Isn't Carpentry as Easy as Having Hands?

"Big Brother Chu—hey, what's that on your back?" "A weapon," Chu Guang answered, unwilling to spend time explaining, and decisively changed the subject. "Are you two here to trade?" Yu Hu nodded like a pecking chick and said sheepishly, "Yeah. My brother and I bagged a deer, so we wanted to trade for some supplies from you. But I can't understand a word those folks say, and I had no idea what to do... Good thing you showed up." Chu Guang glanced at the carcass. It was quite sizable. "No problem. I'll give you a pass in a bit... Actually, let's just do it now." With that, Chu Guang took out his small notebook, drew a few strokes on a page with a marker, and handed it to Yu Hu. "Keep this safe. If someone stops you in the future, just show it to them." Paper and pens produced by the shelter were rather difficult to counterfeit. The writing on the pass was in Chinese, and it bore his signature, making it tough for ordinary people to imitate. Out of caution, Chu Guang also jotted down a numerical code, making it easy to match who was who if he ever issued passes to others down the line. Once conditions improved, he could switch to printed versions with anti-counterfeit codes. Yu Hu couldn't read what was written on it either, but he nodded and carefully put it away. Next, Chu Guang pointed to the old slave beside him, Luka. "He'll be managing the warehouse from now on. Hand your game to him, and he'll arrange for someone to process it." Old Luka was entirely baffled, yet he bowed his head respectfully. In his experience, there was no need to interrupt while the master spoke with a guest. If there was anything required of him, he would be told in detail afterward. If not, it meant there was no need for him to know. This was the first time Yu Hu had seen the man. Unaware of his status, he smiled warmly and nodded. "Understood!" "I happen to be heading to the warehouse anyway. Both of you come with me." Without lingering at the gate, Chu Guang led the pair alongside the covered wagon team toward the warehouse. The reindeer had been freshly hunted, pierced through the throat with a single arrow. Chu Guang had the player serving as warehouse clerk weigh it before sending it over to the butcher to be dressed. Brother Scrambled Eggs had grown increasingly adept at the task and even had two apprentices watching and learning at his side. Most of a mutant reindeer's offal was inedible. For one, there were no spices to mask the gamey stench; for another, there was no telling what the animal had eaten along the way. Even though they were herbivores and did not feed on carrion like hyenas, they were still wild beasts rather than livestock. Plants and fungi harmful to humans were bound to leave traces in their digestive tracts. Without a Constitution-type build, there was no reason to take that risk. Yu Hu and Yu Xiong watched from the side with curiosity. It was not as though they had never seen a butcher dress meat, but this was the first time they had seen bluecoats do it with such skill. Skinning, tendon-pulling, butchering—all done without blinking an eye. The flashing blade seemed never to catch on bone, and the discarded bones had not a scrap of meat left clinging to them. It was nothing short of miraculous. "The old butcher on Bet Street never lets us watch," Yu Hu whispered excitedly to his brother. "Once I get the hang of this, I'll open a slaughterhouse right in front of our house. Business is bound to boom." Yu Xiong shook his head. "Save your breath. Even if you open one, don't put it in front of the house. I plan on having a kid next year. Scaring a baby aside, it wouldn't do to scare Xiaoyu either." Yu Hu scratched his head sheepishly. "Oh, alright. Then I'll open it across from Old Charlie's general store. There's more foot traffic there anyway." Before long, the edible meat was piled on the cutting board, while the inedible scraps were dumped into a plastic bucket nearby. Brother Scrambled Eggs hung his butcher knife to the side, loaded the meat into crates, weighed it, and looked at the manager. "Exactly one hundred kilograms. Quite a lot." Chu Guang nodded and instructed him to take twenty percent of the meat, keep the odds and ends like tendons and bones along with the hide, and pack the remaining meat into the plastic bags the Yu brothers had brought. "Go to the warehouse in a bit and get three hundred grams of coarse salt." The outpost's salt prices had been adjusted once. The price of unrefined coarse salt was now one silver coin per fifty grams, a slight reduction. Refined salt cost five times as much—five silver coins for fifty grams—which was a noticeable increase from before. Salt with added buffs was marked up an additional fifty percent over the base price. However, whether it had buffs or not, refined salt was not sold to outsiders; it was exclusively supplied to players as a perk of sorts. Going by the price of salt, Chu Guang's cost for acquiring the reindeer hide came to roughly six silver coins. Going by his transaction cost, the actual number was likely less than a third of that. After all, most of the coarse salt had been acquired wholesale with smoked meat from the merchants of Red River Town, where an average kilogram of coarse salt cost only three kilograms of smoked meat. Even so, the Yu brothers were thrilled. Getting unadulterated salt in full measure was already a great blessing in their eyes. Better yet, Big Brother Chu had been generous—giving a full fifty grams extra, enough to last them several more days! A win-win situation—truly wonderful! Filled with gratitude, the brothers thanked Chu Guang, picked up their eighty kilograms of venison and three hundred grams of coarse salt, and departed happily. Chu Guang summoned Luka, who had been waiting beside him the entire time, and instructed him: "When those blue-coated *wanjia* come to turn in game, there's no need to weigh it. Give five silvers for a hyena and twelve silvers for a reindeer. Send the carcasses to the butcher, have the meat cured and smoked, then transfer it to the granary for storage. "If it's an outside hunter like that fellow just now, do as I did. Escort him to the butcher, keep twenty percent of the meat for smoking, retain the tendons, bones, and hide, give the other eighty percent back to them, and hand over three hundred grams of coarse salt. Understand?" Luka was very sensible. He did not ask what *wanjia* meant, focusing only on what he needed to do. The moment he grasped the instructions, he nodded at once. "Understood." Chu Guang gave a satisfied nod. Then he recalled something else. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out two coins, one silver and one bronze. "These are silver coins and copper coins. Learn to tell them apart. Later, I'll teach you some simple everyday phrases so you can communicate with the people here. It doesn't matter if you can't understand everything—just do what you are supposed to do and say what you are supposed to say. Understood?" Luka stared at the coins for a moment and nodded vigorously. "Understood!" "Good. That's essentially your job. Stand here for now and observe so you get familiar with the work environment. I'll come back later to teach you the rest." Luka obediently remained in place, standing guard beside the player working as the part-time warehouse clerk, which made the latter feel awkward for quite a while. Chu Guang was very pleased with his attitude. This new NPC was quite decent. You really got what you paid for—someone bought with a chip was far better than a free hand. Xia Yan, on the other hand, was hopeless. She would doze off even when told to recite a book, slacked off the moment she finished a task, and wouldn't budge unless driven with a whip. Her only redeeming quality was being fairly popular on the forums. To this day, Chu Guang still hadn't figured out what made her so "Alpha"—other than the fact that she definitely wasn't an A-cup... At that very moment, Xia Yan, who was dozing off by the door of the weapon shop, sneezed without warning. Sniffling, she raised her head, her forehead flushed red from resting against the counter. Like a marmot that had just woken up, she craned her neck and looked left and right. Seeing that the shop had no customers as usual and no one had come to inspect her, Xia Yan let out a sigh of relief. She pulled her fur coat tighter around herself and resumed her nap. Perhaps because returning to her old trade seemed hopeless and her future looked dim and uncertain, she admitted she had indeed grown somewhat lax recently, losing even her basic vigilance. To be fair, though this place was nowhere near as lively as Boulder City, the deerskin coat was remarkably warm. Not only was it made of premium hide, but it was also entirely hand-stitched. Back in Boulder City, it would probably fetch quite a few chips. Chips... Liquor... chocolate... As the thoughts drifted through her mind, saliva betrayed her and dribbled down. *** The woodworking shed. When Chu Guang found [WC Really Has Mosquitoes], he discovered him standing before a half-man-tall wooden box, fiddling intently with something. "What are you working on?" Hearing the voice behind him, Mosquito put down his tools, clapped his hands clean, turned to the manager, and said with high spirits: "Respected Manager, I'm designing a new type of weapon!" "...A new weapon?" "That's right! After the last battle, I realized we desperately need a fire-support weapon capable of unleashing a massive barrage onto enemy positions within seconds!" Speaking with utter excitement, Mosquito pointed toward the honeycomb-like wooden box before him. "'Blizzard 0.1'! That's exactly what it's designed for!" Was this thing a cluster rocket launcher?! Nothing was loaded inside it yet, presumably because the all-important "rockets" had not been built. Staring blankly at the contraption for quite some time, Chu Guang finally managed to squeeze out a question: "...Didn't you have version 0.2 last time? Why are you back to 0.1?" "Ahem, that was the Hellfire—not the same series." Mosquito looked briefly embarrassed, but his excitement quickly took over once more. "Hear me out! It might look a bit primitive, but I swear it's really, really practical! "According to my design, it can fire all fifty rockets packed with black powder, acetone, and wood tar within ten seconds! It'll saturate a battlefield a hundred meters away!" Saturating a battlefield a hundred meters away sounded nice on paper... Setting aside the spread radius and accuracy for a moment... His biggest worry was a tube blowout that would blanket the negative one-hundred-meter battlefield as well. "Rockets? Are you sure about this?" "Uh, sure! The propellant is black powder, but the effect should be roughly the same, right?" Mosquito's gaze drifted awkwardly to the side as he chuckled nervously. "According to my design, each rocket's propulsion section is about one kilogram. Adding a retardant should theoretically extend burn time to six to eight seconds, generating three point five to five kilograms of thrust. Theoretically, delivering a one- to one-point-five-kilogram warhead won't be a problem at all! "For that one-kilogram warhead, I plan on using a mix of wood tar, acetone refined through wood vaporization, and black powder. That way, it'll ignite in flames after exploding!" Chu Guang's eyelids twitched as he listened. Good grief. He was using explosives to launch explosives. If they actually launched, fine. But what if they failed to launch? That would be an absolute disaster! Clearing his throat, Chu Guang offered a cautiously phrased warning: "For urban combat... that kind of firepower might not be enough, and I have a feeling it's extremely dangerous. I'd still suggest trying to synthesize nitrocellulose first. The yield would probably be much higher." Black powder had a detonation velocity of only six hundred meters per second, whereas smokeless powder could exceed two thousand without leaving fouling residues. He had heard that the famous BM-13 "Katyusha" rocket launchers initially used smokeless powder as a propellant before eventually adopting a double-base solid propellant made by combining viscous nitroglycerin as a plasticizer with nitrocellulose. Black powder... It was fine for basic bombs. Asking it to power something like this was truly pushing it. "Fair point," Brother Mosquito muttered, rubbing his chin. "Tsk, if only I could get my hands on a propane tank." Chu Guang couldn't shake the feeling that this fellow was plotting something perilous, but in this era, it was hard to say whether propane tanks even existed, so perhaps he didn't need to worry too much. "Setting that aside for now... I need you to make three single beds for me." "Okey-dokey. By the way, are they urgent?" Chu Guang thought for a moment. "Can you finish at least one before evening?" Brother Mosquito rubbed his chin. "Shouldn't be a problem." Developing weapons took time. But carpentry? Anyone with hands could do that, right?