Chapter 5
Bei Qiao asked the staff to help park the carriage in the yard. There happened to be a few wooden stakes in the martial arts field, so she tied the little gray donkey to one of them.
The staff provided carrots, and the donkey was quite obedient. It followed Bei Qiao's lead and walked over, opening its mouth to accept the feed. However, while eating the carrots, the donkey looked at the ground with a look of disdain, perhaps because the ground was too hard and cold.
"I'll prepare a shed and hay for you right away." Bei Qiao patted the little gray donkey's head gently. The latter shook his head unhappily but didn't bark at her: "Excuse me, is the little gray donkey male or female? Does it have a name?" The little guy has a good temper. I'll keep him! Anyway, it's only two taels of silver, so I might as well buy him!
"It's number 137, a gentle little female donkey who just turned one year old. The farm doesn't give them names, but if you buy it, you can." The staff untied the little white horse from the carriage and stood aside, holding the reins. "Donkeys have a varied diet. They eat coarse food, including straw and carrots. If you're worried about raising them yourself, you can buy some feed from the farm."
"Then... let's buy it. I need to think carefully about the name." Bei Qiao took out the small bronze medal the staff had given him earlier. "How do I use it? Can I just show it to the stables? Should we go now?"
"Yes, but don't rush to go now. We just need to register you, and we can also give you a month's supply of donkey feed. By the way, the initial capital is only given this time. If it is used up and there is still no income after three months, we will confiscate the carriage." The staff member held the reins in one hand and demonstrated to Bei Qiao the specific steps of tying the carriage to the mount with the other hand.
"Of course. After buying the donkey, can we continue to rent a horse if necessary? The kind that rents by the day?" Bei Qiao learned it after watching the demonstration once, although his movements were a little slow.
The staff watched Bei Qiao tie and untie the carriage and gave him a thumbs-up. "Okay, but you can't rent it with copper medals. You have to pay real money." If you can't make money in the village, you can't guarantee you'll earn money traveling far away. Not making money is the least of your worries; the only concern is that some fool will take the horse with him. This isn't just an AI dog, it's a real horse they've raised and raised. Losing one would devastate them.
"I understand. Thank you. Goodbye." Bei Qiao still had many questions, but there was no need for her to ask the staff member alone. She sent the staff member out the door and watched him ride away: The horse was very beautiful, but unfortunately it was also very expensive.
"Is it my turn?" After the staff rode away on horseback, Yu Qian came over with her purse and shook it vigorously.
"Wait a minute, you have to answer me a question." Bei Qiao handed the lively little gray donkey to his father Bei Gu, who had finally come online, and took Yu Qian back to the front room of the escort agency, closing the door to prevent any natives from passing by: "Why do you know I'm not a native?"
Yu Qian was speechless: "You just want to know this? Come on, we are all players living in this area!" He closed the door so mysteriously, and I thought he was going to ask her something, but in the end,
Feeling a little tired of holding the purse, Yu Qian hung it back on her waist, sat on a small stool, rubbed her arms and continued: "This place is equivalent to the novice village of the game. After entering the game, everyone will first settle down in a small village like this, and then go to a bigger place after making money...ah, thank you." Taking the teacup handed over by Bei Gu, Yu Qian took a big sip, without considering the possibility that the other party had added anything in the tea.
"The village chief will tell everyone about these things. If you don't believe me, you can ask her later. Her house is at the east end of the village, very close to the horse farm."
“So, there are no indigenous people here.”
Yu Qian's eyes widened. "Huh? How could there not be? It's just that there aren't many of us. If I must say, we players are the natives here. The other natives moved in later, fleeing famine, hiding from pursuit, all kinds of people! But don't worry, their character is guaranteed. The village chief won't let people with bad character in at all!"
The novice villages set in the game were initially dilapidated mountain villages. Although there were relevant geographical and population records of this mountain village in the town of the upper level, the population of the village had disappeared for various reasons before the staff arrived. The staff who came to the mountain village replaced the identity of the village chief and waited here for the players to appear.
After that, the player logs in and begins to improve the population and occupation structure of the village little by little. The improvement method is random allocation according to demand, which means that the time is relatively random.
"I heard that being a village chief is actually very tiring. You have to deal with a lot of things online every day and take care of all the family matters..." When Yu Qian told these things to others for the first time, she became more and more excited.
Bei Qiao held out a hand. "Excuse me for interrupting, but I was meaning to ask you before, why don't you rent a carriage yourself?" As the saying goes, it's better to rely on yourself than on others. Why wait for someone else to rent a carriage when you can do it yourself? It sounds like the price of renting a carriage is not completely out of reach for the average person, not to mention that the escort agency's delivery service is even more expensive.
"I can rent a carriage, but the stable only rents carriages, not taxi drivers! There are people in the village who can drive, but they like to introduce other people to potential partners, which annoys me to death!" Yu Qian moved out of her home after achieving financial freedom just to avoid being pressured to get married, and she stayed in the game to experience the life of a stay-at-home girl in the world of ancient martial arts.
"Originally, there were people working at the escort agency before you came. Unfortunately, the young escort leader who was in charge of the agency was a bit of a chuunibyou. Just a few days after opening, he secretly rode the agency's horse and jumped off a cliff, saying he was looking for secret manuals... Even if secret manuals really existed, who would have the time to hide on a cliff?"
Whenever Yu Qian thought of this incident, she felt so angry that her stomach ached. You know, she had already agreed with the escort leader that day to send the electrical appliances for repair, but when she was paying in front, the guy with the middle school syndrome ran away on horseback and almost broke the horse's leg.
"Yeah, even if there really is a secret book hidden there, how could it remain there until he found it? Animals may not be unable to reach places where humans cannot go, and those animals don't know what it means to protect books or what secret books are." Bei Qiao also envied the luck of those protagonists when she was a child, but then she thought, forget it, her relatives are so good, she doesn't want to trade them.
"That's right! I don't know how many times other people have told him these things, but he just won't listen! What happened? He lost his footing on the cliff and fell off on the spot! I was waiting for a carriage at the escort agency. When the village chief brought the news, the escort leader and his wife's faces changed. I didn't feel comfortable urging them to deliver the appliances. Plus, the horse was injured, so they couldn't deliver the goods for a while. So I took the deposit back, thinking of waiting a few days... Sigh."
"What's wrong"
"Perhaps the circumstances of his death were too horrific. It seems this person had some psychological problems in real life after deactivating his account. His parents stayed offline to take care of him, and later simply changed their account back to a tourist account. Without anyone to manage the escort agency, it automatically closed down."
In the game, in order to allow players to get started right after entering the game, there are requirements for opening an individual business. If you want to open a restaurant, you must be able to cook; if you want to open a carpentry shop, you must be able to do carpentry; if you want to open an escort agency, you must be able to ride a horse and drive a car, and martial arts skills are also a hard condition, and so on.
If you want to start a big company, it is not impossible, but you have to get a group of people to link their numbers, submit applications and each person's job intentions in advance, sign a non-monopoly contract, and wait for approval from the official website.
"We've already maxed out the number of restaurants here, but there aren't even a single player who meets the requirements to open an escort agency. You have no idea how hard it was to get you. I barely even play the game anymore, for fear of getting sick from the heat and having to spend extra money." Yu Qian sighed as she stared at the tightly closed escort agency door. "In this awful weather, it takes all the courage I can muster just to go out. And I can't stay home all the time because the local ladies I know are so welcoming. If I stay home, they'll think I'm sick and come knocking on my door with a bunch of people!"
The fact that you can get sick in the game is so real that it makes players want to cry. You can easily catch a cold if you get caught in the rain, or if you don't dry yourself after swimming. You will get indigestion if you eat too much, and your wound may become inflamed if you get injured... In short, all the diseases and injuries that you would get in real life will appear here.
"The most annoying thing is that the transportation here is extremely primitive. If you get injured and are too far from the clinic, your account will basically be ruined!"
"It's indeed a bit troublesome. It seems I'd better take the donkey with me when I go out." Bei Qiao raised her eyebrows: "But there is one thing I have to say first. I can ride a horse, but my driving skills are not very good." Bei Qiao has practiced riding, but there are no carriages in the stables. She has only test-driven the carriage a few times in the scenic area, and there are staff members following her to prevent accidents.
"It's all right, all right. As long as we have a carriage and donkeys to pull it, we can deliver the appliances!" Yu Qian rubbed her hands excitedly. "Can you send it off now? I really can't wait even a day." She had tried renting a carriage and a horse before, but unfortunately, even after paying for the carriage and renting it, the horse was completely unruly and actually broke free from the reins and ran away. If the horse hadn't run back to the stables, she would still owe the carriage twenty taels of silver!
"I'm just a storyteller! It's not easy to make money! I can't use a keyboard to write stories here, I can only write one word at a time on paper with a pen, and I can't write too sloppily! Wow, my life is really too hard!"
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