Chapter 56 - 56 Satisfactory Gains_l
For now, he continued to observe the players, seeing how they waged war and derived pleasure from it.
Once the defenses around the warehouse had reached a certain level, Fang Cheng’s planting requirements changed again.
Players responsible for farming were tasked with planting a highly productive crop, using this crop to increase yields and thereby attracting the arrival of shuttles.
And when the crop reached a certain volume, shuttles indeed appeared. Watching the white dragon materialize, Liuzi, the overall commander, became excited.
He adjusted his floral shorts and then shouted in the group chat, “Gentlemen, the moment for war has begun! Follow my commands, fire!
The next moment, a barrage was unleashed.
The ropes of the trebuchets were cut, and the ancient machinery once more burst forth with its former glory. The shuttles, preparing to plunder the grains mid-air, finally encountered their first resistance.
A heavy rain of stones fell down, most of them missing the target, but some hit the shuttles with a crisp impact sound.
Then the players’ second wave of attack arrived.
This attack was quite creative—upon realizing the low hit rate of the trebuchets, they began to implement a backup plan.
That was to launch other players from the trebuchets like cannonballs into the air!
Though they would surely die afterwards, it didn’t matter as long as they got off one shot. It was worth it.
These players had gone through some training beforehand. As they were catapulted toward the shuttles, they could quickly grab the matchlock guns in their hands and fire the bullets before hitting the ground.
With the players’ ability to resurrect, every one of them, whether launching or being launched, was filled with a desire for war, revealing to Fang Cheng the players’ readiness to do whatever it took for victory.
Traveling thousands of miles is better than reading thousands of books; occasionally observing the players’ actions indeed brought different feelings.
A barrage of bullets drummed on the shuttles like a torrential downpour, making it seem as if the shuttles were constantly being suppressed, but in reality they suffered almost no damage.
The gap in technology became apparent and cruel at this moment.
In the face of the players’ assault, the shuttles offered no resistance, simply emitting a dazzling white light.
This beam of light, like a giant hand, lifted the lid off the warehouse, and the contents were completely sucked away by the shuttles.
After all the materials inside the warehouse disappeared, the shuttles turned and left, leaving behind a group of helpless players.
From start to finish, the shuttles seemed as if they never even noticed the players, epitomizing the saying “ignorance is the ultimate disdain.”
“Liuzi, have we failed?” a player asked gloomily.
“Don’t know, let’s go clean up the battlefield and see if we can find anything.”
At Liuzi’s command, the players went out into the battlefield, searching methodically for any potential spoils of war.
Mingling among the players, Fang Cheng quickly discovered something and confirmed it was just what Liuzi wanted.
A small patch of coating.
The relentless onslaught was not without effect; a multitude of attacks had caused slight damage to the shuttles, and this coating was their spoils of war. Though only the size of a fingertip, when combined with the Spirit Grass here, this coating could produce more interesting things, slightly closing the technological gap between the players and the shuttles.
With the reduction in the technology gap, when encountering the shuttles again, the players would have stronger armed forces for battle and could accelerate the damage to the shuttles, thus obtaining more materials.
In this scenario, war was waged to acquire more materials, narrow the technology gap, and eventually achieve true victory, guarding their hard- earned fruits of labor.
With this tiny piece of coating, Fang Cheng handed it to Liuzi.
Watching Fang Cheng bring in the coating, Liuzi excitedly shouted in Wang s live streaming room, “This is it! This is what I want!”]
Handling the coating with extreme care, Liuzi gratefully thanked him and then, clutching the coating, rushed to the fields to start experimenting with the kind of changes the fragments could bring.
By now, Fang Cheng had a rough understanding of what was to come and felt the time was just about right.
He left the game directly, his physical body once again traversing the black hole to arrive in another universe, and following the trail he had left earlier, he made his way to the shuttle’s location.
This was a massive space base.
The base was located on the dark side of the satellite orbiting the Spirit Grass Planet, where time passed rapidly. The entire base had a history of over ten thousand years, but due to the lack of oxygen and light, it was well-preserved and still as shiny as new.
Due to the chaos of the Heavenly Tao, the information on the base, after tens of thousands of years of erosion, had become untraceable, and it was impossible to understand whom it had once belonged to.
The whole base was silent, with most of the machinery in a dormant state. Observing from outside, Fang Cheng soon understood why it had suddenly become active.
It was because of himself.
He had reignited the local star, the base’s solar energy system had detected the revival of the star, and after charging, it had the energy to launch the shuttle and sent it out.
Upon entering, he saw a shuttle missing a piece of its coating unloading cargo. A beam of white light shot out, placing the cargo from the players inside the base, and then small working robots appeared, transporting the goods to the processing plant.
They didn’t notice Fang Cheng’s presence, acting as if he didn’t exist, busily carrying out their tasks.
Since there were not many solar panels activated, there was only a small working robot, which was not very efficient.
Following the working robot, Fang Cheng watched as it dragged cargo hundreds of times its own size through the base until it arrived at a processing plant.
Depositing the cargo into the processing plant, the room-sized factory emitted a slight humming noise, followed by the vibration of machinery at work.
The machinery here seemed to be specially designed for processing Spirit Grass; regardless of the final form of the Spirit Grass, it could reduce the Spirit Grass back to its original state and proceed with the next steps of processing.
With continuous vibrations, thumb-sized cubes were processed.
These cubes were packed into bags, upon which a line of text was printed, and then Fang Cheng used a spell to translate it into Chinese characters.
“Great Wall Feed, the trustworthy feed you can rely on. Suitable for pigs, cows, sheep, cats, and other creatures, fully nutritious, factory manager’s heartfelt recommendation!”
After reading the text on the bags, and glancing at the distant Spirit Grass Planet, Fang Cheng roughly surmised the story that had once taken place here. The Spirit Grass Planet was originally a place cultivated for Spirit Grass, and this shuttle was a harvester, which would automatically go to the planet to harvest crops at set intervals.
No wonder the shuttle ignored the players, for their bodies were remade from dirt by themselves, and to the shuttle, they must appear as tools similar to itself.
Then, the players’ resistance, in the shuttle’s view, was just a malfunction of the robots, but as long as they could provide enough Spirit Grass in time, the shuttle wouldn’t care about anything else.
The place had originally fallen into slumber due to the extinguishing of the star, but when the star awoke, the shuttle was also reactivated, and the players became the harvest targets.
Having sorted out the cause and effect, Fang Cheng couldn’t help but laugh.
The truth of the matter was indeed amusing.
If this incident were made into a game, it would probably be quite fun.
With a wave of his sleeve, Fang Cheng pocketed all the feed, planning to use it as employee gifts in the future, specifically for those with pets.
These feeds would serve as compensation for igniting the star.
Incidentally gaining some insights and now having employee gifts, Fang Cheng felt this experience was quite worthwhile.
Noticing the time was about right, Fang Cheng decided to leave this place to Liuzi and the others, and then he stretched his fingers, getting ready to go to work.