As soon as the final afterglow of the twin stars was swallowed clean by the horizon, the Gobi desert instantly turned hostile.
The temperature plummeted.
Li Lei’s “Grass Skirt Army” was frozen stiff like freshly excavated terracotta warriors, necks tucked, shuffling over the painful, stony ground as they slowly huddled back toward the landing pods.
No newbie gift pack?
Fine, they’d make it themselves.
The players’ ability to execute was beyond reproach; their only flaw was that their imaginations were too wild, and their common sense was too lacking.
“Out of the way! The server’s first pot of gold belongs to me!”
Keyboard Warrior No. 1 squeezed through the crowd, cradling a large pile of dark red soil as if it were the Heirloom Seal of the Realm.
This was the result of him grunting and digging on his hands and knees for half an hour.
He shoved the crumbly clumps of earth into the recycling slot on the side of the landing pod.
Rubbing his dusty hands, he waited in anticipation.
“Look at this color, this texture. It’s obviously iron-rich soil. It has to be worth at least five points, right?”
The machine let out a low, rumbling hum like an old cow chewing cud.
Then, with a soft *pfft*,
The pile of soil was mercilessly spat back out, blowing dust all over his face.
[Composition: Wasteland soil with extremely low silicon content.]
[Recycling Value: 0.]
[System Hint: This is a resource recycling module, not a trash incinerator. Do not stuff just any garbage inside.]
These lines carried minimal damage, but maximum insult.
“Are you kidding me?” Keyboard Warrior No. 1 wiped the mud from his face, slapping the pod’s hull in anger.
“Is this physics engine targeting me specifically? It’s alien soil, for crying out loud! Even if we can’t grow crops with it, shouldn’t we be able to extract some trace elements? Zero points? You’re a total rip-off!”
“No way…”
Someone who refused to accept defeat tried stuffing some glowing moss they had gathered into the slot.
[Value: 0.001 points.]
Another person stuffed a rather pretty-looking pebble inside.
[Value: 0 points.]
The succession of blows instantly halved the high morale.
This wasn’t scavenging to get rich; it was cyber-slavery, and without pay at that.
A pure forced-labor simulator!
“The game designer is definitely sick in the head.” In the crowd, Breaking Bad tossed aside the dry twig in his hand.
“The physics engine is so realistic, but the economy system is as stingy as Scrooge.”
While everyone was worrying over the piles of “trash”—some even considering whether to stuff their own grass skirts into the machine—a player with the ID “Dragon Seeker” squeezed through from the back.
“Don’t waste your energy.”
He pointed to a massive boulder that Construction Site Palu was about to smash, speaking with the smug superiority of an expert.
“That’s sedimentary rock. In this kind of terrain, the surface sediments are nothing but sand and calcium oxide. Even if you shatter it, you won’t get anything out of it.”
Li Lei’s eyes lit up.
“Do you have a way?”
“I’m on a geological survey team in real life.”
He turned and pointed to a cliff face a hundred meters away.
Though his voice was a bit heavy due to the thin air, he sounded incredibly reliable.
“I noticed it the moment we landed. The fault line over there is off. Everything around is sedimentary rock, except for that gray-black banded vein running through it. That is a textbook igneous intrusion.”
The crowd of laymen stared at him, utterly dazed.
“Igneous what?” Keyboard Warrior No. 1 opened his mouth wide.
“Bro, did you bring a research paper into a video game?”
Ignoring these academic underachievers, Dragon Seeker led a few people up the cliff face.
He pressed his face close to the rough rock wall, examining it as if appraising an antique, before finally raising his hammer and tapping confidently on an inconspicuous indentation.
“Right here! Underneath this brown weathered crust, there’s definitely goods!”
For real?
Li Lei didn’t hesitate for a second.
With a wave of his hand, he barked, “Palu! Take a few of the strongest guys and smash it!”
“On it!”
Construction Site Palu’s hands had been itching for a while.
He swung the half-man-high industrial pickaxe in a wide arc, his core muscles exploding with power as the tungsten-alloy pick head slammed viciously against the rock face, whistling through the air.
*Clang!*
Sparks flew.
The crisp, resounding impact was incredibly satisfying to hear.
As the dusty gray weathered rock peeled away, a heart-stirring, dark-red metallic luster was revealed under the beam of the high-powered flashlight.
Embedded in the rugged metal fracture were several crystals radiating a faint blue glow, like the winking eyes of demons.
“We hit it! We actually hit something!”
“Holy shit! Is this the legendary ‘knowledge changes destiny’?!”
The crowd erupted.
This wasn’t just about mining ore; it proved to everyone that if you knew your stuff, you could actually monetize your real-world skills in this game!
Everyone pitched in to pry loose a washbasin-sized chunk of ore.
Carrying it like a barbarian with a trophy, Construction Site Palu jogged back to the landing pod and stuffed it into the recycling slot.
*Beep—*
This time, the system prompt was pure music to their ears.
[High-purity hematite and associated energy crystal clusters detected.]
[Valuation: 15 Contribution Points.]
Fifteen points!
The digits acted like high-grade adrenaline, pumping directly into everyone’s veins.
“Brothers! We’re gonna be rich!”
“Does anyone here have a geology degree? I’ll pay top dollar to hire you! Carry me, big bro!”
The team, which had been lifeless moments ago, was instantly transformed into a crowd of fanatical gold prospectors.
However, before their dopamine levels could fully peak…
“Lei-ge… come look at this.”
Breaking Bad, who was responsible for the perimeter, spoke in a hushed whisper, his voice carrying a subtle, barely perceptible tremor.
Li Lei’s heart tightened.
Instinctively pressing his hand against the kinetic pistol at his waist, he walked over quickly.
Behind a sheltered crevice in the rocks, Breaking Bad was crouching, the beam of his flashlight locked onto the rock wall.
It was a deep gouge.
Nearly an inch deep, its edges were clean and sharp, even cutting smoothly through the quartz veins inside the rock.
The shape was unmistakably a three-toed claw mark left by some creature of terrifying strength.
“This isn’t from weathering,” Breaking Bad said, turning around with a pale face.
“And look at the ground.”
Li Lei looked down, using the barrel of his gun to poke a grayish-white lump in the sand.
It wasn’t fully dried yet, and gave off a foul, rank stench.
It was droppings.
As the barrel stirred it, several pieces of undigested bone fragments were exposed—the skull shards of some creature, with a distinct row of teeth marks clearly visible on them.
This planet was alive.
And very hungry.
“Everyone, cease operations!”
Li Lei snapped upright and roared into the channel, “Retreat! Fall back to the landing pods! Move!”
Night fully enveloped the Gobi as the wild wind howled, sounding like countless lost souls wailing among the dunes.
Though the players didn’t understand why, they grumbled and retreated under the weight of Li Lei’s authority.
Using the dry wood they had gathered, they lit several bonfires within the makeshift camp formed by the landing pods.
The orange flames danced in the darkness, faintly dispelling the biting cold.
The emergency nutritional paste tasted like fermented toothpaste, but in their state of extreme hunger, the group gobbled it up with gusto.
Fear came quickly, but vanished just as fast.
After all, to the Fourth Cataclysm, as long as their health bars weren’t empty, they could keep messing around.
“Lao Wang, what features do you think this game will unlock later?”
Construction Site Palu asked as he chewed on his toothpaste-flavored dinner, his eyes still lingering longingly on the distant pile of ore.
Hardcore Lao Wang lay beside the bonfire, staring at the unfamiliar starry sky above, a fanatic gleam in his eyes as if he were already gazing into the future.
“I’ve read the setting lore. As long as we have enough resources and keep pushing the main quest, the official team will absolutely unlock the STC standard construction templates!”
He grabbed a stone and sketched excitedly on the ground, spit flying.
“When the time comes, we’ll build a steel fortress right here! Automated mining rigs, fusion reactors, and orbital defense batteries! We’re gonna turn this godforsaken planet into the prickliest hedgehog in the Milky Way!”
“Right! And power armor! Just like the one that NPC Yao Qian was wearing!”
“Think bigger! I want to build a Gundam! I want to pilot a Strike Freedom and pull a drive-by on the Earth Union capital!”
A group of grass-skirt-wearing, dirt-faced grown men sat huddled around the bonfire on this peril-laden alien planet, kicking off a grand, fully automated “pie-in-the-sky” brainstorming session.