And the chestnuts and pine nuts were not the usual size either, but enlarged versions after mutation.
The pine nuts were about the size of a ten-cent coin, while the chestnuts were half the size of a computer mouse.
The number of chestnuts and pine nuts circulating within the complex would be manually controlled by Cao Bingqing and Fu Chenghong.
The value of one pine nut was equivalent to one jin of grains. Coarse grains like sweet potatoes and potatoes, which were filling and high-yield, were items that one basic currency unit — one pine nut — could buy one jin of.
As for the value of a chestnut, it was equivalent to one first-rank crystal core, and also equal to 500 pine nuts. It could buy 500 jin of grains.
People like the sports student Pan Feizhou, the koi He Xuan, the wind-blade woman Ye Jia, Cen Xiyang, and Han Zhi received food and accommodation included, plus 90 jin of grain and one first-rank crystal core per month as their fixed salary. For a non-ability user like Professor Zhao, who was nevertheless a technical department big shot, the guaranteed monthly salary was 1,000 jin of grain plus one crystal core.
But crystal cores were useless to Professor Zhao, so for now, one chestnut could be used instead. When needed, she could directly use the chestnut to buy supplies, or exchange the chestnut for a crystal core, then sell the crystal core to someone who needed it in exchange for supplies.
For the pricing of other necessities across food, clothing, shelter, and transport, Cao Bingqing and Fu Chenghong made some rules with reference to D City Base.
Oil: 5 pine nuts for 300 ml. Salt: 3 pine nuts for 100 g.
The cheapest wholesale single-layer clothes recovered from clothing factories, the kind from before the apocalypse, were 2 pine nuts per piece. Warm clothing such as padded jackets and trousers were 20 pine nuts per piece.
As for quilts, every staff dormitory had the necessary thick cotton quilt and thinner spring-autumn blanket. These belonged to Butterfly Garden’s property, not employees’ personal belongings. If employees needed to buy them, especially the hired personnel from D City Base, a 10-jin thick quilt cost 40 pine nuts. Thinner quilts were cheaper, ranging from 10 to 30 pine nuts. Once bought, they could handle them however they liked.
These prices were not exactly cheap, but with the salary Butterfly Garden offered employees, after deducting food and accommodation, a person could save at least 60 jin of grain per month, equivalent to 60 pine nuts. That meant everyone could afford the items listed above when they needed them.
Especially necessities like salt. If someone bought 100 g and used it sparingly, it could last quite a while and was completely enough.
Fu Erdie looked at the plan her parents had given her. Overall, it felt very reasonable, though in practice, it might need adjusting according to specific circumstances.
But wasn’t price adjustment normal? Fu Erdie kneaded her parents’ shoulders and repeatedly said, “You worked hard.”
“Could we make a currency with an intermediate value? For example, right now pine nuts are like one yuan, and chestnuts are like five hundred yuan. Shouldn’t we make a ten-yuan or one-hundred-yuan currency too?”
Cao Bingqing thought this made sense, so she added almonds worth ten units.
As for a one-hundred-unit currency, the difference from a five-hundred-unit chestnut was not that great, so they did not add another one.
To make the currency look more professional and textured, Fu Erdie specially practised push-and-pull with the intelligent mutated pine nut, almond, and chestnut plants for three days. Inside the plant babies’ energy spaces, she carried out targeted modifications so the nut shells they produced would be glossier, more textured, and less likely to break. Combined with the butterfly-shaped anti-counterfeit mark, the entire nuts became bright and delicate, like those processed “peace fruits” often sold at scenic spots that looked like polished stones, smooth and pretty.
Once the currency system was introduced, it received unanimous praise from the core members on the sixteenth floor.
Professor Zhao took the lead, exchanging her grain tickets and the crystal cores she had no use for into chestnuts and pine nuts.
Out of trust in Fu Erdie, she was not at all worried that the pine nuts and chestnuts would lose their value and become waste paper… no, waste nuts.
Because the pine nuts looked nice, Cen Xiyang strung them into a bracelet and wore it on her wrist every day for novelty.
Seeing this, Han Zhi pestered Cen Xiyang into making him a string too.
Back and forth, the others on the sixteenth floor also began making various decorations from pine nuts.
The unconscious behaviour of the core group affected the ordinary workers.
Especially the technical department’s hired personnel, who had been working there the longest. They were the first to notice the pine nuts their boss often casually played with and learned about this “currency” policy.
One told ten, ten told a hundred, and all employees soon knew that one pine nut equalled one jin of grains, and that pine nuts could be used to buy various goods.
The hired personnel had worked for almost half a year. With wages and monthly bonuses after completing tasks, each person had an average of three to four hundred jin of grain in their hands.
Those with relatives in D City Base would estimate their family’s food intake every month and send back a considerable amount of grain. But even more grain still piled up in their dormitories until there was almost no space left.
They could not send all this grain back to their relatives, because their relatives slept in communal bunks and had even less space to store food.
So these people were worried, not knowing what to do with all this grain.
Now things were good. Grain could be exchanged for pine nuts, which were easier to store and could be exchanged for other daily necessities. When their work here was completed and they had to return, they could use these pine nuts to exchange for grain, transport it back together, and then let the base help arrange unified storage and exchange. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?
As for whether their grain would be embezzled?
If Butterfly Garden wanted to take it, there was no need to go through such a roundabout method. They could simply wait until everyone finished working and then seize the grain. These ordinary people with nothing — could they resist?
The hired personnel quickly accepted the currency.
The newly recruited employees chosen from refugees did not accept it for the time being. After all, only what was in their hands felt real. They had no base protecting them, so holding onto physical things still felt better.
Fu Erdie knew this and did not mind. After all, the currency was for internal circulation and for the convenience of Professor Zhao, her parents, and the others. What other people did did not really matter.
Just like that, the base quietly underwent various changes.
New rules and order were being established.
Although many ability users outside did not yet know about something as unimportant as currency, they were still spreading the name of Butterfly Principal.
However, these rumours mostly circulated among base higher-ups or a small number of solo ability users. Ordinary people, such as the civilians in the An City Base’s civilian district, knew nothing about it.
In a grass shed, a young woman covered in dust and grime was learning from an older woman beside her that her “boyfriend” had taken grain to visit prostitutes.
The young woman’s face was numb. Her once healthy wheat-coloured skin had become thin and lifeless after a year of suffering through the apocalypse.
The older woman was not much better. Her voice was hoarse as she said, “I really hope one day they die under some woman’s belly and never come back.”
These two were none other than Zhao Xiaolu, who had escaped on the first day of the apocalypse, and the owner of the hardware store where she had hidden back then.
They were ordinary people. They had not awakened abilities, nor had they been bitten or transformed. Even their resistance to mutated water sources was among the stronger ordinary people.
At least, it was stronger than their respective boyfriends’.
They were lucky. They were also unlucky.
Because without abilities, they were doomed to scrape by, living in the most wretched state.
On the day of the apocalypse, Zhao Xiaolu first hid in the hardware store. Then, together with the hardware store owner, she packed two large backpacks as full as possible with food, water, defensive weapons, car-repair tools, and so on. They found a chance to leave the hardware store, bypassed layers of zombie encirclement, reached a car, and, taking advantage of the zombies’ poor night vision, sped away.
After leaving, their life was not good. First, various roads were blocked. Then the car’s chassis was scratched by uneven roads and expansion joints.
When they switched cars, most of their supplies were robbed, leaving only a small portion. They barely continued fleeing and reached the deep mountains and forests.
Guarding their last food, they wanted to rely on farming to survive long-term.
But farming was not simple. Land pollution, pests and diseases, high temperatures, heavy rain… any one of these could cause reduced yields.
Soon, the several mu of land they had reclaimed all died off.
The radio, which worked only intermittently and barely had power, received information from An City Base in their moment of despair.
Zhao Xiaolu and the hardware store owner Qin Huai decisively gave up those few mu of land and decided to seek refuge at the base. Using their last petrol and that tiny bit of wild vegetables and tree roots to fill their stomachs, they barely arrived at An City before fainting from hunger.
However, just like the refugees outside D City Base, they were stopped outside the city.
An City could not support so many people.
They had nothing. If they could not enter the city, they could only wait outside to die.
The two repeatedly stressed that they had skills.
The hardware store owner could weld, clear pipes, and repair various uncomplicated car and bicycle parts. To enter the city, she inevitably described herself as an expert in all kinds of things and said she had owned her own shop.
Zhao Xiaolu’s actual job was hardware and software integrated development. Although she had only been a junior developer under the real experts at her company, she did indeed have technical skills.
So the two of them exaggerated their abilities and pleaded in every way. Finally, they obtained interview opportunities.
The interviewer also knew that, in order to enter the city, many people exaggerated themselves greatly. But after testing them, the two did indeed have technical work they could do, so they were allowed in.
Having skills only separated them from ordinary refugees without skills. It did not give them separate housing. At night, they still slept in communal bunks. Only their water source and food were relatively cleaner.
The communal bunks contained men and women, all kinds of people, including those psychologically twisted and perverted.
Among them, two pipe workers had become doubly twisted, both mentally and physically, under the pressure of the apocalypse. Since the base did not really care about dirty matters unrelated to human lives, these two treated the women in the communal bunks as prey. From time to time, whenever some women were alone, they would force themselves on them.
Qin Huai and Zhao Xiaolu became targets and erupted into a fierce conflict.
Two against two, with neither height nor physical strength on their side, they could only rely on sneak attacks and weapons, fighting with a willingness to die, in order to protect themselves.
They stabbed one pipe worker blind, angering a group of his male colleagues who had been watching from the side.
If the floor manager had not coincidentally arrived and forcibly suppressed the violent incident that had nearly cost lives, Zhao Xiaolu and Qin Huai would definitely have died.
After this incident, Zhao Xiaolu knew they had to find backers. That meant the current “boyfriends” of herself and Qin Huai: two very ordinary strength-type ability users who could manage ordinary people.
With these two minor leader boyfriends, they were no longer chased and blocked by that group of pipe workers. But the grain they earned from work had to be given to their boyfriends to squander, even allowing those so-called boyfriends to visit prostitutes.
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