Chapter 36: The Extreme Tug-of-War with Yu Wei

"Yo!"

Chen Shicheng almost laughed out loud; Yu Wei didn't know where he had learned this, but he even knew to block him after school.

However, this also shows that the gap between them is shrinking, and with someone helping, Yu Wei no longer dares to appear in front of him.

After glancing around the empty surroundings, Chen Shicheng, relying on his favorability with the Iron Refining Town soldiers, proposed the idea of spending a night at the military camp's garrison.

After a brief discussion, the patrol soldiers did not immediately agree to his request, but decided to take him to see the young general they had first encountered.

Chen Shicheng knew these soldiers had no authority, so he readily followed them to the military camp to meet that young general.

The fact proved that, although that bit of favorability was useful, its effect was not great.

He didn't even see the general's shadow; only one of the two personal guards who had escorted him before ran over with a message, saying the general agreed to let him stay in the military camp, but only in the outskirts, absolutely not near the central area.

As for this, Chen Shicheng had no objections; he wasn't picky about lodging conditions.

Moreover, he doesn't sleep in the game; after logging off, the game character's sensations don't sync with his body, so even staying in a horse shed is the same.

Thus, over the next few days, Chen Shicheng and Yu Wei began an extreme tug-of-war between men.

After going online each day, Chen Shicheng either mingled with a group of soldiers in the military camp or ran to the outskirts to find that gaze that felt like a blade on his back, deliberately exposing a fatal flaw, madly taunting, then watching Yu Wei's gaze grow increasingly angry yet powerless against him.

After Yu Wei guarded for two days without finding any chance to strike, he probably accepted reality, no longer camping all day at the military camp gate, merely occasionally coming to assert his presence.

But this made it impossible to pinpoint Yu Wei's appearance time, so Chen Shicheng dared not go to the military camp even more, and his mood grew somewhat irritable.

Three days later, at one o'clock in the afternoon.

Chen Shicheng and La Tiao squatted honestly at the edge of the drill field, holding wooden bowls and eating large mouthfuls of the military camp's rations.

Having been blocked at the military camp for three days, he had come to terms with it.

Wasn't it just a test of patience, to see who could outlast whom? During the day he wandered the military camp with La Tiao, observing and chatting with the soldiers like an instructor, and during training he practiced his techniques on the side.

What's more, without using any Merit Points, after just a few practice runs of his newly acquired two sword techniques, they directly reached proficiency, boosting his combat power once again.

The skill Wind-Scrolling Residual Clouds especially delighted him; at full power he could unleash at least a dozen slashes forward within a second.

He tested this on the military camp's targets; after a storm-like blade aura swept past, the dozen or so wooden dummies in iron armor before him were all chopped into fragments, their cut surfaces smooth as a mirror, almost reflective.

Moreover, because of this he compensated the quartermaster twenty taels of silver for the damaged armor and wooden dummies. Chen Shicheng sighed, tossed the loss of twenty taels to the back of his mind, casually threw a large chunk of fatty meat into La Tiao's small wooden bowl, then without a care sped up his eating, finishing the bowl of millet rice in just a few bites.

"Squeak squeak squeak!"

Seeing the chunk of fatty meat that had fallen from the sky into his bowl, La Tiao jumped up angrily, frantically waving its front paws in protest.

"I don't like fatty meat." Chen Shicheng pretended to wipe the corner of his eye, "You eat more, fatty meat is nutritious."

Saying that, he hurriedly got up and dashed to the washbasin to clean his wooden bowl, leaving La Tiao staring at the fatty meat it couldn't swallow, furious yet helpless.

This isn't just a person and beast being spoiled and disliking fatty meat; it's that everyone in the military camp does this. By common sense, an ancient military camp not docking rations is already considerate, and eating meat might happen only once a year.

But here the situation is completely different: meat is freely eaten, while millet, the staple, is hardly seen even once a year.

After just three days, Chen Shicheng's face was oily and seeing meat made him want to vomit, let alone what those soldiers who constantly endure this are like.

It's no wonder that picking any of these people at random yields a level higher than his; they truly are stacked up thanks to excellent conditions.

"Eating meat until you vomit is also a kind of trouble, huh."

Lying on the open ground of the military camp basking in sunlight, Chen Shicheng rubbed his belly and sighed helplessly.

"How come, you can't even last three days?" a teasing voice suddenly sounded nearby.

Chen Shicheng opened his eyes weakly and took a look.

It was one of the two personal guards from before; after getting familiar over this period, he learned his name was Wang Peng, a follower who had been by the general's side since childhood, and these days he had been arranging everything for Chen Shicheng in the military camp.

Chen Shicheng couldn't help but retort, "Brother, do you have too much money and nowhere to spend it? Can't you recall hard times and think of sweetness, eat more grain instead of always eating meat? What's the point of that?"

"Grain?"

Wang Peng squatted to the side, put his wooden bowl aside, absentmindedly plucked a weed and put it in his mouth, chewing it with relish, "Having meat to eat is already good; if you really can't stomach it, you can chew some tree leaves to relieve the greasiness."

"That's wrong; no matter how you calculate, meat is more expensive than grain, right? If you have money to buy meat, why not buy more grain instead? Balanced nutrition is the way to go." Chen Shicheng sat up from the ground, trying to correct Wang Peng's mistaken notion.

"Who told you the meat is bought?" Wang Peng gave Chen Shicheng a strange look, "This meat is the harvest from clearing monsters around the town; it's all free."

"Then why not sell the meat and buy some grain?"

"You could sell it, but you can't buy any."

"What do you mean?"

Seeing that Chen Shicheng knew nothing about the basic situation of Iron Refining Town, Wang Peng simply sat down and patiently explained, "Huangchi County Town and the surrounding villages, including Iron Refining Town, were all cleared out of the forest, with arable land for planting being pitifully scarce."

"Moreover, reclaiming farmland is also laborious; the deep-buried tree roots and the forest's astonishing regeneration speed are an unavoidable problem."

"Furthermore, countless animals in the forest cause damage, and monsters occasionally appear out of nowhere, making both yield and safety unguaranteed; thus the food here is fundamentally insufficient, and we can only transport grain from elsewhere."

"Even so, the grain supply still falls short of demand; if it weren't for living off the mountains, the people here would likely be starving dead everywhere."

"."

Chen Shicheng was somewhat stunned; he had actually become the "why not eat meat porridge" bastard, completely ignoring the constraints of the environment and ancient productive capacity.

(End of Chapter)