225: Chapter 226 Picking up trash

After the task of recovering corpses and scavenging was released, it proved to be quite attractive to those bottom-tier casual players who had been blown to pieces in boarding battles, losing everything down to their underwear, and were in urgent need of recovering their losses.

After all, not only could they earn basic recovery Core Points.

If they were lucky, they could also conveniently pick up dropped equipment and pv terminals left behind by other fallen players in space!

Taking them back to sell directly to the original owners, or flipping them for a high price on the second-hand market, could make up for a significant portion of the losses incurred from failed boarding attempts.

Conversely, however.

This so-called scavenging task had basically no appeal to those veteran players who had large legions backing them or guilds with deep pockets.

In large-scale wars.

As long as you were a member of a legion, your ammunition and basic equipment were fully subsidized by the guild warehouse.

Even if you died and lost your equipment during a boarding battle, as long as you killed a few more bugs on the battlefield and farmed some military merit, you could not only recover your losses but even make a huge profit.

Therefore.

The vast majority of elite players who failed their boarding attempts had no spare time to go into space and play janitor after respawning.

At this moment, inside the Bear Ridge biological flagship—the golden armor, located at the rear of the battlefield.

Paratrooper One, a core key player of Bear Ridge, had just crawled out of the rows of slimy biological incubation pods after having his body reconstructed.

He was covered in nutrient solution and gave his pair of giant bat wings on his back a vigorous shake.

He then hurriedly put on an explosion-proof suit, not even bothering to put on his Power Armor, and rushed off to the bridge to find the legion commander.

"Niuzi! Stop looking, damn it! Something big has happened!"

Paratrooper One burst into the bridge and shouted loudly.

At this time, Makabazi was standing in front of the mosaic compound eye screen, chin in hand.

His mind was full of thoughts on how to find another opportunity to use the golden armor's great mandibles to clamp down on a lone Zerg cruiser and drag it back.

Being shouted at by Paratrooper One like that.

Makabazi was so startled that he shuddered, and the horns on his head nearly hit the ceiling.

"What are you doing?! Jumping and shouting like that!"

Makabazi turned his head, glared with his copper-bell-sized bull eyes, and scolded irritably, "Has the sky fallen or what? What's the matter?"

Paratrooper One leaned in mysteriously, lowered his voice, and said, "I just learned some incredible top-secret information from the forum and the brothers who died and respawned!"

"It is said! Those muscular brutes from the Brotherhood of Steel secretly obtained some kind of underhanded biochemical weapon!"

"I heard that once that thing explodes, it can cause severe paralyzing interference to the bugs' Hive Mind network!"

"That's why the efficiency of those brutes in boarding and blowing up ships has been so absurdly high these past few days!"

When Makabazi heard this, his large bull eyes instantly widened, his face full of disbelief.

"There's such a thing?"

Makabazi scratched his bull head, full of suspicion, "It wouldn't be fake news, would it? Those muscle-bound bros... besides Darkest Dungeon-style brawling, could they really have the cunning to use biochemical poison gas? They are the type who are usually too lazy to even look at a tactical map!"

"It's absolutely true!"

Paratrooper One became more and more excited as he spoke, rubbing his hands together and chuckling, "And the most critical thing is, I've also managed to get the formula for that biochemical weapon from their internal group through some methods!"

"Let me tell you, you just need to extract a certain special cerebral fluid from the brain of a Zerg Tyrant, plus some glands. Finally, use a type of glowing mushroom that grows on that King Planet, and make it into a special biological catalyst! Mix it all together and stew it, and it's done!"

"Wait, wait, wait, wait."

Makabazi was completely confused and hurriedly raised his hand to interrupt him, "I understand the Tyrant brain part, but where the hell is this so-called King Planet you're talking about? Is there such a planet in the Farview Star system? How come I've never heard of it?"

Upon hearing this, Paratrooper One's expression changed subtly.

He looked at Makabazi with a disdainful gaze, like looking at an old bumpkin, and sighed, "Niuzi, you really should spend more time online."

"The King Planet! It's that death planet in the star system that shares the same orbital path as the Gorgon Industrial World!"

"The gravity on that planet is fucking huge! As soon as low-level players or ordinary people land, their internal organs get crushed instantly, and they kick the bucket!"

"But the absurd thing is, that godforsaken place with sky-high gravity actually has a complete natural life system, can you believe it? There are tons of giant glowing mushrooms growing on it! There are even trolls on the forum posting rumors that there might be a group of mushroom people living in there who can dance under ten times the gravity!"

Makabazi finally reacted, digesting this massive amount of information.

"So it's that high-gravity death star. Where did you get this top-secret intelligence?"

"From the official forum, of course!"

Paratrooper One puffed out his chest and said righteously, "In my spare time, besides playing the game and killing monsters, I spend all my time on the forum spamming posts and soaking up gossip!"

"I also heard some gossip. It's said that some division commander from the Scourge Legion has special fetishes in private, likes to be whipped by people... hehehe, this gossip is fresh! Don't go telling anyone else, okay."

Makabazi heard this explosive gossip and his old bull face instantly turned red.

"Ahem... getting off track, getting off track!"

Makabazi hurriedly waved his hand, forcibly pulling the topic back, "That's not right, if that planet has a name, why call it the King Planet?"

"Hey, we players just made it up ourselves."

Paratrooper One shrugged, "Because the gravity there is absurdly high, and the environment is exactly the same as the place where King Kai lives in Dragon Ball. So everyone just calls it the King Planet in private, it's catchy."

Speaking of this, Paratrooper One also realized that the topic had been completely derailed.

"No, no! We are talking about that biochemical stink bomb thing right now!"

Paratrooper One slapped his thigh, "Since we have the formula, are there any big shots in our legion who play the biochemical class? Hurry up and call them over to the lower deck of the spaceship to experiment and replicate it! If we also have this thing, then it'll be a piece of cake for Bear Ridge to board and take back second place!"

Makabazi nodded in deep agreement, "Makes sense! We absolutely cannot let those muscle-bound brutes hog all the glory. Let me think... right, that Playing Valorant Is Too Noisy who spends every day soaking in the lab, he seems to be majoring in biochemical genetics, go call him quickly!"

Not long after.

The player Playing Valorant Is Too Noisy, with a huge rat head, holding a mass of indescribable matter, arrived at the bridge with a very reluctant expression.

"What's the matter? I was right in the middle of a culture experiment, and you called me over in such a rush." The rat-man complained.

Paratrooper One hurriedly pulled him over and, with wild gestures, retold him the principles and formula for stewing a stink bomb using Tyrant brains and glowing fungi.

After listening, the rat-man's pair of tiny rat eyes immediately narrowed.

"Wait."

Playing Valorant Is Too Noisy stroked his whiskers and said thoughtfully, "You mean, you want to put the Tyrant's brain neurotoxin fibers and the spores of those high-gravity fungi from the King Planet into a high-temperature, high-pressure iron pot environment, and let them create some kind of uncontrollable, violent biochemical mutation reaction?"

"Roughly... that's what I mean!" Paratrooper One nodded repeatedly.

After hearing this, Playing Valorant Is Too Noisy rolled his eyes dramatically.

"Buddy! Are you dreaming?!"

Playing Valorant Is Too Noisy poured a bucket of cold water on him without mercy, "How could this thing be so easy to replicate!"

Paratrooper One was unconvinced, "What's difficult about this? It's just a science experiment! Just prepare the necessary materials, make the pot's temperature conditions about right, and follow the formula step-by-step, isn't that it?"

"You don't know jack about science experiments!"

Playing Valorant Is Too Noisy was so angry he jumped up and down, "Buddy! Biochemical experiments are completely different from those one-plus-one-equals-two math and physics experiments of yours, okay?!"

"Biochemical experiments like this are basically metaphysics! Even if the temperature conditions are exactly the same, the weight of the fungus materials added is exactly the same! Even the pot is the same!"

"In biochemical reactions, the final cultured mutation result could have wildly different, absurd changes! I follow the formula, and this pot might end up creating a mass of highly toxic stuff; while under the same conditions on his side, the pot might just end up with a drop of some damn herbicide!"

"You want me to rely on a rough formula to 100% perfectly replicate this kind of accidental biochemical product, which is entirely based on dumb luck, within today? Do you take me for a god?"

Makabazi and Paratrooper One listened to this professional rant and looked at each other helplessly.

Subsequently, Makabazi stepped forward and wrapped his arm around the rat-man's shoulder.

"It's fine! Failure is the mother of failure!"

Makabazi earnestly started painting a big picture, "You go back and look for Big Sister Hong directly, she is our chief biotechnology officer. You two study and work on it together! As long as there are enough materials, I don't believe our intellects really can't cook up that pot of shit!"

"As long as you get this biochemical stink bomb made for our Bear Ridge! I'll make the call! Directly use public funds to separately reward you with a huge amount of Core Points!"

Hearing the five words "huge amount of Core Points", the pair of tiny rat eyes of Playing Valorant Is Too Noisy instantly burst with green light.

What scientific rigor, what biochemical metaphysics, were all thrown to the nine heavens by him!

"Alrighty! Just you wait and see!"

The rat-man patted his chest and guaranteed, "With points, everything is negotiable! Never mind replicating a stink bomb, as long as the money is there, I'll directly boil the Tyrant's brains into curry paste and serve it to you!"

At this moment, in the vast and boundless space battlefield.

After experiencing the initial heavy-fire bombardment, both sides of the conflict seemed to have reached a strange, tacit understanding.

Both had coincidentally chosen to conduct crazy mutual infiltration and boarding battles through small-sized, large-quantity micro-units.

This meat-grinder-like tactic caused both sides to have staggering casualty numbers.

On the Alliance side, in the face of the seemingly endless numbers of the Zerg swarm, the player army losing ten or twenty thousand people a day was considered a small, fortunate casualty count.

And the Zerg swarm on the opposite side was also losing countless high-speed boarding ships every day.

Every few days, they would even have one or two large frigates blown up from the inside by those death-defying, muscle-bound brutes from the Brotherhood of Steel.

The quality of these losses was much greater than on the Alliance side.

The underlying logic of bugs surviving in the universe is very simple: if lost, it must be replenished.

Since it currently cannot take down the territory ahead or eat fresh biomass, the Hive Mind has to settle for second best and send out a large number of recovery units to salvage and recover the corpses and wreckage of both sides that died in space on the battlefield.

And coincidentally, after the players received the bounty task released by Lin Li to clean up the space battlefield, they were also scavenging corpses everywhere, eyes glowing green with greed, to exchange for points!

In this way, the two sides, in order to fight for the trash on the ground, inexplicably opened up a new contested battlefield outside the main battlefield.

At the edge of the space battlefield.

The player Industrial Buzzcut was leading a group of newly respawned players, piloting a huge civilian mining ship, wandering around in the pitch-black vacuum.

As a hardcore life-skill player who had been keen on scavenging since the pioneer days on the surface of Outpost Planet, Industrial Buzzcut had made his fortune back then by recycling scrap metal.

Although space was too vast and corpses were scattered, making recovery difficulty skyrocket, driven by the massive point bounties, this guy immediately gathered his old companions and returned to his old trade.

"Brothers! Trust me, you won't go wrong!"

Industrial Buzzcut sat in the cockpit, smoking an electronic cigarette, "A bunch of us piloting such a huge mining ship, working hard to fish for those scattered little Termagant corpses, what's the point? What we earn isn't even enough to cover the fuel!"

"Let's just play for big stakes! Let's go fish for a big haul! If you don't open shop for three years, you eat for three years once you open!"

The player I Hoe the Crops, You Are High Noon in the co-pilot seat scratched his head, looking at the empty star sector on the radar screen, "Buddy, in such a remote place, where are you going to find anything big to fish for?"

Industrial Buzzcut chuckled and slammed the thruster lever forward, "Don't worry, sit tight! Just wait and see!"

The mining ship twisted and turned through the asteroid belt, creeping all the way into the depths of the Hive Mind's defensive line.

The group of players could only wait in the cabin with suspicious expressions.