Volume 9: Follower Chapter 3 Food Processing Chicken
Chickens are reserved and easy-going animals. In the Farvi continent, there are groups of chickens scattered along the walls of almost every city or town. They stand in groups, leaning against the wall, walking with their heads held high, and observing passers-by with a cold and arrogant look. If you don't provoke them, they will never pay attention to you.
But if you accidentally anger them, and you happen to be a low-level novice who is powerless, then congratulations, you will have the rare opportunity to see the manic and violent side of this reserved animal - at the beginning of my adventure career, I once faced a group of crazy hens with Niu Baiwan, and until now I can always see the overwhelming chicken claws, chicken beaks and messy chicken feathers when I close my eyes. Although I am now over level 40, and my defense is no longer something that ordinary hens can break, I still can't help feeling guilty and short of breath when I see this kind of poultry with a tall body, short feathers and high crowns, and I would rather take a detour than pass by them easily.
However, if you want to get a popular ingredient like "eggs", you have to deal with these birds of prey hidden around us. There is only one way to get eggs, which is to kill a hen and try your luck in its carcass. As far as I know, eggs are not as easy to get as people think. Some unlucky culinary learners may not be able to find an egg even after killing 20 or 30 hens in a row; however, this outrageous world does not exclude the existence of some people with particularly good luck. Some people's luck is even so strong that it surpasses the common sense of animal physiology, and they can actually find eggs from the carcass of a rooster.
Ah, these strange egg-laying roosters, the fighting cocks among roosters...
Feiyin's cooking skills are almost reaching level 15. She has gathered all the rare and precious seasonings, but she is only lacking the most common eggs. This may sound funny, but it is actually not difficult to understand: as an ice magician over level 40, she has been wandering in deserted and dangerous wastelands, dense forests and caves for a long time. Hens, as primary poultry, will never appear in these remote places, and most of her time is spent on lucrative adventures. It is unlikely that she will return to the main city for the purpose of killing chickens.
Therefore, Feiyin's magic backpack was filled with huge ostrich eggs, rough lizard eggs, hard turtle eggs, long and narrow winged snake eggs, and so on, all kinds of egg ingredients you can imagine and many unimaginable ones, but the only thing missing was the simplest and most readily available "chicken eggs".
"If you go with us, we won't be able to kill a single chicken. We'll be lucky if we're not pecked to death by the chickens." Fei Yin rejected Yan Zhen's offer of help without hesitation. We fully agreed with her reasoning.
Unexpectedly, Yan Zhen blinked her bright eyes and said with a smile: "So, if I give you eggs, you won't kill those innocent little chickens?"
Although we all know that Yan Zhen has the habit of calling animals by the word "small" plus two reduplicated sounds, when she said the word "little chicken", Xian Ge Yayi and I couldn't help but look at each other awkwardly with red faces.
"How could you have eggs..." Fei Yin said distrustfully, "...you don't know how to kill chickens..."
Before Feiyin finished speaking, Yan Zhen had already whispered a spell and opened the magical space door where she fed her pets. When the space was distorted to the extreme and an opaque space door appeared completely out of thin air in front of us, a little hen with a head almost bigger than her body, bright eyes, a short hard beak, and yellow fluff all over her body rushed out impatiently.
As soon as it set foot on the land of Falvi, the little hen looked very excited. It swiftly ran back and forth on the nearby grass, trying to flutter its little wings that had not yet grown fully, making a "flutter flutter" sound, and chirping happily in its little mouth. Suddenly, it was tripped by the weeds under its feet, fell to the ground with a "thump", then climbed up with a heavy head, staggered a few steps, shaking its head like a drunkard, and then continued to run out crookedly.
This excited little hen has its name marked on its head: "Li Xiaoniao". This must be its name.
"Could it be that..." Looking at the little hen whose down had not yet fallen off, Fei Yin had obviously understood something. However, this cruel reality came too suddenly, making it difficult for her to accept it for a while. "...This is..."
"It's my third pet. I just caught it two days ago." Yan Zhen tilted his head, looked at the fluffy little thing on the ground, and said with a smile.
As expected!
"But..." Fei Yin asked, not knowing whether to laugh or cry, "...why did you give it such a strange name?"
"Is it strange?" Yan Zhen tilted his head and said with a pure and innocent face, "Not at all. Such a cute baby chicken should of course take my surname. My surname is Li, so it's only natural for it to have the surname Li..."
I've gotten used to my friends who are involved in the space industry having many different names. As long as you stay with them often, you'll know that what Yan Zhen said here about her "surname being Li" and the soul mark on her head are not contradictory at all.
Feiyin opened her mouth slightly, looking like she wanted to say something. But in the end, she just bit her gums hard and didn't say anything. We all know that Yan Zhen, as an avid animal protectionist, lacks the most basic resistance to those cute furry little animals. In her eyes, this bald hen, which is only level one and has no attack power, is probably more precious than a high-level flying bird, the Fire Phoenix. And for her, the only criterion for measuring whether a pet is precious or not is: whether it is cute enough. This young orange-yellow down bird with a head-to-body ratio of almost one to one obviously meets this standard.
"Don't underestimate my little bird, it is born with a skill. Rabbit Cha Cha and Sheep Meet Meet both developed their first skill after reaching level five." Yan Zhen squatted down, stretched out his fingers to tease the new "battle pet" Li Xiaoniao in front of him, and introduced him to us with a beaming eyelid.
"Really? What skills?" Yan Zhen's introduction gave Fei Yin a glimmer of hope. No matter what kind of pet it is, as long as it has some powerful combat skills, even if its own quality is a little worse, it can still be of great help in battle.
Yan Zhen spread his hands, revealing a white oval ball in his palm, and boasted like he was presenting a treasure: "It can lay eggs!"
Feiyin's expression looked as if she had just swallowed an egg in its shell...
In any case, Li Xiaoniao's egg production every thirty seconds met Feiyin's needs for practicing her cooking skills. Soon, Feiyin had enough eggs to learn how to make Rickard's egg omelette and successfully mastered this new cooking skill.
But Li Xiaoniao seemed to be still unsatisfied. As her "egg-laying" skills became more and more sophisticated, her experience was also constantly improving. After laying just over a dozen eggs, Li Xiaoniao's level was about to break through the first level and reach the level of "second-level professional egg-laying hen".
Since Yan Zhen had never had the chance to summon this little hen to adventure with him after recruiting the pet, and its "laying eggs" skill was meaningless to Yan Zhen, who was learning tailoring, so even Yan Zhen himself had just discovered that Li Xiaoniao's "laying eggs" skill was like a life skill for ordinary adventurers. Each time it was used, it could accumulate corresponding experience points, so that the skill and its own level would be improved at the same time. After discovering this secret, Fei Yin and the others suddenly lost all sleepiness, and only wanted to see what kind of things Li Xiaoniao would lay after the egg-laying level was improved:
"Maybe the eggs will get bigger and bigger." Although he looks gentle and refined, the elf archer Xian Ge Yayi's thinking mode often falls into a rigid metaphysical mode. It seems that a certain pattern has been formed in his mind, as if the higher the level of things, the bigger they will be - this is probably an empirical error accumulated during the adventure. When exploring those remote mysterious caves or abandoned cemeteries, the boss-level high-level monsters that appear at the end are often very big.
He himself forgot a very obvious counterexample: he had risen from level one to his current level of over forty, but his skinny body had not become stronger at all.
"You're an idiot!" Fei Yin slapped the elf sharpshooter on the back of his head. "Look carefully, all the ingredients in the recipes are calculated by the piece. To make an egg fried meat roll, you need two eggs no matter how big they are. There's no point in laying big eggs!"
Xiange Yayi touched the back of her head and said aggrievedly, "I'm not studying cooking, who would pay attention to such things? Then what do you think will happen?"
"I guess..." Fei Yin rolled her eyes and guessed uncertainly, "...the higher its level, the more eggs it lays. Level two lays two eggs, level three lays four eggs, level four lays eight eggs..." The more she counted, the more excited she became. When she calculated that "level 20 lays 524,288 eggs, each egg sells for three copper coins, and each egg lays an egg for 15,728 gold coins, six silver coins and four copper coins . It lays twice a minute, and can earn 1,887,436 gold coins and eight silver coins per hour", she began to show symptoms of fainting and dehydration.
"...If that's the case, I'll give you eight silver coins each time!" Oh my god, did I hear it wrong? Miss Feiyin, who is more obsessed with gold coins and treasures than dragons, actually offered to share the money with us. At this moment, even the Supreme God was moved to tears by her generosity. Although this money only exists for the time being - and will probably only exist forever - in her beautiful imagination - it is enough to show that this huge fortune has made her so excited that she has completely lost her mind, and she is completely different from the stingy "human dragon money-maker" Feiyin we all know.
The higher the level means the bigger the number, which in turn means greater wealth. This is indeed a standard "Feiyin"-style answer.
"It will probably lay a double-yolked egg." Yan Zhen made a bold guess.
Well...what if it's of a higher level? I imagined a magical scene of twelve or thirteen egg yolks wrapped in an eggshell.
We didn't have to wait long, and the result soon appeared in front of us. When Li Xiaoniao's level reached level 2, the fluffy little hen chirped proudly, lay on the ground with her butt sticking out, and ran away happily after leaving behind the first product after her skill upgrade.
The four expectant bystanders were immediately speechless.
Can anyone tell us what's going on?
What remains on the ground is a yellow, round, soft solid. Its name is "cake".
The appearance of this cake was not accidental. A moment later, Li Xiaoniao laid two more cakes, and then laid three eggs again. As its skills became more sophisticated, the probability of it laying ordinary eggs during the egg-laying process continued to decrease. When it reached level eight, only one out of every ten eggs it laid could produce eggs, and the rest were all cakes.
We stared in amazement at this cute, powerful "food processing chicken". We watched it lay eggs and upgrade, and laid a variety of foods with eggs as the main ingredients, such as "egg biscuits", "egg rolls", and "egg yolk pies". Although it still only has the skill of "laying eggs", what it lays at this time is no longer a natural egg. When it desperately improved the process with its weak body of more than ten levels and laid a new product called "Portuguese egg tarts", Feiyin's spirit finally began to collapse.
"I didn't learn how to make egg tarts until I reached level 30..." Seeing that the little hen had mastered the cooking skills that she had spent months on in less than half a day, the human female magician couldn't help but feel jealous. Her mentality was seriously unbalanced, and she turned from jealousy to hatred, and inevitably developed violent tendencies:
"...I don't know if I can kill it and eat it. I just learned how to make spicy chicken wings..."
When he reached level 20, his upgrades started to slow down. Simply practicing the skill of laying eggs was no longer able to quickly upgrade Li Xiaoniao's level. And if things continued like this, Li Xiaoniao would soon be able to "mass produce" a large number of Rickard's egg fried meat rolls without Feiyin's help. In order to rest early and to save Feiyin's face, the wild goose formation promptly called back Li Xiaoniao, who was still alive and "laying eggs".
"It's really late, and we should rest." Yan Zhen said to us with a smile.
"Yes, yes. I've been busy all day and I'm sleepy too." Since when, Xiange Yayi began to unconditionally agree with all of Yan Zhen's suggestions.
"You go first, I'll wait for a while." Fei Yin waved at them.
"Haven't you already learned the skills? What else do you want to do?" Yan Zhen asked curiously.
"It's such a waste to throw these things here. I want to collect them all!" Looking at the fruits of Li Xiaoniao's labor left all over the ground, Fei Yin showed an unwilling expression.
"With so many, it might take more than an hour to collect them all..." Xiange Yayi made a canopy with her right hand and placed it on her forehead, looking into the distance at the egg feast that was almost spreading to the horizon.
"All this is money..." Feiyin swallowed a mouthful of saliva and said hatefully!
