Chapter 36 (1/2)

It took them another week to set off, mainly to wait for the money from the auction of ancient books to be in place. Just as Rolin had estimated, the 11 books fetched more than ¥32 million before tax at the auction. The handwritten copy of the play Yushuang Room collected by Cheng Yanqiu was sold for ¥7.1 million, 15% higher than the estimated price, coming fifth among the articles of ancient books in recent years.

Although the exchange rate of RMB to reals was around 1:0.24, Sothebys converted most of the money into US dollars and wired them into Huang Xuan's bank account. Huang Xuan made a profit of 50 times in just three days, and it was when Rolin lacked energy. Therefore, Huang Xuan made an international phone call for Li Shenggang, asking him to contact the generator renting company and to squeeze the electricity of the aluminum factory as much as possible, by which ten million kWh of electricity had been stored up.

However, Huang Xuan had a little trouble with the equivalent. After Rolin had upgraded the base to level 22, the base could carry more types of materials and consume several times less energy. Meanwhile, being able to travel to the times before 1600 made Huang Xuan very excited.

Nevertheless, it was the expectation that made preparing the equivalent tricky.

Although the base already had an electricity storage of ten million kWh, once it traveled to a different plane that had never experienced spatial and temporal oscillation, despite its teeny tiny chance of happening, it would need an enormous amount of energy. Therefore, how to carry the materials effectively became a very important question.

Rolin offered him a regular material list of the base regarding varieties of grains, the cost/performance of which was the highest, and special pieces of handicrafts. Usually, resin consumed less energy than gla.s.s while gla.s.s less than metal. Based on this theory, the time travelers in the past liked carrying delicate but fragile gadgets, which were cheap but hard to estimate and sell.

It had been rumored that the mechanism of energy consumption in a plane pa.s.sage, which involved the relation between molecular structure and energy pedigree, used to be the focus of scientific research. But according to Rolin's explanation, things going bad more easily consumed less energy, which didn't explain why iron rusts easily consumed more energy than diamonds. Was it because the relation between substances had been ignored, which went against storage itself?

Although Rolin's authority had been elevated and his intelligence improved (according to Huang Xuan), he still couldn't read Huang Xuan's mind.

Plane travels were dangerous. However, high risks should bring high profits, which linked closely to the costs. Hence, for days, Huang Xuan had been thinking about what materials to take with him.

Grains should be essential because wherever there were people, they were the standard equivalent which had been said to once carry a pretty high value in the past. Livestock seemed OK, but they were troublesome, for example, their intestines and stomachs needed to be cleaned, which few travelers were willing to do.

Huang Xuan had encountered a pleasant issue for a plane traveler. In the big plane age, prices of products like grains had once been so high that the merchants hadn't been able to take them anymore. In some planes, they had even swallowed half the profit. On the other hand, energy had been the cheapest product in such a plane as had an endless need for energy, because the energy people had been pursuing had been cheap itself. Certainly, the big plane age hadn't been able to last. It had ended like a beautiful Utopia during the spatial and temporal oscillation brought by free trade, which only the closed planes could escape from.

Facing the costly electricity and the limited allowance of materials, Huang Xuan at last purchased 15 million tons of grains and some seasoning like cane sugar and seeds of Chinese p.r.i.c.kly ashes. Although that sounded a lot, since Sao Paulo was the biggest business center of Brazil, with a proper price, Santos Port could s.h.i.+p anything in the world.

At seven o'clock on May 28, Huang Xuan sneaked out of his apartment. Huang Qunsheng would be in the lab that night. Li Qing was at home, but he never stepped in Huang Xuan's room, so Huang Xuan wouldn't be found out until ten o'clock the next morning.

The plane pa.s.sage was as colorful as before. The things around it became colorful too as the base pa.s.sed by, but under careful observation, they turned out to be just common.

Floating alone in the air was boring, especially when there was no reference object around. ”Why the time wasn't unified when I came back to P112 from another plane? Why can't I go to a different s.p.a.ce and time of P112? How many s.p.a.ces and times are there in a plane?” asked Huang Xuan out of boredom.