Fight, Flight, or Freeze: The Healer's Story
Chapter 326: The Value of Something

Chapter 326: The Value of Something

I mean, I couldn’t be the only one thinking that was an asinine idea, right?

"It’s not a bad idea," I said after a long pause when no one else spoke. "But I don’t think that this is the right time. Let’s get the city set up for human habitation first. I am sure that there are going to be a lot of things that we need to tackle before we can take on more people."

There, that made sense, right?

"She does have a point," interjected Lai Dan Dan as she looked up at Chang Guo Zi. "At the very least, we can trust the people here to all be on the same page as us. That might not be the case with outsiders. I don’t want to wake up one morning and have all of our supplies stolen simply because we rescued someone we shouldn’t have. No one wants another Wu Bai Hee."

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Zhao Jun Jie flinch at that statement. But Lai Dan Dan wasn’t wrong.

"Don’t worry about it," I said to Zhao Jun Jie. "You made that mistake once; I don’t think that you will make it a second time. That is why I think that you need to be the leader of City D."

Once again, I managed to shock everyone into silence.

"You really trust me that much?" asked Zhao Jun Jie incredulously.

"Why not?" I answered with a half-shrug. "Out of everyone here, you have the most experience with what a city needs to run. I mean, we could probably half-ass it, but you have the knowledge. Why wouldn’t we put you where you would be most useful?"

It took a second for my words to penetrate, but when they did, Zhao Jun Jie tilted his head back and laughed. "Yeah, I guess that is all that I would be useful for, huh?"

Nodding my head, I smiled at him. "I want... I hope that we can rebuild the city to how it was before the end of the world, with a few tweaks," I admitted. "We need hospitals, schools, everything that people need to grow and thrive. But we also need to be self-sufficient. We need to clear lands for fields and produce what we need."

"It would have been nice if we had some animals," sighed Hu Wen Cheng, "Chicken, cows, pigs..."

"We have them," grunted Fan Teng Fei. "We have enough to get started, and I am sure that we can grow the flock or whatever they are called."

"Wait, you have livestock?" gasped Lai Dan Dan. "I think we have someone here who used to raise cattle for food, but I am not sure. I am willing to bet that if I can find him, he would be more than happy to raise whatever you have."

"Perfect." Things were coming together better than I thought. "But since nothing would really be coming from an outside source, I don’t think that we need money to buy anything."

"Then what do you suggest?" asked Hu Wen Cheng, cocking his head to the side.

"A bartering system? If you are willing to work and put in the effort needed at whatever job is assigned to you, then everything you need will be given to you." The idea made sense in my head, but I didn’t know how it would work out in real life.

"I think that has been tried before, and the results were less than desirable," grumbled Chang Guo Zi.

"Yeah," I agreed. It wasn’t like I was coming up with this from scratch. I knew enough about the different political thoughts of the world I was in before to know what would work and what didn’t, but we weren’t in the same circumstances. "But here is the thing, we need to assume that City D is it. That there is nothing outside of its borders. What is the point in trying to figure out a currency or how much something is worth? The ancient towns would have had a bartering system before money was introduced; we’d go back to that."

"And what about the people who don’t want to work but still profit off of everyone else?" pointed out Hu Wen Cheng.

I blinked at him rapidly, not sure how to say what I was thinking. "The zombies always need food," I shrugged. There, I said it.

"And if someone is too sick to work? Do we just throw them to the zombies, too?" demanded Lai Dan Dan.

"No, but why should we have sick or injured people? That is the point of having a hospital to go to. That is the point of having two healers and two medically qualified doctors on hand. If someone is sick, they will be healed."

"And that costs money," replied the woman, digging her heels in.

"Who said that?" I asked with a sigh. This was getting too in-depth for the current moment. We had no idea what the city was going to be. Let’s just start with the first step before we care about the 59th.

"Everyone knows that everything costs money," replied Lai Dan Dan, "And to say differently is ludicrous."

"Everything costs money because someone put a price tag on it," I answered. "In order to run a hospital, you had to pay for electricity, for the machines, for the doctors, for the medications, for the bandages, for the support staff, and on and on. They had to be paid because they had expenses that they needed to pay in order to survive. Nothing was free because it all came from somewhere else. But have I once charged for healing people? Has Bin An Sha? We don’t need to pay for all the stuff that made a hospital run before the end of the world. It is a gift inside of us."

I felt like I was banging my head against a wall, but maybe I just wasn’t explaining myself correctly.

"It makes sense," nodded Zhao Jun Jie. "Before the end of the world, the only thing to really have value was money. We used it as a way of assigning value to other things, but that was just what we did. Look at inflation; things increased in price because they were harder to get our hands on or it cost more money to transport them. But that was still someone assigning a value to it."

"So everything just goes to everyone?" asked Lai Dan Dan.

"At least it is someplace to start. We can figure things out once we see what works and what doesn’t. For now, let’s get some sleep."