To be honest, Xin Xiaoru had no interest in infrastructure development.
When she had just been reborn, she appeared calm on the surface, but five years’ worth of accumulated fear, anxiety, and despair left her without any real drive to act.
It was only after obtaining the RV that she finally felt there might be some hope in her life, but even then, her plans went no further than finding a few teammates, heading into some deep mountains or remote forests, growing a bit of food, avoiding disasters, and surviving for as long as possible.
However, once her teammates turned out to be ability users, the RV’s protection increased, but so did food consumption. None of them were good at farming. She studied seriously, but that effort was limited to the little patch of land of just over twenty square meters they were currently cultivating. With no pressure, she could plant casually, choosing what she wanted to eat according to the season, sowing it, and watching it grow.
Up to now, farming didn’t seem much different from growing flowers.
But once farming became a profession, a mandatory task that had to be completed, Xin Xiaoru felt a strong sense of resistance. Looking at how the three of them might need to farm over ten mu just to support themselves, and considering that with worsening environmental conditions and reduced yields, they might need thirty or forty mu just to support two ability users, her anxiety only grew.
By cooperating with the base and providing nighttime lighting every day, they would receive five jin of potatoes.
But… five jin was only enough for a single meal for Zhao Changyue…
The system had really nailed their weak points and arranged everything with ruthless precision!
Xin Xiaoru felt utterly exhausted. She planned to look into the situation in other regions in a few days and find some displaced, homeless people to move into the compact dormitory and farm together.
Thinking along these lines, she hesitated and, for the next upgrade reward, chose the option of a 100-person compact hotel.
The upgrade requirement was 100 five-star reviews from guests.
Emmmm… something about this felt a bit off…
Ah, forget it. If she had to recruit people to farm, then so be it. After all, Youzhuang alone had over 200 mu of abandoned terraced fields. Even assigning one complete novice to one mu, it would still take two hundred people to properly farm that much land.
While she was mulling over all this, the RV was carrying dozens of ability users, including He Guying and Zhao Changyue, on a patrol around the base.
Although it was clearly daytime, the aurora was still strikingly visible. What had once been imagined as a dreamlike symbol had now become a terrifying harbinger of death.
Everyone who had originally been working outside immediately took shelter in nearby shops, drenched in sweat from the heat yet too afraid to go back out. Those who had already been indoors draped the lead-lined, radiation-protective clothing distributed by the base over their bodies and heads, doing what little they could to reduce radiation exposure.
Xin Xiaoru didn’t know how much lower the mutation rate inside the base was compared to the outside cities, but even if it was just a few percentage points lower, with a population base of five million, the numbers were still staggering.
Moreover, these zombies were no longer like the early ones, which took a full day, or even several days, to turn. This time, starting from the morning when the geomagnetic storm and aurora appeared, screams began to ring out one after another. Many zombies smashed through windows and doors and walked out onto the streets, moving at roughly the same speed as a normal walking person, but with far greater strength than before.
With Xin Xiaoru’s current physical strength, after killing a single zombie, she hurried back into the RV and dared not risk going out again, leaving the fighting outside entirely to the ability users.
In the end, the RV used the same old method, luring the zombies batch by batch into an open area that had not yet been fully reclaimed, then hanging above them and blowing their heads off one by one.
Almost every newly mutated zombie had a crystal core. However, everyone was busy killing zombies, and no one had the energy to pick them up. When they got surrounded and could no longer hold them back, He Guying would release snowballs to cover a radius of four to five meters, freezing the zombies into ice for two seconds. The others would seize the chance to enter the RV and fly up into the air.
The RV would return to the ability users’ main camp, swap in a new batch of ability user fighters, and head back out with Xin Xiaoru to kill zombies, gathering the headless-chicken-like zombies together again. Once they were exhausted, they would return to switch out another batch of ability users. This cycle repeated continuously more than twenty times a day, without interruption.
Meanwhile, some ability users who were not rotated out used the most primitive method: with the ability user camp as the core, killing zombies one by one as they came, and if a group arrived, holding the small gate in the surrounding wall and fighting them in rotating shifts.
In this way, a full three days passed. More than five thousand ability users killed an average of over 160 zombies each, for a total of 800,000 zombies completely eliminated.
During the following week, the base did not resume normal work. Instead, ability users went door to door to conduct inspections, hunting down and killing any staggering stragglers that had slipped through the net.
On September 27, Yicheng Base officially announced a return to normal!
Restrained cheers rose one after another, and Xin Xiaoru finally let out a sigh of relief.
Then came the intense, gut-wrenching pain.
Because in just a few days, the RV had consumed over a thousand stamina points!
She realized it then, the RV gave benefits with upgrades, but its consumption also increased dramatically! Only after carefully questioning the system did she learn that the compact hotel hadn’t been operating at all, and was actually deducting an idling fee…
An idling fee??? Are you freaking kidding me?!
Each empty bed deducted 2 stamina points per day. Thirty empty beds meant 60 stamina points deducted per day.
On top of that, flight consumption had tripled, from 1 stamina point per hour to 3 stamina points per hour. In other words, over the past ten days, the RV had been fighting zombies day and night, flying 24 hours a day and consuming 72 stamina points daily. Add the 60 points deducted for empty beds, and that was 132 stamina points per day…
If the RV’s income were still the same as before—1 stamina point for each person who entered, this would all be manageable. After all, around a hundred ability users came and went every day.
But after the RV upgraded, it turned out that a person had to stay inside for a full five hours to generate just 1 stamina point.
Five! Whole! Hours!
Oh my god…
How could such an adorable RV come up with something so utterly deranged?!
If it weren’t for the fact that it had previously acted as a bus and gradually accumulated over seven thousand stamina points, the RV would have ground to a halt long ago!
“I’m not upgrading anymore, can’t I just not upgrade?!” Xin Xiaoru shouted at the system. “Roll me back to Lv3!”
The system’s childlike voice sounded a little guilty: “Y-yes… sorry about that…”
“Roll it back,” Xin Xiaoru insisted.
The system muttered timidly, “Th-that can’t be rolled back. Once you reach a level, you’re stuck at that level…”
Xin Xiaoru: “……”
She was so angry she was speechless. “Then as long as I find thirty people to stay in the compact hotel, the 60 stamina points won’t be deducted, right?”
“Nope. They have to pay the room fee for it to count as a real stay. Staying for free only increases popularity a bit—1 point per person per day.”
Great. That was only half of what the empty beds deducted.
He Guying had just finished showering when he saw her sitting in the driver’s seat, fuming, driving the flying vehicle straight out of the city.
“What’s wrong?”
Xin Xiaoru said, “Rounding up labor!” It had to be now, immediately, she needed to fill all thirty spots!
At that moment, outside Youzhuang, two teenage girls were being chased by zombies and fled up the mountain in panic. Once several hundred zombies entered the forest, one of them grabbed her companion and flew up into the air.
When Xin Xiaoru arrived and saw someone flying, she thought, “Did my free labor just deliver itself to my doorstep?”
Then she saw the skinny girl being carried raise her hand, and a pillar of fire shot out from her palm, igniting both the forest and the zombies together.
The forest hadn’t seen rain for a month and a half and was bone-dry; it caught fire almost instantly.
At the same time, the terraced vegetable fields not far away also caught fire.
Xin Xiaoru: !!!???
No, those weren’t laborers. They were about to become souls crushed under her vehicle in one minute!
“Boss, calm down!” Zhao Changyue was startled by her expression and hurriedly said, “The fields are only burned a little at the edges. Brother Ying can protect them with his snowballs.”
Seeing Xin Xiaoru drive the flying vehicle as if she were about to ram someone at full speed, He Guying added, “I’ll go down and control the fire. Once it’s under control, the burned forest can be turned into farmland.”