There are many kinds of equipment in the game. In addition to the most direct weapons, there are also various kinds of clothing, such as armor and robes; and accessories, such as headbands and belts.

Boots are certainly one of them, but since the basic attribute of all boots is to increase agility, many players don't pay much attention to this equipment. When they have spare money, they always want to get more important equipment, and the plan to buy boots is postponed again and again. After all, the shoes before the end of the world can be worn, they just don't have any attributes.

But when extreme high temperatures appear, things are different.

Ordinary shoes before the apocalypse had no attributes and no additional functions, but the boots in the game can insulate against heat, and wearing them can effectively alleviate the problem of physical strength plummeting in high temperatures.

Ye Miao knew this pattern would emerge eventually. She hadn't dared sell a single pair of boots she'd looted from the Fearless Village warehouse, instead keeping them all. Occasionally, when she came across tailors selling boots in her territory, she'd buy a few pairs and toss them in the warehouse, ready for any future crises.

She hadn't expected the mode to arrive so quickly, though, and she didn't have as many boots as she'd hoped. Even so, she still had quite a few. She counted over 700 pairs of white, 200 pairs of blue, and even over 100 pairs of purple.

According to the territory's long-standing business model, aside from the guaranteed three meals a day, which were priced well below market, all other supplies sold in official stores were generally more expensive than those sold in the small market. Now that the boots were on the shelves, Ye Miao's thinking didn't change much. She had no intention of ruining the stall owners' business, so she kept the blue and purple boots priced slightly higher than market price by 20%. The white boots, however, were priced 20% lower, serving as a "guaranteed product" to ensure members had something to use.

Of course, in order to prevent people from hoarding goods, the purchase of white quality boots is limited to one pair per person every five days.

In addition, Ye Miao also put a wave of cloaks on the shelves. Cloaks were originally equipment suitable only for assassins and archers. Their characteristics are high agility and lightness. But in fact, cloaks can be worn over any clothing. They can effectively cover other equipment during high temperature periods and prevent the durability of equipment from dropping sharply under the scorching sun.

As for the origin of the cloak in the warehouse - Ye Miao just wanted to type the words "Fearless Village" in the town's acknowledgments column.

After the two pieces of equipment were put on the shelves, Ye Miao went to find Sister Jin. Sister Jin was the blind box NPC she got in the first wave. Her cooking level has improved a lot, and she has also learned a lot of miscellaneous skill cards. Ye Miao asked Sister Jin to show her the skill panel, and Sister Jin did as she was told. Ye Miao flipped through the panel and took notes, and finally told Sister Jin: "From today on, apart from the three guaranteed meals, you don't have to make other food. Use your free time to make iced sour plum soup, iced mung bean soup, iced watermelon juice, strawberry smoothie, and mango shaved ice. Provide two cups of free ice to He Kailai, Hu Hao, and Miao Lin who help you make the three guaranteed meals every day. Let them choose what they want. The rest will be put in the grocery store. The blue quality cup costs 40 gold coins each, and the purple quality cup costs 100 gold coins each. Each person is limited to two cups per day."

"Okay, I'll remember that, Miss Ye." Sister Jin agreed kindly.

After Ye Miao put these things on the shelves, she didn't issue any announcements or explanations. She had already provided what was necessary, and with so many members in the territory, someone would probably figure out the trick to this model soon, and then the information would spread quickly. She didn't have to worry about exposing her solution to everyone.

Three hours later, Sun Chen's team, who were collecting data outside, could no longer hold on.

When they discovered that the weather was abnormally hot in the morning, they were still in a relatively stable mood. Although the high temperature also affected the territory, perhaps because the territory was protected by the barrier stone, the high temperature was alleviated a lot within the territory, and the impact on the farmland was also limited, which was much better than the previous period of soil erosion.

After planting, they went out to gather food. Initially, they thought the situation was bearable. While the high temperatures reduced crop yields, the percentage reduction was still much greater than the soil erosion. So, for a moment, they all assumed the so-called heat mode was just a weakened version of soil erosion. As for the decreased stamina, they could just take medicine.

This optimism persisted until everyone noticed the equipment's durability was steadily declining. One male team member, already a bit bloated, slumped to the ground, his face red from the sun. He wiped the sweat from his face and panted, "I can't... I can't! If this keeps up, my equipment will break! I've only used this purple hoe for two days! I'm so heartbroken!"

The team members were silent for a while and looked at Sun Chen.

Sun Chen sighed: "This is indeed not a solution."

In fact, it is not just a problem of decreased equipment durability. Soon after they came out, they realized that although the accelerated decline in physical strength can be restored by taking physical strength potions, the high temperature also causes sweating, dizziness and other discomforts, which seriously affect work efficiency.

Sun Chen was just debating whether to return to his desperate farming career when a team member asked in confusion, "Is the durability of your equipment decreasing rapidly? I haven't!"

Everyone turned to look at her.

The speaker was a female player. Seeing everyone looking at her, she boldly opened her control panel and set it to shared mode. "Look... I just replaced my hoe yesterday. When I left, its durability was 295, and now it's 294. And the stamina... I actually think the drop is normal. I don't know why you guys need to keep guzzling stamina potions."

The teammates looked at each other.

Trash game! Why are you treating people differently?

An Yan, who had played games a lot before, frowned and said, "I wonder if you have any equipment that's different from ours?"

"Ah?" The female player was stunned. She looked at An Yan and then at herself in confusion. An Yan also looked back and forth, and the contrast was different.

In Sun Chen's team, most players are already farming and gathering full-time. This female player is indeed different. She often goes out to kill monsters in her spare time to earn some extra money.

Her combat profession is assassin.

"You have boots, a headband... and a cape." An Yan concluded, "If it's really the equipment that's causing the decline in durability and stamina, it should be one or more of these three. I think..." He looked at Sun Chen hesitantly, "Why don't we take turns trying? It should be easy to figure out the results!"

"I think it's okay." Sun Chen nodded readily. The female assassin said, "Don't bother with that. I can take off the three things you mentioned one by one and then I'll know which one is more effective."

"That's right!" An Yan scratched his head and laughed dryly.

The female assassin didn't hesitate. She immediately removed her headband and checked her stamina. It was decreasing without accelerating. She swung the hoe a few more times, but the durability didn't change much either.

Then she took out a pair of ordinary boat shoes from her backpack and threw them on the ground, took off her boots and stepped into the boat shoes.

The next second, the female assassin jumped up and down in pain. "Oh my god, it's so hot! Ahhhh my stamina! My stamina is starting to drop like crazy!"

"Here." An Yan calmly handed over a bottle of stamina potion and thought, "It seems that it's the boots that affect stamina."

The female assassin endured the heat and swung the hoe a few more times. Fortunately, the durability did not change.

Seeing this, she immediately put her shoes back on, her stamina instantly stabilizing. Then she took off her cloak and swung the hoe a few more times, reducing her durability by -1.

Female assassin: “!!!”

An Yan: "The case is solved. The cloak affects durability, and the boots affect stamina. Brother Chen, I think we should go back first and see if there is any equipment we can buy. We can come out later after we buy it."

"Alright." Sun Chen nodded. "If you want to do your job well, you must first sharpen your tools. Let's go back!"

The group then returned to the territory in a mighty procession. As soon as they walked through the gate, they saw a small queue already formed in front of the grocery store.

It's already past peak mealtime, and usually at this time, grocery stores are rarely seen. Sun Chen slapped his forehead when he saw this: "So the boss has already prepared everything! If I had known, I should have gone to check before leaving!"

In the afternoon, everyone in Zhang Tingting's monster-killing team was equipped with a set of cloaks and boots, and they went out again in high spirits.

With the protection of the cloak, the durability of the equipment decreases normally; with the boots under your feet, the physical strength value no longer plummets.

The only problem was that everyone was still dizzy from the sun, and sometimes they would be using their skills when they would suddenly feel nauseous.

At three o'clock in the afternoon, Zhang Tingting, the team leader, was the first to lose her composure. After killing another brown bear, she suddenly turned around, leaned against a tree trunk, and vomited: "Ugh—"

At this point, the system popped up a prompt: "You have heatstroke."

Zhang Tingting, still sweating profusely, angrily closed the notification, thinking: Bullshit! Don't I even know I have heatstroke?!

Lin Shiyun supported her and helped her calm down. Wen Qiang rummaged through his backpack and took out a cup of iced mung bean soup and handed it to her: "Have a sip?"

"..." Zhang Tingting wanted to continue, but the taste of vomit in the game was so realistic that she couldn't drink it directly. Fortunately, she had some clean water in her backpack. After rinsing twice, she took the iced mung bean soup that Wen Qiang handed her and drank it. In a blink of an eye, she downed the whole cup and suddenly felt refreshed.

Looking more closely, the heatstroke prompt has disappeared, and instead, there is a small icon on the right side of the field of vision. When the eyes touch the icon, an explanation will pop up: Cool state, remaining 02:00:00.

Zhang Tingting: “!!!”

Then a loud cry of “Fuck!!!”

When she went back to buy a cloak and boots at noon, she actually saw all sorts of cold drinks on sale at the territory's grocery store. But at the time, she assumed the boss was looking for some extra cash given the recent high temperatures, not realizing that these things could actually prevent heatstroke!!!

"Hurry! Go back to town!" Zhang Tingting made a quick decision. "Go buy some cold drinks and put them in your bag before you come out!"

Cold drinks can alleviate the discomfort of heatstroke; this is clearly stated on the system's attribute panel. However, no player has ever experienced heatstroke before, and even the scorching midday heat of the Frost Giant era wasn't enough to cause this effect. Consequently, over time, almost all players have chosen to ignore this attribute, and all cold drinks sold in the territory are almost solely for the sake of enjoying them.

But now, cold drinks have suddenly become a must-have commodity, and players quickly devised a "strategy" and generously published it as an announcement: "Blue-quality cold drinks provide two hours of coolness, purple-quality for four hours. If you're making iced water, the white-quality version only lasts half an hour."

Other players counted on their fingers as they looked at the announcement: "A cup of blue quality lasts for two hours and costs 40 gold coins. If you're killing monsters for eight hours a day, you'll need four cups, which is 160 gold coins. A cup of purple quality lasts for four hours, so you only need two cups a day, but each cup costs 100 gold coins, which is 200 gold coins."

"If you calculate it this way, the blue quality is still more cost-effective."

"But the drinks at the grocery store are limited to two per day, and buying only blue quality isn't enough!!!"

The limited-purchase drinks provided by official grocery stores are not enough, so the cold drink business in small markets has become booming.

In the official grocery store, purple-quality cold drinks cost 100 gold per cup, so the stall owners set the price at 80 to 90 gold; in the official grocery store, blue-quality cold drinks cost 40 gold, so they sell them for 30 or 35 gold, and there is no purchase limit, first come first served.

The next morning, Zhang Tingting immediately led her team to a newly opened cold drink stand. "Do you have iced mung bean soup? We want 20 cups! What else is available? We want to see it!"

The stall owner was a young woman. Seeing their hustle and bustle, she introduced them with a smile: "We have the same mango shaved ice and strawberry smoothie as the official grocery store. They're both purple quality and only 80 gold coins."

"Five cups of each!" Zhang Tingting said proudly.

The shop owner kindly reminds: "Cold drinks only have a shelf life of three days!"

"I know, there are many of us and we can finish it! I'm counting it!" Zhang Tingting said as she paid the bill and put a total of 30 cups of cold drinks into her backpack. She felt so safe.

Ye Miao walked into the small market and saw that the stall owners seized the opportunity to sell cold drinks. She was very satisfied: Good, this is exactly the effect she wanted!

The territory's warehouse had limited inventory. If the official grocery store was the only source of cold drinks, the ingredients wouldn't necessarily last 15 days. But if everyone was selling, there wouldn't be any worries. She planned to recalculate the inventory tomorrow and spread the ingredients out over 15 days. That way, the official grocery store wouldn't run out of stock, and the price of cold drinks sold by players wouldn't rise too wildly, impacting everyone's normal lives.

In an inconspicuous corner of the small market, Sun Aimei was busy making mung bean soup.

Sun Aimei loved cooking even before the apocalypse began. She amassed tens of thousands of followers on the Xiachufang app by posting recipes, and received countless likes on Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book). Later, during the apocalypse, she and her daughter, Sun Yuanyuan, joined the Fearless Village. Fearless Village wasn't very welcoming to casual gamers, so they resorted to frantic monster-killing to survive, putting their culinary skills aside.

Later, upon arriving in this "pure land," Sun Yuanyuan joined Su Xinran and Lu Weiwei in raising livestock, a job that became quite safe. Sun Aimei, on the other hand, continued to kill monsters. Her reasoning was simple: since her combat skills had already reached such a high level, killing monsters wasn't a big deal.

Therefore, she hadn't learned many culinary-related cards. She'd only learned the "Iced Green Bean Soup" card half-heartedly when it dropped on the first day of the apocalypse. Unexpectedly, the sudden activation of high-temperature mode had given her a new business opportunity.

She reacted yesterday when she saw various cold drinks on the shelves of the grocery store. At that time, most players had not realized the use of these cold drinks. Sun Aimei bought a batch of mung beans before they reacted, and then set up a stall in the small market.

In the grocery store, a cup of iced mung bean soup costs 40 gold coins. In the small market, most players sell it for 35 gold coins, but she only sells it for 30 gold coins. It's considered hard-earned money.

Ever since she set up her stall, there has been a constant stream of customers coming to her stall.

"Sorry, you have to wait!" Sun Aimei greeted another wave of players and explained to them in a gentle manner, "The previous pot just sold out, and this one isn't ready yet. You have to wait about half an hour."

"Don't worry!" The other party was the captain of a combat team. He smiled when he heard her and discussed with her, "Do you think we can make a reservation for tomorrow? There are five people in the team, and each person has four cups. That means we need twenty cups, and we need them tomorrow morning. If you can do it, we can pay the full amount now."

"Well..." Sun Aimei hesitated for a moment, then finally nodded, "Okay! Then I'll get up early tomorrow. Will it be too late for you to pick it up at 8 o'clock?"

"Eight o'clock is fine." The other party nodded in agreement, paid 600 gold coins, and considerately gave her a bottle of stamina potion. "It's too early to ask for it. I'll have to trouble you to work overtime. This stamina potion is our overtime pay!"

"Okay, thank you!" Sun Aimei accepted it generously. The other party said goodbye to her briefly and left, but her mood was complicated for a long time.

In Fearless Village, she had never done business herself, but she had seen others do so. There, both buyers and sellers were obsessed with bargaining, with buyers hoping to spend less and sellers hoping to earn more. Consequently, they often argued until their faces turned red, and it wasn't uncommon for arguments to attract crowds of onlookers.

But in the town where people get rich overnight, although the market is already quite large, such quarreling scenes have never been seen.

Everyone here seems friendly, considerate of others, and genuinely striving to make things work for both sides. It's said that in the apocalypse, order collapses and the ugliness of human nature is magnified. But in the top-down friendliness of Get Rich Town, that ugliness seems to have been eliminated, and everyone has room to show their good side, just like before the apocalypse, where they could easily "extend themselves to others."

Even though she has joined Get Rich Overnight Town for a long time, Sun Aimei still feels sad when she thinks about these things.

She was glad she had brought her daughter here. Every day she spent in that haunted place, Fearless Village, she worried that Yuanyuan would become distorted in that atmosphere!

At 1:30 in the afternoon, most of the players who had returned to the territory to eat lunch and buy cold drinks went out again one after another. The town became much quieter. Even many stall owners in the small market simply closed their stalls. Some went home to rest, and some went out to kill monsters and collect food.

In the corner of the residential area, Du Chuan walked stealthily in the shadows, and groped his way from the residential area to the farmland. After making sure that there was no one around, he picked ten large watermelons that were only one day away from ripening from the intermediate farmland.

Compared with most people in the town who "put their own ideas into others' shoes", Du Chuan always believes that "if you don't take care of yourself, you will be punished by heaven and earth".

When he was in the Fearless Village, he was one of the first players who wanted to join the "Pure Land", but later he was not sure whether he would be chosen. After careful consideration, he "sold" this information to Xu Wu, and asked Xu Wu to exempt him from several periods of taxes.

That incident made Du Chuan taste the sweetness. Later, he joined the Get Rich Overnight gang and met several members who were betrayed by him, but of course he did not expose himself, and he has lived smoothly until today.

Now, Du Chuan is trying to save money to buy a villa. The villa buff is very tempting, if he can't afford a three-story, he at least wants to buy a two-story.

He didn't want to spend extra money when the extreme heat hit at this time!

So, he set his sights on the farmland in the territory where watermelons were grown.

He had seen unripe watermelons in the wild before. While they weren't as tasty, the ingredients they made from them had a chance of being downgraded. For example, [Iced Watermelon Juice] was originally a blue-quality cold drink, but if he used watermelons that were a day shy of ripeness, there was a chance it would become white.

But it’s free after all! If it’s free, it doesn’t matter if the quality is a little lower!

Du Chuan put the watermelon into his backpack and ran away. Then he went to the small market and found a watermelon juice vendor. He asked her, "I have my own watermelon. Can you make watermelon juice for me?"

"Yes, 15 gold coins per cup," said the stall owner.

"Okay." Du Chuan took out the watermelons one by one, "Ten watermelons, all made into watermelon juice."

The stall owner calculated: "One melon can make 3 cups, and yours can make 30 cups, a total of 450 gold."

"Okay." Du Chuan paid the money calmly and waited by the side.

The stall owner started to squeeze juice. The first five cups were of normal blue quality. After the sixth cup, the system showed "white quality".

"Huh?!" The stall owner was stunned and frowned, "What's going on?!"

Du Chuan jumped up at the right moment: "The white quality only lasts half an hour, and you charge 15 gold coins, aren't you cheating me?"

"Sorry, sorry... I don't understand what's going on!" The stall owner apologized repeatedly, and looked at his usual loss of magic power and physical strength, frowning even more tightly.

How strange...

She felt something was wrong, but couldn't figure out the reason for a moment, so she said to Du Chuan: "I won't charge you for the white quality one, okay?"

"That's good enough." Du Chuan was satisfied and continued to wait.

In the end, 10 watermelons made a total of 30 cups of iced watermelon juice, 22 cups of blue quality and 8 cups of white quality. The stall owner, who was unaware of the situation, thought he was unlucky and refunded Du Chuan 120 gold coins.

As for the eight glasses of white, high-quality watermelon juice, Du Chuan also took them. Although one glass only lasted 30 minutes, eight glasses combined would take four hours. Only a fool would leave them behind!

After putting the juice into his backpack, Du Chuan left.

The shelf life of iced watermelon juice is only 3 days. He cannot drink so much by himself. Apart from the part he needs, he plans to sell the rest. After deducting the meager production fee, the rest is net profit.

In the evening, Sun Chen led the team back to the territory. As usual, he checked the farmland. Five minutes later, he stood on the ridge and cursed at the top of his voice: "Who is so ungrateful to steal watermelons! Damn it! They're only a day away from ripening! And you stole them when they weren't ripe yet! You must be starving to death and have never seen food in your reincarnation! I'm %#￥you&#%￥...#%￥%...!!!"

In anger, he uttered a string of curse words.

The author has something to say:

The fever is gone, hehe

I didn't miss a single day of updating during the high fever I had. I'm so awesome! I'll just put my hands on my hips for a moment.

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I'll give out red envelopes to 50 random comments on this chapter.