Chapter 174: The Rose Factory

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The sky turns dark.

A battered and bruised Liu Jiayi and Bai Liu lay by the flower field, they had been back for a while and were now recuperating - a daytime battle with the stragglers had nearly sent Liu Jiayi and a weakened Bai Liu packing with empty stamina slots.

But they both eventually managed to run back.

When he returned, Bai Liu found two new, larger sacks of linen by the flower field, where the processor had come and given them the sacks from tonight's rose picking.

Liu Jiayi was still lying next to Bai Liu catching his breath, "I've got about an hour or two to recover my stamina tank, so do we wait? Or do we go down to the fields and pick roses to attract the stragglers?"

"Your plan to use the other four would require a lot of stragglers, wouldn't it?" Liu Jiayi sat up propped on the ground, her arms back behind her neck and twisted her shoulders, shaking her hands in a warm-up motion.

She squinted at Bai Liu, who was sitting next to him: "I think it's a risky and easy option, but you're not going to change it, are you?"

Bai Liu rolled his eyes and looked at Liu Jiayi, who was sitting next to him: "No."

Liu Jiayi, a very old woman, sighs long and worriedly, like a little old lady worried about the future of her unproductive laid-off son, and turns to Bai Liu with her forehead propped up.

"I occasionally wish you as an adult in your twenties would know better than to keep thinking about betting on a winnable fight and take the path that some normal little players take."

"But it's still too early to talk to you, a C-rank player, when you're a bit older, you can rely on me now anyway, you can rely on yourself later when you're older."

Liu Jiayi gave Bai Liu a helpless look and shook his head.

Bai Liu: "......"

"So what?" Liu Jiayi asked, "The plan you gave me was to use the stragglers to draw the other four players over, right, and how are you going to attract the stragglers without picking roses?"

Bai Liu slowly pulls a bottle of perfume out of his pocket.

Liu Jiayi gazed straight at the perfume for a moment, then expressionlessly shifted her gaze to Bai Liu's face: "This is our last bottle of perfume, and if you waste my hard-earned perfume last night to use it as bait, I'll kill you."

Bai Liu: "......"

Bai Liu tentatively opens the cap of the perfume bottle.

Liu Jiayi held up the poison with a sweet smile, "I'm not kidding you, Brother Bai Liu, this is something I earned from my first job, so you better not use it for me - you've already used up a bottle during the day."

Bai Liu: "......"

This little girl is really angry ...... although he does seem to be quite indebted and messy during the day today ......

Thinking about what happened later in the day today, Bai Liu's eyes wandered for a moment, "But perfume does seem to be the fastest way to attract stragglers ......"

"If you knew you were going to use it at night, you shouldn't have used it during the day! Liu Jiayi couldn't stand it any longer, "Please cherish the fruits of our labour! Don't keep giving me this extreme card-edge game pass!"

Bai Liu crouched with her hands on her thighs, posed in a serious kneeling position, and apologised at light speed: "I'm sorry, my mind was so preoccupied with maximising profit and the cost effectiveness of perfume use that I didn't take our survival rate into account, my bad."

Eight-year-old Liu Jiayi pointed angrily at Bai Liu, who was on his knees apologizing, and scolded, "You are a child! Don't always let yourself behave!"

"Give me survival rate as the first rule of the game! How will you ever play in a league where survival rate is the criterion for victory?"

Liu Jiayi, as a nurse, scolds tactician Bai Liu, who has nothing in his head but points and heads.

"I'll take survival rates into consideration next time." Bai Liu nodded, pretending he had taken Liu Jiayi's words in, before quickly changing the subject to the task, "But for tonight, in order to get the maximum amount of dried leaf roses, let's leave it at that, I'm turning on the perfume."

Bai Liu's hand was already on the perfume.

Liu Jiayi: "......"

So perfunctory that you don't feel the sincerity of your admission of fault at all!!!

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The night is getting darker.

Tang Erda holds her gun alertly and looks around, ready to hunt.

His sack was casually tossed aside, containing only a few dried leaf roses, not much.

Tonight Tang Erda only picked so many roses before stopping his labours as he had figured out the rules of the game - the task of picking roses is not for players to actually pick, but for them to plunder the fruits of other people's labour through stragglers.

And if last night's 40kg of roses were a possibility, he could have done it by picking them, tonight's 80kg made Tang Erda simply give up on such useless work and choose to take his gun and hunt stragglers all night.

But strangely enough, at this time last night, a large number of stragglers had come over to attack him.

But tonight - Tang Erda walked up to the ridge and looked around, and he saw no stragglers for the rest of the night, except for those who had come to attack him earlier in the day.

Tang Erda looked at the sack she had tossed aside and frowned - was it because he hadn't picked enough roses on his side tonight? So the bait wasn't as effective as last night?

But it's already this time of year, and the presence of dried leaf roses being picked over here doesn't attract a single straggler, does it?

No experienced player would move easily in such a large, similar, and somewhat mentally contaminated map scene, but the situation at hand was clearly unusual, and if no stragglers appeared on Tang Erda's side, he would not be able to complete his mission tonight.

Having no choice but to move, Tang Erda decided to take the initiative and go in search of the stragglers who stole the roses.

The fields of flowers were eerily silent at night, and Tang Erda walked along the ridge in a certain direction, where he saw many flower-pickers who shared his identity, dripping from the black veil and bending in silence to pick the flowers.

The men moved quickly, and through the black veil one could faintly see something "fading" from the faces and bodies of the flower-pickers, sliding down the veil and into the mud, but they seemed to have become numb to the situation and continued to pick quickly, oblivious.

Some of the flower-pickers were even picking with hands that had withered to nothing but white bones, still shaking and working hard. With fear visible to the naked eye on their faces, these decreasingly efficient flower-pickers forced themselves to pick more efficiently, choking and coughing violently as they picked roses.

Even at this point, it is clear that their fear is not of withering away, but of being sacked - in a world where not having a job is a thing worse than death.

Tang Erda withdrew his watching eyes as he tightened his grip on the gun at his side.

He couldn't remember how many times he had seen this cruel sight, so much so that when he saw it again, his heart just felt an impassive, almost cold-blooded indifference.

-or desperate powerlessness.

There is no way to change the world, and once dried rose leaf gas becomes widespread, there will be no room for manoeuvre, and all the ordinary people contaminated by deception will become nourishment for the dried leaf rose, spending their life savings and labour on it, and still be happy to do so.

A full moon of pure colour hangs in the northern sky above, the snowy moonlight shining pusily in all directions in a scattered light.

But this ambiguous, soothing pale white glow ends abruptly at the divine edge of the field of flowers, dividing it into two distinct worlds inside and out - outside the field of flowers is a dark, simple sketch without moonlight, while inside the field of flowers is a reflective oil painting in dawn-like hues.

The deep red ripe roses, the dark blue cloudless sky, the light pink wet earth, the black veil of the workers working hard in the intervals of the flower fields, the fragrance of the roses that lingers on everyone's nostrils - everything is so harmoniously quiet and peaceful.

These scenes are photographed in colour and published on the internet or in newspaper headlines with great fanfare, scenes that are enough to lure the masses into a paradise where even the sinful truth of the flower fields is buried.

Shaken and desperate civilians looked on with bleary eyes at this wonderfully unbelievable scene, watching the paid media trumpet the preciousness and rarity of the rose, the beauty and irreplaceability of the place, so that ordinary people subliminally accepted the high price of the perfume.

--After all, it's easier to resent the Rose Factory, the only beautiful place left in the world, than to resent yourself for not being able to buy it and for being ugly and withered.

Yes, roses are so rare, and the effects of dried rose leaf gas are so good, it is only natural that they are very expensive.

It was their fault, not Rose's. How could Rose be so beautiful and useful?

-- all the information they saw told them so.

Finally, the people, in a trance of pain, began to use the rose, which had been pushed into their abyss, as their last salvation, forbidding anyone to speak out to tarnish its preciousness, to obliterate its existence, and to make enemies of all those who denied it - because it was the last hope they thought they had.

This self-anesthetic process of extinction, which Tang Erda first saw with anger, then with disappointment, then with numbness, and now with a vaguely manic calm.

A dark shadow flickers across the flower field and Tang Erda looks over keenly.

On the ground level at the edge of the flower fields, a bunch of small black dots of stragglers are wobbling towards a certain place in a swarm, like ants attracted by a sweet smell, no longer scattered as yesterday, but moving in a fixed direction.

Tang Erda frowns in confusion and follows closely.

After following these stragglers for some distance, one sees a scene that gives one goosebumps - a perfume placed open in the middle of a field of flowers, surrounded by a dense mass of tentacles and hissing stragglers with open white teeth.

But no matter how hard these stragglers tried, it was as if they were blocked by an invisible layer of glass and could not reach the perfume placed inside.

The scene instantly conjured up a prop for Tang Erda - [Magic Space]!

It was a trap made to lure them over!

This thought led Tang Erda to draw her gun without hesitation and to shoot the perfume in the "glass window".

But the moment he drew his gun, Tang Erda felt an indescribable constraint - as if the air to his left and right had frozen in a narrow glass walkway that halted his smooth draw for a second or two.

[System Alert: Player Bai Liu extends (Magic Space) to trap player Tang Erda]