This Game Is Too Real
Chapter 274: Can Be Used as Both Food and Feed

Chapter 274: Chapter 274: Can Be Used as Both Food and Feed

The tide of battle erupted on the tenth day.

Many players noticed that in the last couple of days, there had suddenly been an influx of strange NPCs on the battlefield.

They wore orange hazmat suits with black gas masks on their heads, and never engaged in conversation with anyone. Typically, in groups of two, they carried a stretcher between them, and in groups of three or five, they would move Variant corpses away from the battlefield, keeping busy from morning until sunset.

These NPCs were highly efficient; a pair could transport four hundred to five hundred bodies in a day. It was clear they were old hands at this kind of work.

Some observant players even saw that each of them had a KV-1 Exoskeleton?

Although this was the base model without welded steel plates or mounted weapons, it would still cost 800 silver coins in an NPC shop, the equivalent of four LD-47 rifles.

Players leaning against concrete slope barricades curiously watched these NPCs and whispered among themselves.

"Darn developers, what kind of tricks are they up to now?"

"A new profession, corpse movers?"

"Great, finally, someone’s cleaning up these damned things."

"+1, they stink!"

"It’s messed up that we can block out pain but not the stench!"

Clearing Variant corpses was no easy task.

Players had exhausted nearly every conceivable method.

At first, they discussed burning the bodies, but reality proved less optimistic than expected. Often, only the surface layer burned to char, and the fire extinguished before it reached the underlying corpses.

This game is bizarrely realistic in the weirdest areas; one Molotov Cocktail would be enough to take out two or three Eaters, but to incinerate them to ash would take more than three cocktails.

Mucosal Entities contained significantly more water than humans, and the steam alone would carry away a lot of heat.

Moreover, fat and fat-like substances weren’t easy to ignite, and maintaining a blaze often required a continuous supply of substantial fuel.

If this seems hard to grasp, try cooking a piece of meat from the fridge; even getting it cooked takes a bit of time, never mind reducing it to ashes.

For now, the main method of handling these corpses was to drag them outside the city and bury them, but the speed of removal couldn’t keep up with the rate of accumulation.

The bulk of the Tide’s assault would typically start at six in the evening and last until six the next morning, relentlessly hitting the players’ positions.

Including the Hunter Squads’ efforts to search for and eliminate Crawlers in the ruins, on average, each player would kill over thirty Variants daily.

Clearly the number of Variants was far greater than initially estimated.

After all, players were wiping out around twenty to thirty thousand per day, and after ten days of the Tide, there were no signs of it weakening.

Fortunately, owing to factors such as the battlefield’s width, the massive number of Variants couldn’t fully deploy their numbers; if players faced this many on an open plain, even doubling their ranks might not save them from a challenging fight.

According to posts by players responsible for transporting ammunition to the front lines, ammunition consumption in the last three days had stayed around one hundred thousand rounds per day.

A full-power 7mm bullet weighed nearly 25g, so one hundred thousand rounds amounted to 2.5 tons of ammunition.

To collect the materials required for the ammunition production line, Chu Guang had no choice but to mobilize rookies to dig up the United Human ancestors’ graves while directing the arms factories to add two new ammunition production lines that made steel core, steel jacketed bullets.

Compared to copper shell bullets, steel jacketed bullets had their problems—less ductility, no capacity for reloading, potential rusting—but in Chu Guang’s view, their single virtue overshadowed any defects: they were cheap.

Since the ammunition was quickly used up on the front lines, considering longevity seemed superfluous, and assembly-line produced bullets didn’t need to think about reloading; the recovered casings were just sent to the steel factories to be melted down.

From the eighth day, the front-line situation had entered a phase of attrition.

Loads of ammunition were shipped to the front lines, and batteries of corpses were dragged down from there—mostly Variants, with a few players mixed in.

Initially, it was the rookies moving these bodies, dragging them to the outskirts to be buried, but lately a group of professional NPCs had taken over, and those bodies had vanished without a trace, with no new graves in sight.

Many detail-obsessed players were filled with confusion and curiosity.

Where did the Variant corpses go?

Where?

But their curiosity didn’t last long.

Some attentive players engaged in life-skills jobs soon found that, following the Bachi Aluminium Factory, a new NPC factory had opened at the very southern edge of the new industrial district, called the Didivei Food Processing Factory.

The factory mainly produced nutrient paste and organic fertilizer and also supplied sulfur and lime to the fertilizer factory.

Those trucks coming from the front lines.

Seemed to be heading straight there...

...

"Wasteland OL" Official Website.

As soon as he discovered mosquitos on the New Continent, WC couldn’t wait to start a thread on the forum,

"Big news! The destination of Eater corpses has been found!"

Si Si: "Where did they go??"

Makabazi: "Hurry up! Don’t friggin’ keep us in suspense!"

Battlefield Atmosphere Group: "Exactly!"

Seeing the thread sparked outrage, Mosquito, who had hoped to let the topic ferment a bit before unveiling the mystery, didn’t dare to tease anymore and quickly typed a response.

"The Didivei Food Processing Factory! Located right at the southern end of the industrial area. I saw it with my own eyes; those trucks dragging the bodies went straight in!"

Old White: "Pfft... that name."

Quit smoking: "Damn?! I bought some yesterday! (Alarmed)"

Night Ten: "Damn! You actually bought it?!"

Quit Smoking: "Uh, mainly because it’s cheap. A pound of nutrition paste is only 1 Silver Coin and it can make two meals. (awkward)"

Fang Chang: "No way. (laughter with tears)"

Night Ten: "I feel for Quit Smoking, bro... that’s too frugal. (covers face)"

Si Si: "Eww... have foodies finally stooped to scavenging off Eaters?"

tail: "Shocking! Is this the decline of morality or the distortion of humanity?"

Quit Smoking: "Damn! Is it weird to save money for gear? I just want to spend Silver Coins on something more useful. Don’t you guys plan your expenses when you play ’Game’?"

Wild Wind: "It depends. If you can get satisfaction from virtual food in the game, it means that delicacies are part of the gaming experience provided by the operator. Isn’t it putting the cart before the horse to sacrifice part of the gaming experience to get stronger? (sidelong glance)"

tail: "Oh! tail thinks so too!

Elena: "Honestly though, Eaters are the offspring entities of mutated slime fungus, right? Even though they look a bit like mammals, biologically, they should be considered mushrooms, right? So it’s not wrong to eat them. What I don’t get is why you can’t eat them directly, but it’s okay when they’re made into nutrition paste. (amused)"

Gnome King Riches: "Old Na, what are you trying to do. (amused)"

Elena: "Nothing, just curious. (amused)"

Curious as they were, Old Na in Red River Town had no chance to taste it even if he was curious about the flavor.

However, there were quite a few gamers eager to flirt with death, who took out 1 Silver Coin with curiosity and bought a pound to taste test.

After all, it’s cheap.

Silver Coin won’t buy regret or deception.

Some gamers who enjoyed sharing even posted their taste-testing testimonials on the official website.

An objective assessment says that the nutrition paste made from mutated slime fungus doesn’t really taste especially bizarre. And due to its low salt and sugar content, it’s nearly tasteless.

If that were all, it wouldn’t be so bad to swallow, but what really torments people is the sandy texture that leaves one at a loss for words.

After eating it, you’re always left feeling like there’s phlegm stuck in your throat.

And the greenish color fully suppresses any appetite.

Many players finally understood why some NPCs preferred starvation over eating this stuff.

This thing really isn’t fit for human consumption!

After posting their taste-testing thoughts, the Forum discussions quickly turned to how to make the nutrition paste less nauseating.

Tomato and Egg Stir-fry: "If you could get a grinder to refine the granules a bit more, the texture might improve."

Crow: "You could add a bit of chocolate and sugar! (≖ᴗ≖)✧"

Teng Teng: "Wait... wouldn’t that make it expensive?"

Fang Chang: "+1, the whole thing’s backward."

The feature of the nutrition paste is its extreme cheapness.

Those who can afford chocolate wouldn’t dream of buying something like nutrition paste.

The topic quickly shifted from "how to make the nutrition paste less nauseating" to "how to make it less distasteful at the lowest cost."

That’s when a player with a chemical engineering background popped up.

"How about adding some sweetener?"

"Sodium saccharin? It’s cheap enough, but isn’t it bad for your health?"

"There’s a safe dosage limit, it’s safe as long as it’s under 5mg per kilogram of body weight... it’s the wasteland, what’s there to be picky about?"

"Bro’s a legend 666!"

"Is this a capitalist?"

"Get in line first, not enough streetlights here. (amused)"

...

As players discussed, Didivei Food Processing Factory, located at the southernmost part of the Industrial Zone, was working overtime.

The size of the factory wasn’t small, roughly the size of a soccer field, with one of two warehouses collapsed and the other intact and usable.

Looking at the concrete fragments on the ground, it seemed the place had been cleaned up recently. Many areas were still untidy, but that didn’t affect production.

Since visiting the North Suburb Industrial Zone and Long Endurance Farm three days ago, Detwei immediately gathered a group of small-scale grain merchants from Stone City and raised a huge fund of 300,000 chips to purchase a complete set of nutrition paste production equipment. Along with the old set from his own workshop, he hired mercenaries to transport them to the North Suburb.

Land rent in the North Suburb Industrial Zone was cheap; the first two years were rent-free, with the sole costs being utilities and management fees plus a 20% corporate income tax.

Compared with Stone City, these costs were already very low.

Especially since the labor cost here was cheap.

Basic wages for ordinary workers were 10 Silver Coins a day. Considering meals and other costs, the actual monthly cost was about 400 Silver Coins per person. Employing twenty workers amounted to a monthly cost of just 8,000 Silver Coins.

What does 8,000 Silver Coins represent?

To be honest, even Detwei didn’t have a precise grasp of that.

The exchange rate provided by the bank was that one chip could be exchanged for 2 Silver Coins, but this was definitely not the market rate. Otherwise, the wages of the workers here would be ridiculously high, with basic daily wages reaching 5 chips.

Moreover, the bank here only provided services for exchanging chips, Dinars, and CR into Silver Coins, without the option to directly exchange Silver Coins back into chips or other currencies.

If one absolutely needed chips, one had to apply as an enterprise, specifying which equipment to purchase, and obtain approval before the exchange could be made.

Here, foreign exchange controls are very strict.

But it’s not as harsh as it is in other small survivor settlements in Qingquan City, such as prohibiting residents from privately holding chips or trading with foreign merchants.

Detwei actually doesn’t care too much about these.

Even though he couldn’t exchange silver coins for chips, he could buy things with silver coins and then transport them to Giant Stone City to sell.

As long as he paid taxes on the products he produced, they could be freely taken out of the country.

Beyond that, Shelter No. 404 provided him with ready-made factory space and a low-interest loan of six hundred thousand silver coins for paying labor, utilities, and a series of other expenses.

It’s equivalent to not having to spend a penny to open a factory here!

Equipment and technology are enough!

And it’s okay if he incurs losses, as the factories operate under a limited liability system, and debts won’t trace back to individuals. At most, the equipment and other assets could be auctioned off.

With such generous conditions, Detwei felt so moved he almost cried!

"... Our factory’s daily processing capacity has already reached 100 tons, with a daily output of 10 tons of nutrition paste and 4 tons of organic fertilizer!"

"I guarantee that this figure will at least double or even triple by the end of the month!"

Walking in the spacious factory,

Detwei, beaming with joy, was enthusiastically introducing the production line he got from Giant Stone City to the esteemed Manager beside him.

One could see workers in protective gear throwing corpses of Eaters, Crawlers, and even Butchers, all from the truck into steel-made containers.

Their appearance and the work they were doing made it hard to associate them with food production - it rather looked like they were disposing of bodies.

Once the container was filled with corpses, a worker at the control station operated a crane-like device to hoist the container, moving it to the top of a cylindrical metal tank as thick as a fuel tank.

As the container tilted, one Variant corpse after another fell into the giant metal tank, just like dumping dumplings.

The round hatch sealed shut, the pressure indicator began to rise, and with the roaring buzz, the whole setup began to work.

There were a total of eight such thick metal tanks here!

After being encased, these corpses would go through a 24-hour process of high-temperature drying, deactivation, compression, and other procedures. Then they would be transported through pipes to a workshop on one side of the factory, where a series of complex processes would separate out the effective components.

After this series of pretreatment, the resulting viscous substance looked like globs of green slimes, and it was basically impossible to tell if they had any relation to the "Mutated slime fungus".

Ignoring the smell, it was even kind of cute.

"... One hundred tons is still a bit less, the frontlines kill at least twenty thousand Variants each day, and I hope you can manage to increase the processing capacity to over four hundred tons by the end of the month."

Eyeing the factory equipment with interest, Chu Guang casually mentioned.

"By the way, what about the market? Are the nutrition pastes easy to sell?"

This was Chu Guang’s second concern.

With a slight smile and confidence, Detwei said,

"Don’t worry about that. Although these devices are not the most advanced, our cost is very cheap! In terms of pricing, we have an absolute advantage that allows us to beat our competitors!"

Beyond cheap production costs, another massive advantage of setting up a factory here over Giant Stone City is the convenience of transportation.

Qingquan City’s resources may be rich, but the road conditions are really hard to describe – a kilometer here is harder to traverse than ten kilometers outside the city.

In front of dirt paths that are two to three meters long and cliffs that are four to five meters high, not only wheeled vehicles but even tracked vehicles would be discouraged.

That’s why when Giant Stone City’s commercial teams trade with surrounding areas, they usually choose double-headed cows or other livestock as means of transportation.

Some inter-regional commercial teams also choose to settle outside the city, then employ local cart teams to communicate with survivor bases in the city.

However, in the North Suburb, this problem is much easier to solve.

This place is essentially a suburb, so once you leave the city, there’s a wilderness. Products produced in the factory can be directly loaded onto trucks and pulled away.

"... Currently, my partner has secured an order worth a total of two hundred thousand chips from a farmer in the south. They need a large amount of nutrition paste to feed slaves and livestock, and our price and supply volume are irresistible to them!

"The other party even expressed their willingness to come and pick up the goods, this will be a long-term deal!"

Chu Guang looked at him surprisingly.

"Nutrition paste can be fed to livestock?"

Detwei’s face carried a confident smile.

"Of course! If humans can eat nutrition paste, then so can animals, and it’s quite high-quality feed! Some farmers would mix it with green wheat and feed it to double-headed cows. Cows fed with this kind of feed are much stronger than those fed with straw and grass!"

Not bad.

Chu Guang nodded, a satisfied smile appearing on his face.

He hadn’t expected the nutrition paste to have such a wide range of uses.

Even if this food processing factory were ever to mismanage and not be able to repay its loans, eventually going bankrupt, he wouldn’t have to worry about making a loss.

Detwei had a similar expression on his face.

Although he had invested a huge sum of three hundred thousand chips all at once, he didn’t feel any pain at all, because that money would soon be earned back.

Shelter No. 404’s industrial zone offered electricity prices on par with Giant Stone City. Taking all costs together, the cost per ton of nutrition paste was only 200-208 silver coins.

According to the official exchange rate of 1 chip to 2 silver coins, recharging 100 chips would yield one ton of nutrition paste.

Meanwhile, in Giant Stone City, even for the Vijia Commerce, the cost to produce one ton of nutrition paste exceeded 200 chips!

Usually, the retail price of nutrition paste ranges between 1 to 2 chips per kilogram, while the wholesale price starts at one ton, ranging from 300 to 400 chips per ton.

What did that mean?

It meant his costs were only half of what Vijia Commerce’s were!

And his profits were more than three times theirs!

The huge bargaining space allowed him to wantonly bring the factory price below the cost line of his competitors!

And what about brand effect?

What brand effect does nutrient paste, a food for livestock, need?

The only requirements from buyers were that it shouldn’t kill them and should fill them up, even if you slapped a "special large quantity" label on it, it wouldn’t make the nutrient paste sell any better.

No matter how Detwei calculated, this was a surefire profitable deal.

And that was just the profit from the nutrient paste, the leftover waste from the production line could still be turned into organic fertilizer or sold to the chemical plant next door.

Looking at the non-stop operation of the machinery before him and listening to its roaring noise, Detwei felt an overwhelming surge of excitement.

If the Manager wasn’t standing right beside him, he might even have been unable to resist cheering for the tirelessly spawning Lair.

"Let the Tide come fiercer!"

...

In fact, even if Detwei did shout out, it wouldn’t have mattered. Chu Guang wasn’t so petty as to blame him for a few words.

After all, he got rich.

It was normal to be excited.

But no matter how much he earned, he couldn’t earn more than Chu Guang.

More than seventy percent of the production costs for Didivei Food Processing Factory, whether for water and electricity or the purchase fee for raw materials, were paid directly to Shelter No. 404.

Not to mention that for every ton of goods produced, a 20% tax had to be paid to the shelter before they could be sold.

And although the wages paid to the workers weren’t given directly to the shelter, they would ultimately end up in Chu Guang’s hands.

In this economic cycle, not only was employment created and the labor force maintained, but it also boosted the spending power of the residents and generated even more demand.

Chu Guang had lost count of exactly how much he had won.

Anyway, he won big!

...

After inspecting the operation of the food processing factory, Chu Guang didn’t stay in the industrial zone for too long but instead went straight to the front line.

The situation at the front had been getting more intense recently.

Over the past week, Chu Guang’s focus had been mostly on logistics.

With the plague and fiscal deficit problems solved, he could finally devote all his energy to addressing the Tide issue.

Temporary command post.

Chu Guang gathered the frontline officers and staff for a combat meeting.

Wrench, the head of the security team, was the first to report on the recent combat situation.

Then Vanus, serving as a staff officer, summarized the intelligence and presented his views.

"...The stalemate has continued for ten days, with no sign of the Tide’s attack weakening, while the frontline’s loss of ammunition and personnel has been increasing continuously."

"There are signs that our enemy has deployed hatching chambers or even a Lair on the front line, possibly around Street No. 65."

Vanus said this as he circled a red circle on the map, encompassing the area around the Bell Tower on Street No. 65.

Although there was no direct evidence that the Lair was there, based on footage captured by drones, most of the Crawlers infiltrating the players’ side position appeared to be spreading from there.

Chu Guang frowned slightly.

"So you’re saying, the Variants we’ve been up against recently aren’t the ones that came from the city center but are hatched nearby?"

Vanus shook his head.

"It’s hard to say, but their continued reluctance to launch a full-scale offensive is quite suspicious, and it’s difficult not to think of some unpleasant possibilities."

Wrench suddenly spoke up.

"I don’t know if it’s right to say this, but these Variants... they give me a feeling... as if they’re preparing for something."

After several days of probing, these Variants had become familiar with the players’ defense strategy, yet they kept sending in Eaters.

If it wasn’t because they lacked intelligence...

Vanus’s brow wrinkled.

"Are they buying time?"

Wrench nodded.

"That’s what I believe too."

Chu Guang stared at the map for a long while before speaking.

"The front line positions are stable, and we have stocked enough ammunition and equipment in the fifth ring’s ammunition depot; now is the best window of opportunity for a counterattack."

Saying this, Chu Guang looked around at the officers and staff.

"No matter what they’re preparing for."

"Before they’re ready, let’s solve this problem once and for all!"