Chapter 5: The 5th Day of Livestream Selling
Plane Number: D-2324.
Codename: Wasteland.
Civilization Level: Transitioning from planetary civilization to stellar civilization.*
Civilization Type: Postwar, technologically distorted, semi-silicon-based, semi-mechanical civilization.
Status Overview: This is a barren steel graveyard after nuclear winter. Human survival is greatly threatened by mutated creatures such as radiation beasts and pollutants. Order has collapsed, civilization has been severed, and the ratio between light and heavy industry is severely deformed.
Mainframe Evaluation: Pragmatic hyenas after the collapse of civilization. Here, a bottle of clean water may be more meaningful than philosophy.
Wasteland World, Kaman Plain.
The mercenary Gray felt as though his lungs were burning. Every heavy breath inside his gas mask brought with it an intense smell of radioactive dust and rust.
The mechanical arm on his left side, which had once cost him a large sum and was praised as “a mercenary’s best assistant,” was now hanging powerlessly. Some mutated mole’s acid had corroded one hole after another into it, and even the flesh around the connection point had begun to send waves of searing pain.
But he had no way to leave this place and repair himself.
Because he was trapped.
The reason Gray had rushed into this old library, which had been deemed utterly worthless, was purely because he had been chased by a razor boar king covered in shards of metal until he had nowhere else to run.
The beast’s heavy breathing and the sound of it violently scraping at the hard soil seemed to still echo beside his ears, ready to launch another charge at any moment.
Of course, that was impossible. For some unknown reason, that king boar could not enter the building before him.
But that was all.
Possessing a bit of petty cleverness, it kept wandering around the only exit, its blood-red eyes like two death-summoning red lamps, refusing to leave.
Gray lay despairingly on the library’s rotten floor. The iron bookshelves were like the elephant graveyards he had once seen. Yellowed dry bones had collapsed everywhere, and the paper books that had once been placed on them had long since turned into damp ash and mud. Only some remnants of covers made from synthetic materials remained, barely recognizable.
The supplies on this always-valiant mercenary were already exhausted. The last tube of nutrient solution in the side pocket of his backpack had been divided and eaten three days ago, and only a strange-smelling residue, perhaps already lightly contaminated, remained at the bottom of his canteen.
He was thirsty and hungry. He felt as though even his blood was heating up, and he could barely keep hold of the electric dagger that had accompanied him for years.
In Kaman, this was usually death’s final notice.
Private First Class Gray used the last of his strength to lean against the cold metal information desk and sit up little by little. He had never thought that one day, he would die like an insignificant rat in a pile of civilization’s ashes. All he could do was try his best to keep the final stretch of his journey as dignified as possible.
He fumbled for the orange core in the pocket on his chest.
This was something he had dug out from the remains of a prewar robot while taking the enormous risk of being exposed to severely excessive radiation levels. It was the size of a fist, its surface covered in circuits he could not understand, and occasionally, faint streams of light would flash across it.
It was the most valuable thing on him. He had originally planned to bring it back to Gear Town and exchange it for a decent exoskeleton, or at least half a year of peaceful days without having to lick blood from the edge of a blade.
But now, it was only a slightly prettier burial object.
Just as Gray was almost ready to give up, gather his strength, rush out, and make one final gamble against the razor boar king, the retinal assistance device before his left eye, which had become unreliable after being knocked around, suddenly flashed with violent static snow.
Along with a sudden, unexpected wave of dizziness, when Mr. Gray opened his eyes again, what he saw was already an unprecedented interface, so clean it was almost dazzling. A comfortable and tidy milky-white living room directly covered the library that had originally been nothing but broken walls and ruins in his field of vision.
Only after quite a while did he distinguish that it was not the image of his retinal assistance device that had been invaded. Instead, through the projection function of the device, an overly large floating light screen had lit up before his eyes.
It was not the crude projection common in the wasteland, filled with electromagnetic interference. Its edges were clear, glowing with soft white light. It looked like the kind of screen interface from before the nuclear winter that people in the settlements often spoke of as though they were dreaming.
And on that screen, a black-haired young man was tasting a can of fruit in syrup.
The black-haired young man was very beautiful, but a pragmatist like Gray truly had no time to appreciate it.
What he paid more attention to were the words on the screen that he did not recognize. It was extremely magical. Their meaning actually flowed directly into his mind.
Gray’s brain crashed on the spot, because the meaning of those words was not profound at all, nor was it as mystical as those salvation religions in Kaman. They were even a little too straightforward, like merchants from all over the world hawking their goods in all kinds of accents at the multi-settlement grand market held once a month.
“Ten transaction points, ten transaction points! All canned goods are only ten transaction points each!”
“You won’t lose out buying it, and you won’t be fooled buying it!”
“Buy today, ship today. Right this very moment, straight to your home.”
“What you see is what you get. Only the last eleven are left—uh, no, ten. There’s meat and fruit, one to two cans of each flavor, and free samples are available.”
“Once the stream ends, the original price returns. One day only, one stream only. Don’t miss it if you’re passing by!”
At that moment, the folds in Gray’s brain were smoothed flat by these simple and crude slogans. For several minutes, he even suspected that the absurd scene before him was a hallucination right before his death.
Other people saw their life flashing before their eyes.
He was watching a man eat canned fruit?
This young man was naturally none other than Lin Zhao, who, under 1114’s instigation, had opened a can on the spot to prove how delicious Qin Xiaoman’s family’s canned goods were, attempting to do an eating broadcast for the family members in his livestream room.
And Gray, the mercenary from the wasteland world, was one of the family members Lin Zhao had drawn using his beginner lottery chance.
The matter was indeed somewhat fantastical.
Lin Zhao knew nothing about the wasteland world Gray was in. After all, on the lottery page, all he saw was:
“This lottery draw will randomly connect two [???] that have passed the mainframe’s safety assessment. These will be your initial trade partners and sources of resources. The first transaction will, as much as possible, be targeted toward areas where the goods are scarce. This cannot be obtained repeatedly. [???] has no absolute good or evil. Commodity trade is destined to come with both fortune and disaster. Please make your choice carefully, host.”
For the censored parts, Lin Zhao guessed and assumed they should be the names of foreign cities or places.
After all, China had already comprehensively moved toward moderate prosperity. The only places that would consider canned goods rare could only be relatively remote and impoverished areas on Blue Star, the kind with scarce supplies or frequent wars.
When deciding to send targeted traffic to this codename D-2324, 1114 had also introduced it to Lin Zhao. Among a huge pile of censored information in its database, it had seen words related to “postwar.” D-2324 should have just ended a long and drawn-out war.
Lin Zhao became even more convinced that it was one of those small countries or regions where tribal conflicts often broke out.
Of course, Lin Zhao had also asked 1114: in areas like that, wealthy people still would not lack canned food, and those who did lack canned food probably could not afford to pay. Who exactly could he sell to?
1114, however, stated that their transaction system was a noble system, a pure system, a system free from vulgar interests. Naturally, it would not only accept currency, but would collect all equivalent items that could be traded.
“It will also estimate transaction points according to the value of different items. For example, this can of food is worth ten transaction points on my side, so the other party only needs to give us something local that is equivalent to ten transaction points.”
If there was too much or too little, the system would balance it out. It would also give the other party change in other equivalent items.
“Of course, the currency of the host’s location can also be exchanged at equivalent value.”
1114 had also explained the grand economic principles behind this to Lin Zhao, declaring that all its exchange methods were scientific and reasonable. At the very least, they would not disrupt the economies and markets on both sides.
But its explanation was really too long. By the time it entered Lin Zhao’s ears, it had turned into: this business has no risk; it can be done.
To be fair, this big-data targeted traffic distribution really had something to it.
Lin Zhao had only awkwardly eaten in front of the camera for a few minutes, and had not even eaten one-third of a can of fruit, when someone in the livestream room was already asking how to try a sample.
The idea of offering samples had also been a temporary adjustment Lin Zhao made after learning that 1114 had point-to-point real-time transmission functionality, and that once a stable connection channel was opened, it would not require much more energy.
Qin Xiaoman had given him a dozen cans in total, meaning twelve. One was used for the eating broadcast, and one was divided into many small portions. Lin Zhao temporarily ordered some transparent takeout containers through a delivery app, the kind usually used for side dishes, and evenly placed one or two pieces of fruit and some syrup in each.
Because he did not think he could successfully sell everything all at once, he only planned to use the principle of “each generation has its own version of free eggs” and use free samples as a gimmick to advertise in this remote area.
He was already prepared for the possibility that even if all ten cans were given away, he might not see a single cent in return. He only wanted to spread the word as widely as possible. After all, in a place with such blocked-off information, there probably were not many people who could watch livestreams on their phones. He would still have to rely on word of mouth.
The only thing he needed to worry about was how to explain this point-to-point transmission to his first foreign customer.
But the other party did not ask.
Then that probably meant the system had its own reasonable method over there. Lin Zhao was not especially at ease with 1114, whose brain had been damaged in the crash, but for now, it seemed like there were no problems.
It was just that this foreign customer had remained silent for some unknown reason for a very long time.
Of course Gray was still in shock.
He looked at the plastic food container that had appeared out of thin air in his arms and simply could not believe it.
This was actually real.
There really was someone who would give food to others for free—and it was the rarest kind of natural food at that.
The instinct to eat urged him to bite into the sugar his body desperately needed, but he still used his utmost effort to restrain himself. First, he lowered his head and measured the radiation value.
It was not as though he had never heard of scams in the underworld. Things like using abandoned waste materials to synthesize fake food. He did not mind fake food. When starving to the extreme, he had even eaten low-radiation dirt.
It was just that if these materials were not highly radioactive, ordinary people would not bear to throw them away as trash. Although he was already breathing more out than in, he still did not want to eat highly radioactive pollutants at the end of his life and cause himself to mutate completely.
But then something that made Gray even more suspicious that he was hallucinating happened.
Radiation value: 0.
0.
That number was so unreal that for a moment, this mercenary who licked blood from the blade thought his testing pen was broken. But the yellow peach before him was so tempting that he decided to gamble.
With one bite, how could he describe the feeling of natural food entering his mouth?
The black-haired man on the screen was simply eating blindly!
Gray did not believe there was anyone in this world who could eat such sweet, moist, chilled fruit that made saliva bloom in the mouth and not be intoxicated at all.
That dry, bland sentence of “It’s very delicious” was utterly insufficient to describe the feeling of juice exploding in the mouth, and completely unable to interpret the shock and cleansing that zero-radiation canned fruit could bring to the soul.
How could he act so ordinary about it?
What did he usually eat?
Dragon liver and phoenix gallbladder?
Author’s Note:
Terms like planetary civilization in the civilization level are based on the method proposed by a former Soviet astronomer of classifying civilizations according to their ability to use energy. There will be adaptations according to the needs of the plot, so please don’t take it seriously.
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