Chapter 17
Each player starts with a dungeon key. If they exit for various reasons before completing the dungeon, they can consume resources to reset it and even choose a higher difficulty. However, once they clear the dungeon, regardless of the level of the Creation Seed they obtain, the dungeon key will disappear.
If you want to try again, you can—just open the game store...
In the current holographic version of Wan Jie, the store is gone. This means that once the future interstellar civilizations discover this difference, the game will more thoroughly distinguish between true lord-type players and individual adventurers who abandon territory development.
Ye Bai could even predict that in the future, large territories in the game would be organized by civilization, with most residents not being NPCs but players from that civilization.
Next, Ye Bai briefly browsed the news about Wan Jie, most of which discussed the differing attitudes of NPCs and the reduced difficulty of obtaining tasks.
After all, only a day had passed in the game. Even players with prior experience from visitor accounts, unless they directly challenged nightmare dungeons like Ye Bai, had only leveled up one or two times at most and hadn’t encountered much.
Moreover, there was competition among cosmic civilizations. Even if there were new discoveries, they were likely being discussed in internal forums within their own civilizations.
For instance, Ye Bai hadn’t found any news discussing the wilderness starting point.
With so many players flooding in, it was impossible that there weren’t any lucky players born in the wilderness. Clearly, this had become an unspoken secret among the interstellar civilizations, all secretly exploring and experimenting.
Ye Bai smiled slightly, perfectly aligning with her intentions. She wanted the entire universe to mistakenly believe that Bai Ye was a level 20 or above class-changed player; that was her goal.
Exiting the star network, she returned to reality.
In the morning light, Ye Bai bought a bottle of nutrient solution from the automatic vending interface on a public bench, drinking about half of it. By the time she logged back into the game the next day, she would finish the rest.
The nutrient solution was a high-energy polymer with an extremely high absorption rate, reducing even the need for bathroom breaks. Its effects were not much different from the ‘Bigu Dan’ (a fictional pill that allows one to go without food) found in fantasy novels.
Thus, Ye Bai didn’t linger in reality for long. After stretching her body, she lay back down on the bench to log in again.
What were the villagers’ 997 compared to their hardworking lord’s 007?
...
On the morning of the third day after Bai Ye Village was established, Ye Bai and Ka Li stood a distance away from the tunnel the villagers had tirelessly dug day and night.
Ka Li asked Ye Bai, “My lord, everything is ready. Should we detonate it now?”
“Detonate,” Ye Bai affirmed, predictably covering her ears with her hands.
With confirmation, Ka Li snapped her fingers—
“Boom…”
A muffled sound echoed from the sealed tunnel, causing the ground beneath their feet to tremble slightly.
Ye Bai watched Ka Li’s actions with admiration. After class-changing, her attribute panel would show ‘spiritual energy,’ commonly referred to as the blue bar, which was required to use professional skills.
What Ka Li was using now was the basic professional skill of the 【Demolition Expert】 class—【Detonate】. This combat style involved using bombs with various effects, and with a snap of her fingers, she could detonate bombs from a distance without looking back at the explosion, which was incredibly cool.
But while she appreciated it, Ye Bai already had a rough idea of her future class change and wouldn’t be taking that route.
After waiting for the shockwave of the explosion to settle, the two approached the mine.
The previously sealed stone wall had been blown open significantly. Before Ka Li could step into the cave to assess the situation, her expression changed; she had sensed the energy fluctuations inside.
As they entered the cave together, a deep, dark blue glow emerged from behind the layer of hard rock that had been blasted away.
This was the highest energy level resource in the technology tree of Wan Jie—the Source Crystal.
Since Ye Bai hadn’t unlocked the prerequisite technology for 【Energy Exploration】, even though Ka Li was a senior engineer capable of constructing a Source Crystal mine, she couldn’t confirm the location of the Source Crystal mine. Even if she followed Ye Bai’s arrangements out of loyalty, it didn’t mean she fully believed that a mine could be found here.
Now, with the evidence before her, Ka Li was instantly convinced of Ye Bai’s capabilities.
“My lord… impressive!”
【Villager ‘Ka Li’ loyalty +5】
Ye Bai was pleasantly surprised. Gaining favor from a senior professional wasn’t easy. Other villagers had only gained a couple of points of loyalty after enjoying a barbecue yesterday, and Ka Li hadn’t budged. She hadn’t expected such an unexpected reward after successfully opening the mine.
“Hahaha… Ka Li, you’ll be in charge of the follow-up construction of the mine.”
“Not a problem!” Ka Li was full of energy. The Source Crystal mine was a precious resource that only a few major cities possessed. She could already foresee the future development of Bai Ye Village. As an elder professional of the territory, she would surely achieve better career development here.
“Then you get to work. If you run out of stamina, I’ll use Energy Protection on you.”
“Okay…”
Ka Li looked at Ye Bai’s back with a sense of awe. The 【Energy Protection】 ability, which only lords could use, was supposed to be a rare occurrence, but… in the past two and a half days, every villager in the village had had the fortune to experience it, and some even twice.
This lord’s energy was truly terrifying…
...
Ye Bai arrived at the temporary material pile next to the Tree of Creation, where a heap of materials collected by the villagers was waiting to be synthesized.
In addition to stones and wood, there were also some iron ores.
Ye Bai counted the quantity and found that they were still eight iron ores short of the materials needed to build the blacksmith shop. It should take about half a day to gather the rest.
However, there were enough other materials to construct another building.
Ye Bai opened the building interface and walked along the central axis of the Tree of Creation to the edge, nearly six hundred meters away, selecting the building blueprint for the 【Composting Plant】.
This was the first level two technology Ye Bai unlocked in the early stages of city building, 【Irrigation and Fertilization】, which was also the first building constructed in the village, highlighting its importance—wells and campfires were considered ‘infrastructure’ and didn’t count as ‘territorial buildings.’
After planning the blueprint, Ye Bai immediately issued orders for two villagers to come and construct it. This building was expected to be completed before nightfall.
Now, the scraps of meat Ye Bai had on hand would only last through today. The high-quality beast meat obtained from killing the Rage Horn Beast had other uses. Besides Ka Li, the other eight villagers were divided into two collecting iron ore, two constructing the composting plant, and two gathering nearby berries, while the last two were cultivating a small plot of land in the area Ye Bai had planned.
Relying on gathering berries and mushrooms nearby could only sustain them for a short time; they would soon face food shortages. Farming, as a stable food source, was best started as early as possible.
According to the game’s settings, under the protection of the Creation Seed, the crop growth cycle in this world would be accelerated.
If it followed real-life settings, where crops took a year to harvest, players who enjoyed the satisfaction of farming would suffer greatly. Therefore, in the game, the crop growth cycle was roughly one month per harvest, and various methods could be used to increase yield and speed up growth.
This design was meant to save a lot of farmland space, allowing lord players to have more room for building planning within their territories, while also generating more areas for monsters to spawn around the territory—truly a win-win situation.
However, Ye Bai suspected that this one-month growth cycle, in the eyes of interstellar players who had achieved productivity liberation, might still seem normal.
And now, Ye Bai was the first to build the composting plant, and the reason was simple.
During the first fifteen days of city building, to prevent the villagers from starving en masse, the crop growth cycle was set to one month per harvest, with an additional 15% growth speed bonus. Under these circumstances, if fertilizer was applied to accelerate growth…
Then this fertilizer couldn’t just be called fertilizer; it had to be called “golden muck.”
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**Chapter 13**
Before night fell, the composting plant was completed.
With the first building constructed in the territory, the basic information of the territory now included two new attributes: 【Health】 and 【Sanitation】.
【Bai Ye Village】
Lord: Bai Ye
Current Population: 9
Population Attraction: 10% base attraction + 8% environmental attraction + 15% title bonus
Buildings: Composting Plant x1
Health: 100
Sanitation: 95
Happiness: 80
These two new attributes were interrelated. Sanitation naturally represented the hygiene conditions of the residential area. If sanitation was too low, it would lead to a decrease in the territory's health, resulting in widespread disease outbreaks. At that point, if the territory lacked medicine or medical buildings, they could only watch helplessly as infected villagers lost health to the disease until death.
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