With enough materials in the Storage Bag, a small wooden box half a meter high and thirty centimeters wide is crafted after a three-second synthesis and quietly stays in the Storage Bag.
With a thought, Jiang Yuanxin placed the wooden box in the corner of the thatched cottage.
The finished Storage Box is not very large, with a rustic natural wood color, and it fits well in the cramped space of the thatched cottage, even temporarily serving as a nightstand.
The initial broken Storage Bag has twenty slots. According to the details, collecting resources and upgrading can expand it;
The Storage Box, once made, has thirty slots and can also be upgraded. The only current issue is the lack of an encryption feature, and it's so light and small that it's easy to carry away, so Jiang Yuan only transfers the basic materials from the Storage Bag into it. By the way, he thinks about himself, a player with a collecting habit. If he can't upgrade the Storage Box in time, he might need to make a lot of them to be useful.
[Task 2 completed, Wild Strawberry Seeds (Spring) issued]
[Task 3: Harvest ten strawberries. Reward: Well blueprint]
"I have to harvest strawberries?!" Jiang Yuan glanced at the large and spacious yard cleared out yesterday, which was quite suitable for farming, but waiting until the strawberries were harvested to complete the task, wouldn't that take too long?
Surprised, he clicked on the seed package details and glanced over, instantly relaxing his furrowed brows.
[Wild Strawberry (Spring): Plant in spring, matures in four days. After planting, Butterfly Demon Scale Powder available in the privilege store can be used to hasten ripening]
Turns out it only takes four days to grow, which fits the farming game setting well!
Really, if it were like reality, where you have to wait several months to harvest crops, the farming aspect of the game wouldn't be attractive at all.
[Butterfly Demon Scale Powder: Made from the wings of the Night Butterfly Demon Beast in the wilderness. Sprinkling the scale powder makes the crop mature within ten seconds for harvest. Collect materials and process them at the mill]
Jiang Yuan opened the privilege store and checked the details of the Butterfly Demon Scale Powder. For one Spirit Stone, you can buy one portion that can ripen one crop, which is very tempting!
So Task 3 is straightforward; you just need to spend some Gold Coins to buy a hoe for digging and a watering can from the store. Following the farming process in the newbie tutorial, plow the field, sow seeds, water, buy the Butterfly Demon Scale Powder, sprinkle it, and directly pick the fruit.
"Better go back, eat and rest well before farming." Jiang Yuan was really too tired, understanding that the tasks in the game are such that each seems easy, hooking players into getting immersed.
If you lack willpower and keep being led by the nose, you'll soon be addicted to the game and unable to extricate yourself.
Ignoring the continuously flashing light spots on the task page, he clicked exit, turned over his tired body, ordered some barbecue takeout with his phone, then got up to drink water and zone out, clearing the brain's cache.
In reality, while just a few minutes passed, he went through a whole night of ups and downs, mentally exhausted and overwhelmed with excessive information, causing a sense of immense void and absurdity upon returning to reality.
This feeling wasn't unfamiliar.
There was a period when Jiang Yuan was in middle school that he was addicted to games. He once skipped class and played a game all day and night, and at the moment he turned off the computer, he felt dazed. The blending and collision of virtual and reality provided a hard-to-describe cognitive illusion, leading to an inexplicable depression due to emptiness and loss.
That inexplicable emotion was too strong and impactful; after that, he never dared to indulge in games again.
Later, after getting into college and learning more, he realized that the game's instant feedback mechanism keeps offering quick-paced, high-intensity pleasure and satisfaction. Once you stop and return to the slow-paced reality lacking immediate gratification, you feel emptiness, getting harder to adapt to reality the longer you indulge.
"I initially thought staying in the game to sleep and rest would be more time-efficient compared to reality once the home was built safely enough, allowing longer stays. Now I think, for mental and physical health, it's better not to indulge. Balancing rest and work is the key to longevity." After summarizing his experience, he overturned his previous thoughts and went to take a shower.
When he opened the door and picked up the bulging barbecue bag ready for a feast, Yang Hongye happened to come out of her room to get water. Seeing at least forty or fifty skewers in his hand, she was instantly surprised and widened her eyes, "Didn't you eat enough for dinner?"
She wondered, thinking Jiang Yuan usually doesn't have a big appetite and isn't a big eater. They ate so much meat during their hotpot dinner, so how come he's eating again just past nine?
"I had a whim and worked out lifting some weights. It consumed a lot, felt hungry, want some?" Jiang Yuan was truly exhausted and hungry. Since there were several fitness gadgets just collecting dust in his room bought ages ago, shifting the blame onto them was simple and straightforward.
Yang Hongye laughed and waved her hand, "No, no, you go ahead and eat. I can't be bothered to exercise so much, it's easier to maintain my figure by eating less. By the way, it's better to work out gradually, there's news about people suffering from something serious due to over-exercising, like rhabdomyolysis, it's quite dangerous, so keep safe."
He smiled in response, opened the package, and took out the steaming barbecue, accompanied by icy cola, and started eating.
Full and too tired to browse short videos, Jiang Yuan lay in bed at barely ten and, contrary to his usual late sleeping habits and the rare occasion of deciding to sleep early, fell asleep in just a minute without insomnia.
When he woke up naturally and energetically opened his eyes, it was already 6:30 in the morning.
Since graduating from high school, he hadn't gotten up this early. After freshening up cleanly, he took out ten boxes he bought last night for packing cherries.
He weighed them individually with an electronic scale, packed them into ten boxes of 100 kilograms, and before Yang Hongye's sleep was disturbed, he placed the goods in the living room, then went downstairs for a run, had breakfast, and brought her a portion.
"Sure enough, no benefit, no early rise. You used to get ready only after I'd gone to work, but now with a business opportunity to make money, you're all prepped so early!" Yang Hongye was in a great mood too, claiming a ticket and retuning several thousand yuan in unexpected earnings. She even fell asleep last night with a smile on her lips.
Seeing the ready breakfast on the table, her eyes curved in thanks.
"It's just us; no need for politeness." Jiang Yuan glanced at the large cherries in the Storage Bag and sighed, "If it weren't for your help finding a sales channel, I wouldn't know how to do business. It's a pity such expensive fruit can only be given as gifts and doesn't have any long-term stable customers, so it can't be done as a formal business."
A few hundred yuan per kilogram of fruit is only plausible for gift-giving to maintain customer relations; otherwise, who would intentionally buy it to eat?
"I used to think the same way." Yang Hongye drank soy milk, speaking a bit thickly, "But after working in this job, I realized what being wealthy means; we're in too low a stratum to even imagine what wealthy lives are like. A few hundred yuan per kilo of fruit, a ten-yuan egg, spending ten or twenty thousand on a meal, that's everyday life for the rich. One day, I'll take you to a high-end member-only supermarket. What's three hundred yuan per kilo of cherries compared to that?"
She gestured with her hand, swallowed a mouthful of soy milk, and described, "Just a palm-sized box, about fifteen strawberries in total. Care to guess how much they can sell for?"
Jiang Yuan's mind went blank, his concept of expensive strawberries stuck at the shocking fifty yuan per kilogram he knew of; how ludicrous could they be?
"A hundred?" He casually guessed a high price, recalling the pack of unplanted strawberry seeds.
Yang Hongye shook her head, "A box is 299, and that's the promotional price!"
Seeing the shock on his face, she laughed self-deprecatingly, "When I first found out a colleague was a wealthy second-generation experiencing working life, I joked that in the next life, I'd be smarter to choose a good birth, become a rich second-generation right from birth, with a hundred thousand yuan of allowance every month to spend however I want.
But the colleague looked scornfully at me and said, 'You don't even dare to dream big, how could you think you can spend however you want with just a hundred thousand? It can't even tailor your clothes!'
I commute to work in a second-hand car bought for fifteen thousand, while they drive a full-spec Porsche, live in million-dollar duplexes, and their monthly salary doesn't even cover fuel and snack expenses. They eat a few hundred yuan per kilogram of fruit, which is the same concept as us eating two yuan for three kilograms of fruit.
In our second-tier city, I've been to over twenty high-end communities. Just imagine how many rich people there are? A few hundred yuan per kilo of fruit, how much is consumed daily?"