That night, every ability user staying at the inn slept remarkably well.
Especially the Yu sisters.
The twin rooms were a bit larger than the large-bed rooms, cozy in atmosphere, with soft bedding — but the most important thing was, there was a shower here!
Sure, it required swiping a card, at 1 point per minute, but the water that came out was completely clean, without a trace of radiation!
Although a notice was posted in the bathroom reading [Shower and sink water is not for direct drinking; we bear no responsibility for any resulting issues], the two sisters — who had never seen anything this wonderful in their lives — couldn’t tear their eyes away from it, and stubbornly filled every water container they’d brought with them before finally feeling satisfied.
Late that night.
The two sisters sat by the head of the bed, reminiscing about everything that had happened that day.
Yu Qing said, “Captain Wang and the other two ability users went back. By tomorrow — maybe even right now — Lu Tianxin and the deputy commander probably already know what’s going on here.”
Yu Chun was toweling off her hair.
The moment she’d realized she could shower here, she’d washed her hair for the first time in nearly a month.
That feeling… how to put it?
No longer greasy, no longer itchy — her whole body felt refreshed, as if she’d been reborn.
Yu Chun had been thoroughly won over by the inn.
“What are you so worried about,” she said, unconcerned. “Don’t tell me — after everything that’s happened, you still want to go back to the base? I’m definitely not going back. This is what it means to actually live like a person.”
Yu Qing looked at her younger sister, somewhat helpless, and sighed. “The innkeeper here really is powerful, and with so many tier-five and tier-six ability users all checking into the inn now, even if the base wanted to start a war, it couldn’t really pull it off. It’s just…”
“Just what?” Yu Chun asked.
She had a bottle of soda in her hand — bought from the vending machine downstairs. She figured she might as well try it at some point, since it cost twice as much as the mineral water — curious just how good it could possibly taste.
She twisted off the cap.
Pop!
A burst of fizz shot out.
It startled Yu Chun.
Seeing the foam bubbling up, she fumbled in a panic and quickly shoved the mouth of the bottle against her lips.
The soda instantly surged up the neck of the bottle, rushing eagerly into her mouth, as if countless tiny creatures were tickling the inside of her cheeks.
Sweet.
Yu Chun’s eyes lit up.
Forgetting all about her sister, who was still mid-sentence, she gulped down most of the bottle in one long go.
Only then did she set the bottle down with satisfaction, let out a contented breath, and wiped the foam from around her mouth with her arm.
“This is way too good! I’ve never had anything this delicious in my entire life!” Yu Chun quickly held the bottle out to Yu Qing. “Sis, try some!”
“…No thanks.” Yu Qing waved it off, looking at her sister seriously. “What I’m trying to say is — if most of the base’s high-tier ability users end up moving into the inn, the base’s overall strength will weaken. Next time mutants attack the city, we won’t have nearly enough defenders to protect it.”
Hearing this, Yu Chun’s smile did indeed fade, and she went quiet.
It wasn’t that she hadn’t thought of it — she’d just been deliberately avoiding the thought.
Panlong Base had been their home for over twenty years. They’d been through so much there, good and bad — it wasn’t something that could just be cast aside overnight.
But the inn’s appeal was undeniably real, too.
Who wouldn’t want to stay somewhere safe, clean, and with plenty of supplies?
In the future, it wasn’t impossible that an entirely new base might spring up around the inn itself.
“So what do you think we should do?” Yu Chun asked. “Go back? Do you even want to?”
Yu Qing turned her head away and said nothing.
Did she want to?
She didn’t.
But…
“Don’t overthink it, sis.” Yu Chun sighed as well. “When the time comes, there’ll be a way to sort it out somehow.”
And so, they both slept soundly through the night.
Early the next morning, Chu Yi changed into a sleek set of workout clothes, walked out of the inn, and headed toward the mangrove forest behind it.
With more than a dozen additional people now staying at the inn, the scent of humans in the area had grown stronger, and mutants had begun gathering nearby one after another, drawn by the smell.
Chu Yi extended his mental power, branding the souls of four tier-one mutants, turning them into puppets under his control, and then began his experiment.
He first named the four tier-one mutants Number One, Two, Three, and Four.
Then he transferred all the muscular strength from Numbers Two, Three, and Four entirely into Number One.
Number One’s appearance showed no visible change whatsoever.
But when it moved, it ran more than twice as fast as an ordinary tier-one mutant.
The force behind its strikes had grown stronger too.
He then had Number One kill off Numbers Two, Three, and Four.
Having lost all their physical strength, these three tier-one mutants had no ability to resist whatsoever, and were killed outright.
And remarkably, the power that had been drained out of them was still sitting within Number One’s body — it hadn’t vanished at all.
But this didn’t mean the power had truly become Number One’s own.
This energy was instead gathering within the “Mark of Greed” Chu Yi had branded onto it — meaning that, whenever he wished, he could transfer that stored power out at any time.
In other words, the “Mark of Greed” functioned essentially as a temporary storage space, capable of holding any kind of power.
And most importantly, he could even convert the stored power into readable data.
Take right now, for instance.
Chu Yi could see that inside Number One’s “Mark of Greed,” the combined strength of all three absorbed tier-one mutants added up to something comparable to a tier-one speed-enhancement ability user.
This was, frankly, unbelievable.
While ability users could absorb energy from crystal cores, that didn’t mean a tier-one user absorbing a tier-two core would instantly be promoted to tier two.
Whether human or mutant, the amount of energy that could be directly absorbed from a crystal core was minuscule — which was exactly why ability users leveled up so agonizingly slowly.
Awakening an ability around age five, and managing to break through to tier five by one’s twenties or thirties, already counted as being a powerhouse.
But here was the key point:
Tier-one mutants had no innate abilities of their own — their strength was entirely natural, born with them. So even after their bodily strength had been drained away, the crystal core in their heads remained completely usable, entirely unaffected.
Which meant that, as long as there were enough tier-one mutants around, Chu Yi could effectively earn double the points from a single monster.
Looking at this freshly-made slave of his, he felt quite pleased.
Having his “kind little system” extract the three tier-one crystal cores, he happily reaped another 30 points.
His attention then drifted to the system panel.
The rewards issued from the previous main quest still hadn’t been used.
Underground parking lot development rights, and branch development rights.
Building the underground parking lot would cost 1,000 points.
[Remaining points: 2,568]
Chu Yi set the entrance to the left side of the inn’s main gate.
Vehicles in the wasteland had no license plates, so anyone wanting to park in the underground lot would first need to register a plate for their car, linked to their inn points card.
Well — the registration fee, let’s say, 10 points.
As for anything free?
That kind of thing simply didn’t exist in Chu Yi’s establishment.
He carefully reviewed the overview for the parking lot.
Inside, cars could be refueled or recharged.
For those without a car, the place also offered a rental service.
Chu Yi went over everything thoroughly and then set his standards.
Parking fee: 5 points/hour (24-hour pass: 99 points; monthly pass: 1,999 points; yearly pass: 19,999 points.) [Once a daily/monthly/yearly pass is activated, parking time converts into an hourly balance. For example, with a 24-hour pass, the card holds 24 hours of parking time. If parked for 9 hours on the first day, 9 hours are deducted; parking can continue the next day, and so on, until all 24 hours are used up.]
EV charging: 2 points/kWh (Vehicle must be moved once fully charged; occupying the spot afterward deducts 10 points per 10 minutes.)
Gas refueling: 10 points/liter
[Yearly membership privilege: 12% off charging and refueling. Can be linked to up to ten vehicles.]
Writing this out, Chu Yi heard the system let out a small “huh.”
“What is it?” he asked, glancing up with a casual air.
[I just figured… given how much you care about points, you’d never bother setting up any kind of membership system.]
“Oh, I did — but only a yearly membership privilege,” Chu Yi mused lightly. “The kind of person who can afford a yearly pass isn’t exactly short on points to begin with. Doing this is really just a way to squeeze even more crystal cores out of them.”
At this, he shifted the subject: “Do you know why I capped it at linking only ten vehicles?”
[Um…] The system thought it over. [Are you worried that yearly members will charge and refuel vehicles for other people, and earn a commission acting as a middleman?]
[After all, since they get 12% off, they could charge others at 5% or 6% off and still turn a decent profit — and it’d be an ongoing business for them, too.]
“If that were my concern, I’d have simply limited it to one vehicle per account,” Chu Yi said.
“Giving them room for ten vehicles was precisely because I anticipated they’d use their membership to profit off the price difference. But that’s absolutely not the same as endorsing them squeezing out unlimited profit from it — if it were unlimited, watching someone else make money like that would eat me alive with envy.”
“By the same logic, if I completely blocked off this path, I’d actually end up making less. Think about it — anyone who sees this membership privilege is bound to think to themselves that they, too, could make money off it through the membership. So would that make more people sign up, or fewer?”
“Obviously more. Which means I end up earning even more points myself.”
“On top of that, the electricity and fuel costs I’d need to cover each month for the underground parking lot only add up to about 100 points total — this is pure profit. Why wouldn’t I do it?”
“What I want is exactly that — the wasteland folks’ hunger for a little cheap advantage.”
A yearly pass at 19,999 points was hardly a stretch for tier-five and tier-six ability users.
Even someone like Zhu Bei, a tier-two speed-type ability user, had scraped together over seven thousand points bit by bit — never mind someone more powerful.
If even three or four suckers like that showed up over the next couple of days, his own ability level advancing was practically a given.
Right now, Chu Yi’s biggest wish was to level up his own ability.
Only by leveling up could he have any real security when traveling outside.
The underground parking lot spanned 3,500 square meters total, with 100 parking spots, 20 charging stations, and 6 fuel pumps.
For the inn’s current scale, that was more than sufficient.
Except…
“The parking lot needs two entrances and exits. I’ve only set up one so far,” Chu Yi said, pulling up the map to take a closer look.
Behind the inn lay a fairly large stretch of mangrove forest — under the sunlight, that fiery red color shimmered brilliantly, like flames burning bright.
He rather liked it.
Purely out of personal taste, he thought that in the inn’s future development, he might turn this stretch of forest into a special park.
And roughly a thousand kilometers beyond the forest lay a small mutant nest.
The density of mutants over there was even higher than around the base.
Before long, Chu Yi had made up his mind — he’d set the second exit at the back of the mangrove forest.
Construction complete.
Now, all that was left was to sit back and wait for the income to roll in.