Under the blazing sun, the twin stars hung in the sky like tireless heat lamps, baking the rocky desert below.
In the open-air warehouse of the Buzhou Outpost, ore was piled as high as hills.
The hundred or so players looked as if they had just been fished out of the water, completely drenched in sweat and grease, yet not a single one complained of fatigue.
Watching the monitoring data in the back-end, Yao Qian saw their ruthless drive—acting as if they wanted to scrape three layers of soil off the earth—and couldn’t help but want to award them an “Employee of the Month” prize.
*Ding!*
A crisp system notification tone cut through the noisy construction site.
[Server-wide Announcement: The Version 1.1 “Military Supplies Exchange List” is officially online! Soldiers, please proceed to the plaza’s holographic screen to view it.]
“It’s open! It’s open!”
“Kindergarten Boss,” who had just been grunting and pushing a wheelbarrow, let go of the handles.
His movements were faster than a student rushing to the cafeteria when the school bell rang.
The once orderly and busy construction site instantly erupted into chaos.
Over a hundred people swarmed toward the center of the plaza.
To anyone else, it would have looked like a zombie horde invasion.
Although Li Lei was more composed, his steps weren’t much slower.
After all, the self-defense pistol in his hand, which could only shoot five meters, really didn’t give him any sense of security.
The holographic screen expanded in the air, its faint blue light reflecting on their eager faces.
The icon in the first row lit up.
[Individual Portable Folding Cover]
[Description: High-strength alloy steel plates that provide reliable protection when you log off.]
[Price: 10 Contribution Points]
“Construction Site Palu” squeezed to the very front, his eyes shining as he clicked the preview.
Then, the entire plaza fell into an eerie silence.
What the holographic projection showed was simply two rusty steel plates welded together with a hinge in the middle, and a support stand in the back that hadn’t even had its burrs sanded down.
Calling it a cover was generous; it looked like two pieces of scrap metal that had somehow come to life.
“That’s it?” Palu stared wide-eyed, looking like he had just swallowed undercooked rice.
“The scrap materials I scavenge from construction sites are better than this! And they dare charge 10 points for it? The game devs must have lost their minds craving money!”
“Don’t panic, look at the ones below!” someone shouted.
Li Lei swiped down the list, his gaze skipping past the pile of junk that only those aliens would consider treasure, and locked onto a row of icons radiating a lethal temptation.
[Basic Kinetic Rifle (Finished Product)]
[Description: Standard-issue gunpowder weapon with an effective range of 400 meters. Requires a dedicated ammo box.]
[Price: 500 Contribution Points]
Below it, a line of small red text read: [Ammo Box (500 rounds): 100 Contribution Points].
*Hiss—*
A collective gasp rippled through the crowd.
500 points!
These people had worked themselves to the bone, yet each player’s balance was only around ten or twenty points.
Even the veteran players who had saved some assets beforehand, combined with their desperate efforts hauling bricks today, could scrape together two to three hundred at most.
This wasn’t selling guns; this was highway robbery!
“What a rip-off! Absolute rip-off!”
“I did the math. At our current brick-hauling rate, I’d have to work five days straight without eating or drinking just to buy one rifle?”
Morale plummeted visibly.
The players had hoped to trade their muskets for cannons in the new version, but reality dealt them a harsh slap in the face: without money, you could only take your pickaxes and go toe-to-toe with those heavily armored monsters in melee combat.
Li Lei frowned.
The price was indeed absurd, completely blocking any hope of the players quickly arming themselves.
Just as he was about to gather everyone to discuss whether they could pool their money to buy one first, a balding, middle-aged man squeezed his way to the front like an eel.
It was “Hardcore Lao Wang.”
This older brother didn’t say a word.
He swiped through the list for a while, scrolling straight to the “Maintenance Components” section at the very bottom.
This section sold all kinds of miscellaneous spare parts—screws, springs, buttplate pads, and the like—at prices so cheap they were practically giving them away.
Lao Wang stared at two of the icons, his eyes darting rapidly.
[Standard Rifle Barrel (Spare Part): 5 Contribution Points]
[Trigger Return Spring: 2 Contribution Points]
“I knew it…” Lao Wang muttered.
Without hesitation, he spent every single one of his pitiful, hard-earned points from brick-hauling.
With two soft chiming sounds, a dark seamless steel pipe and a heavy-duty spring dropped out of thin air next to his feet.
The surrounding players stared in bewilderment.
“Lao Wang, have you lost your mind? What did you buy that junk for? Can that kill monsters?” Palu scratched his head, completely dazed.
Lao Wang ignored him.
He bent down, picked up the parts, and turned to run toward the workbench, yelling as he ran, “Palu, lend me your nail gun! And ‘Breaking Bad,’ give me that roll of industrial duct tape you had!”
Though the crowd didn’t understand what he was up to, seeing Lao Wang look like he was about to tear the game apart made them follow him out of sheer curiosity.
At the workbench, sparks flew.
Lao Wang held a welding torch, his eyes shining brightly behind his goggles.
He stripped down the pneumatic nail gun they used for construction work, violently prying off the safety valve meant to limit its power.
*Sizzle—*
The welding torch spewed intense heat as he crudely welded the brand-new rifle barrel onto the nail gun’s muzzle.
The joint was bumpy and uneven, with a rough weld seam that looked like a crawling centipede, exuding a wild, wasteland aesthetic.
“Will… will this actually work?” Kindergarten Boss swallowed hard, feeling like the contraption could explode at any moment.
“Why wouldn’t it work?” Lao Wang said without looking back, his hands moving rapidly.
“This game prides itself on 100% physical simulation, right? Since it’s simulated, firearm mechanics are universal! As long as you have a barrel, a firing pin, and a primer, this is a damn gun!”
He fished out a “Rifle Ammunition Component” he had just spent a fortune to exchange, carefully slid it into the barrel’s breech, locked it with the return spring, and wrapped it securely with over a dozen layers of industrial duct tape to serve as a makeshift locking mechanism.
Five minutes later.
A grotesque monstrosity was born, practically radiating an aura of “is this thing actually safe?” It had the grip and gas tank of a nail gun, but its front featured a long rifle barrel.
Wrapped heavily in gray duct tape in the middle, it looked like a chimera dug straight out of a junkyard.
“Let’s go! Time for a test run!”
Lao Wang cradled this ten-pound hunk of metal and marched toward the shooting range at the edge of the base.
The crowd of over a hundred players held their collective breath, craning their necks.
They wanted to see the show, but they were also terrified of getting hit by flying shrapnel.
Li Lei, showing great foresight, waved his hand to make everyone step back ten meters.
Fifty meters away stood a block of basalt used as a target—a tough nut to crack that even Palu hadn’t been able to break earlier.
Lao Wang raised his weapon.
He didn’t even bother aiming—this piece of junk didn’t have any sights anyway—simply pointing the barrel in the general direction of the target.
“I don’t care which programmer wrote this code, today I’m going to teach you what working-class wisdom looks like!” Follow the newest chapters on novelping.com.
Lao Wang roared, pulling the trigger that originally belonged to the nail gun.
The high-pressure gas in the canister was released instantly, driving the modified, weighted firing pin forward to slam violently against the bullet’s primer.
*Boom!*
A thunderous explosion erupted across the desert.
Everyone’s eardrums rang from the noise.
A half-meter-long orange-red flame spewed from the muzzle, followed closely by a plume of black smoke.
The massive recoil sent Lao Wang stumbling backward like a drunkard.
He fell flat on his rear, and the heavily modified gun almost flew out of his grip.
The tape wrapping the barrel joint had curled from the intense heat, and a few hairline fractures were even visible.
But no one cared if Lao Wang was hurt.
Every single pair of eyes was glued to the spot fifty meters away.
On that incredibly hard basalt rock, a bowl-sized, shattered crater had appeared!
Fragments of stone were still clattering down, and the center of the impact was deeply cratered, revealing the grayish-white raw stone within.
This power was at least five times greater than the pistols in their hands!
“Holy… shit!!!”
Someone shouted first, and then the entire outpost erupted in a cheer loud enough to blow the roof off.
“Incredible, Lao Wang! You can actually do that?!”
“This is what playing a game is all about! Is this the charm of a physics engine? I’m in love!”
“500 points? Only an idiot would spend 500 points on a finished rifle! I can hand-craft a cannon for just 7 points!”
Lao Wang rubbed his shoulder, which felt close to being dislocated, as he stood up from the ground.
Though covered in dust and grime, his face was beaming.
He held up the smoking, modified gun like a general who had just won a grand victory.
“Brothers!” Li Lei was the first to snap out of it, the gleam in his eyes impossible to hide.
“Did everyone see that clearly?”
“We did!”
“As long as there’s a tube, everything can be modified!”
Li Lei waved his arm and pointed at the holographic screen.
“Stop saving your damn points! Buy the barrels! Buy the springs! As long as it can fire a bullet, I don’t care if you have to throw stones at the primer to set it off—just build it!”
The players who had been complaining about the high prices just moments ago rushed toward the exchange point like madmen.
“Give me two barrels! I’m making a double-barrel shotgun!”
“Where’s the tape? Has anyone seen tape? Paying top dollar for tape!”
“Palu! Let me borrow your industrial pickaxe so I can take off the handle. I want to make a stock!”
In just half an hour, the Buzhou Outpost transformed from a primitive mining site into a heavy metal weapons factory.
The harsh sounds of metal being cut and the explosions of test fires echoed everywhere.
Yao Qian looked at the monitor screen showing the group of “cyber-orcs” carrying all kinds of weirdly shaped weapons and howling with excitement, feeling a bit helpless.
He had set the high prices as a barrier, hoping to make these guys haul bricks for a few more days to help him earn more energy points.
Instead, these unruly players had used their tiny scrap of physics knowledge and their complete disregard for death to turn his sci-fi masterpiece into a wasteland assembly simulator.
“This…” Yao Qian watched a player trying to bind three rifle barrels together to make a “Gatling gun.” He held it in for a long time before finally letting out a laugh.
“Fine, you win.”