Several months passed quietly in this casual atmosphere. After several course calibrations, the Terminus avoided the place that might still be wanted for its crew members, and used the planetary rings as cover to arrive at a stable orbit directly opposite the Mars orbital station.
Since the Est. did not have the ability to re-enter the atmosphere, Qin Zhongquan gave the first mate instructions on what to do. Then, he put on his own equipment and, together with the priest and two other professional robbers, boarded a transport craft and landed in a deserted area on the surface of Mars.
The site they chose is marked as a garbage dump on standard Martian maps and is located at the bottom of a naturally formed crater. It is far away from any nearby Martian cities and is connected only by a few poorly maintained surface roads.
As Qin Zhongquan led his group off the boat, he immediately heard complaints coming from behind him.
"Boss, the smell here is worse than the deep-water base on Jupiter's moon!"
Thanks to nearly a century of environmental transformation by the community, the Martian atmosphere, while not easily life-threatening, remains barely sustainable. The atmosphere here is approximately one-fifth the density of Earth's, primarily composed of carbon dioxide, water vapor, and suspended particulate matter and hazardous substances tens of thousands of times more abundant than in a typical artificial environment. This is a typical area of heavy industrial pollution.
Even though humanity's current recycling capacity is several orders of magnitude higher than it was on Earth, facing a consumer market worth hundreds of trillions of dollars, even the most powerful productivity cannot prevent garbage from accumulating in one place through years of atmospheric circulation, turning into a slope and eventually a hill. Seen from the air, this depression resembles a disgusting, festering pustule on the face of a sallow old woman.
But even so, there are still people alive here.
Ordering his men to shut up, Qin Zhongquan adjusted the filter on his helmet and looked into the distance. Under the gray-brown haze, countless "waste species" wearing simple protective equipment were moving around on the garbage mountain like some insects on Earth, picking out relatively useful waste or fighting for some "high-value" objects.
Some "scholars" on the Internet believe that they are descendants of the community's aristocrats, while others believe that they were once a group of untouchables who couldn't make it in the city. The truth is confusing, but the fact is that anyone who claims to be civilized turns a blind eye and regularly throws garbage here, under the euphemism of respecting the customs and culture of these poor people.
The four of them were noticed by the local manager not long after they left. A group of shirtless guys wearing strange bull-nose masks quickly swarmed over and surrounded them.
Afterwards, a sedan chair made of transparent and colorless plastic bottles was lifted high above their heads by some people, passed through the wall of people, and placed in front of Qin Zhongquan and others.
Sitting in the sedan was a huge "person". Unlike the "useless ones" around it, it was wearing a relatively intact orange-yellow protective suit, and a transparent helmet wrapped with tape revealed a pale blue face like a pumpkin.
"Outsiders, the Plastik people do not welcome you!" The speaker was not the person sitting on the seat, but the intercom held in its hand.
Qin Zhongquan hesitated for a moment and turned up the volume of the exoskeleton speaker: "We are looking for scrap metal, not you."
"Scrap! You're looking for scrap too!" The voice on the intercom immediately became panicked. "No, there's none left. They've taken all the scrap. We don't have any scrap left, not even a single piece! Oh—God of Thorium, please let us go. The Wild Boar King has all the scrap!"
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