Chapter 173: The Rose Factory

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During the day the roses in the field were closed, turning into an unblooming bud, the moist soil became dry, and the field looked harmless and tranquil, but Bai Liu experimented for a while and found that their spirit levels dropped faster when they were around the field than when they were anywhere else.

They only had two bottles of low grade perfume, and in order to keep their spirits up, the perfume might not last the night if they stayed around the flower fields, so Bai Liu made the decisive choice to stay away from the flower fields - or to be more precise, Bai Liu wanted to stay away from the whole Buming polluted area. The perfume factory.

With two bottles of perfume that hold their fragrance for four hours, they are going to last until the next morning, and staying in a place that is more prone to contamination is clearly not a good option.

Bai Liu decided to follow the factory outside, to see what was going on in the lot where this factory was located.

"What you can think of, others can think of too." Liu Jiayi, who was holding Bai Liu's hand, grimaced, "We'll easily run into other players if we head out like this, and aren't you going to think of a way to get 80kg of roses for each of us for the night? I've already stretched my abilities to the max with what I did last night, so I can barely make 80kg, doubling it to 160kg is out of the question."

Bai Liu was in no hurry: "Didn't you hear the processor say this morning that all the new flower pickers finished last night?"

"There are six players in this game, and the players start off as new flower pickers, so if all the flower pickers have completed their tasks, that means that the other four players, apart from us, are also capable of picking 40kg of roses in one night."

Bai Liu smiles: "Four people can pick 40kg in one night, isn't that exactly the 160kg we need?"

"......" Liu Jiayi rubbed her arm, which had gone goose bumps from Bai Liu's bewitching smile, and asked, "What do you want to do?"

"First investigate the situation around this factory." Bai Liu's eyes turned deep, "Every monster in the game has a origin and a cause, stragglers are transformed from people, and since I can make deals with people, I thought ......"

"You want to make a deal with these stragglers?" Liu Jiayi frowned back, "Many of the monsters in the game are tainted, mentally zeroed humans who have gone insane, how do you make a deal with a creature that has gone insane? They don't even have the sanity to understand you."

Bai Liu lowered his eyes to Liu Jiayi: "What if they can regain their sanity for a short time?"

Liu Jiayi was stunned and subconsciously retorted, "Impossible."

The alienation of monsters in the game is irreversible, it is a [rule] of the game, which means that after the spirit value is 0, the spirit value will freeze and turn grey and cannot be returned with [spirit bleach].

A monster will always be a monster, and it is impossible to change back into a human being.

But soon Liu Jiayi also found something wrong - the [mental bleach] in this game was originally frozen!

Not only for the monsters, but also for them, and the perfume is not limited to [drifters], which means that if the perfume can be used on [drifters] and takes effect, and the group of monsters regain their sanity and become normal human [drifters], then it might be possible to temporarily stop the attack on them - like a [mermaid statue] that is being looked straight at Stop the forward movement.

"Perfume is likely to be the weakness of this group of stragglers." Liu Jiayi looked up at Bai Liu, "When did you think of that? It's that this game's [perfume] can be used as a [mental bleach] for monsters."

"Before you get into the game." Bai Liu said.

"Before entering the game?!" Liu Jiayi was full of question marks.

Bai Liu tossed the bottle of perfume in his hand, his eyes following the up and down of the tossed perfume as he curled the corners of his mouth, "Someone told me before I entered the game that even using this perfume on a staff who had gone mad would restore their sanity and state of mind, no matter how mad they were before, once they sprayed the perfume, they turned back to their normal self as if nothing had happened look."

"I was thinking - this is like a flip-flopped version of spiritual bleach."

Bai Liu drops his eyes and casually plays with the two bottles of perfume in his hands, "It can restore and enhance one's state, pulling one back from a state of madness, and in addition to the game's setting - for the player, if he doesn't use [mental bleach] all the time he will be tainted by the game's monsters' mental values to drop go insane."

"For players, [Spiritual Bleach] is [Rose Perfume], we ordinary players are also "addicted" to it, in order to buy it to survive, to work for the game to earn [Flower Picker], can not earn points [Rangers] will be [laid off], sent to the [Unknown District], while advanced players who earn it are promoted to the front of the stage."

Bai Liu looks to Liu Jiayi: "Don't you think these mechanisms, they look familiar?"

Liu Jiayi was a little creeped out, she understood what Bai Liu meant: "...... game is a big [rose factory]."

-- If the game is a large factory that exploits players, who is the [factory manager] in this game that exploits everyone and gets the most out of it?

Bai Liu's eyes turn dark - they walk to the edge of the flower field.

Outside the magnificent fields of flowers was not a pleasantly scented town, but a desolate and dilapidated suburb, with curling discarded newspapers and some long-abandoned factories that could not be seen for dozens of metres, a picture of two worlds from the beautifully coloured fields of flowers and perfume factories behind them.

Bai Liu walks up to the door of one of the empty factories with a job advert on it, but it is ten years old.

But it looks like there was no need to recruit for this factory afterwards - the tin-skinned roller shutter door of the factory had the word [dismantle] written in yellow paint, and the paint was peeling off at the bottom of this word, a very dated texture.

Liu Jiayi squatted down to look at the scattered pieces of newspaper on the ground.

[Rose perfume introduced?! New addictive substance, banned nationwide, sparks public protest!

--This kind of thing should be banned, so how come coffee and cigarettes are not banned?! This is a serious infringement of our people's freedom to consume!

(Mr. Wang, the owner of the convenience store who led the protest, said that he allegedly stocks a lot of rose perfume in his shop and has made hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit from it this year)]

[Factory explosion, perfume spreads, protests win, dried rose leaf gas sells worldwide!

[Rose perfumed gas lifts people's spirits, students learn more efficiently, employees work more efficiently ...... usher in a golden period of rapid development, factory enterprises expand their recruitment by 7.2 percent this year ......]

[...... rose gas ushered in the third major price increase of the year, causing massive protests around the world, as a necessity the perfume has become a burden for most people with an average annual income of less than 100,000 ...... rose perfume as a necessity for billions of people ...... vaguely trending towards luxury goods]

[...... The perfume's three consecutive price increases serve as a signal for countless poor, ordinary people, sounding the death knell ......]

[Global governments unite to protest against sky-high perfume prices, sanction the unlimited multiple price increases of Rose Dry Leaf Gas, and demand that factories stop this behavior or they will be forced to close them ......]

[...... Three heads of government wither on tour over loss of perfume supplies ...... Perfume factories pledge to prioritise supply of speciality perfumes to countries willing to make friendly agreements with factories ...... Joint sanctions Association disintegrates ......]

[...... Global Rich List Butchered by Rose Perfume Manufacturing and Selling Industry ......]

[......During the Great Depression ......Many factories closing ......Schools closing ......Unemployment rate climbing ...... riots were frequent ...... street intersections were filled with withered and dying stragglers ......]

[...... Rose manufacturing or the only way out of employment for today's youth ......]

[...... Rose production fell last year and the number of people dying worldwide rose further compared to previous years ......]

......

Bai Liu also squatted down close to Liu Jiayi to look at the newspapers on the ground.

Even Liu Jiayi, who is not a particularly nice little girl by nature, felt a tingling sensation when she saw the newspapers and the shocking black and white pictures on them.

The messy crowds, the bloodied roads, the holes everywhere where dying people hang from bridges for relief, and the numb eyes looking at the camera, give a spine-chilling eeriness to the black and white photographs.

"This kind of thing, it really only destroys the ecology." Bai Liu picked up a photo from the ground with the caption [Desperate, wilted exiles hang from a bridge hole en masse; Rose Factory remains indifferent, won't sell perfume at reduced prices].

[Rose perfume, which was promoted for free in the early days and promised to be sold to the public at low prices all the time, has now long risen to a sky-high price ......]

"Give it to you for free when it's promoted, give it to you at a low price, and then raise the price after you've got used to it and it's long since cornered the market so that you can't find any alternatives either, but you can't survive off the thing anymore and have to pay a higher price for it and become a slave to the rose."

"It's a very conventional exploitation routine, but the implementation of such a routine on top of an addictive item that causes death leads to an all-consuming, crime-like demise that kills all of humanity - even money loses its colour in these apocalyptic times."

"So I don't like this stuff, it erases the meaning of what I'm after."

Bai Liu calmly uncrosses his fingers as the cold wind whistles past, taking the old newspaper fragments out of his hands.

Is this the future that Tang Erda sees, where there is no solution but to drown?

Watching Su Yang and her team members become these rose-obsessed metamorphoses with no way to save them but to watch them wither or go into the next timeline cycle to escape ......

A few more times of this kind of thing and it's no wonder this man is going crazy.

Liu Jiayi alertly closed in on Bai Liu and stood in front of him - these [stragglers] hiding in the factory were trying to attack them.

"Perfume! He smells of perfume!"

There was a maniacal shrill and a piercing chirp from the shifting black shadows, all of which lunged towards Bai Liu.

"I'm surprised there are so many stragglers here." Liu Jiayi held the poison back taut, "Are you sure we have enough perfume?"

"Not sure." Bai Liu replied honestly, "But isn't that with you?"

Liu Jiayi: "......"

Liu Jiayi rages: "Shit!!!"

The black mass of stragglers with their tentacles slithered like snakes from the ground, the newspapers on the ground were swept into the air by the tumbling tentacles and carried far away by the wind in the dark dusty sky.

One of the photos shows a flower-picker smiling happily with the shell of his torn face - [Even though he works overtime around the clock every day, without rest, and is not a regular employee, picking 40kg of dried leaf roses to barely get a bottle of low-grade perfume, it's the happiest thing in the world to work in a rose factory].

[We are doing the work of changing the world and saving others.]

[If we work hard, we might be able to lower the price of perfume and keep more people alive!

-- said a dying flower-picker feebly.

(At the time of this report, the willing flower picker had been sacked and laid off for breaching Rose Factory regulations by disclosing details of his work to the public.)