My Apocalypse System Arrives 10 Years Early

Chapter 88: Chapter 84: Ranked First Again

After that, Li Xiang showed himself eating a kung pao chicken-flavored self-heating meal in the snow, and then ended his stream.

It was already noon, and his fans needed to go eat as well. Seeing how much Li Xiang was enjoying his self-heating meal, they thought he must have a sponsorship deal.

In reality, he didn’t.

One fan joked, ”That company should be paying you.”

Li Xiang didn’t think much of it. Then, to his surprise, a staff member from the marketing department of that very self-heating meal company contacted him that afternoon to discuss an advertising partnership.

They settled on a price of 80,000 yuan for a 60-second ad. The company’s requirements were that he could no longer deliberately hide the brand name as he had before. It had to be displayed naturally, given a close-up, and described in more detail.

They were worried Li Xiang’s description wouldn’t meet their requirements, so they even sent over a script. How he integrated it into his video was up to him.

Since he was taking their 80,000 yuan, this was all part of the job.

Jiang Jianguo and Li Yucheng returned, pulling the empty sleds. Since Li Xiang had been guarding the cave, he hadn’t had time to hide their gear, so that task fell to them.

They were quite experienced. They found a remote mountain hollow, dug a deep pit, and buried all the gear. Then, they covered it with a large snowdrift and left a marker.

This freed up the other sled, which was used to load the two large wild boars bound by the Hunting Net.

As for the six wild boars in the cave, they did the same thing, loading them into large iron cages.

The three men and three dogs worked together to transport all eight wild boars back to the village.

Just like before, they paraded through the entire village and posted all over their social media feeds.

The village was once again abuzz with excitement. Many were envious, lamenting that they were too old and frail to follow Xiang Ya into the mountains. ’Otherwise, just think of how much money we could be making!’

Jiang Cai’Er was also happy for them.

The wild boars were kept in Jiang Jianguo’s pigpens.

His family had a row of six or seven pigpens. They had tried to get into pig farming before, but it hadn’t worked out. One year, an outbreak of swine fever killed off a large number of their pigs, leading to disastrous losses. They hadn’t tried again since.

It’s truly difficult to make a business work in the countryside. So this year, the Jiang Family was only raising two pigs: one to slaughter for the New Year and one to sell.

The other pens had been left empty, used for storing firewood and other odds and ends. Now, they cleaned out two of them, which were perfect for holding the wild boars.

It was too late to make the delivery today; by the time they reached the county seat, everyone would have already gone home. The weather was foul, the roads were slick, and rushing around in these conditions was asking for an accident. So, just like last time, they all decided it was best to go in the morning.

Jiang Jianguo and Li Xiang worked together again, reinforcing the area around the pigpens by building up thick walls of snow.

The heavy snow had its advantages. Snow was a readily available building material, making it convenient to build things like this.

It would just mean a bit more work the next day to reload the boars onto the tractor trailer. When the time came, they could just use the Hunting Net to wrangle them.

Aunt Jiang was busy in the kitchen, cooking up huge pots of pig feed. She intended to give the wild boars a good meal.

Once they had eaten their fill, the boars would be more docile and less likely to cause a ruckus or try to escape.

’Call it one last kindness before they meet their end.’

’Besides, after a good feeding, they’ll weigh an extra twenty or thirty pounds at the Forestry and Grassland Bureau weigh-in tomorrow, right?’

In fact, Li Xiang had already done the math. Selling the live boars to the government buyback program versus processing them into smoked meat himself yielded roughly the same profit.

The official buyback price was 20 yuan per jin for live boars and 10 yuan per jin for dead ones. After all, this was the price for the whole animal, not butchered meat.

A 400-jin wild boar would yield about seventy percent of its weight in meat. If he turned that into smoked meat, it would then shrink by roughly 50%, resulting in about 140 jin of final product. That didn’t even account for the immense amount of time and labor, or the countless pine trees he’d have to chop down.

With this many wild boars, the volume was just too great. He couldn’t possibly process it all himself.

Weighing the two options, it was obviously much less hassle to sell them directly to the government. ’Plus, you could say I’m doing my part to help the government,’ he mused.

Of course, if a restaurant wanted to buy some, he could sell to them as well. With 800,000 wild boars in Sichuan Province, and given his abilities, he certainly had no shortage of supply.

「The night passed without incident.」

Early the next morning, Li Xiang and Li Yucheng gathered at Jiang Jianguo’s house to get to work.

Li Xiang was the main force and an expert when it came to wrangling pigs. Everyone was curious as to how the wild boars became so docile in his hands, not daring to struggle.

Jiang Jianguo mulled it over. He figured it was because Li Xiang was so ferocious when killing the boars that he had become stained with a kind of killing intent. He probably carried the dying animals’ fear and resentment, which was why the other boars froze in terror when they saw him.

It was the same principle as why dogs would be scared half to death when a dog butcher or a dog trader came to catch them.

When Jiang Jianguo whispered this theory to Li Yucheng, Li Yucheng nodded in deep agreement.

Li Xiang was speechless. ’It’s just the White Fang Dagger,’ he thought. ’Why do they make me sound like some professional pig butcher? This is terrible for my image!’

He decided that from now on, when others were around, he couldn’t be so quick to just chop off a boar’s head. ’Yes, I have an image to maintain. I’m practically a major influencer with over 1.5 million fans, after all.’

Jiang Jianguo’s tractor trailer bed was 3.4 meters long, 1.9 meters wide, and about 0.5 meters high. It was big enough to hold all fourteen wild boars.

When he wasn’t hauling anything, he just drove the tractor cab by itself. For plowing, he would attach the necessary agricultural accessories.

Li Xiang discreetly tried to give Jiang Jianguo a thousand yuan. The pig feed cost money, after all, and Jiang Jianguo was also using his own tractor and fuel. But Jiang Jianguo refused, saying it was a trivial amount.

Li Xiang insisted, saying he’d fill up the gas tank for him next time instead.

When they arrived at the county’s Forestry and Grassland Bureau, the staff were stunned. ’Your little three-man team is back with another delivery already?’ One of them went out to look and exclaimed, ”Holy shit, it’s over a dozen again! And that big boar is massive! It must be at least four or five hundred jin!”

The final weigh-in showed the fourteen boars had a total weight of 1,893 jin. Since they were all alive, at a rate of 20 yuan per jin, the total subsidy was 37,860 yuan—tax-free cash.

The staff member congratulated Li Xiang and his team, encouraging them to keep up the good work. Then followed the familiar procedure: logging into the backend system to update the rankings.

On the Bounty Hunter Team rankings on the Forestry and Grassland Bureau’s official website, Li Xiang had been in first place after his last delivery. But as of that morning, his team had fallen to sixteenth place.

Ahead of him was a familiar name: the ”Lei Family Gou Hunting Team” was ranked thirteenth.

Lei Jiaming had been secretly pleased, thinking he had finally gotten the better of Li Xiang. But now, with this massive delivery, Li Xiang instantly shot back into first place, pushing Lei Jiaming’s team down to fourteenth. The news infuriated Lei Jiaming.

The burly man, who was built like an iron tower, silently swore that he would catch up and experience the thrill of holding the top spot for himself, even if only for a little while.

As for the other teams, especially those in second and third place, they were naturally far from impressed.

It was also worth noting that, according to news reports, one hunting team had suffered a devastating loss: two of their high-end, imported Hunting Dogs had been killed, a loss valued at 120,000 yuan.

Each of the two high-end Hunting Dogs had been purchased for 60,000 yuan, and the team’s leader was heartbroken over the loss.

Of course, 60,000 yuan per dog wasn’t even the most expensive; there were others that cost even more.

The Forestry and Grassland Bureau urged everyone to prioritize their safety, reminding them to only hunt wild boars after ensuring the security of their lives and property.

Wild boars were ferocious, and all hunters were reminded to treat the threat with the utmost seriousness and not let their guard down.

They spent the rest of the day resting. They were exhausted.

Li Xiang was fine. As an Extraordinary Being, this level of exertion was a walk in the park for him. It was mainly Jiang Jianguo and Li Yucheng who were worn out due to their age.

Li Xiang secretly headed back into the mountains, carrying a shovel and wearing a bamboo basket on his back. Using his Divine Movement Technique, he moved without leaving a single track in the snow. He went around and dug up all the nests of potential Mutated Creatures—the snakes, insects, rats, and ants—that he had marked before.