【Congratulations — registered residents have reached 50,000. System has been upgraded to Town-level.】
【New item list unlocked. Please review at your convenience.】
【Resident probationary period extended to three months. Special provisions apply to special populations.】
【One lottery draw awarded.】
【To upgrade to City-level, a single city must reach a population of 1,000,000.】
Well. It seemed the system had decided that Zhao Baihui's strategy of spreading growth across multiple settlements was cheating, because this time it was demanding a single city of over a million people.
【Current primary city population: 8,437 (Taoyuan Town). Total population: 50,000+】
Longcheng's population was actually slightly below Taoyuan Town's at the moment, so the system had defaulted to Taoyuan Town — the most populous — as the primary city.
That wouldn't be the case much longer.
…
Zhao Baihui shot straight up out of bed in the middle of a dead sleep. The commotion was so loud it startled Mingming, who was sleeping downstairs — she couldn't imagine what had happened.
The noise carried far enough that lights began flickering on one by one in the neighboring building where Jinyi, Jinxiu, and the others slept.
"What are we waiting for — the lottery! I want electricity, electricity, electricity!"
【Congratulations — you have drawn the Complete Basic Electrical Technology Package.】
【Related purchasing permissions now unlocked.】
The girls came running over to find their master standing on the bed in his pajamas, arms waving wildly, with Mingming beside him looking utterly at a loss.
"Master, Master, what's the matter? You're frightening us!"
"Ha! Nothing's wrong, nothing at all — I'm just happy."
Seeing that he could still answer questions and appeared to be in no distress, the girls let out a collective sigh of relief.
"Master, could you tell us — what's the good news?"
Zhao Baihui raised an eyebrow and grinned. "Heh heh. I'll have you know, your master just broke through to a new cultivation realm. My spiritual power has increased enormously!"
Jinyuan exclaimed excitedly, "Congratulations, Master! Does that mean you can fly now? Fly for us — show us, go on!"
Well, damn. He'd laid it on a bit thick.
"This is a spiritual advancement. You wouldn't understand even if I explained it. Everyone go back to bed. Off to bed, the lot of you."
"So you can't fly then…"
Watching Jinyuan's barely concealed disappointment — she was clearly having second thoughts about her master's legendary greatness — Zhao Baihui found that utterly unacceptable.
"You — just you wait…"
He thundered downstairs, strode into the ground-floor hall, gave a wave of his hand, and a massive object appeared — nearly as tall as a man, square and boxy, a hulking great thing.
A perfect embodiment of the words: big, dumb, clunky, and crude.
And it had cost him two hundred thousand, for heaven's sake.
Another day of missing Pinduoduo. A few rounds of bargaining and you could've grabbed something like this for two hundred yuan.
Another wave of the hand — a pile of round, bulbous light bulbs materialized on the floor.
Another wave — a large drum of oil appeared before him.
He poured the oil into the machine, started it manually by cranking the handle — no small effort — and once the engine was running, he adjusted the output by hand, then picked up a bulb and connected it.
The others watched their master bustle about for a bit, then hold up a small object with a triumphant grin and call out at the top of his lungs:
"Let there be light—"
Click.
Brilliant light flooded the entire hall in an instant.
Everyone stood there, dumbstruck.
Let there be light — and there was light?
Good heavens. Had Master reached up and pulled down the sun itself?
"Heh heh! So tell me — is your master extraordinary, or what?"
Jinyi and the others had never read the Bible, so they couldn't quite catch the full depth of Zhao Baihui's satisfaction — but even without the reference, the sight was staggering enough.
Jinyuan was the first to snap out of it. She threw her arms around Zhao Baihui's waist, bouncing on her toes and stretching her free hand upward, trying to grab the little sun for herself.
"Master's incredible! Master, Master, let me play with the sun! Let me have a go, please!"
"Absolutely not — it's burning hot. You have to hold it from the bottom, like this — hey, hey, hey, stop climbing on me, I'm not a tree trunk!"
"Ow—!"
"Ha! Burned yourself, didn't you? Serves you right, you little wild thing!"
"What the — Mingcheng! What do you think you're doing? A steady fellow like you, and you went and touched the electricity with your bare hand?!"
"Mingming! That's a light bulb — you can't eat it!"
Jinyi, Jinxiu, Mingming, and the rest gave up any thought of sleep, throwing themselves into gleeful chaos over the little sun.
For people of this era, the sight was simply too staggering, too far beyond comprehension.
Once Zhao Baihui was satisfied that everyone had gradually grasped the basics of how to use the thing — and what not to do — he headed back upstairs, changed his clothes, came back down with his thermos of tea, and settled happily into a chair, sipping away and watching his household make fools of themselves.
There was nothing particularly remarkable about electricity itself, and the generator was an eyesore.
But his people were endlessly entertaining. It had been a long time since he'd seen those looks on their faces — that wonder, that bafflement, that innocent delight or vexation. It gave him a deep sense of contentment.
At the same time, he had his complaints. He had electricity at last — but what the system called "basic" technology was, frankly, as basic as it got.
That enormous ugly contraption ran at mediocre efficiency and had cost him two hundred thousand. He was now in charge of fifty thousand people, pulling in five hundred thousand in daily subsidies, and he could only afford two and a half of these things.
The light bulbs weren't cheap either — twenty yuan apiece for old-fashioned incandescent bulbs, one hundred watts a pop.
The oil was expensive too…
Running the numbers, the cost came to roughly two yuan per kilowatt-hour. A hundred-watt bulb burning for an hour would cost two mao?
And the wiring wasn't cheap either.
The next day, a construction crew moved into the Zhao residence and got to work — and every one of them was a top-notch craftsman.
By that evening, the entire estate blazed with light as if it were noon, and the household was beside itself with joy.
Well — that was Zhao Baihui's description of it. Jinyi and the others were genuinely astonished and delighted, though perhaps not quite to the extravagant degree he made it sound.
With a population above fifty thousand, the daily subsidy came to five hundred thousand — annual income well into the hundreds of millions.
But Zhao Baihui didn't actually have that much cash on hand. More than half of everything he earned went straight into purchasing resource nodes.
At the current level of technology, any but the shallowest deposits were simply inaccessible.
Even the shallow ones were only partially exploited.
He could push harder, of course — but that meant spending lives, and that was something Zhao Baihui refused to do.
He'd rather spend the money, open more extraction sites, and do it properly.
Back at the residence, he summoned a large stockpile from the system: generators, light bulbs, wiring, oil.
The plan was to roll it out in stages — starting with the district government offices, then the security bureau, then various public institutions, then key enterprises like Taoyuan Grand Hotel.
Step by step, batch by batch.
They were all his children. He couldn't play favorites.
Taoyuan Town, Xinghuo Town, and the ten settlements built afterward — each of them deserved at least a few units.
Running through the math, Zhao Baihui felt numb.
Several tens of millions in savings sounded like a fortune — until you did the arithmetic and realized he'd end up in the red by several tens of millions all the same.
And that wasn't even touching the ongoing fuel costs. Once these machines started running, they'd be guzzling diesel nonstop.
Diesel was completely beyond their current technological capabilities to produce.
"Jinyi — there are exactly one hundred generator sets. You handle the allocation. Not one unit more, that's final!"
"Find me craftsmen — the best available. I want research and development on generators started immediately!"
"At this rate, your master's magical reserves won't hold out!"