Language barrier?
Can't communicate?
To Chu Guang, that wasn't a problem at all.
As a tool man, he only needed to master a few simple phrases to meet the players' needs for Game functionality.
For example, the simplest buying and selling could be learned without complex vocabulary.
And if he couldn't understand the players' trash talk?
Cool as a cucumber.
After all, even in a fully immersive virtual reality Game, it wasn't possible for every NPC to have full, realistic intelligence.
That was only reasonable.
Therefore, Chu Guang didn't ask Xia Yan to learn Chinese but only to grasp a few basic words and set phrases.
However, what he didn't expect was that, despite setting his expectations very low, she still fell short of them.
"...For customers who come into the shop, you have to say 'Hello, I am Xia Yan, the weapon shop owner's wife, how may I assist you?' When you hear 'I want to buy something,' point to the menu and respond 'Look for yourself,' and when you hear 'I need to maintain my firearms', hand them over and answer 'Bring them here'?"
What in the world was all this?
Holding the piece of paper in her hand, Xia Yan had a distressed expression, looking to Chu Guang, who was sitting on a chair, for help.
Despite every word being annotated with pronunciation, she was still struggling with the strange sounds.
Even though it was indeed quite similar to the language of United Humans.
Noticing that Xia Yan was looking at him, Chu Guang shifted his gaze away from the computer screen and turned to look at her.
"Have you learned it?"
Xia Yan: "Not yet..."
Chu Guang: "Then what are you looking at me for, keep studying."
There was a moment when Xia Yan felt that perhaps giving birth to children might be easier, but for some reason, the man showed no interest in her.
Am I that ugly?
Hardly.
Pinching her own red hair tips in frustration, Xia Yan was quite confident in her appearance. For instance, the captain had pursued her for a while.
She just hadn't been interested.
Life as Cannon Fodder was too hard, constantly under the threat of death; her dream was to marry into the Inner City of Giant Stone City and live a wealthy life.
Actually, when she thought about it, it wasn't impossible.
What if one day she received a mission to escort a VIP? It was possible that the kind of situation from a novel, where the beauty saves the hero, could happen.
Only too bad that talking about escorting VIPs was out of reach for fringe teams like theirs, that couldn't even take work around the second ring road but were delegated to the Wasteland to open "Blind Boxes."
As for the dream life?
Even less likely now.
Who would want a cripple?
And a cripple who had been captured by Barbarians at that...
While Xia Yan was feeling melancholy about her misfortunes, a light cough sounded beside her.
"Try to contain your expression a bit."
"Ah?"
Xia Yan looked confused.
She obviously was daydreaming.
Seeing her instinctive reaction, Chu Guang, sitting at the chair, was speechless.
He sighed, paused for a moment, and said emotionlessly,
"Starting now, I'm timing you. In two hours, I'll test you again."
"If there's still no progress, the Brown farm next door might be more suitable for you. They happen to need serfs."
"It would also make me a bit of money."
...
It was winter now, and Brown's farm didn't need serfs; instead, they would be getting rid of a bunch of old things who couldn't work, or the defective goods with broken arms and legs, at the end of the month.
No one would want a crippled mercenary, even if she was free.
As for coveting beauty, that was even more ludicrous; even the rustic tycoons on Bet Street could afford clones more exquisite than stars after some minor adjustments. What would a soul, outwardly strong but inwardly weak and crude, even be worth?
This was the Wasteland.
Selling that woman off, Chu Guang had just been speaking offhand.
It was more to scare her a bit and give her some motivation.
Even if she was indeed too foolish to memorize those few pages of script, he wouldn't actually sell her as a slave.
At most, he would throw her out.
In fact, having interacted with her during this time, Chu Guang found her quite entertaining; talking nicely did no good, but threatening her worked wonders, making her timidly study.
Why the trouble?
Chu Guang shook his head and went back to his internet. He'd just discovered that his Steam account was still active, perfect for killing some time...
The next morning.
Having had a good night's sleep, Chu Guang opened the player list, unlocked login permissions in bulk, and led the online players to the surface.
"Respected Manager sir, where is the lady from yesterday?" Standing beside the Manager, Fang Chang respectfully asked.
"You mean Xia Yan? Her injuries are quite severe; she needs a few days of quiet rest. I spoke with her last night, and she has agreed to join our cause. Once her wounds heal, she will be responsible for Outpost Weapon Maintenance Work."
Of course, Chu Guang didn't mention that she had been studying until two or three in the morning, ultimately having to be carried to the next room by himself. Odds are, she was still sound asleep.
After hearing the Manager's response, Fang Chang's eyes lit up.
New intelligence!
The new NPC's name was Xia Yan!
Her identity must be a Weapon Shop Owner or a similar profession!
Quietly noting down these facts, Fang Chang planned to update his thread with all this information after logging off for the day.
Chu Guang could guess what he was thinking, which is why he had been so detailed in the first place.
Continuing his role as an NPC, Chu Guang took the players to the open space of the sanatorium for a quick pep talk, then announced the dismissal.
After two days' time to get used to the game, the new players had pretty much got the hang of it and no longer needed his direction.
Watching the gradually rising furnace flames and black smoke from outside the construction site, and those players climbing up and down the scaffold, huffing and puffing as they worked, Chu Guang suddenly felt like the old duck-raising farmer.
Every day, his job was to drive the ducks out of the pen, let them waddle about on their own, and then herd them back into the pen at nightfall; afterwards, he'd tally the day's yield and calculate how much the ducks had fattened up, and on top of that, systematically pluck a few feathers for himself.
Of course, that wasn't exactly right either.
```
After all, most of the tools for the work were provided by themself, and most of the jerky they ate was also brought back from their own hunting.
Thinking this way, they really did put in quite a bit of effort.
Probably?
Standing at the construction site for a while, just as Chu Guang pondered what to do today, Night Ten had already proactively come over.
"Respected Manager," Night Ten said with a respectful salute, eagerness written all over his face, and took the initiative to speak, "Are we going hunting again today? When do we leave?"
Chu Guang was slightly startled and nodded.
"...Now."
Well then.
Now these players had become rather initiative, learning to assign work for themself?
But Chu Guang didn't say anything.
After all, he had indeed planned to go out for a stroll and smoke some game meat.
Chu Guang, with Night Ten in tow, returned to the shelter and donned a tactical belt he had stripped from a mercenary, slid the pistol he had picked up into it, and then inserted two 5mm pistol clips as spare ammunition.
His primary weapon was still his 9mm iron pipe rifle, as well as the Physics Holy Sword—a steel pipe that could pry open doors and hammer people.
Although he now had the options of a submachine gun and a shotgun—these two "close combat divine artifacts"—neither was particularly meaningful for hunting.
The spare ammunition for the spreader contained no slug rounds; using buckshot would damage the fur.
Rather than relying on close-quarters firepower suppression, Chu Guang preferred to use the high-quality 9mm iron pipe rifle with rifling threads, taking down the game with a single shot at a medium distance.
Or at least immobilize it, then go up close for the coup de grâce with the steel pipe.
This would not only save precious ammunition but also preserve the game's fur in a more complete condition.
After all, each additional bullet hole or slash would decrease the quality of the fur by ten percent.
"Take this with you."
Chu Guang handed Night Ten a pistol and a crossbow, along with a beast skin quiver holding fifteen crossbow arrows.
"Can I use the shotgun?"
Night Ten looked at the pistol, then at the shotgun leaning in the corner of the wall, pleadingly gazing at Chu Guang.
However, Chu Guang had no intention of yielding and said expressionlessly,
"We're going hunting, not fighting mutants."
"You get used to these two weapons before talking about others."
...
Chu Guang set off on a hunting trip with Night Ten.
The players at the outpost worked as diligently as they had the day before, some moving bricks, some mixing cement, some plastering—none were idle.
Thanks to the thirty tools exchanged by the esteemed Manager from the Brown farmstead, the work efficiency of the players had substantially increased.
Especially those building the walls.
The enclosing wall's construction site was advancing at a visibly rapid pace.
Not just at the construction site.
Fang Chang and Old White, pondering over the primitive method of smelting, had made new progress in their work after acquiring fire tongs and a hammer.
They had dismantled parts from the cars in the parking lot—rusted car frames, engine hoods, suspensions, and even the engine casings—these scraps, subject to two hundred years of weathering until no complete structures remained, were like natural open-air ore deposits to them.
Smashing the brittle rust into the furnace, still using charcoal as the reductant and manual bellows for airflow, this time they actually succeeded in smelting the junk into hot molten iron.
```
"Awesome!!!"
"It worked!"
Old White and Fang Chang clenched their fists excitedly.
They had been waiting for this moment for a full three days!
The hot molten iron produced by this method would cool down into pig iron with high carbon content. By repeatedly heating and cooling, they could reduce the carbon content to between 2% and 1.5%, obtaining the most basic steel materials.
As for creating alloys by adding metals like chromium and nickel, that was still too difficult for them. Real steel smelting required professional equipment, at the very least an electric furnace.
Actually, forget about smelting steel; just being able to produce molten iron from industrial waste was already an incredibly significant achievement for their rudimentary production facilities!
"What should we forge?" Old White excitedly asked Fang Chang, "An axe? Cutting tools? Or something else?"
Fang Chang, with an equally joyful face, pondered for a few seconds before responding.
"Let's start by making a big pot!"
"I'm so sick of stew, I could throw up!"
Although yesterday's mashed potatoes weren't bad, they heard from Brother Catfish that there wasn't much soy sauce left. If nothing unexpected happened, it would be pine nut and fresh fish soup again today.
That stuff really wasn't tasty at all; one sip and your mouth would be filled with the flavor of catfish.
"Haha, good idea! With an iron pot, we can stir-fry!"
The two quickly reached a consensus, starting to work with the little yellow clay left from brick-burning, figuring out how to create a mold for making the iron pot.
Meanwhile, in front of the carpentry shed.
Brother Mosquito, sitting on a small stool at the doorway was fully engrossed in the handcraft before him.
He was seen cradling a trash bin picked up from who knows where, sealing it with a wooden board, then hammering a stainless steel pipe into it, making a simple spray kettle structure.
And he wasn't done yet.
Clearly dissatisfied with a simple slanted sprinkler, Brother Mosquito sealed the connections with pine resin, fitted the exterior of the trash bin with a hand-carried wooden handle, constructed something akin to a pressure sprayer from a plastic bottle, and connected a tube bent into an S-shape to the back of the bin.
"Perfect!"
Having completed his creation, Brother Mosquito looked at the device in his hands with a joyous expression.
A manual pressurized flamethrower!
As long as wood tar was poured into the bin and a lit cotton strip was inserted into the front pipe, theoretically, within a radius of five meters, this device could become the nightmare of any person or Variant—
Of course, provided you didn't set yourself on fire too.
To put it in high social IQ terms, the design concept of the device was a bit cyberpunk, but Brother Mosquito felt it wasn't a big issue, and it could always be improved later on.
For now, they could call it "Hellfire 0.1"!
As he was contemplating where to test it, Brother Mosquito looked up and suddenly saw Wild Wind approaching with a plastic bucket in hand.
That guy usually went fishing early in the morning, and typically he wouldn't be seen near the sanatorium until the afternoon. But today was an odd exception; he was back before ten o'clock.
"Yo, back so early today?" Mosquito asked, seeing Wild Wind approach, teasing him with a smile, "Don't tell me the traps broke again."
"It's not the traps," Wild Wind said, throwing the plastic bucket onto the ground, "Guess what I found?"
"Found what—?" Mosquito froze when he saw the contents of the bucket.
Inside were some white stones mixed with yellow and light brown impurities.
The stiff look on his face instantly turned to ecstatic joy.
"Bird Feces Stone!?"