After Joining the Game, She Came Out as Gay [Infinite] - Chapter 19

Qi Cheng and Xia Lin had already been working in this corporate slave mine for ten consecutive days, and they had basically mastered the working routine here.

First of all, as the lowest-of-the-low “corporate slave pigs” (miners), talking about “human rights above all else” was a complete pipe dream—something impossible to achieve.

The “Hallelujah Mining Co., Ltd.” founded by the God of Calamity was a truly black-hearted enterprise.

Miners had to begin mining operations at 6:00 AM every morning. At 12:00 PM, there was a half-hour break for lunch.

While it was technically half an hour, the walk from the mining site to the cafeteria took 10 minutes, and then queuing for food took about 6 to 10 minutes—unless you were lucky enough to be among the first few in line.

In that case—who the hell actually had time to eat?!

Consequently, during the lunch hour, the cafeteria was almost devoid of miners.

The afternoon work session lasted from 12:30 PM until 9:00 PM, after which was the miners’ free rest time.

Although their location was at the bottom of a Great Canyon, there were small towns nestled within the various connecting tunnels.

Of course, these towns were also at the bottom of the canyon; trying to climb the cliffs to leave this place was absolutely impossible.

The towns had some small taverns, late-night diners, and the kind of shops that catered to “certain needs.” As long as you had money, you could spend to your heart’s content.

For most miners, let alone enjoying themselves in those kinds of shops, they didn’t even go to the taverns.

At most, they would go to a late-night diner for dinner and pick up a bento for the next day’s lunch while they were at it.

As a side note, the official company cafeteria dinner time was 6:00 PM to 6:30 PM; if you were late, you were out of luck.

The employee cafeteria was free, but a set meal at a late-night diner in town cost 5 gold coins.

The daily wage for a miner was 10 gold coins.

9:45 PM

Qi Cheng and Xia Lin sat exhaustedly in a late-night diner, ordering two cheap set meals.

The 5-gold set meal was the cheapest thing available; if you wanted to satisfy your taste buds, there were naturally more delicious dishes.

Of course, before ordering, let your money do the talking.

Qi Cheng gulped down the free plain water provided by the owner and then slumped weakly against the dining table, her whole body aching.

Beside her, Xia Lin looked at her with deep concern. “Qi Cheng, are you alright?”

“…I’m fine, I’m just a bit thirsty,” Qi Cheng replied, giving her a reassuring look.

“…”

Xia Lin looked at a roll-up banner for the Hallelujah Mining Co., Ltd. recruitment notice standing in the corner of the restaurant and couldn’t help but sigh deeply.

[Recruiting Talents—It Must Be You!

Vacancies Awaiting; Gathering the World’s Best Talents to Build a Bright Future.

Harmonious Company Atmosphere; Room and Board Included.

Base Salary + Commission + Special Allowances + Promotion Opportunities.

Everything You Want, We Have It All!

Come, Join Us—We’ve Been Waiting For You!]

This kind of promotional language, which heralded how beautiful the world was, was just like buying something online only to find it didn’t match the seller’s pictures—and when you tried to reason with customer service, they’d reply in a thick accent: “The company reserves the right of final interpretation.” It was total bullshit.

They had been completely swindled by the God of Calamity.

The area where the miners worked was a downward-extending dungeon instance, or rather, a regional connecting map.

Every floor produced Magic Crystals. The deeper the dungeon floor, the higher the purity of the crystals produced.

Currently, all miners were excavating in the first and second floors of the dungeon.

Based on Qi Cheng and Xia Lin’s progress, the combined revenue the two could generate for the company in one day was 50 gold coins.

Hallelujah Mining Co., Ltd. naturally provided promotion opportunities for employees, and as the Goddess of Beauty had explained at the start, promotions were based entirely on employee performance.

During these ten days, Xia Lin had already managed to find out that if one wanted to be promoted to “Manager,” they needed to achieve a performance total of 2 million G.

For an actor, the most important thing besides acting skills is rapport.

Knowing how to make an audience like and accept you is a major field of study.

Given Xia Lin’s current achievements, she naturally knew how to win people over.

Therefore, with her skills, it wasn’t difficult to extract this information from the Goblin Mine Overseer.

In other words, if Qi Cheng and Xia Lin could maintain a daily performance of 50G, they would need to work for a total of another 109.589041 years to be promoted to Manager and leave this place to clear the game.

—Of course, putting the issue of time aside, the major premise they faced was whether they could even consistently maintain that 50G daily performance.

Fifteen hours of high-intensity labor, combined with the fact that mining was an incredibly physically draining task, plus lack of sleep and careless eating—if they kept this up, their bodies would eventually break down.

Naturally, their performance would drop as well.

Even more despairing was that with the company’s massive scale of excavation, the production rate of the first two floors of the dungeon couldn’t keep up with the rate of extraction; the Magic Crystals available for mining were decreasing by the day.

If summarized by the conditions of an MMORPG: the mining nodes on each map are fixed, and there is a cooldown for respawns. If one person mines all the nodes on a map, it’s a bumper harvest. But if a hundred people are fighting over those same nodes, one can imagine how much each person gets.

Furthermore, it was impossible to camp a single node.

Fortunately, no Player vs. Player (PVP) situations occurred here; the miners wouldn’t fight each other over nodes.

After all, whether you handed in 100 common-grade ores or 1,000 common-grade ores, the fixed daily wage was still 10G.

Because common ore was worthless.

What was valuable were Fine-grade ores and Exquisite-grade ores; the most incredible were Transcendent-grade ores.

If they could mine Transcendent-grade ore, it was estimated that Qi Cheng and Xia Lin could gather the 2 million G promotion fee in just one month.

But looking at the company’s current progress in conquering the dungeon, they’d be lucky just to bring back Fine-grade ore.

Because the dungeon was also a nest for demonic beasts.

The further down the dungeon went, the more ferocious the beasts became.

This world had the profession of “Adventurer,” and Hallelujah Mining Co., Ltd. also employed them.

However, the wages paid to adventurers were exceptionally high, so the company preferred to hire a large number of miners rather than invest in a large number of adventurers to pacify the dungeon.

Currently, only the beasts on the first and second floors had been wiped out; the third floor was only half-conquered.

One reason was the lack of adventurers, and the other was that the demonic beasts were simply too strong.

In Qi Cheng’s view, these adventurers were nothing like those in games who possessed powerful skills; they were weak to an infuriating degree.

And Fine-grade ore appeared on the third floor.

That was the objective factor.

The subjective factor was Qi Cheng’s misjudgment in choosing the Elf race.

In this place, every race had its own advantages.

The Elf race certainly had the ability to use recovery magic, but the MP consumption was massive.

Here, there was no game-like setting where MP would automatically replenish after a night’s rest; there was no such luck.

If you wanted to recover MP, you had to go to a potion shop and buy MP recovery potions.

One bottle cost 50G.

And if an Elf ran out of MP, they would enter a state of fatigue where physical consumption became double the normal rate.

After using recovery magic once, Xia Lin discovered this problem and was immediately stopped by Qi Cheng.

The Elf race was inherently advantaged in magic, but their physical strength, endurance, and stamina were shockingly low.

Even with full MP, their physical strength wasn’t enough to support fifteen hours of excavation work.

Hallelujah Mining Co., Ltd. naturally had daily quota requirements for every miner.

If Qi Cheng hadn’t helped Xia Lin shoulder part of her tasks, Xia Lin would likely have been fired by the company within three days for failing to meet the daily quota.

And at that point, they had no means to change identities and re-apply for the job.

When that happened, only a “GAME OVER” ending would await Xia Lin.

Orcs and Half-Orcs, on the other hand, had the best physical strength, endurance, and stamina. For the same task, other races might show signs of exhaustion, but for the Orc race, it was a piece of cake.

However, the intelligence of Orcs was not high, making them inferior to Elves in that regard.

But this was just mining—what did you need intelligence for?

Those glowing ores were exposed on the rock faces; even someone who didn’t understand geology could recognize them at a glance.

The second-best race was the Lizardmen.

While they weren’t as strong as Orcs, Lizardmen had very high agility.

In other words, in the time it took an Orc to mine one ore, a Lizardman could mine two.

But these two races were hideously ugly; unless someone had incredibly high mental fortitude, they would definitely not choose these two races while knowing nothing about the mining game.

This was one of the clever traps set by the God of Calamity.

The owner brought over the two set meals. Xia Lin picked the meat out of her plate and placed it on Qi Cheng’s.

Before Qi Cheng could refuse, Xia Lin said, “I hate eating braised pork.”

Qi Cheng knew she was lying.

She wanted Qi Cheng to get more nutrition.

Over the past few days, Qi Cheng hadn’t allowed her to exert too much physical strength; Xia Lin must feel guilty, thinking that Qi Cheng was doing all the hard labor.

Qi Cheng didn’t decline further and silently ate the meat.

Xia Lin then asked the owner for paper and a pen. A moment later, she had drawn a map.

In truth, while the Elf race was weak, Xia Lin’s physical condition was her own; she didn’t just inherit the base stats of the Elf race.

Although not as strong as Qi Cheng, Xia Lin had also undergone physical training while she was alive. She wasn’t so fragile that she couldn’t complete a daily quota.

It was Qi Cheng who had deliberately had her preserve her strength and asked her to cozy up to the NPCs.

In other words, grinding “Favorability.”

On the first day of the game, Xia Lin had discovered that as long as she could talk about topics that resonated with these NPCs, their favorability would skyrocket.

This was exactly Xia Lin’s forte.

By the seventh day of grinding, an Orc had suddenly told her where the entrance to the third floor of the dungeon was located.

Although mining sites were becoming scarce, the dungeon was still massive. Qi Cheng, who had to mine whenever she saw ore, simply didn’t have time to explore the full extent of the dungeon.

Xia Lin had ground favorability with a few other NPCs as well, and now a rough outline of a small part of the third floor had formed in her mind.

“According to the information from those NPCs, there is a Fine-grade Magic Crystal node one kilometer from the entrance of the third floor. But there are also Slimes patrolling nearby, so mining it won’t be easy,” Xia Lin said, pointing to a spot marked with a red ‘X’ on the map.

The adventurers conquering the dungeon generally wouldn’t choose to clear out all the small fry monsters; instead, they prioritized killing the Floor Boss. Only after the Boss was dead would they return to annihilate all the demonic beasts on the floor.

Because if the Boss wasn’t destroyed, these mob-level beasts would respawn infinitely.

The adventurers had only explored half of the third floor; they wouldn’t find the Boss’s lair so quickly.

Adventurers naturally didn’t think much of Slime-level monsters. But for miners, they were still extremely dangerous.

Therefore, even though some NPCs knew exactly where the nearest Fine-grade Magic Crystals were, they wouldn’t even consider mining them.

They didn’t want to lose their lives for nothing.

“According to the NPCs’ descriptions, the Slimes’ patrol route is like this…” Xia Lin drew a circle. “But we can’t be sure of their spawn frequency or their numbers.”

The only thing they could confirm was that if the information came from an NPC, it was indeed accurate. They had already tested this before.

“It doesn’t matter,” Qi Cheng said while chewing on a piece of beef. “A Slime’s only means of attack is acid dissolution, and they aren’t agile. As long as I don’t let them get close, it’s fine.”

A Slime’s transparent body encased a black magic core, which was their heart—very easy to identify. Slimes themselves had no defense to speak of, so throwing a pickaxe from a distance to shatter the magic core would do the trick.

Precisely because they were so easy to kill, they were looked down upon by adventurers.

“Tomorrow, we can apply for ‘Business Travel’ with the Mine Overseer.”

“Business Travel” referred to miners voluntarily wanting to explore and mine Magic Crystals in the dungeon floors below the third level.

Even if you only brought back one piece of Fine-grade Magic Crystal, you not only secured your 10G daily wage but also earned a commission. The more you mined, the higher the commission.

But if you failed to bring back a single piece of Fine-grade Magic Crystal, at most, you wouldn’t be paid for that day; you wouldn’t be fired by the company.

After all, miners weren’t adventurers; choosing survival over results when encountering demonic beasts was only human nature, and the company wouldn’t make things difficult just because there was no performance.

In fact, the company strongly encouraged miners to go on “Business Travel.”

“But I feel like ‘Business Travel’ is just another trap set by the God of Calamity,” Xia Lin frowned.

Information about the third floor was too easy to obtain; rather, it was as if the God of Calamity had designed it that way on purpose.

He wanted to use the demonic beasts to give participants a “GAME OVER.”

“Elves can use haste magic in addition to recovery magic, right?”

“Yes, but it only lasts for 3 seconds.”

“That’s enough,” Qi Cheng smiled. “Right now, we need to quickly raise the money to buy MP potions. While stocking up on MP, we can also effectively grind reputation with the potion shop.”

This was also something Xia Lin had scouted out. Once a certain number of items were purchased at the potion shop, the owner would unlock special items. They would also accept special orders from regular customers.

Presumably, these special orders referred to Mimicry Potions.

Qi Cheng still hadn’t used her bottle; as long as the pharmacist could see the ingredients inside, they could quickly manufacture a few more.

“Besides, we have to clear the game as quickly as possible. The Goddess said that as of February 13th, a total of 1,207 people have died. That means the total number of people participating in the survival game is 1,207.”

Only 2 winners out of 1,207—the competition was truly fierce.

Xia Lin sighed. “But even if we successfully mine Fine-grade ore and rely on performance for promotion, replacing the Manager is still too slow. And as for Transcendent-grade ore, I don’t think we have the ability to mine it at all.”

Before we even saw the ore, we’d become a meal for the demonic beasts.

Qi Cheng laughed. “I never intended to take the promotion route anyway.”

Xia Lin was stunned. “You’re going to use the ‘killing’ method? But these NPCs won’t just listen to our commands, will they?”

The ideal way would be to provoke these NPCs and let them act as the first “tools” to attack the Manager.

That way, even if the Manager self-destructed, it wouldn’t threaten them.

But although these miners were also dissatisfied with the company due to its exploitation, not a single one was willing to go against it.

Doing something that would cut off their livelihood was something even the low-intelligence Orcs wouldn’t do, let alone the other races.

“The third trap set by the God of Calamity is likely intended to catalyze conflict between lovers through massive amounts of painful labor and mental pressure, forcing everyone to abandon each other. As long as one person is willing to strike the first blow, the other will surely be saved,” Xia Lin sighed.

“Qi Cheng.” She suddenly looked at Qi Cheng without blinking, her eyes bright and shining. “If necessary, I can be that ‘tool.’ If it’s you, it shouldn’t be hard to find a new partner in the third stage.”

“What nonsense are you talking about?” Qi Cheng flicked her forehead. “We agreed to let you be resurrected.”

She said “you.”

Not “us.”

Fear instantly surged into Xia Lin’s heart.

“I’m telling you,” Xia Lin gripped Qi Cheng’s hand tightly, nervous and angry. “I will absolutely not allow you to be that tool!”