At the same time, it was also the mayor’s home.

Although he had lived here for five months, Brian Carter had never seen the mayor. That adult was very mysterious and rarely showed up in public.

“Yo, back so early?”

Seeing Brian Carter coming from the corner of the street, Old Walter, with a pipe hanging from his mouth, squinted his eyes and let out a wisp of murky white smoke from his nostrils.

He was holding a double-barreled shotgun in his hands.

Although it looked rather old, no one doubted its power.

Brian Carter had once seen with his own eyes that this old man, with just two shots, brought down a rampaging mutant brown bear charging at the Bet Street gate.

Ever since then, he had always longed to own one himself.

“Got held up outside for a night.”

“Outside?”

The old man glanced at the pointed water pipe slung over Brian Carter’s back, his eyebrows arching in surprise.

No one knew better than he did how dangerous the night could be.

Every time he was on night duty, he never dared to take his index finger off the trigger. The slightest sound or movement would make every nerve in his body tense up.

Although the mutants in the distant outskirts weren’t as dangerous as those in the city, there were too many raiders eyeing this place greedily.

If you fell into their hands, your fate wouldn’t be much better than dying to mutants.

Old Walter found it hard to believe that this guy had survived a night on the wasteland with nothing but a steel pipe.

“Something unexpected happened.”

Brian Carter didn’t explain further, just gave Old Walter a tired look for him to figure it out himself, then walked straight through the settlement’s gate.

Bet Street had only one junk recycling station, easy to find, right next to the main entrance of the settlement.

Under the rolling shutter sat an old-fashioned electronic scale that never weighed accurately, and beside it stood an archway sign reading “Fair Prices, Honest to All.”

This shop was the mayor’s property, and it was the only place on Bet Street that bought used parts and mutant mole rat skins.

To monopolize the scavenging business, this dictator had even arbitrarily issued a law.

Namely, no one was allowed to privately sell their hunted prey or scavenged junk to passing merchant caravans.

The reason given was to ensure that Bet Street’s goods could be sold at reasonable prices, rather than being shamelessly squeezed by “cunning merchants.”

The reason such a tyrannical rule could pass was, to some extent, because the survivors here were all quite ignorant.

And most merchant caravans wouldn’t risk offending this dictator just to buy a pitiful amount of supplies from scavengers.

They only did big business.

And only with people they trusted.

“Selling? Or buying?”

The shopkeeper was a fifty-year-old man named Charles. It was said he used to be a resident of a shelter in another province, but was later captured and made a slave, until the mayor bought him from a slave owner and put him in charge of dealing with the scavengers.

Most of the residents here were native “wastelanders,” uneducated, terrible at math—so bad they could even get simple addition and subtraction under a hundred wrong.

But Charles was different.

He came from a shelter.

Although no two shelters on this wasteland were exactly the same, they all had one thing in common.

Anyone who could live there was an elite of pre-war society. Their children not only inherited sharp minds from their parents, but also received a good education from an early age.

If the world hadn’t gone to hell, he probably would have become an engineer, doctor, or scholar like his parents.

Not a bookkeeper here.

“Selling.”

Without any nonsense, Brian Carter took out six used batteries and five tubes of adhesive from his backpack and tossed them onto the scale’s tray.

He had scavenged these from the ruins of nearby buildings before discovering Shelter 404.

Old Charles picked up the used batteries from the table, casually checked their models and whether they were swollen or damaged, then tossed them onto the scale.

These things were definitely scrap, no doubt about it, but the materials inside could still be recycled.

“Quality’s not bad. The trash around here should have been picked clean. Where’d you get the good stuff?”

He calls this good stuff?

“Just lucky.”

“Heh, just making conversation. Hmm, the batteries are decent, but the adhesive is average—the seals have been opened, and the insides are probably a mess. I can only give you half price for those… All together, that’s 3 chips.”

Brian Carter didn’t haggle, just took the three white chips from him.

These plastic coins with a metallic sheen were the “currency” issued by Boulder City, the largest survivor settlement in Springwater City, and could be exchanged for food and supplies in most survivor settlements in Springwater City.

The front of the chip bore its denomination, while the back had a special anti-counterfeit code and stamp, which would show a unique luster under sunlight.

These chips had many advantages: heat resistance, easy to store, highly recognizable. Most importantly, with postwar technology, they were basically impossible to counterfeit.