Chapter 279 Little Windmill
Commander Page's Diary
X. X/XYYXX continued
[After my big fuss, Zeka's face full of blisters looked even more stupid. No matter what I said, he refused my request to meet with Inspector General Mars.]
I had to tell him the truth.
[“Contraband 241 has been activated.” I said to Captain Zeka, “When I jumped, the two carriers of 241 were swept away by the space tide!! Let me see Inspector General Mars immediately, we must analyze their coordinates immediately! ”]
[Captain Zeka turned around and asked, "Are you telling the truth?"]
[“I bear witness to this with my life.”]
[“I understand.” Captain Zeka said, “I will report it to the Inspector General immediately.”]
"What are you doing?" Principal Wu asked Yan An.
Yan An was sitting on the ground, cutting branches with the Swiss Army knife he carried with him.
"Cutting branches." Yan An replied.
"So, what are you going to do with the sticks?"
“Make a windmill.”
"Windmill? What windmill?" Principal Wu asked puzzledly.
"Little windmill." Yan An picked up a branch and gestured, then continued his work.
Principal Wu couldn't understand Yan An's actions at all at this moment, but he didn't know what he should do.
Now he even had some hope that the aliens who had kidnapped them for no apparent reason would reappear in front of them. At least they would know where the Earth was.
Two days ago, Principal Wu and Yan An were still in a cell on the spaceship. They had already experienced several rounds of being robbed, and their initial panic turned into numbness. The aliens who kidnapped them at first could not communicate with them, but later they were injected with an intelligent nano solution, and the screams that were originally incomprehensible to them were automatically transformed into understandable language. Before Yan An and Principal Wu could be shocked and admire this high-tech translation technology, they began to be robbed by the two families in turn.
Both factions of aliens claimed that they were the righteous side, and the other side was the evil kidnappers with bad intentions. Faced with Yan An and Principal Wu's full of questions, neither side had more time to explain, they were busy dealing with the other side's serial counterfeiting and fraud tactics. So Yan An and Principal Wu were at a loss to find that there were more and more aliens who looked exactly the same, and the two of them went back and forth in this alien spy game.
After being sent into the cabin of the Tianlai again, an accident happened.
At that time, Principal Wu was sighing and Yan An was sitting on the bed in a daze, but soon, a sudden change began.
A blinding white light appeared before their eyes, and then their vision failed. Principal Wu felt that his vision was plunged into a colorful darkness, and his body was swept into a violent hurricane. He could not shout or exhale, and in his trance, he could only see countless twinkling stars, which reminded him of the lights of cities on Earth at night. Then all the dim lights were like scattered fireflies, and he sank into the silent and deep sea, and an indescribable beast was lurking above his head. When he raised his head and looked up, the beast's eyes were burning like torches.
He lost all consciousness.
When the clear world came into his sight again, he was already standing on the land of this alien planet.
“……” Principal Wu opened his mouth and stared blankly at the scenery in front of him.
"It looks like we've been teleported to a planet." Yan An beside him said slowly.
“…”
One second they were still in the cabin of the Tianlai, and the next second they were teleported to this planet for unknown reasons. After experiencing all kinds of incredible things in the past few days, Principal Wu and Yan An were not as frightened as they were at first when facing this sudden teleportation.
Yan An speculated that it was because the fight between the two groups of aliens was too intense, so Commander Page simply transferred them to another location and picked them up later.
"How long will we be here?"
"I don't know." Yan An looked around. They were in a hilly area. The vegetation everywhere was cactus-like creatures with sharp thorns. The breeze was mixed with the smell of dry sand. Some yellow-brown grass was dotted on the land.
Soon they met the local alien residents. The bodies of these residents were made of gears and complex coils. At first, Yan An and Principal Wu thought that these local residents were robots. Yan An tried to communicate with them. Because of the nano-intelligent solution injected into their bodies before, they could communicate with the residents smoothly.
The local residents called themselves Weizra people. After a period of communication, Yan An found that these alien residents were not robots as he thought. Their bodies were a kind of gelatinous organic matter, and this gelatinous organic matter was the brain that directed the body's actions. When they walked, they made the sound of gears turning. They spoke in a soft voice and showed no hostility to the sudden appearance of the alien Homo sapiens Yan An and Principal Wu.
Yan An and Principal Wu were soon taken to a nearby town inhabited by Vizsla people. The local mayor, who was made of shiny copper-yellow gears, questioned Yan An and Principal Wu, and finally said that he had never heard of the planet Earth, and the locals could do nothing for Yan An and Principal Wu.
"You can stay here and receive relief food once a day," the mayor announced. "You need to find a job on your own. We only provide relief food for 20 days."
So Yan An and Principal Wu settled down in this small town temporarily. They lived in a local temporary shelter, and as the mayor said, they could get a small piece of green-brown Bingman cake every day.
Yan An and Principal Wu felt that the cake had a pungent, choking feeling in their throats and tasted a bit strange, but they had no other choice.
In the first two days after arriving, Yan An and Principal Wu would wander around the town and talk to the locals when they had nothing to do. The residents of the town were basically employees of a large foundry nearby, and their lives were simple and regular.
They set out in the morning to go to work in the factory, leave work and go home in the evening, and go to work again after a night. They rotate as precisely as gears without changing.
After a few days, Yan An and Principal Wu's novelty about the Vizsla people had completely disappeared. In Principal Wu's eyes, these alien gear people were boring and dull, and their lives were not fun at all.
"It's just going to work and going home every day. I thought aliens would be any different." Principal Wu said to Yan An.
"Not really, they have an entertainment activity." Yan An said. After some observation, he found that the most common facility in this small town is a kind of oil bath called Pachi Pachi. Every time when it's time to get off work, this group of gear people will rush from the factory to the large and small Pachi Pachi stores in the town. That's their reward time after a hard day's work.
Spend three Yi coins, you can enjoy a Pachi Pachi comfortably. Yan An once curiously inquired about it and found that Pachi Pachi is actually an oil bath for the locals. For the people of Weizsla, the happiest thing in the world is to soak their gears with high-quality warm oil. After a comfortable oil bath, their gears become silky and smooth, and their bodies are bright and shining.
It is their only enjoyment after daily boring work, the source of joy in flat life, and the most indispensable ritual in gear life.
"Just take a bath." Principal Wu said, and he sat down. "How many days have we been here?"
"Today is the third day." Yan An said.
"The mayor said that we can only receive free relief food for twenty days. Have you ever thought about what to do if no one comes to pick us up after twenty days?" Principal Wu looked distressed.
"So we have to think of some way to change the current situation." Yan An lowered his head and continued to cut branches.
"oh?"
"From what I've seen along the way, I think the two of us are very valuable. If the information that those aliens claim to be the guardians of the Earth is true, there is a good chance that we will be rescued if we stay where we are." Yan An said his judgment calmly, "But we can't just do nothing all the time."
"Well, I agree with you."
"From the current situation, the locals know nothing about the Earth. If we want to get more information, we must obtain more resources."
"You are right, but I still don't understand why you want to make a windmill?"
“I just wanted to do it.”
“…”Principal Wu gave up communicating with Yan An.
Yan An used the paper in his notebook and asked the staff at the shelter for some nails. In one afternoon, he had made a dozen small windmills.
He found a table and borrowed a long container from the staff to fill with sand. He lined up the windmills and inserted them into the sand. The wind blew from time to time, and the windmills turned rapidly, looking quite eye-catching.
Not long after, a Weizsla man stopped in front of Yan'an's windmill and asked, "What's the use of this?"
"On Earth we call it a small windmill," said Yan An.
"What's the use of this little windmill?"
"It may not be of much use to you."
"Yes," the Weizsla man admitted. "Such devices are common in our area, where wind and water are used to collect energy. I don't understand the significance of your little windmill."
"Look, it's moving."
"Yes. But it's not collecting energy."
"In fact, it is a mascot of our planet, symbolizing the never-ending rotation."
The other person looked confused as if he didn't know what the Earth was: "Mascot?"
Yan An said seriously: "Yes. To some extent, it can improve your luck."
"Luck value?"
"On our planet, we use it to keep machines running smoothly. Increasing luck means reducing the possibility of gear failure in a certain sense."
"So? This is a probability item?" The Weizra man turned the gears, picked up a small windmill, and looked at it curiously.
"It's the mascot of the Earth, that's all. I don't know if it works well on this planet." Yan An smiled and said, "It's very cheap, you can try it."
"How much is this?"
"One Yi coin."
"Although it's cheap, I don't think it's necessary to buy it." The Weizra man shook his head and left.
Then, from time to time, Vizsla people passed by on the road. They were curious and indifferent to the windmills sold by this alien Homo sapiens. In the evening, a Vizsla person suddenly came to Yan An's stall and shouted, "Give me one!"
The Vizsla man announced in a loud voice that he would be doing very delicate and complex machine control work tomorrow, and he was worried that his gears would go wrong at an inopportune time. One Yicoin was very cheap, so why not buy one and give it a try.
After closing the stall that night, Yan An only sold a small windmill and earned one Yi coin.
Principal Wu said, "How come I didn't know that the mascot of the Earth is a windmill?"
"Maybe some ethnic groups in some regions really regard it as a mascot." Yan An said confidently, "Have you noticed that the local gear people are all pragmatists? There is no market for it just as a decoration."
“You are engaging in false propaganda!”
"I said it was a lucky possibility, I didn't say it was inevitable, nor did I say it was certain."
"Okay, but it looks like you haven't opened up the market even so."
"Let's see tomorrow." Yan An said calmly.
By the evening of the next day, Yan An's small windmill business was still slow.
When the stall was about to close, the loud-voiced Weizsla man appeared again and said that he had done his work without any mistakes today. Although he didn't know whether it was the effect of the windmill, he still came to thank him.
This time was just the rush hour for the Weizlans to get off work, so it attracted the attention of a group of gear people who were getting off work. Seeing the Weizlan man's happy face and the fact that one Yi coin was really cheap, several Weizlans came to buy the windmill. Soon, all the windmills on Yan An's stall were sold out.
When we rested at night, Principal Wu said, "You are really lucky."
"It's a matter of probability." Yan An said, "I've said before that this is just a small windmill with a certain probability of increasing the possibility of luck. Please pay attention to the word probability. If their gears really break down, they won't blame it. On the contrary, if everything is fine, then they will think it's the blessing of the small windmill."
“…”
"Those who benefit from it will often spread the word about its effectiveness," Yan An said. "We'll see tomorrow."
"..." Principal Wu said, "What do you call this? Cutting leeks?"
"This is a common business method for health products on Earth." Yan An said with a smile, "And we only sell it for one Yi coin, which is equal to the fare for a local public transportation, and to some extent, it is also equal to its actual handmade value. There is no loss for both parties."
"You're really smart." Principal Wu gave a thumbs up. "I'll help make the windmill later."
When the stall opened on the third day, some people from Weizla had heard the news and rushed to buy the potentially lucky windmills. By the afternoon, all 100 windmills were sold out.
Yan An and Principal Wu used the money they earned to buy a batch of colorful paper materials and nails at the local market, and returned to the shelter to work harder. By this time, both of them had become experienced, and they planned the material sizes in a unified way, which greatly increased the production speed. The two worked until almost dawn.
By the fourth day, all 450 windmills they made were sold out.
That night, Yan An hired a shelter worker for 50 Yi coins to help him process the windmills. By the fifth day, they had sold 812 windmills.
When Principal Wu was about to go to the market to buy a new batch of materials, Yan An shook his head.
"Our business is almost coming to an end." Yan An said.
"oh?"
"This windmill has no technical barriers. It is selling well now, but I think there will be followers in the next few days."
Just as Yan An said, on the sixth day, windmills similar to Yan An's appeared in the market of Wezla. The labels of these windmills were hung with auspicious words in local language, and even had slogans such as "Original from the Earth, Definitely from the Earth".
Principal Wu said dissatisfiedly: "Earth, do these gear people know where the earth is?"
"It is inevitable that a popular product will have counterfeits. This product has lost its business opportunities," Yan An said. "We have made some money in the past few days , and now we can focus on other areas."
"What's your direction?"
Yan An's eyes were fixed on the Pachi Pachi Baths in front of him with a bright neon sign.
“This time, we are targeting places that locals cannot leave at all.”
"You said Yan An and the others are not here?" Xiao Zhen was stunned. "Wait a minute, could it be that the contraband 241..."
Mr. Cat replied: "Yes, it is a product that connects the four dimensions. 241 was dormant after being decomposed by the fugitive. Just like the grass carp, Yan An and Principal Wu would not have any problems after ingesting it. On Earth, they are stable. They are also stable during normal navigation. But that stupid Inspector Page took them on several space jumps, which caused the dormant 241 particles in their bodies to become active. The Tianlai was sailing to the Midia galaxy. You know there is a black hole over there. The jump at that time sent Yan An and Principal Wu directly into the closed time curve. Although the result is completely uncontrollable, we can calculate their coordinates afterwards. Fortunately, we can pick them up now."
"..." Xiao Zhen stood up, "You just said that we are going to pick them up."
"Yes."
"They entered the time curve." Xiao Zhen touched his chin, "You mean, they are also in this time and space? I see. At this moment, how long has it been for them?"
Captain Madara shouted, "They won't be old men when you go to pick them up!"
"One year ago." Mr. Cat said, "The jump of the Tianlai a day ago transported them to the planet Tengxi a year ago. Now they have been there for more than a year. Don't look at them like that, they are safe. We will go and pick them up now."
One year. Xiao Zhen was filled with worries. For Xiao Zhen, only a few days had passed since the beginning of this chase, but in the blink of an eye, Yan An and Principal Wu had already experienced a year. They had no knowledge of this galaxy and had been thrown on an alien planet for more than a year.
This is the perfect tense that cannot be changed.
Obviously Yan An is his nominal father, but now Xiao Zhen feels like a frightened old father, worried about Yan An's diet, and even more worried that they will be bullied by the local alien natives because they are unfamiliar with the place.
I hope nothing happens to them, Xiaozhen looked at the Tengxi star marked on the star map. The local residents are a kind of creatures that are a combination of organic matter and gears. This kind of residents is known for being rigid and dull. I just hope they don't hurt Yan An and Principal Wu.
