half of their journey.
Hearing the expected answer, Chu Guang let out a soft sigh.
"Even though it was only a short time, I'm really going to miss you guys."
"Same here," Lu Yang said sincerely, looking at Chu Guang. "I learned a lot from you, and your noble character left a profound impression on me."
"The feeling is mutual!" Chu Guang smiled. "Your technology has left an equally deep impression on us! Let's save our farewells for the day you actually set out. On a day worth celebrating, let's not make the mood so somber."
Lu Yang smiled as well.
"Right. That carbon dioxide scrubber we found still has quite a few interesting things left inside. I'll send you the coordinates in a bit. If you're interested, you can go salvage them."
Chu Guang asked instinctively, "What's left there?"
Lu Yang gave a mysterious smile and didn't answer directly.
"If I told you now, wouldn't that spoil the fun of unboxing?"
Seeing Captain Lu keeping him in suspense, Chu Guang wore a helpless expression.
Another blind box?
He had opened more than enough blind boxes today.
Even though Captain Lu didn't say what was there, Chu Guang still deduced plenty of information from that secretive grin.
There had to be quite a few good things stored there.
The man probably wanted to give him a pleasant surprise.
"All right. Tomorrow morning, I'll take a couple of people over to have a look."
...
The Pioneer would depart within three days.
After exchanging a few more pleasantries with Chu Guang, Captain Lu led his marines back on the road, escorting the fuel rod back toward the Pioneer.
Old Luka, who had been waiting nearby for a long time, saw that the Administrator had finished his business. He walked over from the trucks and bowed respectfully.
"My Lord, your cargo has arrived. Where would you like it unloaded?"
Chu Guang glanced left and right, his gaze finally settling on the main building of the sanatorium. After several rounds of repairs, the condition of the rooms there was quite good.
At the very least, it was much sturdier than the newly built brick houses outside.
"Put it on the first floor of the sanatorium for now. Find a larger room for it. I'll head over to take a look in a moment."
Old Luka nodded respectfully. "Yes, My Lord."
The machine tool was bulky and extremely heavy.
To be safe, Old Luka first had the players at the woodworking shed build several unloading braces and arranged for four Strength-type players. Only then did they manage to unload it from the truck.
A minor hiccup occurred along the way.
Because the machine tool arrived fully assembled, the entire unit couldn't fit through the sanatorium's main entrance. In the end, Chu Guang had no choice but to select an outer room and have half a wall knocked down just to carry the machine inside.
With a silver metallic finish and a boxy, sharp-edged exterior, it looked like an oversized freezer from a distance. Yet its internal structure was far from as simple as it appeared on the surface; inside lay an entirely different world.
Chu Guang took a quick glance through the user manual.
The processing chamber had a volume of 1.5 cubic meters and could handle workpieces up to 1×1×1 meter in size.
Due to the specialized nature of magnetic confinement plasma machining, the equipment imposed stringent environmental requirements on the workpiece, requiring a near-vacuum. Therefore, once material was fed into the inlet, it first entered a buffer chamber between two airlocks to be flushed with protective gas and pumped down to a near-vacuum before being transferred into the processing chamber.
The operational procedure was exceptionally rigorous, even tedious.
Relatively speaking, however, the machine had virtually no requirements for its external surroundings. As long as it was plugged into power, it was ready to run. Chu Guang didn't need to build a cleanroom just to pamper it.
Looking at the high-tech machine tool sitting behind broken walls and rubble, Chu Guang couldn't help having Xiao Qi take a photo of it.
This was so wasteland!
With the unit deployed, the next step was powering it up.
Chu Guang carefully checked the device's rated power. When he clearly saw the unit of measurement, he momentarily wondered if his eyes were playing tricks on him.
"Megawatts?! Holy crap... It eats this much electricity?!"
According to the materials Chu Guang had looked up on the internet, ordinary machine tools had power ratings in the kilowatt range.
Yet this single piece of equipment, covering less than three square meters of floor space, demanded power on the megawatt scale!
On second thought, however, Chu Guang felt relieved.
After all, this thing manipulated plasma at temperatures of hundreds of millions of degrees. Not only did it need to generate magnetic fields to confine it, but it also had to precisely align the plasma into single-atom blades capable of cutting materials.
Such terrifying control was more than enough to ignite a fusion reactor, let alone operate a machine tool. Looked at that way, not reaching the gigawatt scale could practically be considered energy-saving.
Chu Guang even suspected that with slight modifications and replacing the working gas with helium or hydrogen isotopes, it might genuinely function as a nuclear fusion reactor.
Using it like that, of course, would be a bit like burning a painted lute for firewood...
In any case, it was fortunate that Captain Lu had gifted him two cold fusion batteries earlier.
Otherwise, relying on the ten-kilowatt firewood generator he had bought from Liszt—even combined with the one seized from Old Leech—would never have powered this electricity-guzzling monster.
Chu Guang fumbled around for a moment and found the emergency power socket near the wiring interface, which happened to fit a standard cold fusion battery.
Power connected.
The indicator lights flared to life!
Watching the touchscreen slowly illuminate before him, Chu Guang stroked his chin with interest and studied it closely.
"Speaking of which, how do you use this thing again?"
There seemed to be a manual loaded onto the screen.
Just as Chu Guang was about to tap it open, Xiao Qi's voice drifted down from upstairs.
"Master, if you don't know how to use it, Xiao Qi can help operate it for you!"
Hearing the voice from the third floor, Chu Guang looked surprised. Walking outside, he tilted his head up and asked, "You know how to run this?"
Xiao Qi replied, "In theory, it shouldn't be very difficult. This kind of machine tool is highly automated. You only need to input preset processing parameters and load the materials; the machine takes care of the rest. I'm sure if Master finished reading the manual, you could operate it too. Xiao Qi is just streamlining the process for you... By the way, Master, can you bring Xiao Qi over to have a look first?"
"Hold on. Let me head back into the shelter to find a few blueprints, and you can help me run a test run!"
Without waiting for Xiao Qi to reply, Chu Guang turned and headed back into the shelter.
On the official forum, technical wizards occasionally tossed blueprints they had obtained from who-knew-where into the discussion boards, arguing with others until they were red in the face.
For classic firearms like the AK, Mosin-Nagant, Kar98k, SKS, and Type 56, everything from animated GIFs of their internal mechanisms to professional schematics annotated with part dimensions was available. Although Chu Guang hadn't pinned those posts, he had quietly saved them all.
Intuition told him there would come a day when these would prove useful.
And now, that chance had arrived.
Selecting a schematic for the AK-47, Chu Guang then went to the warehouse to fetch several steel ingots of suitable size and shape.
Although the steel produced by No. 81 Steel Mill was mediocre in quality, these particular ingots were reserve supplies scavenged by the Cow and Horse Squad from a private shelter.
Using them to machine the barrel and receiver was as good as it got!
The airlock hatch closed. As the materials were fed from the inlet into the buffer chamber, the CNC machine tool began its work.
Before the blazing plasma, the hardened steel yielded like soft clay, effortlessly sliced apart.
To his astonishment, Chu Guang discovered that the equipment didn't just machine multiple geometric surfaces of a single part; through pre-programmed designs, it could form eight plasma blades to cut at various angles and differing depths simultaneously. It could even carve multiple parts of different sizes and contrasting shapes from a single block of material, minimizing scrap to the absolute limit!
Because an AK rifle didn't require high-precision tolerances for its parts, the machining process didn't take very long.
Not counting the startup sequence, Chu Guang waited about fifteen to twenty minutes before all the machining cycles were completed.
The finished parts and the trimmed scrap were ejected together from the outlet, neatly sorted into separate compartments.
Although machined by plasma at hundreds of millions of degrees, the volume of working medium used for cutting was extremely small, so the temperature of the finished workpieces barely rose—only reaching around forty to fifty degrees Celsius. This minimized dimensional errors caused by thermal expansion to the greatest extent possible.
According to the manual, if parts required nanometer-level precision, the finished workpiece's temperature could even be kept identical to the moment it entered the intake.
Of course, doing so would increase the time required several times over.
Following the blueprints, Chu Guang assembled the parts, quickly producing an AK-47 without a wooden stock or handguard.
Factoring in electricity consumption, raw materials, and the amortized cost of the technology itself, this was probably the most expensive AK in the world.
"Master," Xiao Qi chimed in.
Caught up in his excitement, Chu Guang didn't have time to pay much attention and gave an offhand reply.
"What is it?"
"Xiao Qi just feels... this machine tool doesn't seem meant for producing such crude things, uh."
Chu Guang answered without hesitation, "I know. I just wanted to test whether it actually works well."
If it could make a gun, it could make the tools to produce guns.
Once he replicated an entire production line, wouldn't his players each get one?
By that time, once steel production ramped up and rifle output followed, everyone would be fifty-buck brothers—no, make that hundred-buck conscripts.
One life every three days, one gun a day; the 'bug' where the weapons shop couldn't restock in time would be completely patched. He would never have to worry about a gun costing more than a human life again!
Fiddling with the AK in his hands, Chu Guang felt it left and right, his face brimming with excitement.
Too bad he didn't have matching ammunition.
Otherwise, he really would have liked to fire off a couple of test rounds.
If it worked fine, he could toss it in the warehouse and sell it as a limited-edition skin. After all, it was a dream crossover with CrossFire—charging five hundred silver coins wouldn't be excessive, right?
Xiao Qi watched quietly from the side, not daring to speak.
It always felt like Master wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed at times.
Fortunately, he wasn't like this every day...
Chapter 160