Cave Refuge-Chapter 346 - 307 Precious Supplies during the Catastrophe Period_2

But Dong Tianyu was reluctant to use Survival Points. In his view, the daily allocation of Survival Points was like relief funds—he preferred not to use them unless necessary, and only then would Dong Tianyu dip into his Survival Points.

After all, within the Cave, Survival Points were virtually akin to a wish-granting orb. As long as one had enough Survival Points, the Cave could fulfill some of the desires Dong Tianyu held in his heart.

"The metal shell of my car is an accidental product, and it’s difficult to replicate it at this time. Aside from that kind of metal, what other items are considered valuable?"

When Rylan heard that Dong Tianyu couldn’t get the special metal for the Black Car’s shell, he didn’t question or get angry. After all, when he initially asked Dong Tianyu, he’d already anticipated this outcome. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

Since the Catastrophe, humanity’s high-tech production equipment had been almost entirely destroyed, so it was normal that they couldn’t produce that special metal anymore.

Still, Rylan felt a tinge of regret thinking about this. After several tests, he was certain that if Dong Tianyu had a reliable channel to obtain this special metal regularly, then it might become a special commodity, similar to a nutritional supplement.

"Ah~

It seems I’ve overthought this. Besides that kind of metal, the only things of higher value would be materials produced from monsters. Just like before the Catastrophe, the raw materials could become very expensive if transported to other areas, but wouldn’t be too pricey in their place of origin.

Next would be high-quality fruits and some industrial products that were produced before the Catastrophe but couldn’t be manufactured anymore afterward.

However, unlike the luxury items before the Catastrophe that weren’t particularly practical, the items now considered valuable all have strong practicality and features that are hard to replace."

Hearing Rylan list these things, Dong Tianyu realized that the most likely thing he could have were the fruits produced by the Hundred-Fruit Tree. If Dong Tianyu didn’t use Survival Points to speed up the ripening process, the tree would bear fruit twice a year, with each type of fruit yielding one hundred kilograms per harvest.

All this time, with every mature cycle of the Hundred-Fruit Tree, Dong Tianyu always set aside fifty kilograms of each fruit variety as a reserve. The remainder of the fruits were either given to the Canaries or brought to his parents. He personally didn’t eat much, occasionally being treated to a piece or two by the Canaries to taste something fresh.

Although the fruits from the Hundred-Fruit Tree hadn’t been treated with chemical fertilizers or industrial agents, the presentation of the fruits at the time of harvest as well as the taste when eaten were absolutely superior to any variety of the same kind of fruit before the Catastrophe.

But even though the fruits Dong Tianyu had were very precious, outsiders didn’t know of the Hundred-Fruit Tree’s existence. So just with fruits alone, Dong Tianyu felt it wasn’t significant enough.

Just as Dong Tianyu was pondering what other valuable items he might possess, Ye Liuyun suddenly spoke up, "Do you still have any perfume or cologne, like cosmetic products?"

Ye Liuyun’s question was a wake-up call. Perfume and cologne production principles and processes were quite simple. Before the Catastrophe, even ordinary people could follow short videos circulating online to make these items themselves.

But at this time, aside from a small amount of cosmetics that survived the Catastrophe to the present day, there hardly were any industrially manufactured perfumes, let alone handmade ones.

The reason for their absence on the market was simple. If it wasn’t a matter of process, then it had to do with the availability of raw materials.

Traditional perfume manufacturing merely needed flower petals and alcohol, while modern processes required the synthesis of fragrances in laboratories using special equipment.

In this era, although the survivors of China were not short on food, compared to the ordinary cereal bricks they used to eat, they had mostly switched to meat after the appearance of ancient creatures. Just like the ancient nomadic tribes, grains were now more expensive than meat.

Even if they turned grains into alcohol, aside from a small portion that was distilled repeatedly for high concentration to be turned into medical supplies, the rest of the alcohol was generally blended into various spirits and placed on dining tables.

Aside from the great difficulty of obtaining alcohol, flower petals are even rarer. This is mainly due to the previous rounds of natural disasters, including freezing cold, extreme heat, flooding, perpetual night, and earthquakes.

There was basically no suitable time for planting flowers. Whenever a disaster ended, the survivors would franticly plant crops in the fields. Who had the leisure or time to cultivate flowers for beauty and pleasure?

Even if some people had flowers in their homes or offices, not to mention those types of petals were unsuitable for making perfume, even those suitable for perfume, if you plucked all the petals from those flowers, how many could you get? The scant number of petals obtained would not be enough to manufacture perfume.

Therefore, due to the lack of raw materials, it was nearly impossible to make perfume using ancient methods.

And to produce fragrance using modern techniques, it required specialized equipment. The electromagnetic pulse destroyed over ninety-nine percent of Blue Star’s electronic devices, although survivors have been repairing those devices afterward.

However, equipment like that used in fragrance production was almost at the bottom of the survivors’ priority list for repairs. With floods and earthquakes, survivors didn’t bother protecting such impractical equipment. So now, these devices were mostly beyond repair, and fixing them was many times more difficult than manufacturing new ones.

Many might say that equipment from laboratories is highly versatile, and other devices could also produce the effect of synthesizing fragrances.

They’re not wrong. It’s like using a centrifuge from a space research institute to whip cream or make ice cream—it’s not a special period, so who would use a high-precision centrifuge for whipping cream?

For this reason, whether through ancient methods, which lacked raw materials, or modern industry, which lacked equipment, perfume, which used to be common, had become a rarity.

Normally, if perfume remains unopened, it can be preserved for a long time. Moreover, since many perfumes are packed in crystal (glass) bottles, in theory, perfumes produced before the Catastrophe should still be usable.

But just like those specialized perfume-making devices, when the Catastrophe first struck, everyone rushed to save life-saving supplies. Who would bother to rescue cosmetics that couldn’t be eaten or drunk?

So after the successive Catastrophes, by the time survivors realized the value of cosmetics had increased, and they started looking for them, what they found in the warehouses were nothing but ruins.

Unlike the pretentious merchant Dong Tianyu, the well-informed merchant Ye Liuyun knew early on that as the survivors’ lives gradually stabilized, the prices of everyday consumables like cosmetics would start to rise.

And most importantly, many people, like Dong Tianyu, had stored some plant seeds after the Catastrophe struck. Although most people stored seeds for crops, a small fraction did store a variety of plant seeds.

However, in the onslaught of Catastrophes, most seeds stored by the survivors became dead due to improper preservation, unable to sprout. And even those well-preserved seeds, due to the passage of time, started to have very low germination rates.

It can be said without exaggeration that aside from the flower fields tended by the Canaries in the Cave, several species of flowers and plants on Blue Star have become extinct.

Not just the raw materials for flowers, but remember those containers Dong Tianyu collected at Pengville Port during the intense cold of the Catastrophe, and at the Black Tortoise Market, as well as the Food City and Logistics Park, where he amassed a large amount of supplies? Among them were various types of perfume.

Most of these perfumes were imitations of middle- and high-end brands, but regardless, they were still perfumes with intact packaging and no damage.

Especially the imitations of high-end perfumes, with their exquisite packaging, if not for professionals in the relevant field, an ordinary person could hardly tell them apart from the genuine articles.

But at this point, even high-quality fakes have become the real deal.