Chapter 179: Do You Top Up Carrots?

Chapter 179 -75: Do You Top Up Carrots?

In front of Zhang Yang, besides his laptop, was a propped-up tablet, with his phone and the Enoch Bracelet he had received sitting next to it.

Li Boxue’s setup was even more exaggerated. He had somehow found a power strip, which was now bristling with all sorts of chargers. Three or four old phones were lined up in a row, their data cables a tangled, dense mess.

Hearing the door open, the two of them turned around at the same time.

“Yu Xian, Old Shi, man, you’re finally back!” Zhang Yang lunged from his chair and grabbed Shi Zuozhou’s arm.

“Quick, quick, I need some urgent help! A real emergency!”

“Wh-what’s going on?” Shi Zuozhou was taken aback by his intensity.

“Do you have any old phones, old computers, any electronic devices!” Zhang Yang’s gaze fell on the bracelet on Shi Zuozhou’s wrist.

“Let us borrow them! Don’t worry, we won’t use them for free! We’ll treat you to bubble tea, or if you want, we can go for hot pot at the second cafeteria!”

Yu Xian and Shi Zuozhou glanced at each other, then at the interface on Zhang Yang’s screen. They both realized what was happening.

“What do you two need the devices for?” Shi Zuozhou struggled to keep from grinning.

“We need to run a piece of software. Don’t worry, it’s clean. We’ve scanned it with antivirus,” Zhang Yang said mysteriously.

“Yeah, yeah, if you’re worried, you can just format the old phones,” Li Boxue added from the side.

Watching the two of them so pumped up, Yu Xian found it amusing. ‘Have these two “lost lambs,” entranced by the dreamscape, really been trained into the most diligent miners by the currently worthless “Carrot Points”?’

Yu Xian turned to look at Shi Zuozhou. Both of them had the same strange, exasperated-but-amused expression.

“Alright, alright.” Shi Zuozhou dug an old, unused tablet out of his cabinet.

“Here, take it. And don’t worry about treating us to anything.”

“Thanks, man! You’re a true brother!” Zhang Yang quickly took the tablet and rushed off to find a charging cable.

Li Boxue and Zhang Yang started discussing in hushed tones:

“Should we go buy some more second-hand phones? I saw some on a resale app for just a few dozen yuan…”

…

「In the washroom.」

The tap gushed, washing away the foam in the sink.

Shi Zuozhou mumbled indistinctly while brushing his teeth:

“Old Yu, this Skinner box of yours… seems a little too well-built. The rat race has already started?”

He spat out the foam and couldn’t help but marvel aloud:

“These little donkeys, chasing a carrot on a stick… if they find out this thing is just a string of useless numbers, you think they’ll tear us apart?”

Yu Xian turned off the tap, shook the water from his hands, and looked at his own tired face in the mirror.

“This current buzz is definitely temporary.”

The initial smooth progress hadn’t made him get carried away. He analyzed the situation calmly.

“Their current frenzy is driven by novelty and a ‘get in on the ground floor’ mentality. They think it’s an early-bird bonus, wondering ‘what if this stuff becomes valuable later?’ But that mindset has an expiration date. For the system to truly function, we must give it a more core, irreplaceable value.”

“A more core value?” Shi Zuozhou rubbed his chin, lost in thought.

‘What else could there be? Real money? We don’t have any… What else could it be exchanged for…’

His eyes lit up as if he had a brilliant idea.

“Old Yu, what if we set up a ‘Bounty Board’? For example, if someone wants a specific dream script, they post a task on the board and use Carrot Points as the reward. That way, you have both supply and demand. Wouldn’t that create a marketplace?”

Yu Xian was taken aback for a moment. Seeing Shi Zuozhou’s excited face, he felt a stir of inspiration.

“That’s a solid line of thought,” he nodded.

“Letting users generate their own content, like the UGC model in games like Roblox or Eggy Party—that would give Carrot Points a ‘currency’ attribute, a value in circulation.”

“Right? Right?! I told you I was a business genius!” Shi Zuozhou raised his eyebrows smugly.

“We could also create membership tiers, like a ‘Carrot Club’ that costs a certain amount of Carrot Points to unlock. We could post important information and intel inside, turning it into an ‘information exchange.’ And we could do things like red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet diamond tiers, early access to content, skin lotteries…”

The more Shi Zuozhou spoke, the more excited he became, already fantasizing about a user topping up their account with eighty thousand yuan just for Carrot Points.

“Alright, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Yu Xian patted Shi Zuozhou’s shoulder, interrupting his fantasy.

“Relying on entertainment resources alone might still be too flimsy. If, one day, the Great Flood really comes and the internet goes down, in that kind of extreme environment, what’s truly valuable won’t be entertainment anymore.”

“You mean…”

“Survival.”