Chapter 296 Starting a Company in the Game
The passenger ship sailed into Moses Port.
All the guests on the ship, including the VIP guests in the private rooms on the third floor, went to the corridor and to the windows and watched the three undead passengers, who had been with them for most of the journey, disembark.
The errand boys and rickshaw drivers who were waiting for business at the passenger ship's landing dock also stared blankly at the dead soul getting off the ship.
However, no one was running around or shouting to cause a stampede. After all, the great achievements of the Tarantan Undead were reported in newspapers and on the radio every day... Many people in Moses Port even boasted about their dealings with the undead and how friendly they were after drinking.
Well, the premise is that these undead spirits are not in front of me...
If it's really right in front of you, there's no such thing as friendly or unfriendly - most people are superstitious about cemeteries and will avoid houses where people have died. In the final analysis, a living skeleton is too challenging to accept.
The dock, which was always so noisy that even quiet voices could not be heard, suddenly became eerily quiet.
It was not until the three undead ghosts swaggered away through the crowd that people seemed to have found their tongues again, and all kinds of noises suddenly exploded.
"Ms. Gold Coin, what did I just see?"
"Oh my god, no one will ever believe that I was on the same boat with the dead!"
On the deck, the bearded captain with messy hair stared blankly in the direction where the undead were leaving, still holding two silver coins in his sweaty hands.
"First mate, the dead really are on board our ship." Amid the noise of people on and off the dock, the captain regained his ability to speak.
"Yes, sir." The first mate wiped his sweat, "and paid for it."
"Is this - no, this must be luck! Absolutely!" The captain suddenly became excited and raised his fist holding the silver coin. "The dead will pay when they get on our ship. What does this mean? It means that bad luck will never bypass our ship! Our ship is blessed by the Lady of Gold Coin. The most dangerous and terrible things will never happen on our ship!"
"And this is the lucky silver coin!" The captain spread out his palm and said loudly with great force, as if he wanted to convince himself, "This is the lucky silver coin paid by the magical Tarantan ghost, which can ward off disasters and solve problems! I will make them into amulets and carry them with me. Whoever gets it will be accompanied by luck forever!"
First mate: “…”
The first mate quietly moved away from the captain.
"Don't you believe it, first mate?" said the captain.
"Well... of course I believe it." The first mate said insincerely, "It is indeed a lucky silver coin."
The bearded captain put his arm around the first mate's shoulders, lowered his voice, grinned, and said fanatically as if he wanted to hypnotize the first mate as well: "Vampires and undead have boarded our ship, and no one on the ship has encountered any bad luck! Our ship is a lucky ship, absolutely, there is no doubt about it!"
First mate: “…”
If it wasn't so hard to find a job, he really would have had trouble doing this job - he attracted vampires and now the undead, what luck!
The three players didn't care at all how much excitement their boat trip brought to the natives. Once they got on the dock, they ran to Crescent Manor as if they were familiar with the place.
The servants of Crescent Manor were obviously much more receptive to the undead than the ordinary people in the city. They took the undead to meet up with the Innadri visiting group without the undead having to find a way to communicate with them.
Not long after, the orange cat boss met Zhao Zhenzhen, who had squeezed out time to go online.
"Getting something for nothing?" Zhao Zhenzhen laughed when she heard the orange cat boss's request for cooperation.
Although she laughed, Zhao Zhenzhen did not reject the orange cat.
Firstly, because Nadeli wants to build a thermal power station, a power grid and carry out infrastructure construction, it really needs a large amount of river sand and pebbles.
Second, the inland river fleet that will be brought back from the territory of Odysseus can be used for this business.
However, the official support of Huaxia for private entrepreneurs has always been conditional. It is not reasonable to let entrepreneurs take the benefits without giving back to society. After discussing the mining matters with the map, Zhao Zhenzhen put forward two requirements:
The first requirement was that the orange cat boss should use part of his profit to set up a building materials company. This company, which mainly engaged in the mining of river sand and pebbles, must solve the employment problem of some of the young and strong people in Nadeli (that is, the group of contract workers).
The orange cat boss patted his chest and agreed - all the people in his micro knight territory were less than two hundred people, and there were only fifty or sixty young and strong people. They also had to work on the farm, and mining river sand and pebbles required a lot of NPC workers.
The second requirement is that the orange cat boss must use a portion of the profits he makes from mining river sand and pebbles to give back to the local people and solve their living difficulties; he cannot make a fortune by using local resources himself while the locals do not benefit at all.
The orange cat boss was very unhappy when he heard this condition: "That's my knight's territory, Sister Zhao, I want to build my territory even without you telling me!"
Zhao Zhenzhen knew that a skeleton couldn't live a life of luxury in another world, but rules were rules, and there was no way to get around them just to show favor, so she dragged the orange cat to sign a contract to provide the local natives with a minimum living standard...
Next, the orange cat boss happily dragged his friend back to Innadri, and the three of them worked together to set up a building materials company endorsed by the Innadri City Hall...
Being able to be the boss of a company in the game was something Tang Jia could never imagine. She ran errands and joined in the fun while shouting, "The Undead Chamber of Commerce has such a high reputation that they can even do this? What a loss, if I had known earlier I would have also earned some reputation in the Chamber of Commerce!"
"I told you guys to play with me!" The orange cat boss finally puffed out his chest in front of the girl and said proudly, "Boss Ouyang is playing the caravan mode with me. He used to only have a store in Westram, but now he has a store in the main city (Innadri City), right in the bar area!"
“Is this true? Hasn’t Boss Ou Yan always been posting orders to gain experience? When did it become so big?” Tang Jia, who was hanging out with the two of them, suddenly felt like she was out of place.
Ou Yan kept his mouth shut, but from his quickened steps one could tell he was somewhat pleased with himself...
While following the clerk from the city hall to sign up NPC employees, the orange cat boss kept brainwashing the student girl Tang Jia who had not yet graduated: "I'm telling you the truth, Xiaotang, whether you are playing games or in reality, everything else is fake, getting married is the bottom line!"
"What's the biggest worry for girls your age? Parents forcing you to get married? Anxiety about your appearance? Anxiety about your body? Or are you envious of others having boyfriends while you're still single? I tell you, as long as you make money, none of these will matter!"
“Making money is the fastest falling thing in this world. You fall fast while making money, and you fall even faster after making money!”
Tang Jia, who was still in the stage of establishing her outlook on life, was stunned by this guy.
The orange cat, who had experience in managing and operating companies in real life, took his two friends and spent several days to complete all the formalities and set up the company team. After the Innadeli delegation took over the fleet from the Odysseus family, the building materials company, which was fully led by the players, officially began operations.
On March 14, 1032 in the alien world, only a few days away from the Lunar New Year on Earth and when the player online rate reached 99%, two major events occurred.
One is that Hal Maxwell, the former professional mentor familiar to the players, suddenly issued a task to summon undead warriors to fight monsters on this day and opened a new temporary teleportation point.
Players who were busy killing monsters every day were not very interested in this mission. Those teams that had been squatting in a fixed place for a long time did not move. Only a few individual teams that had just been formed ran over.
Within half an hour, the players who had gone to fight monsters were calling out to their friends in their friend lists: "Fat monsters, come quickly!"
…The prisoner road repair team is protected by the Sokri Mercenary Group, and has more than 20 operators with professional and semi-professional combat capabilities. They are capable of dealing with ordinary monsters and beasts on their own, and will not ask the undead for help if the monsters are not difficult to deal with…
By the time the big group players who were stationed at the fixed spot heard the news and rushed over, the lucky individual group players had already completed the quest, collected a bunch of materials and were waiting for the auction at the Exile Town teleportation point.
"Hurry up and grab the next random quest that Hal gives out. Even though this NPC's inner demon book has been worn out, the quests are still very useful." La Hongge and Qin Guan, the two Blood Alliance bosses who were overtaken by the individual groups, secretly made up their minds.
The second thing is that it did not have much impact within the player community, and many people didn’t even know about it.
But for the villagers of the small mountain village facing the Barcelo River at the junction of the territories of Innadri and Odysseus, this was undoubtedly a major event that changed their lives.
At noon that day, the villagers in the mountain village went home for lunch under the scorching sun after being busy in the fields all morning as usual.
In the manor house at the top of the mountain village, Miss Linda, wearing a dusty maid's dress that she hadn't worn for many years, was sweeping the yard listlessly with a broom.
The guard who was "exiled" to this village with her was chopping wood in front of the fence, while another deacon was lazily lying under a plum tree to enjoy the cool air.
It has been five days since we arrived in this small mountain village.
The Undead Lord only came on the first day, and there was no news after that, nor did he leave any instructions to the three people who stayed behind - the orange cat boss never thought that these three NPC subordinates also needed to be taken care of emotionally, or at least to give them a big promise or something to stabilize their hearts.
In the past few days, Miss Linda, the guards, and the deacons still held on to a glimmer of hope, counting on the undead who could always solve problems unexpectedly to come up with magical methods that they would never think of to resolve their current miserable situation.
By now, the poor trio no longer had much hope and could only silently hope that Miss Phoenix would remember them soon and transfer them back.
The villagers were also very calm about the increasingly lazy behavior of the trio, and just lived their lives as usual. It was obvious that from the beginning they had not expected that the people sent by the three great lords would have much effect on the poverty of the village...
Compared with usual, the only slight change in the villagers is that... the young unmarried girls in the village would pretend to pass by the lord's house unintentionally whenever they had nothing to do.
The guards and deacons were all relatively young. If they took a fancy to a girl in the village, even if they would not formally marry her and just have a romantic relationship with her, a little money that slipped through their fingers could greatly improve the lives of the girl and her family. At least they could have more money to buy salt at the nearby village market.
As for the young and beautiful Miss Linda, even the most confident young men in the village would never think that they could win her favor - the maid dress that Miss Linda wore, which she didn't care about at all, was already a sky-high price that the young men in the village couldn't afford for several years.
Of course, the miserable trio of exiles had no intention of giving back to the villagers’ little wisdom…
Seeing the smoke rising from the villagers' homes below, the guard, who had nothing to do but chop wood, put down his axe and turned to look into the yard: "Miss Linda, do you have any rum left?"
"Yes, there's half a bottle left. It's on the cupboard in the kitchen." Miss Linda replied lazily.
"I mean... we should have lunch." The guard had to be direct and explicit.
"The bread is in the cupboard, and the leftover soup from yesterday is on the stove. Just heat it up." Miss Linda was unmoved and continued to scrape the fallen leaves on the ground listlessly with a broom.
The guards couldn't do anything about her, so they could only scoop water from the water tank in the yard to wash their hands, and then went into the kitchen by themselves.
The deacon lying under the plum tree didn't seem to "come alive" until the guard entered the kitchen. He propped up his arms and shouted, "Sprinkle some pepper in the soup, it's too bland! Wash two more potatoes and add them in!"
Guard: “…”
He is a professional warrior, not a cook!
There was nothing he could do. The butler and the secretary were of higher status than him, and they made it clear that they did not want to do the cooking work, so he had to do it, unless he was willing to starve.
"It would be better to find a village girl as a lover and let her be the cook. " The guard thought in despair.
The guard had just started the fire when a white light suddenly flashed on the iron plate summoning array in the main room that had been idle for several days.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Bai Guang's guard rushing out from the kitchen.
Miss Linda, who was absent-mindedly leaning on the broom, and the butler who was eating salted fish under the plum tree, also cast their eyes over at the same time.
This is probably the most anticipated time in their lives for the three of them to see the undead appear - even if it's just a mess, as long as it can bring some hope of change to this desperate exile life!
The undead , carrying a bulging backpack and holding a woven bag , walked down from the iron plate in the white light.
"Busy!" The orange cat boss waved happily to the familiar Miss Linda, and walked out of the main house dragging a woven bag.
Behind the orange cat boss, Tang Jia and Ou Chu, who were also carrying large backpacks and dragging woven bags, appeared one after another.
"Good day, Lord of the Undead." Miss Linda threw away her broom and trotted over to the player excitedly, "Good day, two Undead Warriors."
These three skull faces that would give her nightmares at night were extremely familiar to Miss Linda, who was suffering from the dull and stagnant life in the mountain village.
"Good day, good day." The orange cat boss took off his heavy backpack and stretched his arms, saying, "Ms. Linda, please help call all the young and old in the village together. Let's hold a general meeting."
Miss Linda: “…Huh?”
No matter what, there is an orange cat who is the lord of this micro-knight territory, and the medal was awarded by Miss Phoenix herself. The three exiled people have to listen to his words.
When the guard ran out to call for help, Miss Linda wanted to ask the orange cat why he did this, but when she turned around, she saw the Undead Lord draw his weapon and chop his two companions into white light...
Miss Linda: “???”
"Don't get me wrong, it's not an internal fight. They are going to commit suicide and go back to wait for the transmission CD. Then they will move another batch of things over later." The orange cat explained to her.
Miss Linda didn't understand, she just tried to put on a smile that seemed to show understanding... She had long given up trying to understand the thinking patterns of these undead.
Soon, dozens of families and two hundred people from the whole village, young and old, were driven over by the sweaty guards, filling the spacious courtyard of the lord's house.
The orange cat boss walked to the steps of the main house and called Miss Linda to his side, and instructed her: "Help me translate. I will say one sentence and you will say one sentence. You must convey the original words without changing any words."
Miss Linda responded solemnly: "Yes, my lord."
The orange cat boss raised his hand and waved enthusiastically: "Hello, folks!"
Miss Linda's expression froze.
The orange cat boss urged: "Help me translate, Miss Linda, smile more friendly, raise your hands, don't be so tense, come on, smile like me, with both rows of teeth showing."
Miss Linda had no choice but to raise her arms stiffly and force a smile at the more than 200 villagers who were a little afraid of the three undead and kept shrinking back, and raised her voice in self-abandonment: "The lord said, hello, fellow villagers!"
All the villagers, more than two hundred confused faces, looked at Miss Linda.
Miss Linda took a deep breath. Really, when Miss Phoenix handed she should have taken a cold shower and been sick for three to five months!
The orange cat boss doesn't care at all about the villagers' reactions. No matter how much he loves to make money in the game, it's just a game. No matter how smart the NPC is, it's still an NPC after all. In his opinion, as long as the steps are done well and the program is correct, the NPC should trigger the reaction mechanism according to the route he planned and designed, and there must be no problems.
Next, the orange cat boss introduced the business scope of the building materials company established in the territory to the villagers step by step. The river section within the territory of the Knight's territory is the property of all the people in the territory. To sell the river sand and pebbles in the river section, all the people in the territory need to work together and cooperate with the logistics and transportation work of the new shipping department of the Transportation Department of Innadri City Hall...
The villagers, whose literacy level was close to zero, were completely confused by the otherworldly prints. They were not excited at all. Some elderly villagers even thought that the undead lord brought by the Odysseus family was mentally ill - the sand and stones on the river bank could be sold for money? This undead must be crazy!
The three exiled people who were more knowledgeable were able to understand what the orange cat was saying, including Miss Linda who was translating personally. The three of them opened their mouths so wide that eggs could be stuffed directly into them.
——In this extremely poor place, there are things that can be traded as commodities?!
The orange cat didn't care about the NPCs' reactions. After announcing the matter, he opened the backpack and woven bag he brought with him, and recruited workers from the villagers who could help dig river sand and pebbles on the spot...
When it comes to their own interests, even the most closed-minded, old-fashioned people with heads full of rocks can understand what people say.
Among the villagers, a middle-aged man who looked at least sixty years old but was actually less than forty, took a small step forward without fear of the undead lord who seemed to be mentally ill, bent over humbly, and carefully asked Miss Linda, who was in charge of translation, for confirmation: "Respected, noble lady, may I ask, what the lord said about getting paid for digging sand and stones, is it true?"
Miss Linda's facial expression was a little out of control. She tried her best to maintain a stiff "friendly smile" and nodded, saying, "The Lord has announced that those who work eight hours a day in the sand dredging can receive ten kilograms of food. If they continue to participate in the sand dredging work for a week, they can also get a small bag of salt like this."
As she spoke, Miss Linda pointed to the backpacks and woven bags carried by the dead.
The salt is the 100-gram well salt sold in the cafeteria of the Undead Chamber of Commerce, which comes from the Earth.
As for food, it was potato vermicelli and cornmeal produced by the Westham public grain factory, all coarse grains - after all, wheat was a staple food, and the Westham Town Hall had to stockpile it as a strategic material and could not sell it in large quantities to the outside.
Zhao Zhenzhen did not require the orange cat's building materials company to have the whole village invest in it and share dividends with every household. Instead, she made the orange cat sign a contract to use the company's profits to build public service facilities. The reason is that giving money directly is meaningless and will instead breed lazy people and be detrimental to long-term development. The orange cat, who has a player mentality, will not consider these things, but Zhao Zhenzhen will definitely consider them carefully.
When hiring villagers for labor, the government did not save trouble by directly paying them money, but used daily necessities instead of wages. This was also made from the standpoint of the villagers in this small mountain village. Even if they had money, it would be difficult for the villagers with inconvenient transportation to purchase supplies, so it would be better to give them food and salt directly. When the villagers' minimum living security was no longer a concern and at least their families had overnight food, it would be more economical to distribute cooking oil, iron pots and bowls than to distribute money.
This treatment was in line with the needs of the villagers. All men and women over the age of 18 who met the employment requirements of the building materials company rushed forward like crazy, not caring about whether they were undead or not...
The orange cat boss likes this kind of enthusiastic workers, and happily asked Miss Linda to select people from each household - this is also Zhao Zhenzhen's requirement, every villager's family must have an adult employed, if there is really no suitable strong laborer, then two minors can make up the quota of an adult.
The reason why the selection is not open to all is because it is now the spring ploughing period, and we need to leave labor force for farming in every villager family; allowing minors to make up the number is to ensure that every farmer family can benefit from the river sand and pebble business... In a place where the indigenous people cannot even guarantee three meals a day, there is no need to worry about any protection laws. The most important thing is to let people have enough food first.
A total of 35 young and middle-aged laborers were selected from 41 farming households; the other six households were unable to select adults other than farmers, so they sent two "elderly people" over 40 years old and eight minors to make up the number.
After registering the names of these formal workers, Orange Cat first gave them a day's wage in advance, and asked the villagers to take the advance food home and have two full meals so they could start work tomorrow. Many families could not guarantee to have enough food even during the spring plowing period, and only the strong laborers working in the fields could get about 80% full. Orange Cat did not want to send hungry workers.
That night, the ship from Innadri brought Innadri's contract workers, as well as the tools and equipment needed to mine river sand and pebbles...
