"We understand, we understand."
After nodding like chickens pecking grain, Brother Ni was the first to reach out and ask, "So what do we need to do to rebuild the agency and change this world?"
Lin Miao was very pleased with this straightforward fellow, and indicated for everyone to look around.
"This is located on a barren mountain in the eastern suburbs of Night City, a place rarely visited by people, but there are ultimately some usable resources. I've already prepared the resources for the initial phase, come with me."
After speaking, he turned and walked toward the gas station next to the bar. The four of them followed closely behind Lin Miao, taking the opportunity to look around this so-called wild town. As a test build for Game 0.1, the graphics quality was already quite astounding—the faintly visible distant city, the highways like webs crisscrossed below the hills, and even those shining solar arrays—all matched exactly the content in the official guidebook, not CG, but reality!
However, this town was indeed desolate. The plywood of the houses was tumbling and shattered, the fuel pumps at the gas station had been dismantled and pushed away, and the garage had been cleaned out, leaving not even a wrench, just empty shells like the bar.
But in the innermost room of the gas station, there were several pieces of equipment that were out of place with the surrounding environment: a gigantic machine connected top and bottom to the ceiling and floor, with a cylindrical heavy furnace in the middle, a box on the left side that was more than two meters wide and over one meter high, and the right side connected via a track-like thing to another equipment in the room that looked somewhat like a rolling mill or a panel press machine, purpose unclear.
At the entrance was a spread-out handcrafted platform with a full set of tools. These things were in the same style as those seen in the bar's basement upon awakening, and there were several items resembling steel plates beside them.
Lin Miao stood beside the machine, speaking emotionally, "We paid a great price to gather enough resources to assemble these things."
Us?
Brother Ni keenly noticed this different choice of word.
"So, there were others before?"
Lin Miao nodded, his eyes a bit dim, "Yes, my comrades, who were also your predecessors, but they're all dead. Sometimes, to gather resources, you have to steal or even rob, but the company's secret equipment isn't easy to obtain, so eventually, only I was left. That's why I had to restart the machines and create you all."
Then, Lin Miao looked at the four of them again, his acting deserving of a Golden Horse Award, his eyes showing a hint of sadness as if recalling a sorrowful past, but quickly reverting to determination, "Before the Doctor died, he entrusted everything to me. So even at all costs, I must rebuild this world!"
With just a few words, Lin Miao's remarkable past was constructed in the minds of the four—a legacy of the deceased, comrades falling one after another, leaving only him—leaving them deeply moved.
The players were actually quite easy to fool; if you merely cooperate with them a bit, this group would willingly toil for you.
Lin Miao watched the four, who were caught up in their emotions, his lips slightly curved upward but quickly drawn back, as he sternly began introducing several machines in the room along with... missions.
"Our most critical task now is to build a base for the agency in Evil Land, and these devices can assist us."
He walked to the largest machine in the room and said, "This is a waste recycling separation electric furnace that can recycle most solid waste products we come across—polymer plastics, scrap metals, composite panels, even rubber and glass—using high-pressure ionization and centrifugal effects under a vacuum environment to restore and separate them into usable materials. But before use, you need to set the type of waste and products in advance on the panels; only one type can be processed at a time, the remainder will be discharged as residue and cannot be recycled again."
Speaking, Lin Miao casually picked up a piece of scrap steel from the floor and tossed it into the container on the left side of the recycling furnace, then demonstrated in front of the four.
"Just by setting it like this, the scrap steel will be heated to a molten state by ultra-high-pressure current, then centrifugally separated and cast into metal ingots in molds. We don't have conditions for quenching or tempering now, make do with it."
Outside the recycling furnace, there should be additional metal processing facilities, but Lin Miao hadn't drawn any, so he could only temporarily mix two types of equipment together.
Indeed, after a few minutes of low, rotating humming from within the central furnace, a matte steel ingot with a faint red, high temperature was shot out from the output port and transported on a conveyor, entering another machine. Then, after bouts of ear-piercing metal striking sounds, the steel ingot was pressed into a steel plate and piled on the ground.
"Once the steel plates cool, you can use them for secondary pressing, combining with high-density fiberboard to form composite panels, which are the main material for building houses shortly."
However, there was obvious waste in this process; the result of separating a single substance was that other materials would most likely be discarded, with some non-recyclable steel slag spat out of the chute beside the recycling furnace.
Due to different melting temperatures, other materials might degrade or even be scrapped, so the recovery rate depends on the material content, and the issue with composite materials is even more severe.