Chapter 22: Kidnapping Baby Mutant Leeches
Increase in strength by 10%?! What kind of incredible technology was that?! Would this be considered a sugary treat or a stimulant? Chu Guang wasn’t sure about the ingredients, and there wasn’t even a list of ingredients or a production date on the packaging.
"The effect’s duration really is 10 hours..."
The 10% enhancement looked pretty good, and even 10% of his strength at a critical moment would be enough to turn any situation around. As for eating a lollipop when he was in battle…
That didn't match his tough-guy image at all! He also had no idea when it would actually take effect.
After thinking for some time, Chu Guang decided to put it aside for the moment. Having one more trump card in his hand wasn’t a bad idea.
...
Early the next morning, the players went online as scheduled. Although they were exhausted from working during the day, any fatigue was gone completely after they logged on. They were full of energy.
Old White's cement kiln was completely dry. He and Gale went to the construction site marked on the map and pulled dozens of kilograms of limestone back on a pallet. They then went to the river to grab a few large buckets of clay and sand before starting the first round of cement production.
The typical formula for Portland Cement was easy enough to find online. It was made by crushing limestone, mixing it with a specific ratio of clay and iron filings, and heating the mixture to 1450 degrees celsius in a special kiln. The cement clinker produced only needed to be mixed with sand and water to make cement mortar, which could be used for construction. Some professional websites even provided specific ratios for different types of cement according to their needs.
As long as someone did their homework before playing the game, it was much less difficult than it would be to travel to a primitive time to start from scratch.
Since it was their first time making cement, Old White chose the simplest formula. The material requirements weren’t too complicated, and it could be done with what they had in the shelter, albeit barely.
Relying on his physique, he smashed the stones they brought back from the construction site as much as he could with a hammer. He mixed them with clay and iron filings reduced with charcoal before sending the mixture into the newly completed kiln.
Charcoal was lit as green smoke slowly emerged. Ample Time helped enthusiastically from the side, pressing the branches they had tied to a clay tray. It was a simple bellow made with water pipes, bark, and cotton thread, which could send a large amount of air into the kiln to make the charcoal inside it burn better.
"How are we going to measure the temperature inside the kiln?"
"No idea."
"You don’t know?!"
"What? Do you have an industrial thermometer? Don't be ridiculous. Just squeeze the bellows. Put more effort into it, and it'll be done! Sigh… Where can I find a generator?"
"..."
Old White groaned while touching his chin, and Ample Time was speechless.
This motherf…
Since becoming the Construction Captain, he was acting more and more like a real foreman.
While working the billow, he wondered where Gale and Night Ten went. It wasn’t just the two of them that didn't know, Chu Guang had no idea either. He had the power to confirm whether a player was online or offline, and roughly where and how far away they were through the system. However, he had no real way to locate a player’s specific coordinates. At the very least, he couldn’t do so at the moment.
Just as Chu Guang wondered what those two were doing, he saw them walking toward him with buckets.
"Where have you been?"
Faced with the administrator's inquiry, Gale answered truthfully, "Near the mutant leech nest."
Chu Guang frowned. "Didn't I tell you not to go in there?"
"We didn't go in, but we did set up a trap near the nest. See? These are their larvae." Gale hadn't spoken yet, and seeing the unpleasant look on the Administrator's face from the side, Night Ten was scared that their favorability score would drop. He quickly put down the plastic bucket in his hand to explain.
Chu Guang took a look at the barrel and found that there were a number of glass bottles inside. The bottles were full of palm-sized larvae. Their bodies twisted constantly and their deformed mouths stretched in some strange way. They also seemed entangled with each other. They looked like they came straight out of some tentacle adult movie.
"Interesting... How did you manage to catch them?"
Back on Baker Street, he never heard of anyone catching them. Although mutant grubs were rich in protein, they were also full of parasites that couldn't be killed by boiling them, no matter how long they tried.
Coupled with the special environment they grew in, those mutants rarely acted alone. It was difficult to know how easily they could fight off any strange mutants. Very few survivors were interested in figuring that out for themselves.
"We used blood! We used animal blood to lure them into the bottles. Large leeches can't get in, and the smaller ones can't get out after they’ve squeezed themselves into the bottles!" Night Ten said excitedly
Gale quickly added, "These mutant leeches should be out foraging at night and they return to rest in the day. Other than some bottles that were crushed, we still managed to catch these little guys. I was actually just trying it out, but it seems my method was effective.”
Chu Guang rubbed his chin and nodded. "So that's it... This is actually a good idea."
No wonder Gale had asked him for some meat from yesterday’s hunt; he had planned to use it as bait to catch leech larvae.
It was just…
"... What are you going to do with them?" Chu Guang asked. He stared at Gale and frowned, "I don't know much about regular leeches, but mutant leeches can’t be eaten."
"I’m not planning to eat them! I plan to use them to fish!"
Chu Guang raised an eyebrow in shock, “You’re planning to go fishing?"
"Mhm," Gale nodded, looking a little excited. "When I was exploring the shoreline of the lake before, I found some big black birds catching fish! Since there is life in the lake, we can catch some to fill our bellies!
This is actually a good idea!
Listening to Gale, Chu Guang's eyes suddenly lit up. It wasn’t that he hadn’t tried to fish before. After all, compared to hunting, fishing came with much smaller risks. It was just that his fishing skills were really hard to describe with words alone.
It was rare for him to catch anything, even with professional fishing gear and bait, and there was no such thing in the wasteland.
The problem wasn’t even that he was bad at fishing. If it really was so easy to catch fish, why didn't the survivors build their homes by the lake?
The fish in the lake were all mutants, after all.
Moreover, after trying a few times without any success, Chu Guang lost the fishing gear that he had taken a long time to make, so he gave up trying.
"Do you know how to fish?" Chu Guang asked suddenly.
Facing the administrator's question, Gale froze and said, "No, but I checked on the Internet and there are traps for fishing. I’m going to try and make a few of those.”
He wasn’t sure if an NPC could understand what he meant by the internet, but he hadn’t reacted when they talked several times about things back in reality before. Gale thought that he was probably programmed to automatically ignore anything like that, so he didn’t try to hide anything.
Chu Guang was overjoyed, but nodded without revealing any emotion on his face. "Okay, since you know how to catch fish, I'll leave it to you!"
After receiving the order, Gale and Night Ten immediately ran to make a trap. Catching fish was much more interesting than cutting trees and playing with mud!
Chu Guang watched them gather branches and some plastic ropes that they had found somewhere as they went to squat in the corner to start making their trap.
Ignoring them, what Chu Guang wanted to learn at the moment was how to use tobacco leaves he had bought to smoke meat.
The day before, he followed what survivors in Baker Street did. He crushed the tobacco leaves and wrapped them on the meat before roasting them with firewood so that the tar in the leaves that were rich with ketol compounds would penetrate into the fat layer of the meat and kill any parasites or microorganisms.
He wasn’t sure if he was imagining it, but he felt that the meat was a little smelly after he was done.
"It shouldn't be..." Picking up a piece of hind leg meat and sniffing it, Chu Guang frowned.
Under normal circumstances, meat smoked that way should have a nicotine smell, and the surface should have a burnt-yellow greasy luster. However, the hind leg in his hand was a dark red color, it looked cooked on the outside and raw in the middle. It also had a faint rotting smell.
"Is this the wrong method?"
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