Chapter 26

“What?! You want to go to the Lindong Shelter? This is too dangerous!”

When Tang Yu decided to take a trip to the Lindong Shelter, Chen Haiping became very agitated.

It was an understandable reaction. They had just provoked a big boss of the Lindong Shelter, and he now wanted to deliver himself to his door. How was this any different from suicide?

Tang Yu waved his hands. “Calm down, calm down. It’s not like Lin Wei recognizes me. Even if he finds out that Han Jing went missing around here, at most, he would target our shelter. If I go to the Lindong Shelter, I’ll just be a random survivor and won’t stand out at all.

“Moreover, the Lindong Shelter is the only large shelter in the Lincheng region. It should have more information and more resources. Only there can we gain some understanding of how much power Lin Wei has under his command. It’s not like we can just sit around and permit our opponent to freely investigate us, right?”

“I’ll go.”

Roger had never been much of a talker.

Tang Yu shook his head.

Roger was a reliable man, but both he and Yilian were not people from this world. Though the contract had endowed them with some common knowledge of this world, they couldn’t compare to ordinary people who had twenty-some years of experience living in this world. Sending them to Lindong to gather information would be getting half the result with twice the effort.

However, if it was just gathering information, there was no harm in sending Roger to gather information in Lindong.

But Tang Yu didn’t want to go to Lindong purely to gather information on Lin Wei’s faction. This was his secondary goal. What he really wanted was to learn more about developments in the outside world through Lindong.

In the early stages of the apocalypse, when radio signals were still present, Tang Yu had been able to get information on the situation throughout the country. But ever since the signal had been cut off, the flow of information had come to a stop. That wasn’t even mentioning that the threat of the demonized beasts had grown greater and greater, with even survival becoming a problem. As an ordinary person, he had been more concerned about other kinds of information.

Things were different now.

He now had the power to protect himself and wanted to develop. Even if he had the system, he couldn’t just close himself off to the outside world.

The system was his advantage, and Tang Yu naturally had to use it well. He certainly wasn’t clinging to some moronic notion of getting stronger on his own. He had a cheat, so why not use it?

It was just that he couldn’t put everything on the system.

He had learned from the mouths of Han Jing and his team members that Lindong had scientists that had made many important discoveries while researching the new substances that had emerged after the apocalypse.

This was the difference between small and large shelters.

It was humanity’s intelligence.

Combining the system with the logic and intellect of human science was how the domain would develop in the future.

Moreover…

Tang Yu’s train of thought began to drift into the distance.

Lindong was a large shelter, so it might have information from all across the country. In Lindong, he might be able to find information on the shelter where his parents were.

He couldn’t entrust this to other people. He was the only person capable of sorting through all the miscellaneous information to find what he wanted.

As for safety…

Chen Haiping’s worries were understandable, but in the end, Chen Haiping was an outsider. He knew only a smidgen about the domain and the trump cards Tang Yu possessed.

This was why he was worried.

Tang Yu naturally wasn’t heading to Lindong alone. He would definitely be bringing a bodyguard, and he still needed a few days to prepare equipment.

Even if he faced the worst-case scenario, he was confident that he could escape unscathed.

…

Time flew by.

In the blink of an eye, several days had passed.

Over the last few days, the domain continued to steadily develop according to plan.

A team under Roger and Yilian had searched through the surrounding towns and villages. Not only had they found several practical items, they had also found several survivors who had been hiding out.

All of these survivors were brought back to the domain without question.

These were added to some barely capable survivor groups that were living out in the wilderness and who had either happened to pass by the shelter or learned of its existence through other channels.

With these dribs and drabs of survivors, the shelter now had nearly one hundred survivors.

Over the last few days, Tang Yu had also worked on strengthening his monitoring of the domain.

Two days after they had captured that team of four, they had captured another team attempting to infiltrate the shelter.

These teams clearly weren’t very efficient, allowing Tang Yu to relax a little.

No other teams came after these two.

He presumed that these investigating teams had probably marked the area around the shelter as a dangerous region, or perhaps they already had a few clues. When going out, Yilian and Roger had occasionally come upon signs of survivor activity.

These might have been left behind by those search teams.

“What a pity. I’m still lacking one key item for my trip to Lindong.”

Tang Yu was so sure that he could escape unscathed no matter what danger he faced because of a certain item.

A Town Portal Scroll.

This was a very common item in games, and it had a chance of appearing in a Level 1 market and didn’t cost that much… In a game, this item could save some time on the road, but in reality, it was a life-saving divine artifact.

He had been waiting all this time, refreshing the market every chance he got.

But when he needed it the most, it didn’t appear.

Tang Yu refreshed the market again today.

A moment later, his eyes widened in glee.

It wasn’t that he had spotted the Town Portal Scroll, but in reality, this item would also be considered a divine artifact.

Backpack (10 Slots).

In the game, the backpack was just an expansion of one’s inventory, and it didn’t even increase the inventory by much.

But things were different in reality. This backpack appeared like an ordinary backpack, one of the smaller kinds, but inside was another world.

A ten-slot backpack held ten different spaces. Each space was one cubic meter in size. Put together, the backpack could hold ten cubic meters, an absolute necessity for a traveling family, a sniping assassin, or the aspiring roadside bandit.

Tang Yu immediately bought the three backpacks available on the market, upon which he realized that he was running out of Origin Crystals.

Over the last few days, he had built the market, upgraded the domain castle, built the walls, and also bought a map and the backpacks from the market.

But he made only one or two hundred units of Origin Crystal each day. It wasn’t a small amount, but it didn’t match his expenditure at all. Tang Yu looked at his reserve of Origin Crystals and saw that it was on the verge of running out.

More importantly, he had built very few buildings.

Overlord Tang was very concerned.

As he glanced at the spatial backpacks he had bought, his eyes lit up. He had thought of a new source of revenue.

…

It was a clear day, the weather hot and steamy, the burning sunlight roasting the shattered earth. The air was pervaded by the smell of… sweat?

Avoiding the sweaty laborers, Tang Yu secretly made his way out of the shelter with his two automaton guards.

His target was the Origin Crystal vein several kilometers away.

He was greedy for this Origin Crystal vein, but he had no way of mining it… There were many demonized beasts in the mountains, and he had never gone inside before. Even before finding the Origin Crystal vein, he would be endlessly pestered by demonized beasts. In this situation, mining the Origin Crystal vein was a fantasy.

Yes, sending survivors to routinely mine the vein was unrealistic.

But breaking apart the rock and putting the ore containing Origin Crystals into the spatial backpacks seemed plausible.

Leaving the vacation villa from the side, one could take a mountain road that circled the mountain behind the vacation villa.

Tang Yu proceeded along this winding mountain road.

On one side was the steep mountain face, and on the other side was a steep cliff overlooking a small creek. After the apocalypse, the shelter drew most of its water from this creek. Fortunately, the creek hadn’t been polluted much before the apocalypse… At the very least, the creek’s water hadn’t turned red, yellow, or some other strange shade.

Number One and Number Two flanked him like two door gods while Tang Yu leisurely observed his surroundings.

This road wasn’t very wide, only enough for two cars side by side.

At a glance, he could see that nearly half of the road had been overtaken by grass.

This grass had grown from the dirt next to the cement road and had experienced frenzied growth. Some of the grass was one or two meters high, and some of the grass had grown through the cracks in the road, cracking the surface. Anyone who had been hiding all this time after the apocalypse and had only chosen to emerge now would perhaps come to realize something.

This world had become far too alien.