Chapter 7: Starfire Town_2
Future town? This is it?
He had already seen the anti-gravity hovercar and flying device, and he had seen the gloves on Hanyu's hands, whose principle was unclear but clearly contained high technology.
The full-cover armor on Wen Lei also made him envious and curious.
Ren Zhong had already formed a general speculative image of the era's technological background.
But in this town, what first caught his eye was a scene reminiscent of the slums of Mumbai.
Sheds made of asbestos tiles, rusty metal sheets, planks, and dried yellow grass were jumbled together in haphazard chaos.
Beneath the jagged eaves of the shacks, clotheslines made of iron wire were hung with colorful clothes.
These clothes fluttered in the wind, swaying slightly.
The streets were filled with passersby dressed in simple clothes, with numb expressions, shambling in the same direction, men and women, old and young, resembling corpse drivers from Xiangxi passing through the night.
Many people had sallow complexions, looking malnourished.
Ren Zhong was puzzled.
The town environment, and the mental and material state of ordinary residents, were extremely incongruous with the technological background he had imagined, full of discord.
The floating truck went forward about a kilometer.
The "scenery" Ren Zhong saw along the way was largely the same.
He didn't know how to comment.
If this is the life of future humanity, it would be better to rewind time back to 2020.
That year, 1.4 billion people had just used the efforts of three generations to completely emerge from the shadows in a land of 9.6 million square kilometers and completely eradicated dire poverty.
But many years later now, the double lack of spirit and material still loomed over this small town.
Suddenly, the scenery in front of Ren Zhong changed dramatically.
The slum suddenly disappeared, replaced by continuous neat white walls on both sides of the road.
The white walls blocked his view.
After moving forward for about another minute, he saw a tall, integrated alloy building.
The streamlined building lying on the ground showed no seams on the surface; the upper part was a transparent dome, while the lower part was a metallic plate that shone with black light.
The metal plates showed no signs of rivets or welding, and every few meters there was a large floor-to-ceiling window.
At first glance, the building looked like a giant submarine docked on the ground, with a strong sense of technology, akin to the sets seen in science fiction movies Ren Zhong had watched.
The immense contrast from before actually gave him the illusion of having traversed hundreds of years in time.
The vehicle slowly came to a stop.
"We've arrived."
Zheng Tian called out, jumping out of the vehicle first.
Ren Zhong also got out of the vehicle and looked around.
This was a spacious plaza.
The hover truck was parked about ten meters in front of the submarine-like building, and there were a dozen or so other vehicles of various sizes nearby.
The shapes of these vehicles looked much more formal than Zheng Tian's vehicle.
In the direction the back of the truck was facing, there were three large platforms set up.
Behind each platform stood two staff members in dark blue tight-fitting overalls.
In front of one platform, dozens of people lined up, one by one.
People were either carrying boxes or holding bags, waiting their turn.
The first in line was a stocky woman dressed in cool clothing, who was plucking items out of her bag.
The items clattered onto the alloy platform with a bang, seemingly a pile of dismembered Ruined Beast remnants.
When she finished dumping, four snake-like mechanical arms extended from the sides of the platform, deftly working through the pile of remains, disassembling and categorizing.
After the disassembly, payment was made, the person left, and the next person came, all done smoothly and briskly.
At the same time, the various parts on the platform automatically moved to the conveyor belt on the side, quickly being sent up through the window holes on the side of the submarine-shaped building, entering inside.
The other two platforms had no one lining up, but trucks came in one by one after being called, and several mechanical arms pulled things out of the compartments like dancing demons, then sorted and conveyed.
The whole process was extremely efficient and almost without human operation.
The blue-uniformed staff didn't move an inch from start to finish, their existence seeming only to maintain order.
Seeing this scene, Ren Zhong had to admit he was deeply impacted.
The single street he passed through felt like a cleaver, sharply dividing this world into two halves.
On one side was the wildness with a nineteenth-century vibe, on the other side was twenty-second-century civilization.
It didn't take long for Zheng Tian's team to be called, and after the items were counted, Ren Zhong mimicked Zheng Tian's action of gently touching the wrist watch to a spot in front of the platform painted with a WIFI symbol.
The wrist watch on his hand emitted a bone conduction sound only he could hear.
"Sold one Crystal Winged Dragonfly Corpse with 80% integrity, received 0.8 Contribution Points."
Ren Zhong understood.
Contribution Points were the currency in this world.
He had gone from being a clanging pauper to a wealthy man with 72 cents.
Great, he had earned his first bucket of gold in the new life.
He just didn't know how much purchasing power 72 cents had.
He also learned another thing.
Although Zheng Tian's team's vehicle looked shabby and unsightly among the teams with vehicles, compared to those who had no transportation at all, scavenging on foot in the wild, the vehicle-owning Zheng Tian team was indeed the social upper class.
The scavengers lined up behind one of the platforms, carrying boxes and bags like moving ants, were the true riffraff.
"The team doesn't even have a Demolition Master, so they can't even fully extract and preserve special materials like Crystal Chips. These riffraff are really wasting resources, destroying valuable materials."
As they left, Zheng Tian disdainfully commented on those still in line.
She seemed to be mocking these riffraff while also flaunting her own strength in front of Ren Zhong.
Ren Zhong meanwhile learned another thing, the tall and full-bodied girl named Chen Han was apparently the so-called Demolition Master.
Occupation name obtained.
World view completion progress +1.