Jiang Qi was a transmigrator.
In his previous life, he had been nothing more than an utterly ordinary college student. In his spare time, he liked building model kits and tinkering with DIY projects.
At first it was just a hobby. Later, when short-video platforms took off, he made an account of his own and began posting more complicated DIY builds—things like handheld cannons from video games and transformable armor.
He never had that many followers, but within his little niche, he was fairly well known. Newcomers in various circles would call him "boss" and "master" all day long.
Jiang Qi had been quite satisfied with that life.
And then he transmigrated.
He could not even remember exactly how it had happened.
Other people at least seemed to have some clear cause behind their transmigration—getting hit by a truck, dying from overwork, something like that. But Jiang Qi? He had simply gone to sleep, and when he woke up, the sky had fallen.
As transmigrators went, though, Jiang Qi had actually gotten rather lucky.
At the very least, the moment he arrived, he received the standard transmigration starter gift: a Mechanic Support System.
At present, the system only had two functions. The first was Appraisal. The second was Synthesis.
The effect of Appraisal was simple: as long as he focused his attention, he could identify the basic information of any object he wanted, and the result would appear before his eyes in the form of an information window.
Synthesis was even more practical. It allowed him to combine any materials that were similar in shape and size. Depending on the number of objects used in the synthesis, the final result would also differ.
Of course, repeated synthesis had its limits. Those limits seemed to be related to Jiang Qi's knowledge of materials science, the nature of the material itself, and the number of times it had already been synthesized. Jiang Qi still had not fully figured it out.
By system standards, this thing was probably no more impressive than a stray mutt by the roadside.
But Jiang Qi did not dislike it.
He did not have many strengths, but one of them was that he was very easy to satisfy.
At the very least, this was not one of those systems that executed you if you failed your objectives, right?
For a while, Jiang Qi had even fantasized about using the system's abilities to rise rapidly through the ranks, become a CEO, marry a rich beauty, and reach the pinnacle of life.
Then reality dumped a bucket of ice-cold water over his head.
He discovered that the world he had landed in was, quite simply, a complete hellscape.
Or at least, the region he was in was spectacularly unfriendly.
This little town was called Deadwood Town. Not because there were so many dead trees here, but because it was the territory of the Flying Crow Gang.
"A crow belongs on dead wood, its black eyes fixed on blood and wealth in the distance."
It was a line from a song—one everyone in the Flying Crow Gang knew how to sing—and that was where the town's name came from.
That said, there really were plenty of dead trees here too.
This damned place was incredibly arid. If you stood at the edge of town and looked out, all you could see was a wasteland of yellow earth stretching to the horizon.
Deadwood Town was like an island, trapping all of its ordinary residents inside.
Naturally, it had trapped Jiang Qi too.
Without a proper vehicle, there was simply no way for him to leave.
At first, Jiang Qi had not thought too much of it. After all, his system looked pretty good at making money.
But he soon realized that even if you had the ability to make a fortune, without a peaceful business environment, even a cornucopia that could produce gold out of thin air would only bring about your death.
Deadwood Town belonged to the Flying Crow Gang.
It was land they had seized with guns, cannons, armored off-road vehicles, and remote-controlled machines.
In a sense, everything here belonged to them.
If they wanted to, any resident could be fitted with collars and shackles at any moment and reduced to slavery.
Even before what had happened today, Jiang Qi had already been skimmed and exploited by the Flying Crow Gang's men more than once under one excuse or another. Nearly every scavenger had gone through the same thing.
But they had no way to resist.
Deadwood Town was an island that imprisoned everyone in it. As long as they could still survive here, no one would risk their life stepping into the boundless desert beyond.
White-Claw Crow was the leader of the Flying Crow Gang, the petty king of this "island."
He was the only real "big merchant" in town. All of the most important transactions in the settlement could only be conducted through him.
Even the smaller businesses he could not be bothered with were handed off either to other members of the Flying Crow Gang or to people closely tied to them.
In other words, nearly every decent job in town had been monopolized by the gang.
As for what ordinary townspeople could do with what remained...
Other than working for the Flying Crow Gang, most of them had only one option left.
Go scavenging on the garbage mountain a kilometer outside town.
And the existence of that mountain of trash was the real reason the Flying Crow Gang had built a settlement in this godforsaken region in the first place.
In this world, the surface was known as the Wasteland.
And beyond the Wasteland, there was another place known as Tiangong.
It was a collection of sky cities floating high above the heavens.
Jiang Qi did not know much about Tiangong. Nor did he understand why a world capable of building such outrageously inefficient industrial wonders would still leave huge swathes of land abandoned.
At first, Jiang Qi had even thought Tiangong was just a legend passed around among the wasteland folk.
That belief lasted until the day he stood at the edge of the garbage mountain and saw that pale golden outline suspended in the sky.
In that moment, he truly understood what the words Tiangong meant.
That day, the scavenger who had shown him the ropes told him that this garbage mountain was actually Tiangong's dumping ground.
Every night, they sent down their trash and surplus goods through pipelines from the sky, and over time, it had piled up into this "garbage mountain."
To the people of Tiangong, everything here was worthless refuse.
But to wastelanders like them, it was a treasure vault packed with untold riches.
At that moment, Jiang Qi truly felt the vast disparity of the world.
Tiangong and the Wasteland clearly existed within the same world, and yet they were two completely different worlds.
One was a utopia floating among the clouds.
The other was a barren land of exile.
And he understood why reaching Tiangong had become the dream of nearly every wastelander.
A dream that was almost impossible to achieve.
Around that massive garbage mountain, several small towns had been established, each controlled by a different gang.
While they ruled those towns, they also offered protection to the people living in them.
And the main duty of those residents was to go to the garbage mountain and pick through trash on the gangs' behalf.
As for why the gang members did not go themselves...
No, of course they did.
They simply had far better equipment, and often brought heavy machinery as well. Their expeditions focused more on hunting for valuable finds, while ordinary scavengers could only collect the easier-to-gather materials around the outer edges.
Yes—exploring the garbage mountain was no simple job. Equipment was extremely important.
This place was nothing like a heap behind some recycling station. It was filled with every kind of waste imaginable.
Leaving everything else aside, the sheer bacterial contamination produced by the piled-up household garbage and human waste was already a constant threat to the scavengers' health.
Then there were the highly contaminated materials and the razor-sharp edges of countless discarded objects. Those dangers could be every bit as deadly as traps on a battlefield.
Because of that, for ordinary scavengers, venturing deep into the garbage mountain was nearly impossible. All they could do was collect common resources from the outskirts.
For example, during the past month, Jiang Qi had spent most of his time picking up cardboard.
It had gotten so bad that among the scavengers, he had become jokingly known as the King of Cardboard Collectors.
Join here to read ahead.
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TYPE-MOON: Redemption Beginning with the Holy Grail War (Chapter89)
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I, Lord Ravager, Utterly Loyal! (Chapter75)
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Crossover Anime Multiverse: The Demon Hunter of an Unnatural World 57
From Junkman to Wasteland 35
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