AWACS - An American With A Chinese System
Copyright© 2025 by PT Brainum
Chapter 51
I wasn’t interested in seeing what was available to do in Hamburg on a Friday at 4 in the morning. I was sure that there was a coffee shop open somewhere, but I wasn’t interested in leaving the safety of my hotel room. I finally decided it would be best to sleep, so triggered my chicken alarm, which despite the coffee, put me straight to sleep.
I woke up feeling ok at 630 am. I was fully rested, but I still felt the imprint of the karmic weight of being imbalanced. It was almost like my soul was bruised. I moved gingerly, and wondered if my get healthy skill would help with injuries like this. I tried it while in the shower letting the extremely hot water beat on me, but it wouldn’t activate. I guess it wasn’t the type of injury that could be simply healed.
I went to fix myself another coffee, and found the cups dirty, so I tried to summoned and returned them to a clean and ready to use state. They didn’t move, because they weren’t mine, so I summoned a cup from home. This continued to be my favorite and most used skill. I checked my stats to see what I could do:
0/170,000,000 (117) Level
8,512,000/1,700,000,000 positive points
1,919,793,964 neutral points
7,331,000/1,700,000,000 negative points
33/35 Active Skills
31/32 Passive Skills
47,605 Bonus Neutral Points
Active Skill Upgrades: 6/10
Passive Skill Upgrades: 4/10
I had 2 hours until Pitcairn midnight, and looking forward to the bonuses I was now in line for. My 76,000 points per minute was daunting. It came, with the positive doubling, to a bit over 6 million points an hour. 28 hours was enough time to make enough points to level up.
Pick a New Passive Skill:
~幸灾乐祸 lucky disaster laughing at misfortune (0/4)
~生米煮成熟饭 uncooked rice boiled till cooked rice (0/4)
~安居乐业 lived peacefully cheerfully work (0/4)
~乱七八糟 seven chaos eight bad (0/2)
~缘木求鱼 climbing trees to catch fish (0/3)
I checked the list Scribe had given me earlier, and chose:
~幸灾乐祸 lucky disaster laughing at misfortune (1/4)
- danger danger, when traveling in a disaster area all generated points double
Not exactly what I was expecting. I’d save a passive skill upgrade for it, if I found myself in that situation. Otherwise I’d keep that option open.
I was sitting on a ton of points that I knew eventually I’d be able to spend and level up with. I wanted to upgrade the really good stuff, and not just use them up. The same way that even now, with nearly two billion points, I still hadn’t used up my bonus neutral points.
I switched to my active options:
Pick a New Active Skill:
~万水千山 ten thousand waters, thousand mountains (0/4)
~按图索骥 to check a picture to search for a horse (0/4)
~步步高升 step by step to get a promotion (0/1)
~热锅上的蚂蚁 on hot pan is an ant (0/3)
~以一当十 one to ten (0/2)
Scribe recommended to check a picture, it was flashing in a set of four blinks. I selected it, then used an active upgrade on it.
按图索骥 to check a picture to search for a horse (4/4)
- using a photo instantly know the location of a person living or dead shown in the photo, cost 100,000 points, must be holding the photo
- can also be used to find items or any other living creatures, stacks with above
- can also be used with a drawing or other picture type, must be a drawing of a specific item or person to be effective, stacks with above
- cost reduced to 1000 points
Well that would be certainly useful if I was a member of the FBI or other investigative unit. Great for finding lost and stolen items, as well as criminals. Maybe even locate lost pets or children. I wondered why Scribe recommended it. I ate a few pomegranate seeds to go with my jujube, plums, and peaches for breakfast.
The inspiration of the pomegranate seeds were impressive. Looking at what the jujube had done to me, along with the plums, I was looking impressive too. I pushed the peels into the trash, and sat at the little desk in the room, summoning my laptop and a printer.
Wikipedia had photos of some really old money. I had discovered that recently when surfing and looking for big bills to print. In the process I had discovered that some of this old money had no known bills remaining.
It was a few measly points to upgrade my printer, which fixed the dried ink problem as well. With it able to print on both sides of the page, I copied over the pictures into paint on the windows laptop. I soon had pdfs printed of four different bills, six per page, one sheet with the fronts, one sheet with the backs.
I printed the pdf’s, and waited for them to print. The new printer did some cool thing where it printed the page completely, both sides, one after the other. I wasn’t sure how it did that, but I wasn’t going to question it.
I surfed looking for water turbines or other water power companies nearby while waiting for the pages to print. When the first page printed, I used my perfectly complete ten beautiful skill for the first time, restoring the photos of the bills to perfection. The holes that had been there were now gone, and they looked like photos of a brand new bill.
I summoned a pair of scissors and trimmed the six 1907 1000 swiss franc bills from the paper. The internet said that there were only 37 bills that had never been collected when this bill had been recalled.
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