Yu Tang had enough herbs on hand to make four batches of healing pills. Each batch yielded ten, for a total of forty pills and 2,000 points of Health.
That was already a considerable amount.
Yu Tang put half the pills away and sent the other half to Su.
When Su asked what herbs he needed, he quickly sent over eight portions of Angelica Root and nine of White Peony Root.
Yu Tang didn’t stand on ceremony. He put them in the Medicine-Crafting Bench and made two more batches. That replaced the red pills he’d given away and left him with a few herbs to spare.
Once the pills were ready, Yu Tang listed all of the day’s goods on the Trading Market in one go.
A Campfire Blueprint, a Pearl Bracelet, Fish-Skin Shirts, crossbows, swords, spears, and more than half of his sea urchins and seaweed.
Sure, he could keep them fresh in a storage cabinet, but when he had the chance, nothing beat eating seafood fresh from the ocean!
The players who’d seen his Survival Feed spotted the sea urchins and forgot all about the weapons for a moment.
“Ahhh! Big shot put up sea urchins!”
“Haha, I got one! No more staring at pictures and wishing!”
“He listed dozens of them! The big shot is so rich!”
“Hold on. You can sometimes catch sea urchins around reefs or in shallow water at low tide, but in deep water? What kind of joke is that? It’s ridiculous.”
“Who cares? If there’s food, grab it!”
“There’s none left! They’re all gone! I didn’t get one, waaah!”
It wasn’t just ordinary players who were shocked. Players with skill and luck were surprised, too.
Bai Xiao most of all.
Even before the Irresistible Fish Bait appeared, he’d caught something every time he cast a line—fish, shellfish, and mussels, one after another.
But he’d never caught a sea urchin.
And seaweed grew on the ocean floor. Fishing lines couldn’t reach anywhere near that deep, so there was no way to catch it with a rod.
So how had Yu Tang gotten any?
A glimmer of insight flashed through Bai Xiao’s mind, but the possibility seemed so remote that he dismissed it.
Maybe I really am not lucky enough.
Besides the sea urchins and seaweed, many players noticed that the trading requirements for weapons had changed.
The sea urchins mostly cost basic materials such as planks. For the weapons, Yu Tang had added the option to trade for vegetable and fruit seeds in addition to crafting materials.
“What does the big shot want seeds for?”
“Does that mean we can farm in this game? Will we finally have a stable source of food instead of worrying about it every day?”
“Seriously? This isn’t a cozy farming game. We can farm in a survival world?”
“I hope so. Fish is great, but we can’t eat it for every meal.”
Yu Tang: “Black-Iron Chests can contain Crop Plot Blueprints.”
The players got excited.
“There really are crop plots?”
“You got the blueprint, big shot?”
“I’m still trying to get enough to eat, and the big shot’s already farming??? Feels like he’s a whole version ahead of the rest of us.”
“I’m sick of saying how jealous I am.”
While the ordinary players wasted time in Regional Chat, the players who actually had supplies quickly bought out everything Yu Tang had listed.
Several of them were familiar faces: Bai Xiao, Wen Yin, Jiang Xing, and He Chong.
Wen Yin traded cabbage seeds for a shirt. The other three paid with crafting materials.
Two other buyers trading for equipment also had seeds: one offered cucumber seeds, the other spinach.
Yu Tang put the new materials in the Forging Benches as usual, then headed for the garden.
There were thirty cabbage seeds, only twenty cucumber seeds, and a hundred spinach seeds.
Mature cabbages took up quite a bit of space. One Basic Crop Plot could only fit twenty seeds, so he’d have to move the remaining ten to the next plot.
He might still get more cabbage seeds later. Although half of Plot No. 7 was empty, Yu Tang planted the spinach in the next plot and put the cucumbers in the one after that.
There weren’t many cucumber seeds, but a single vine could produce plenty of cucumbers. He didn’t need to worry about running out…
[This crop cannot be planted in a Basic Crop Plot.]
Yu Tang: “?”
He’d already figured out what he was going to make with the cucumbers, and only now it was telling him he couldn’t plant them?
Did that mean he’d never get to eat smashed cucumber salad, chilled cucumber salad, or cucumber soup?!
Yu Tang looked more devastated than if his father had died. Fathers were just for providing the seed; cucumbers could satisfy his appetite. Obviously, the latter mattered more!
But he couldn’t plant what the plot wouldn’t accept. Cursing the System in his heart, he put the seeds away until he found a more advanced Crop Plot.
…
Once the seeds were planted, there wasn’t much else to do that day apart from listing weapons as they finished crafting.
Yu Tang grabbed some pudding, yogurt, beef jerky, and other snacks, settled back against his bed, and opened the Trading Market.
There were even more kinds of goods on the market than there had been the previous few days. Along with Yu Tang’s weapons, people were selling bows and arrows, daggers, watermelon knives, copper swords, and even slingshots.
With more weapons available, more players had a chance to get one.
There were noticeably more water sellers, too, along with all kinds of tables and chairs, curtains, wall art, and other decorative knickknacks nobody really needed. People were selling just about everything.
Everything except Medicine-Crafting Benches and healing pills.
No one had mentioned either one in the Trading Market or Regional Chat.
Since Yu Tang hadn’t gotten a blueprint in the first two days, the Medicine-Crafting Bench Blueprint was probably much rarer than the other special tools.
In other words, there wouldn’t be many players who could make medicine. Pills would likely become a long-term bestseller, just like high-level weapons.
After looking around the Trading Market, Yu Tang returned to Regional Chat and saw a player who’d completed the construction quest bragging about it.
“You built a wooden house that fast? Another big shot? 666!”
The player who’d completed the quest was quite frank.
“No, I built a thatched hut. I got the blueprint by buying the one Big Shot Su listed.”
“Didn’t Big Shot Yu say that a thatched hut wasn’t as sturdy as a wooden house, and something about Defense? Why build one? Weren’t a lot of players planning to wait?”
“Come on. The top players can kill things and get their own blueprints. Players like me can’t get a weapon, let alone a blueprint unless we buy one. Having a fallback option is good enough.
“I don’t think ordinary players need to measure themselves against the big shots. It’s better to complete the quest and get the reward. Once your stats improve, you can work toward the Kill Quest. That’s a perfectly good way forward, right?”
The other players paused. Then they realized… he had a point.
It was like playing an online game. The big spenders and hardcore players got every good piece of gear the moment it appeared. Most ordinary players just wanted a reliable baseline.
Quite a few people realized they’d been thinking about it all wrong.
No one knew what dangers the Survival World held in store. It might not be smart to keep measuring themselves against big shots they could never catch up to.
If they dragged their feet, they might lose their lives before they got the chance.
Some players who’d been lucky enough to get thatched-hut blueprints but didn’t think they were very strong decided on the spot to stop waiting and build their houses now.
They were all quests, and the rewards were about the same. The sooner they got them, the sooner they’d get stronger!
Before long, the number of players in the Trading Market and Regional Chat looking to buy thatch shot up.
Someone else said, “I got a house blueprint today, too, but it’s for a stone house. Which is better, stone or wood?”
“Stone should be sturdier, right? But you never know how the game will work.”
Yu Tang hadn’t seen a stone house or built one, so he had no plans to weigh in.
He hadn’t seen Su say anything, either. Bai Xiao, however, reminded the others, “Before you worry about which is sturdier, you have to be able to gather the materials.”
Planks and thatch were basic materials. They came in the Supply Drop Wave, but the drops never included stone.
The only way to get stone was from a chest.
The other players understood at once. When they thought about it that way, the stone house didn’t seem like such a good deal.
“Honestly, if you’re only building a small stone house, thirty or fifty square meters, you can probably gather the materials if you try.”
“Sure, but what about comfort? Forget whether it has more Defense. Stone houses are cold in winter and hot in summer. They can’t be comfortable.”
“You’re getting picky now. If we don’t get another blueprint later, are we supposed to wait until the Protection Period ends and our stats get cut in half?”
“…I almost forgot about the penalty for not finishing the quest. Fine, I guess we’d better build.”
~
While the players chatted, it quickly became nine o’clock.
The man-eating sharks stirred again. Players who’d been resting up, ready to kill them and get a good night’s sleep, started fighting back.
Molotov cocktails, iron swords, crossbow bolts, arrows, machetes—players used every kind of weapon. They threw and stabbed at the menacing sharks, and the Kill Progress Bar, which had been stalled for hours, began to rise rapidly.
There had been just over five hundred kills around dusk. By nine-thirty, the number had climbed by more than three hundred, and it was still going up.
But alongside the rapidly rising Kill Progress Bar, the Survivor Count was dropping even faster.
The players watching saw the number of survivors in the region keep falling and couldn’t help sighing.
During this time, one player had suddenly said, “If anyone survives the Survival World, please look after my child, XXX. I live at XXX. I’m begging you.” Then their name grayed out.
Regional Chat went quiet for more than ten seconds.
After that, similar messages appeared every few minutes.
Some asked other players to look after the children or parents they’d left behind in the Real World. Others left last words for relatives and children stranded in other regions, people they might never see again.
Some confessed feelings they’d kept bottled up for years.
The others watched those players send their messages, then saw their names go gray not long after. Their chests tightened and their throats went dry. The more sentimental ones even had tears in their eyes.
Yu Tang’s expression remained calm. He swiped through the Status Panel a couple of times, then listed twenty Low-Grade Healing Pills on the Trading Market.
[Low-Grade Healing Pill: Exchange two Angelica Root and two White Peony Root for one pill. Limit one per player.]
He also set aside ten pills specifically for injured players. To trade for one, they had to provide a screenshot of their Health Bar.
There was no real need to set a purchase limit. He’d earn the same supplies either way. He just didn’t want people buying up the pills to resell them at a markup.
After listing them, he announced it in Regional Chat.
The dejected chat exploded with excitement.
“Healing pills! The big shot’s selling healing pills again!”
“Ahhh! I want one! But I don’t have Angelica Root or White Peony Root. Are those the herbs you need to make them?”
“I have some! I got Angelica Root in a quest reward chest. Eating the herb raw only restores ten Health, so I thought it was kind of useless. Now I can trade it for a healing pill and get several times the effect!”
“Who was it that called the big shot coldhearted? He even set aside half the pills for injured players. Anyone else would probably keep their medicine in case they needed it. They’d never let it go.”
“Still, there aren’t many.”
“Be glad you can buy any at all! Don’t complain about the quantity.”
…
Wu Yuanpeng lay on a Simple Bed, barely clinging to life. His arms and legs were smeared with blood, and his breathing was shallow.
He’d just spent more than half an hour struggling to hack a man-eating shark to death with a short knife.
The knife’s reach was too short. He couldn’t avoid the shark’s sharp teeth, and it had taken a bite out of his thigh. His Health Bar was down to fewer than twenty points and visibly ticking down by the second.
The Simple Bed couldn’t restore his Health fast enough to make up for the loss. His face was deathly pale, and despair filled his eyes.
Just as he was about to leave a final message in Regional Chat like the other players, Yu Tang’s notice about the healing pills appeared.
A spark of life flared in Wu Yuanpeng’s dim eyes.
