Chapter 282: Forced Sense of Belonging

Chapter 282: Forced Sense of Belonging

Dan Marina always managed to find connections, even to places where she had none at all. This skill was something not just anyone could master. Zheng Yichen was quite envious. Things that others couldn’t achieve even if they talked themselves hoarse, Dan Marina could solve with just a charming smile and a few seemingly simple words.

Was this woman’s charm that great? Zheng Yichen thought about it and figured it was probably because he interacted with her too often and knew her too well… Anyway, all the witches Zheng Yichen had seen so far were quite beautiful. The matter of the Fixation Potion was quickly pushed into the auction. The entire auction did not prohibit adding other good items brought by people.

Moreover, this type of Magic Potion that Zheng Yichen brought out was something they had never heard of before. If it weren’t for the appraisal of that small bottle of potion confirming its effects were real, they wouldn’t have believed such a novel potion existed. As for the actual potion to be auctioned, it was fine to just leave it at the depository since the people in charge of this auction were from the Sanctuary Church.

Their ironclad reputation didn’t need much worry.

After the item was deposited, all that was left was to wait for the auction to begin. There were still four days until the auction started. With nothing much to do during this time, Zheng Yichen simply split his time between making Power Crystals and solving the Paralysis Potion formula issue. Since he decided to use them as a set, and there was still time, if he could figure out a compatible formula in advance, it would give the auction of the Fixation Potion an extra boost, right?

Even though this was a consumable item, its price couldn’t possibly match those of permanent auction items, but this was a very necessary advertising opportunity. After all, this type of potion was a high-end product. It couldn’t be like the Mana Enhancement Potion, which was a product for the low-end market, where large quantities meant better prices, and building a reputation would be relatively easy.

High-end products were different. First, they had significant sales limitations. High-end products were destined to not be usable unconditionally in every situation. What? Encountering a monster in the wild? A bit difficult? Have a bottle of Mana Enhancement Potion! What? No difficulty? Then to save mana recovery time, have a bottle of Mana Enhancement Potion!

Anyway, high-end products always required choosing the right timing to use. Because they couldn’t be used almost unconditionally, the effectiveness in building reputation would be much lower. Therefore, an initial advertising role was very important. Letting many people who could afford high-end products learn about this potion from the start would make things much simpler later on. Even those who normally couldn’t afford it would try to prepare such a potion when attempting something with a low success rate!

On the other hand, without such reputation, even if those people knew about the effects of this item, they might choose other types of potions that seemed more reliable because they didn’t understand its specific characteristics. Therefore, advertising was particularly important. Zheng Yichen even thought about… maybe placing an advertisement in the Magic Weapon Forum!

“Wait! Advertising seems like a good idea!” Zheng Yichen, who was working hard on researching the compatible potion formula, suddenly rapped his own head. Generally speaking, Magic Weapon Summoners were not ordinary people. There were more Ranked Practitioners among them. So advertising there would let more powerful people know about this potion. Therefore… it was very necessary to do it. And starting this trend now would allow him to earn a large amount of Mana “fees” in the future.

Of course, Zheng Yichen wouldn’t let advertising run rampant. It could exist, and if arranged well, it wouldn’t cause much annoyance. But once it reached a level of saturation where ads were shoved everywhere, it would only bring about resentment. Zheng Yichen didn’t want to tarnish the Magic Weapon Forum just for an extra way to harvest Mana.

Besides, having fewer ad slots wasn’t completely meaningless. At least the quality would improve, right?

To compete for those limited ad slots, some Magic Weapon Summoners would surely pay more Mana!

Ad slots couldn’t be like pinned posts, where you could push your way up as long as you had enough Mana. That would be somewhat unfair and affect the motivation of those who wanted ad slots. The best way was timed auctions… dividing ad slots into seven levels. The highest level was the most eye-catching, but each placement could only last one day, decreasing from there. The longest duration belonged to the least favorable position, lasting seven days… As for more ad slots, Zheng Yichen felt that even if he allocated the Magic Weapon Forum space most reasonably, it wouldn’t be enough. More would only cause annoyance.

“Hmm, as for how to advertise… I definitely need to create a new account.” Zheng Yichen muttered. For things like Earth’s vehicles and machinery, he used Tianwang’s account. For potions… maybe Bayi?

After thinking it over and feeling it was about right, Zheng Yichen simply took out the main body of the Magic Weapon Summoning Book. As for the compatible potion formula he was adjusting, besides requiring sufficient knowledge of Potionology, the rest was just trying out some experimental steps.

During the experiments, Zheng Yichen had to continuously reduce the degree of his own Mana harmonization, then modify the follow-up formula based on the experimental results, reaching a level where it could be directly produced without needing his power harmonization. As for more perfected versions?

Zheng Yichen picked his nose. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do it, but he didn’t have time! Later, when this dragon took off, active in broad daylight without worries, able to be a lazy, do-nothing dragon, he could take his spare time to slowly fill in the holes he dug before. After all, every product he had created so far had corresponding notes.

After spending some time readjusting the control core of the Magic Weapon Summoning Book, Zheng Yichen didn’t immediately open the advertising function. If he were to open it, it would have to wait until after the auction ended. Also, he needed to discuss it with Qin. After all, she was his business partner. If he just did it without a word, it would be fine if there was no impact, but if it really caused some impact, then meeting later would always require wasting words to explain. Rather than that, it was better to explain things clearly early on. Good for you, good for me, right?

“OK! Back to researching the compatible formula.” After grinning to himself alone in the Laboratory for a while, Zheng Yichen, who started working again, was watched by Loris as she quietly left the Laboratory. Although Zheng Yichen seemed a bit crazy now, it was still better than him burying his head in serious experiments all alone. This somewhat crazy reaction was completely a form of self-amusement, wasn’t it?

Being able to amuse oneself meant his mindset was still okay. At least, aside from heartless people, not many could self-amuse when feeling depressed.

Zheng Yichen was working, and Loris wouldn’t disturb him at this time. So after idly spacing out for a bit, she left the room and walked out. She had already seen the Blueprint for the Underground Base design. Even though there were Alchemical Puppets here every moment, using Zheng Yichen’s perfected blueprints to expand the place further, the Underground Base gradually became richer, moving away from its initial empty, unoccupied state.

Now, walking through the passages here, one could see the busy Alchemical Puppets in the corridors. Some had Disguise Skin, while others directly exposed their skeletal frames, though these were fewer in number. They all had a temporary destination: the workshop for covering Disguise Skin. Although this seemed to increase the cost of producing Alchemical Puppets, in the long run, Alchemical Puppets with a layer of Disguise Skin were actually more economical.

The Disguise Skin was a protective layer for them. With such a layer, it could reduce the environment’s impact on the Alchemical Puppets. Any impact would directly affect the outer skin.

And… as Zheng Yichen put it, a bunch of people, even fake ones, walking around was much better than a bunch of skeletons. After all, relying on the Otherworld’s conditions, the Disguise Skin of these Alchemical Puppets had no stiffness characteristics. If you didn’t know their identity, they looked just like people. Certain robots with human skin might cause the “uncanny valley” effect, but these had characteristics more like the Terminator.

After all, Zheng Yichen’s inner self was also Human. Even though he wasn’t bothered by the so-called uncanny valley effect now, if something truly indescribably frightening appeared before him, if it was hostile, it would only eat a super-enhanced version of his Light Cannon with no other result. Under such circumstances, how could he be scared? The only emotion would be disgust.

At least when these Alchemical Puppets were active here, it truly made the Underground Base feel “lively,” not empty. If there were more time and better conditions, Zheng Yichen even planned to upgrade the production workshop. For example, putting more thought into the Puppet Core to make the daily behavior of these Alchemical Puppets more human-like. Although cores made from high-quality Soul Material could indeed give Alchemical Puppets such characteristics, the value of that stuff was too high, making mass production difficult.

As for creating some special existence? Zheng Yichen felt the idea that robots would definitely choose to oppose humans after developing some form of intelligence was really far-fetched. Without deliberately vilifying this notion, the biggest factor was that the two didn’t seem to have much resource conflict. If forced to say there was, wasn’t there also resource conflict among Humans?

Nothing was absolute.

Watching Loris pass by, the Alchemical Puppets along the way slightly bowed in greeting before continuing toward their destinations. This was also a programmed setting. If in an environment with ample time and no special threats, upon encountering important individuals who needed greeting, and it was the first meeting within a certain timeframe, the greeting setting would trigger. Of course, this greeting frequency wasn’t completely triggered; it also depended on the number of Alchemical Puppets in the nearby area. If the number exceeded a certain standard, it wouldn’t trigger.

To these greeting Alchemical Puppets, Loris gave a slight nod. She had little contact with people. Although these were Alchemical Puppets and this behavior was a programmed action setting, she felt it wasn’t bad to give a slight response while walking idly. Just a nod, it wouldn’t affect her at all.

Besides, these Alchemical Puppets didn’t greet every single one they saw, so it didn’t annoy her. Instead, she felt it was nice. At least now the place truly felt like an Underground Base. Even though the entire Underground Base was supported by Zheng Yichen, occasionally one could see some Ghost Maids leading a team of Alchemical Puppets passing by.

These Ghost Maids also carried something like a keyboard on their backs. This thing was also invented by Zheng Yichen, a ‘speaking device’ specifically for Ghost Maids. It had ‘letters’ decomposed from the Common Tongue. Since Zheng Yichen had a foundation in pinyin, he created an Otherworld version of pinyin based on pronunciation… though it wasn’t easy, setting aside a little time each day was enough.

The main structure of this thing was based on Irene’s modified Image Retention Spell, forming a special Alchemy framework. Each key on the keyboard had a rather complex Image Retention Spell!

Each key pressed would be temporarily recorded by the central core inside the keyboard. After forming a word, pressing the space bar would produce the actual word displayed… on an attached ‘Magic projection screen’ above the keyboard. As for voice, that really stumped Zheng Yichen. Just forming words had already made him rack his brains to connect those preset Image Retention Spells, making each letter pressed trigger the Image Retention Spell to contact another or several Image Retention Spells, and generating associations was already mind-burning enough!

Connecting for voice reading? Zheng Yichen felt his current Magic knowledge couldn’t handle adding that yet. Even though advanced Image Retention Spells could indeed retain sound, that was easy when used for recording and playback. Directly scanning words and producing sound? Hard… Magic also had its systems. You couldn’t just come up with some black-tech Magic whenever you wanted. Without Irene’s modified Image Retention Spell, Zheng Yichen couldn’t even make this special keyboard.

So voice output was out of the question for now. Ghost Maids didn’t have the conditions to speak using Magic either. As for the Image Retention Spell… they could use that, but not all Ghost Maids were Spellcasters; many were more like Warriors. Although they also had Mana, mastering such Magic wasn’t easy. It was better for Zheng Yichen to prepare such a keyboard for them.

Now that he made this thing, it was a foundation. In the future, he could use this as a starting point to create some new products later, right? Anyway, Zheng Yichen had decided. It was difficult for him to develop a strong sense of belonging to this world, but he could make the things he created leave traces in this world that gave him a sense of belonging!