The sky turned dark.
The injured Liu Jiayi and Bai Liu lay next to the flower field. They had been back for a while and were now recuperating. During the battle with some vagrants during the day, Liu Jiayi who exhausted her physical strength and the weak Bai Liu were almost sent away.
However, the two of them managed to return in the end.
Bai Liu found that there were two new, larger sacks on the edge of the flower field. The processing worker had probably come and given them sacks for picking flowers tonight.
Liu Jiayi lay beside Bai Liu and gasped. “My physical strength requires one or two hours before it will recover. Should we wait? Or go to the field to pick roses and attract the vagrants?”
“Your plan to use the four other players will require a large number of vagrants right?” Liu Jiayi sat up on the ground. She extended her arms behind her neck, twisted her shoulders and shook her hands in a warm-up gesture.
She squinted at Bai Liu who was sitting next to her. “I think this plan is dangerous and it is easy to be overturned but you won’t change it, right?”
Bai Liu looked at Liu Jiayi next to him. “No.”
Liu Jiayi was extremely mature and when she sighed with worry, she was like a little old lady worried about the future of her laid-off son. She held her forehead and turned to look at Bai Liu.
“I occasionally hope that you, as an adult in your 20s, can be a bit more sensible and don’t always think about betting and winning. Please try to take the path that normal players will take.”
“However, it is too early to talk about this to a player with a C grade panel. Wait until you grow up a bit. In any case, you can rely on me now and you can rely on yourself when you grow up.”
Liu Jiayi looked at Bai Liu helplessly and shook her head.
Bai Liu, “……”
“So?” Liu Jiayi asked. “The plan you gave me is to use the vagrants to attract other players. How can we attract the vagrants if we don’t pick roses?”
Bai Liu slowly took out a bottle of perfume from his pocket.
Liu Jiayi stared directly at the perfume for a while before moving her gaze to Bai Liu’s face in an expressionless manner. “This is our last bottle of perfume. If you waste the perfume I earned with my hard work last night as bait, I will kill you.”
Bai Liu, “……”
Bai Liu tentatively opened the lid of the perfume.
Liu Jiayi smiled sweetly and held up the poison. “I’m not joking with you, Brother Bai Liu. This is what I earned with my first part-time job. You better not mess with me. You have already used up a bottle during the day.”
Bai Liu, “……”
This little girl was really angry… although he had acted recklessly during the day…
Thinking about what happened during the day, Bai Liu looked away for a moment. “However, the perfume is indeed the fastest way to attract the vagrants…”
“If you had known you were going to use it at night then you shouldn’t have messed around during the day!” Liu Jiayi couldn’t bear it. “Please cherish the fruits of our labor for a little bit! Don’t always play this extreme walking on the edge of a card method!”
Bai Liu put his hands on his thighs, knelt down and apologized at the speed of light. “I’m sorry, I was focused on the pursuit of profit maximization and the cost-effectiveness of using the perfume. I didn’t take our survival rate into consideration. I was wrong.”
The eight year old Liu Jiayi angrily pointed at Bai Liu, who was kneeling on the ground and apologizing. “Are you a child? Don’t always follow your own nature!”
“The survival rate is the first rule of clearing an instance! How can you play in the league where the survival rate is the standard of victory in the future?!”
Liu Jiayi, the healer, scolded Bai Liu, the tactician who didn’t calculate anything except points and what people thought.
“Next time, I’ll take the survival rate into account.” Bai Liu nodded while pretending that he was listening to Liu Jiayi’s words. Then he quickly changed the topic to the task. “However, let’s do this first in order to get the maximum dry leaf roses tonight. I will use the perfume.”
Bai Liu’s hand was already on the perfume as he spoke.
Liu Jiayi, “…….”
It was so perfunctory that she didn’t feel any sincerity in admitting his mistake at all!
The night was getting darker.
Tang Erda grasped his gun vigilantly and looked around, prepared to hunt.
His sack was casually tossed aside. It contained some dry leaf roses but not much.
He only picked a few roses before he stopped working. It was because he had already figured out the rules of the game. The task of picking roses wasn’t for players to actually pick them. It was to let players plunder the fruits of other people’s labor through the vagrants.
Last night, he still had the possibility of picking 40 kg of roses but tonight’s quota of 80 kg made Tang Erda simply give up on doing this useless work. He chose to raise his gun and hunt the vagrants.
The strange thing was that at this time last night, a large number of vagrants had already come to attack him.
Yet tonight—Tang Erda walked into the field and looked around. Apart from some vagrants who came to attack him earlier, he didn’t see a single vagrant in the second half of the night.
Tang Erda looked at the sack that he had thrown aside and frowned deeply. Was it because he didn’t pick enough roses tonight? Therefore, the effect of the bait wasn’t as strong as last night?
However, it had already reached this point. There were roses on the ground. How could there be no vagrants attracted to them?
In this type of large-scale map with a certain mental contamination effect, experienced players wouldn’t move easily but the situation in front of him was obviously abnormal. If Tang Erda didn’t fight any more vagrants, his task tonight wouldn’t be completed.
As a last resort, Tang Erda still chose to move. He decided to take the initiative to find some vagrants who stole roses.
The flower field at night fell into an eerie silence. Tang Erda walked along the field in a certain direction. He saw many flower pickers in the lower field wearing the black gauze cover and bending down to silently pick flowers.
These people moved very quickly. Through the black veil, he could vaguely see things ‘fall off’ the faces and bodies of these flower pickers from time to time. They seemed to be numb to this situation and continued to pick flowers quickly without taking a second look.
Some flower pickers even had their hands withered to the bone but they were still working hard despite the trembling. These flower pickers who had lost their work efficiency had visible fear on their faces. They forced themselves to improve their picking efficiency while coughing violently.
At this point, it was clear that they weren’t afraid of withering but of being fired. In this world, having no job was more terrible than death.
Tang Erda withdrew his observational gaze and tightened his grip on his gun.
He couldn’t remember how many times he had seen this cruel scene. It was so that when he saw it again, his heart was indifferent. It was an almost cold-blooded indifference.
Or perhaps it was the powerlessness of despair.
This was a world that couldn’t be changed. Once the Dry Leaf Rose Gas became popular, there was no room for maneuver. All ordinary people who had been deceived and contaminated would become the nourishment of the dry leaf roses. They would spend their life savings and labor to obtain it.
A solid full moon hung in the sky. The snow-colored moon shone hazily in all directions with a scattered light.
In this ambiguity, the soothing white light stopped abruptly at the edge of the flower field, dividing the inside and outside of the flower field into two completely different worlds. Outside the flower field was a dark and simple sketch without moonlight. Inside the flower field was a reflective oil painting with the color of dawn.
The dark red mature roses, the dark cloudless sky, the light pink moist soil, the hard-working workers covered with black gauze spread out through the flower fields, the rose fragrance that made people flutter and lingered on the tip of everyone’s noses—everything was harmonious and quiet.
If this scene was photographed in color and published on the Internet or in newspapers, it would be enough to lure countless people who yearned for paradise. The evil truth of the flower fields would be buried.
The crumbling and desperate civilians looked at these wonderful and unbelievable scenes. The paid media advocated the preciousness and rarity of the roses and the beauty and inability to be replaced nature of this place, making ordinary people subtly accept the high price of the perfume.
After all, it was easier to resent their ugly and withered selves who couldn’t afford to buy the perfume than to resent the rose factory, the only beautiful place in the world.
Yes, roses were so rare and the effect of the rose perfume was so good. It was natural to sell it for an expensive price. They just couldn’t afford to buy it because they had no money or ability.
It was their fault, not the roses’ fault. The roses were so beautiful and useful. How could they be wrong?
—All the information they saw told them so.
Finally, the people who were in the trance of pain started to take the roses that thrust them into this abyss as their last salvation. They forbid everyone from opening their mouths to defile the preciousness of the roses or erasing the existence of the roses. They were enemies of all those who denied the roses—because this was their last hope.
For this type of self-anesthesia demise, Tang Erda had been angry when he first saw it. Then he was disappointed, numb and now there was only the calmness of madness.
A dark shadow flashed on the edge of the flower field and Tang Erda keenly saw it.
On the ground level at the edge of the flower field, a bunch of vagrants were heading somewhere in groups. The vagrants were like ants attracted by sweetness. They no longer scattered as they did yesterday and were heading in a certain direction in a fixed manner.
Tang Erda frowned in confusion and followed closely.
He followed these vagrants and after a certain distance, he saw a scene that gave him goosebumps. A perfume was placed in the middle of a flower field, surrounded by densely packed tentacles and the roaring vagrants with open mouths that revealed sharp teeth.
Yet no matter how hard these vagrants tried, they seemed to be blocked by an invisible layer of glass. They couldn’t reach the perfume placed inside.
This scene made Tang Erda instantly think of an item: Magic Space.
It was a trap made to lure them over!
This thought made Tang Erda pull out his gun without hesitation. He wanted to shoot the perfume placed in the ‘glass window.’
However, the moment he pulled out his gun, Tang Erda felt an indescribable restraint. It was as if the air on his left and right sides condensed, forming an incomparably narrow glass plank road. This made his originally smooth gun-drawing method pause for a second or two.
[System notification: Player Bai Liu has extended the Magic Space to trap player Tang Erda.]
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