Chapter 16 Infrastructure Maniac and Biological Streetlights
After the "group buying craze" subsided, the atmosphere in Temple Square finally shifted from frenzied consumption to rational planning.
Although everyone had changed into their desired "artifact" breastplates or pooled their money to buy skill books, looking at the dilapidated wooden huts around them that resembled a refugee camp, and the makeshift fence that had already been breached by the kobolds, everyone felt a little uneasy.
"This won't do, it's too unsafe."
A player with the ID "Civil Engineering Dog" stepped forward. In real life, he was a project manager covered in dust and grime on construction sites, and once he entered the game, his occupational hazard, ingrained in his DNA, instantly kicked in.
He held a tree branch in his hand and drew a long arc on the ground outside the temple square.
"Brothers, listen to me," the civil engineering guy said, pointing to the distant, rolling black mountains. "Our previous fortifications were too simplistic. We have the temple behind us, and we can actually use the natural terrain on both sides. As long as we're here..."
He drew several lines heavily on the ground, saying, "Following the contours of the mountain, build a low wall to enclose the temple square and the living area behind it, thus forming a closed inner city."
"A low wall?"
A new player nearby, still munching on black bread, asked, "But we don't have cement or steel bars. Just piling up stones won't be sturdy enough. And this project is too huge! There are only fifty of us. When will we ever get here?"
"Isn't that a narrow perspective?"
The civil engineering student pushed up his non-existent hard hat and revealed a smile that would make even a capitalist weep.
"Who said we had to move it ourselves?"
He pointed to the three kobold prisoners trembling and tightly bound in the corner of the square—the only "living" survivors from the battle.
"Look at these guys, their forelimbs are thick, their nails are sharp, their center of gravity is low, and their lower bodies are stable. What does this mean? It means they are natural miners and porters!"
"Although there are only three now, we can let them do the hardest work first! As for the others…" The Civil Engineering Dog looked towards the Misty Forest, "Didn't a few teams that bought breastplates just now go out to the outskirts of the forest to capture 'wild laborers'? When they come back, our construction team can be expanded!"
With the added advantage of being a "construction maniac," the remaining players quickly sprang into action.
Despite the shortage of manpower, everyone followed the civil engineering team's plan and began laying the foundation and erecting pillars. In just one afternoon, rows of rough but orderly wooden frames were erected around the temple. Although the stones had not yet been filled in, the basic shape of a "city" was already emerging.
Meanwhile, the three unfortunate kobold captives, tears streaming down their faces, were frantically digging foundation trenches under the urging of the whip (vines). They simply couldn't understand why these humans were even more exploitative than demons.
However, the players' creativity goes far beyond that.
While everyone was enthusiastically setting up wooden stakes, a player with the ID "Edison Reincarnated" was squatting in the ruins behind the temple, staring blankly at a blob of acid slime that had just spawned.
He held a stone that emitted a faint green light in his hand—fluorite, which he had found by chance while clearing the ruins.
"This thing can light up, but the brightness is too low, and it can't be fixed in place..."
Edison reincarnated frowned and looked again at the translucent slime that was wriggling and digesting a bone.
Suddenly, a bold idea exploded in his mind.
"The slime's body is a semi-transparent fluid... If we put a light-emitting object inside, could it act as a light-focusing or light-diffusing device? Like a lampshade?"
Let's get right to it.
With lightning speed, he grabbed the baby slime, which was only the size of a washbasin, and forcefully stuffed the fluorite in his hand into its body.
"Glug."
The slime instinctively swallowed the foreign object.
The next second, a miracle happened.
The fluorite, which was originally just a faint glow, suddenly burst into a soft and bright green light after countless refractions and diffuse reflections inside the slime's bubble- and slime-filled body!
The whole slime looks like a giant, bouncy green jelly light bulb!
"Holy crap! It's done! A bio-electric light bulb!"
Edison shouted excitedly, but he soon discovered an even more amazing feature.
When he tried to reach out and poke the "light bulb," the slime felt threatened, and its core contracted.
"Pfft!"
A stream of acid was sprayed precisely onto his hand.
-5 (Slight Corrosion)
Edison looked at the red mark on his hand, but instead of getting angry, he laughed like a madman.
"It can glow... and it can also automatically counterattack..."
He carried the glowing slime and ran all the way to the civil engineering dog that was directing the construction of the framework.
"How outdated! Don't seal it all up! Leave a hole in this newly built template wall! Leave a circular groove every five meters!"
"What are you going to do? Raise fish?" The civil engineering student looked completely bewildered.
"I want to build defensive towers!"
Edison held up the "glowing jelly" in his hand. "Look at this! Just embed this slime that has swallowed fluorite into the wall, leaving a hole on the outside. At night, it will be a street lamp! If any monster tries to sneak up from the side or climb the wall, the slime will automatically spray acid at it!"
"And this thing doesn't need electricity or maintenance; you just need to feed it some garbage occasionally! It's a true bio-energy automated defense system!"
All the players were stunned by this idea.
"Wow, that's amazing! What a brilliant idea!"
"Are they using slimes as landmines?"
"And this green light... it looks especially like something out of a demon god! The underworld effects are off the charts!"
Although the walls are not yet fully built and large-scale installation is not possible, this does not prevent players from getting the "streetlights" up first.
Everyone followed suit, finding vines to weave into nets or nailing broken wooden strips into cages, putting slimes stuffed with glowstone (or glowing mushrooms) inside, and hanging them on the newly erected wooden frames or on the camp's pillars.
Night falls.
When Livy inspected his territory again, he was stunned by what he saw.
Outside the temple square, although the city wall is still just a bare wooden frame, lanterns emitting a faint green light hang from those frames.
These green dots swayed slightly in the night breeze, and occasionally the slime inside would wriggle, casting a ghastly green light on the surrounding mist.
On the only temporary, meter-high wall erected for testing, Edison was excitedly testing his "prototype defense tower." He poked a slime in a hole in the wall with a stick, only to get sprayed with green liquid, causing the surrounding players to burst into laughter.
The entire temple area, bathed in these green lights, appeared both eerie and... full of a violent aesthetic that combined industrial wasteland with magical creatures.
"These guys..."
Looking at those "slime streetlights," Li Wei couldn't help but laugh out loud.
"They actually turned my temple into a hellish amusement park?"
However, looking at the three kobolds working hard under the green light, and the players busy catching slimes and glowstones, Levi felt an unprecedented energy.
With a wave of his hand, Li Wei bestowed the title of "[Base Builder]" upon the players who participated in the base construction, and casually gave Edison the title of "[Junior Inventor]".
"Now that the foundation is laid," Li Wei looked out at the dark forest in the distance, "let's wait for good news from those slave-hunting teams. We'll need quite a few 'volunteers' to build this wall."
...
While the players at the base camp were engrossed in "biotechnology lighting" and "fully automated slime defense towers," several "slave-hunting teams" were trudging through the Misty Forest.
As the player with the highest agility in the entire server, "I'm Not a Husky" led his team with a clear objective, heading straight for the Blackrock Mine they had previously interrogated. They moved swiftly, having already knocked out two lone kobold scouts along the way, and were dragging them back with ropes.
The other trio, led by "Hakimi North Green Bean," plus two newbies who joined at the last minute, had a completely different style.
"Captain, are you sure this is the way?"
Looking at the increasingly thick gray-white fog around him and the withered tree roots under his feet that looked like ghost claws, "Ashigahayekunailong" felt a little uneasy. "I remember that Husky and the others went to the left just now."
"Ha! What do you know!"
Hakimi confidently brandished his rusty iron axe (the first one in the entire server), pointing to the right front: "A man's intuition tells me there's a big one over here! The husky is going to the mines to catch laborers, but we're different, we're going to discover a new continent! I have a feeling there's a hidden map ahead!"
So, under the leadership of this directionally challenged captain, the five-person team successfully... went the wrong way.
They strayed from the kobolds' territory and plunged deeper into the Forsaken Lands.
After walking for about half an hour, the surrounding trees began to thin out, replaced by pebbles and rubble everywhere.
"Hey? There's a building!"
The sharp-eyed "Oh my god, Ding-dong machine" suddenly pointed ahead and exclaimed, "It looks like a village!"
Everyone perked up and rushed over.
However, when they saw the scene before them, their initial excitement at discovering a new map was instantly extinguished, as if doused with a bucket of ice water.
This is indeed a village, or rather, it used to be.
Today, only desolate ruins remain.
Houses collapsed, walls covered with huge claw marks and charred remains. Most horrifyingly, the ruins were littered with skeletons. Not just one or two, but hundreds, even thousands, of corpses piled up in the streets, inside houses, and even hanging from dead trees.
Although the system has undergone "post-war sensory blurring," the overwhelming sense of devastation is still suffocating.
"this..."
Hakimi's carefree grin vanished. He walked to the center of the village, where there should have been a small square.
Now, the square is piled high with bones, like a small mountain. And at the top of the pile of bones stands a statue that is only half-buried.
The statue was dressed in a white robe (though it was now filthy), and seemed to be holding a scepter. Even though only half of the body remained, the original carving was still exquisite and exuded a sacred aura.
But now, the statue has been smashed to pieces, its head is gone, and its chest has been pierced open by some kind of sharp weapon, covered with black filth.
Around the statue, several broken flags were scattered, on which the golden sun emblem could still be faintly seen—the symbol of the Orthodox Church.
"This is... the church of the Church of the True God?"
Ashiga picked up a broken stone tablet with a faint inscription: "May the light... protect... forever..."
"Protection my ass."
Oh, Majili kicked a pebble on the ground, his voice low and somber, "There was a massacre here. And it looks like the so-called righteous gods couldn't hold out at all; they were completely flattened."
The players fell silent.
Although they came to play a game, and were part of the "Fourth Calamity," this was the first time they had so directly experienced a cruel aspect of the world's backstory.
The Land Forsaken by God is more than just a name. This place has truly been abandoned by the gods, both the righteous gods and the established order.
"That damn planner..."
Hakimi took a deep breath and cursed, "Why make the scene so depressing? It's making me lose my mood for jokes."
Although he was cursing, his hands didn't stop moving. He took off the [Evil God's Heart-Protecting Mirror] that everyone had pooled their money to buy and turned on the recording mode.
"Brothers, take pictures of this. Post it on the forum when we get back. This material is absolutely explosive."
While navigating the camera, Hakimi explained, "Look, everyone, this is called environmental storytelling. The art style of this game is absolutely amazing, the sense of desolation, the sense of despair... It seems that our main storyline isn't just farming, but also surviving in this hell."
Just as everyone was feeling heavy-hearted, frantically taking screenshots and recording videos of the ruins and corpses, and also complaining about the dark psychology of the planners.
Suddenly, a new player in the team tugged at Hakimi's sleeve.
"Captain... um..."
"What's wrong? Did you see a ghost?" Hakimi turned around impatiently.
"No...it's not a ghost."
The newbie pointed to a mountain hollow a few kilometers away at the end of the ruins, his voice trembling slightly, yet carrying a hint of unbelievable surprise:
"Look over there... isn't that smoke from a chimney?"
"ha?"
Hakimi, Ashiga, and Omakiri all turned their heads at the same time, looking in the direction the finger was pointing.
Against the gray horizon, at the foot of that desolate black mountain range, a wisp of extremely thin and faint smoke, almost invisible to the naked eye, was slowly rising.
Smoke signifies fire.
Fire signifies civilization.
Or rather... a survivor?
Hakimi's eyes lit up instantly, and the emotions he had just been immersed in were instantly thrown to the winds.
"Holy crap! Someone's here! Alive!"
He slapped his thigh and roared excitedly:
"Brothers! We've got a job! That direction! There's definitely hidden story content! Maybe even hidden NPCs!"
"Quickly! Mark the coordinates! Let's not alert anyone yet, go back and get reinforcements!"
The frustration of taking the wrong path vanished instantly. In this wasteland filled with death and ruins, that wisp of smoke was more dazzling than a lighthouse to the player.