To Chu Guang's surprise, the ox was carrying quite a few good things on its back.
For instance, resting right on top were five "Rider" revolver rifles.
The weapons possessed a 7mm caliber, with two crude rifling grooves inside the barrels to keep the ballistic spread relatively stable within fifty meters.
Better yet, their simple leaf-spring receiver mechanism was not only exceptionally easy to maintain, but also quite reliable in combat. Even if a misfire, dud, or jam occurred, there was no need to panic—a light flick of the cylinder was all it took to keep firing.
Detaching the barrel turned it into a pistol, though accuracy then became a matter of pure luck.
Naturally, what pleased Chu Guang most was its rate of fire.
Though semi-automatic by design, as long as one pulled the trigger fast enough, putting six rounds downrange in quick succession to lay down suppressive fire was no problem at all!
It was remarkably user-friendly.
Just as Chu Guang was pondering whether to pick one of the rifles as his "compensation," his gaze suddenly fell upon the sacks tied to either side of the two-headed ox.
Opening one up to look, he found it packed to the brim with coins.
Some of the coins were brass-colored, while others were silvery white. Whatever material had been used, they surprisingly showed no signs of rust. The brass coins were slightly smaller, the silvery ones slightly larger, marked with denominations of 1 and 10 to denote their face value.
"Pre-war currency? No, that's not right..."
Flicking up a coin, Chu Guang flipped it over to the reverse side and quickly made out a line of small print in the Human Alliance tongue:
[Galaxy Arcade]
Well, damn.
They were actually arcade tokens.
"Where did you get these?"
Tossing the coin back into the sack, Chu Guang sized up the merchant named Sun and asked, noting the nervous expression on his face.
Hearing Chu Guang's question, Sun Shiqi answered honestly.
"I found these coins in the basement of an arcade. I thought I could probably smelt some copper and steel out of them, so I just bagged them up."
Caravans rarely stopped to scavenge on their own; typically, they traded with local scavengers. That benefited both parties and avoided potential conflicts.
Yet nothing was absolute. Just as penniless mercenaries occasionally moonlighted as marauders to rob and pillage, merchants strapped for cash would naturally risk scavenging junk themselves.
Take the merchant before him, for instance. He had clearly not been in this business long; for all Chu Guang knew, the two-headed ox behind him had only recently been bought with pooled savings.
"Are there more where you found these?" Chu Guang asked.
Sun Shiqi froze for a moment, then nodded instinctively.
"I think there are two more cabinets... Probably enough to fill four or five more sacks like this."
"Very good. I want all of them."
Chu Guang unloaded the two sacks from the ox's back, looked at Sun Shiqi, and said, "These two sacks and the coins inside will serve as your compensation to us. Next time you come here, remember to bring the rest of those coins. Let's see... how about four kilograms of dried meat for every hundred kilograms of coins?"
A hundred kilograms was roughly the volume of one sack, containing around thirty to forty thousand coins.
Business was about playing the long game; Chu Guang had no desire to fleece the man too harshly. So he chose these two sacks, which conveniently happened to be useful to him.
Besides...
Since he intended to let the man leave, Chu Guang did not want to make his demand for weapons too obvious.
Evidently not expecting this man to be interested in such scrap, Sun Shiqi was visibly delighted, though he dared not show it too openly. He nodded hurriedly and said, "No problem! As long as you need them, I'll definitely bring them all next time!"
He could not care less what the man before him wanted the coins for. Perhaps for nostalgia? Perhaps for some other reason? These popsicles were hard to read in the first place.
He had originally planned to haul these coins to Boulder City to sell as copper and steel, which would not have fetched many chips anyway.
If he could use them to open up a market with a shelter, there was no way this deal could be a loss!
Furthermore, shedding some load ahead of time would make the road ahead easier for him to travel.
Aside from the two sacks of coins, Chu Guang also kept the five revolver rifles he had taken a fancy to earlier, and bought the two hundred rounds of 7mm ammunition the man was carrying.
In exchange, he provided the merchant from afar with a total of fifty kilograms of smoked meat and ten kilograms of smoked fish.
Although their initial contact had been fraught with misunderstandings, on the whole, the outcome proved quite satisfactory to both sides.
Chu Guang obtained what he wanted, while the merchant named Sun secured the trading rights and food he needed.
Survivors living in Qingquan City could hardly imagine the conditions over in Red River Town. Though less than a hundred kilometers apart, the ecological environment there presented an entirely different picture.
According to merchant Sun's own account, the area housed a massive chemical industry base and a landfill.
Because no one maintained these facilities after the war, their stockpiles leaked, severely contaminating the local soil. Heavy metal levels were particularly high, causing widespread desertification and soil crusting that nature had still not fully restored even now.
Not only that, but owing to the fragile ecosystem, the local mutants consisted primarily of scavengers and arthropods.
This extreme situation left the local survivors with virtually no usable farmland and made it exceedingly difficult to sustain life through hunting.
Interestingly, however, the landfill that locals had protested more than once before the war became the greatest wealth of the local survivors in the two centuries following the nuclear war.
Nearly half a century's worth of refuse lay buried there, a large portion of which had never been degraded or processed.
In the current Wasteland Era, the trash buried beneath had formed an "unnatural mineral deposit" in its own right, fostering a booming local industry in mining, archaeology, and trade.
"Then what do you eat?" Chu Guang could not help asking after hearing Sun Shiqi's description. "Do you rely entirely on imports?"
Food prices would have to be through the roof!
"Of course not entirely on imports. We don't have reindeer or hyenas, but many mutant moles and rats are edible. Besides that, we catch less dangerous insects and use them to make protein extracts to feed livestock, or turn them into something like nutrient paste... like this stuff."
As he spoke, Sun Shiqi drew a sealed glass jar from a pack draped over the two-headed ox's back, containing a pitch-black, gelatinous substance.
It looked a bit like herbal turtle jelly.
Chu Guang had indeed seen it when rummaging through the packs earlier, but not knowing what it was used for, he had ignored it.
He never imagined it was actually food.
"What's this made of?"
Sun Shiqi gave a sly chuckle. "Mutant cockroaches."
Chu Guang: "..."
Fuck!
He felt he would never be able to look at herbal turtle jelly the same way again.
"Even though it's protein and fat extracted from mutant cockroaches, after several repeated rounds of boiling, filtering, drying, grinding, soaking, and reducing, it really has nothing to do with cockroaches anymore. It's packed with pure protein... Care for some?"
Chu Guang kept a straight face. "No need."
He would rather starve to death than ever bring himself to eat that stuff.
Still...
Going by what this guy said, the cost of this food seemed very low?
Mutant cockroaches were common anywhere, and the cockroaches here in Qingquan City would definitely contain far fewer heavy metals than those in Red River Town.
In times of need, using this nutrient paste as emergency rations for the players seemed like a decent option?
On the question of whether to remain a decent human being, Chu Guang fell into deep contemplation for a good while.
Just then, however, another matter suddenly crossed his mind.
"Sounds like you know a lot about insects?"
Sun Shiqi nodded at once. "Of course, we deal with those things every day."
Chu Guang pressed further. "Then do you have any way to deal with leeches?"
"Leeches?" Sun Shiqi blinked. "Do you mean... those mutant leeches?"
"Yeah."
Seeing Chu Guang nod, Sun Shiqi pondered for a moment, an awkward look on his face. "Those things... are pretty rare in Red River Town, probably because we have a lot of ants over there."
Chu Guang frowned. "Ants?"
Sun Shiqi nodded and continued, "Yeah, we have a type of mutant called the ironback ant. They're about the size of a thumb, with the biggest growing to the size of a fist. Their carapaces are rock-hard and corrosion-resistant, and they eat almost anything. Most mollusks and soft-bodied creatures are no match for them."
Chu Guang asked, "Could you bring a few for me to see next time?"
Sun Shiqi smiled and said, "No problem! Leave it to me!"
After the trade was concluded, the merchant named Sun did not linger long, choosing instead to resume his journey.
Chu Guang did not try to keep him, only warning him that there was a mutant camp near 76th Street and signs of marauder activity north of Wetland Park, before wishing him a safe journey.
The silhouette of the two-headed ox gradually disappeared into the woods.
Watching him depart, the players were buzzing with discussion.
"That guy really was a merchant just now!"
"Damn, good thing we didn't beat him up."
"Even if we did, it probably wouldn't matter. We could've kept all his stuff."
"True, but what if the merchant doesn't respawn once he dies?"
"Not respawning after dying is unlikely, but maybe in this 'Winter Is Coming' expansion pack, he really is the only merchant. Besides, haven't you heard the dev? Wasteland OL claims it's building an economic system that fully and realistically reflects supply and demand. If that's not just an empty promise, playing the long game is the way to go!"
"...Guess that makes sense."
Paying no mind to the players' chatter, Chu Guang's thoughts at this moment were entirely on the two sacks of arcade tokens.
He had a bold idea.
If plastic chips could serve as a universal equivalent, why not metallic currency?
These two sacks of coins numbered sixty to seventy thousand at the very least, and before long, that merchant named Sun would bring him another huge batch.
For a population under five hundred, these coins would be more than enough!
The brass-colored coins could serve as copper coins, and the silvery-white ones as silver coins, with an exchange rate of ten to one.
As for the original contribution points, they would be merged into a new honor system, usable for purchasing status, titles, and even private land.
At the same time, the mercenary, caravan, guild, and legion systems to be introduced in the future would also be tied to contribution points. Only players with sufficient contributions would have the right to lead others.
This would not only strengthen governance, but also severely curtail players who loved causing trouble.
After all, the more valuable a player's account was, the more they would cherish their hard-won access to the game, the more inclined they would be to grind away, and the more willingly they would uphold in-game order of their own accord.
Causing trouble was fun.
And this was human nature.
Dragging the two sacks—weighing nearly a hundred kilograms each—back to the shelter alone, Chu Guang then found an empty room without any activated incubation pods and leaned the sacks against a corner of the wall.
Then he turned and returned to the resident hall, booted up the computer, logged into the official website's backend, and began editing a title:
[Wasteland OL Closed Beta Alpha 0.3 Patch Notes: Major Economic Overhaul!]
Typing out this line, Chu Guang opened his document.
He had lifted quite a few brilliant ideas from the forums earlier.
Now, they could finally be put to good use...
Chapter 45