First Blood!

"Someone... someone died?!" Lao Bai stood dumbfounded, unable to process it for a moment. When it finally sank in, his immediate reaction was: You can actually die in this game? To be fair, unless you went out of your way to court death or throw your life away, getting killed in this game was pretty hard. Not only could Lao Bai not wrap his head around it, but Chu Guang was also utterly baffled. He had not expected a non-combat accidental casualty right after the third batch of players logged in—at least half a month earlier than he had anticipated... The player who died was named Yaya, carrying a Perception-type gene sequence with the talent Toxin Intuition. Chu Guang remembered sending her out that morning to gather berries and edible mushrooms. Somehow, she had managed to wander all the way into the mutant leech nest. Through the player roster, Chu Guang could track players' approximate locations. When he followed her path and found that her last active area was inside the mutant leech nest, he immediately gave up any thought of recovering the body. Mutant leech larvae were manageable—their mouthparts were degenerated, making it hard for them even to draw blood. At most, they fed on rotting scraps, occasionally getting chewed on by wasteland cockroaches and rats, or netted by industrious players to use as groundbait for fishing. Adult mutant leeches, however, were another matter entirely. They swallowed their prey whole in a single gulp. Their digestive fluids carried a paralytic agent that relaxed a victim's muscles within a minute and caused unconsciousness in a matter of minutes. There was no doubt about it; by now, there probably would not even be bones left to find. Regardless, logout time had arrived. Chu Guang brought the players back to the shelter in batches, saw them settled into their hibernation pods to log off, and then returned to the surface alone to stand beside the active substance extractor. A layer of dust coated the cylindrical extraction furnace. Ever since obtaining the device, Chu Guang had not used it once because there was no electricity. What truly tested his patience was that while the incubation pods came with wireless charging ports compatible with the shelter, this quest reward did not—it only offered a bare plug with positive and negative leads. Evidently, whoever designed the contraption had no intention of letting him siphon power from the shelter. "Xiao Qi." "What is it, Master?" "Tell me... how do you inject the synthesized material produced by this thing into the incubation pods?" Chu Guang asked, rubbing his chin. "It's very simple! The active substance storage canisters on the incubation pods are all detachable. You should be able to just pour the active substance straight in, right?" Chu Guang nodded thoughtfully, then shifted the topic. "Meaning... taking canisters off the other incubation pods would work too?" Xiao Qi paused. "Uh, I don't know... Master, you aren't thinking of stealing—" "Borrowing," Chu Guang interrupted in an unquestionable tone. "I won't be able to get my hands on a generator until the end of the month, and I'm not going to leave a dead player waiting until the end of the month to revive." "Besides, there are still seventy unopened pods sitting there doing nothing. We might as well put the active substance inside them to work first." Xiao Qi murmured softly, "But... what if we run out?" Chu Guang answered without hesitation, "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. First, we handle the problem right in front of us." There were always more solutions than problems. Steepening the death penalty or tacking on extra penalties for consecutive deaths would surely curb the players' reckless curiosity. Later, when the player count grew, he could simply set up a starter village and forbid anyone below level five from leaving. There were plenty of ways to keep waste in check. Chu Guang still had no idea what this player named Yaya had been thinking. It was one thing for anyone else, but she was Perception-type, after all. Once he returned to the shelter, he planned to speak with her in his capacity as the developer. Still, the core issue right now was not how she had died, but that she was a complete novice with zero contribution points to dock. In other words, she could not afford the death penalty at all. That was rather awkward. He could hardly let her run a tab. What would the other players think? Wouldn't everyone just go wild? "...Looks like I'll need to institute forced labor or punitive quests as an alternative when a player can't afford the death penalty." "Right, plus a deduction in favorability, and extending the respawn cooldown for consecutive deaths." There were always more ways forward than roadblocks. Returning inside the shelter with Xiao Qi, Chu Guang first tallied and summarized the day's achievements in a document on his computer. This was a habit he had built up recently. As more players arrived, the daily swings in warehouse inventory amounted to significant figures. As the manager, he had to coordinate and plan out every single resource. Mobilizing players to fell trees when lumber ran low, rallying everyone to hunt and forage when food grew scarce—everything was done to keep construction and production moving smoothly, rather than letting operations grind to a halt over a shortage of any single item. "Building material receipts: 84 logs, 500 kilograms of charcoal, 500 kilograms of calcium carbonate cement, two stacks of yellow mud bricks, and a number of hardened cement blocks. As for consumption... 220 logs; today's cement production was basically wiped out, with an extra 200 kilograms drawn from inventory." "Roughly." "Food inventory receipts: 50 kilograms of dried smoked meat, 10 kilograms of smoked fish... plus 2 kilograms of edible roots, and a small quantity of raspberries. Consumption: roughly 10 kilograms of dried smoked meat. Tonight's dinner was fresh fish soup stewed with pine nuts, so none of the smoked fish in storage was touched." "Maybe I should hire a warehouse manager." He also needed to figure out how to get a more accurate scale and proper measuring tools. Chu Guang spent some time allocating contribution points to each player's account based on the statistics provided by Xiao Qi and their actual output. The newcomers earned contribution points primarily by hauling bricks. Calculated at 10 points per hour, their totals mostly fell between 90 and 100. Only Tengteng remained at 0 contribution points. Tailoring, however, was a technical trade. Working with unfamiliar materials required a period of trial and error. Once she adapted to the tools and supplies available here, her contribution points would undoubtedly begin to snowball. With the players' earnings settled, Chu Guang opened the system to check the rewards for today's daily quests. [Quest: Fell 10 trees. Reward: 1 reward point] [Quest: Slay 1 mutant. Reward: 3 reward points] [Quest: Gather 1 ton of stone. Reward: 1 reward point] [Quest: Stockpile 10 kilograms of food. Reward: 1 reward point] A total of 6 reward points. In truth, the workload completed by the players went far beyond the daily quest requirements, but these were all the reward points that could be easily earned in a single day. Chu Guang tallied the points from previous days. Adding today's, he now had 17 points in all. "Time to take a gamble!" After a moment's thought, Chu Guang opened the Manager Allowance sub-page, poured 10 points into an intermediate blind box, and spent the remaining 7 on basic blind boxes. Soon, the wall shuddered. As the alloy hatch slid open, the rewards rolled out along the conveyor belt. [Nano-Healing Needle: Primarily used for non-fatal physical trauma. Significantly accelerates tissue repair within a short duration to speed up wound healing.] "This one must have come from the intermediate blind box." No specific efficacy details were listed, side effects were unknown, and active ingredients and mechanisms of action were entirely absent—just like the earlier enhancement injection, it was a product with no manufacturer, no inspection certificate, and no production date. Since Chu Guang was not injured, he placed the healing needle in his desk drawer for now, then inspected the other rewards. Unsurprisingly, five of the seven rewards were lollipops. One orange-flavored pop, much like the earlier chocolate-flavored one, granted a ten-hour attribute buff, though this one boosted Constitution rather than Strength. As for the other two items, one was a 200-gram bar of chocolate, and the other was a 230-gram can of beef. Hmm... The chocolate ought to be fine, but was the canned beef truly safe to eat? If Chu Guang remembered correctly, canned food had been invented around 1800 during the Franco-Prussian War. This aged tin might very well be older than the relics sitting in the museums of his former world... "Forget it... I'll just find a player to test it on tomorrow and see if it's edible." After debating with himself for a long time, Chu Guang decided that once the players logged on the next morning, he would pick someone with high favorability and treat them to a meal. Surely nobody would turn down a stroke of good fortune like that. With the rewards sorted, Chu Guang sat down at his computer. Rather than opening the chat group right away, he brought up the official forum to look for the player with the ID Yaya. He had expected to spend some effort searching, but the moment he opened the page, he saw her handle pinned right to the forum homepage, with a thread that had already collected over a hundred replies. [Waaah, it's my own fault for being reckless! I never should have risked my neck! Begging the almighty dev to have mercy, I really didn't do it on purpose, please don't ban my device! QAQ] Ban her device? Surely it wouldn't come to that. Chu Guang did not understand what was happening from the title alone, but as he read through the entire thread, he finally pieced together what had taken place. This girl... Really had an extraordinary talent for courting death.