Watching the utterly unmistakable shock on his old comrades’ faces, Guo Fanxiang nodded, thoroughly satisfied.
“You’ve all seen the pricing over there. I’ve got a yearly pass, so you can come to me for fuel — cheaper that way. I’ll charge you 5% off.”
Everyone exchanged glances.
In the end, it was Yu Chun — the younger of the Yu twin sisters — who spoke up directly. “Then why don’t we just register our own yearly passes ourselves? We’d get 12% off straight away.”
After all, none of them were exactly short on points — the problem was just that most of their reserves were still sitting back at Panlong Base, waiting to be retrieved.
Guo Fanxiang mulled it over and figured she had a point.
“In that case,” he said, “let’s go find the tier-three and tier-four ability users and offer them a discount instead. But we should agree on one fixed rate across the board.”
The others thought it over and nodded in agreement.
By the time they’d driven over, registered their license plates, and gone down to inspect the underground garage, they came back with expressions of utterly undisguised astonishment.
“That much electricity,” Yu Chun marveled. “Running 24 hours a day — how much must that be wasting? Is the innkeeper really that powerful?”
Yu Qing tugged at the hem of her sister’s shirt and murmured, “He is the innkeeper, after all — better not go speculating too openly.”
“I’m not saying anything bad! It’s just, with all this, the base really doesn’t stand a chance competing,” Yu Chun said. “Anyway, I don’t want to stay at the base… you can only shower there once a month. During scorching season, it’s completely unbearable.”
Scorching season — that meant summer.
The wasteland’s temperatures were bizarre in the extreme. During the hottest stretches of summer, it could sit at fifty or sixty degrees Celsius all day long.
Meanwhile, some of the colder regions maintained a year-round temperature of negative fifty degrees, with extremes reaching negative seventy or eighty in the worst cases.
Not to mention all the other natural disasters — acid rain, hurricanes…
If the inn could withstand even these extremes—
then people would probably start fighting tooth and nail just for a chance to secure a spot living there.
Hearing this, Yu Qing said nothing.
Yu Chun knew exactly what was weighing on her sister’s mind — worry that the base wouldn’t be able to hold onto its ability users, and would ultimately be swallowed up in some mutant surge.
“Don’t overthink it. Let the higher-ups worry about that stuff. Didn’t you see Deputy Commander Lu himself come by the inn to eat, too?”
That much was true.
“Anyway, let’s head back to the base first and pull out all our crystal cores,” Yu Chun urged. “If we’re too slow about it, with this many people going to withdraw their cores, something that unusual is bound to get reported straight up to the base commander — and then we might not be able to leave at all.”
Yu Qing: “…Fine.”
“Whatever happens, I’m definitely not leaving that inn.” Seeing the worry still lingering in her sister’s eyes, Yu Chun settled the matter firmly. “A place this good — what if we leave and can’t get a room back? As long as we have enough points to auto-renew every day, I’ll happily stay there forever.”
The two sisters had completely different personalities. Yu Chun knew her sister tended to overthink everything — to outsiders, her sister came across as the more mature one, too.
But Yu Chun believed that her own carefree, unbothered nature was exactly what would let her survive longer out here in the wasteland.
If you worried about everything, overthought every little detail, in the end the only one who lost out was yourself.
Living in a world like this — wasn’t seizing the moment exactly the point?
“Anyway, I’m definitely not checking out. The inn even has air conditioning — that’s something I’ve only ever seen in old textbooks at school. Something that existed before the great catastrophe a hundred years ago.”
“And you’ve already felt how powerful that air conditioning is — remember how well we slept last night? It’s so hot outside right now, there’s no way I want to sweat it out back at the base.”
At this point, seeing her sister still lost in thought, Yu Chun steadied herself and looked directly at her.
Meeting her gaze head-on.
“Sis,” she said.
Yu Qing froze slightly.
Yu Chun rarely called her “sis” directly — normally she just used her name.
But this time, there was a stubborn, earnest weight behind the word.
“I really, truly want you to stay by my side, all the way to the end,” Yu Chun said, each word deliberate. “I don’t want to lose you. You’re the only family I have left here.”
“And besides, with the innkeeper’s inn around, I really believe the future can’t be too bad.”
Yu Qing gave a bittersweet smile, reached out and ruffled her sister’s hair, and said, “Alright, alright — I’ll stop overthinking it. Let’s head back to the base and pull out the crystal cores. Sooner there, sooner back.”
…
All sorts of events were unfolding throughout the inn.
And as long as they happened within the inn’s protective barrier, under the watch of its surveillance, Chu Yi could see every single one of them.
At the moment, he was looking over the system panel, planning to continue renovating the inn.
First, on the newly unlocked fifth floor, he’d build eight rooms, using up the remainder of the room-building allowance available to him.
On the fifth floor, he decided to build nothing but twin rooms.
Construction cost 100 points × 8, plus an expansion cost of 6 points × 8, and an additional 10 points for toilet-and-shower installations.
Total cost: 858 points.
[Remaining points: 1,350]
There were currently fourteen unsold rooms in total — two large-bed rooms, and the rest all twin rooms.
Still, Chu Yi wasn’t the least bit worried about the twin rooms not selling.
If anything, for anyone hoping to save money, a twin room was actually the best option. Split down the middle, it only came to 85 points per person.
Meanwhile, Xue Xiaobai and Zhu Bei, now heading back to the inn, were in the middle of discussing exactly this — room arrangements.
The story starts back in the morning, with Xue Xiaobai receiving his rented ability.
The two of them had driven off in a truck, heading out into a more distant stretch of wasteland.
Aside from mutants, the wasteland also teemed with countless other monstrous beasts.
Following the great catastrophe, the human population had plummeted drastically, while other species had thrived and multiplied in their absence.
There was one particular beast called a gale rabbit, which could birth a litter of twenty or thirty pups at once — capable of running the moment they were born, and always carrying a wind-type ability. They reached full maturity within just three months, growing and reproducing at an astonishing rate.
Most people who didn’t want to subsist entirely on insect biscuits chose to head out into the wasteland to hunt these beasts, treating themselves to a rare proper meal.
Ever since renting a tier-one strength-and-speed ability from Chu Yi, Xue Xiaobai felt as though he’d been given a cheat code — tier-one mutants and beasts were no longer any trouble at all.
Coming across a small group of six tier-one mutants, he charged straight in, taking each one down with a single decisive strike.
His speed left Zhu Bei gasping in amazement, over and over.
“This is absolutely incredible!”
Xue Xiaobai had, since the age of ten, tagged along behind ability-user squads, helping collect crystal cores from the mutants they killed.
Crystal cores were embedded inside the heads of mutants and beasts — retrieving them required carefully cutting the skull open.
But ability users, busy fighting off enemies, hardly had time to dig out a core from every single mutant they killed, so that particular task always fell to ordinary people without abilities.
It had even given rise to an entire dedicated profession — crystal core collectors.
Xue Xiaobai had been doing this for six years now, already a seasoned hand, and knew precisely how to open a skull to extract a core in the fastest way possible.
Having just cleared six tier-one mutants in a mere ten minutes, Xue Xiaobai currently felt like his whole body was brimming with energy.
“I feel like… today’s an especially good day,” he said. “Even a tier-two mutant wouldn’t be a problem!”
“Maybe we could try one, but let’s not get too reckless about it,” Zhu Bei said. “At this rate, we can easily make at least 300 points today, no trouble at all.”
To claim he felt no envy at all would be a lie.
Even though he had his own speed ability, still stuck at tier two, his strength simply wasn’t enough to take down a tier-one mutant in a single strike.
A tier-two ability sounded impressive on paper, but in practice it was really only useful for fleeing danger.
Watching Xue Xiaobai clear six mutants in ten minutes now, that envy had reached its absolute peak.
But Zhu Bei told himself firmly — he absolutely could not let this push him toward taking any wrong turns.
Xue Xiaobai had been the very first guest to check into the inn, so of course the innkeeper would show him some special favor. As long as he himself kept staying at the inn, being the second guest to check in was bound to bring him some advantages too, eventually.
If he just kept at it persistently, surely he’d earn eligibility for ability rental of his own someday!
At this thought, Zhu Bei’s spirits lifted once more.
Thinking of his sister, gradually recovering — and thinking of a future where he too might rent an ability, maybe even a tier-two or tier-three one—
He no longer felt the road ahead looked so bleak after all.
The two of them roamed the wasteland, hunting down every mutant they came across, and by the end of the day, their haul was truly bountiful.
With his rented ability, Xue Xiaobai killed at a blistering pace, and the crystal cores had already filled up half his backpack.
“I think I finally understand why those ability users live so comfortably,” he said. “If you really put in the effort, you can kill quite a lot in a single day!”
Watching the sun sink toward the west, he started loading mutant corpses onto the truck.
Panlong Base had a dedicated facility that purchased mutant corpses, rendering them down into mutant-oil. A single mutant corpse fetched roughly 5 points.
They planned to earn points from that first, then convert them into crystal cores afterward.
Looking at the small mountain of corpses piling up on the truck bed, Zhu Bei fell silent for a moment before finally speaking up. “Liu Dao and the others being dead — his cousin in the inner city doesn’t know yet. If he finds out, things definitely won’t stay peaceful for us…”
Xue Xiaobai caught on immediately. “So we shouldn’t use this truck? But everyone’s trucks look pretty similar — how would they even be sure this was Liu Dao’s truck specifically?”
The bigger issue was that vehicles were expensive.
Abandoning this truck to go buy a new one entirely was simply out of the question for him.
He didn’t have that kind of money.
“Isn’t there a rental option? At the inn,” Zhu Bei said, recalling the underground parking lot that had appeared outside the inn that very morning. “If it’s cheap enough, we could rent one together — way more convenient than this truck. And this one, we could sell to a used-vehicle dealer back at the base, get a few crystal cores out of it too.”
Xue Xiaobai thought it over and figured that made sense.
Once the two of them had worked out the plan, they drove first toward the base to sell off the mutant corpses.
Along the way, Xue Xiaobai spoke up slowly. “Brother Bei, I’ve been thinking about something.”
Zhu Bei, driving, looking out at the endless expanse of wasteland ahead, felt a rare sense of ease settle over him.
Hearing his companion’s voice beside him, he paused briefly before asking, “What is it?”
“I was thinking, about switching to a twin room. What I mean is — instead of each of us renting our own single room, you and I could share one room together, and my mom and little Nan could share the other. Wouldn’t that make your rent cheaper? And it’d be more convenient too.”
Zhu Bei looked puzzled. “That could work, sure, but wouldn’t that make your own share more expensive? It was 130 before, and now you’d be paying 170.”
“It’s only 40 more points. If I put in real effort every day and kill more mutants, that’s completely doable! I killed fifty-eight tier-one mutants today alone — there’s no shortage of mutants to kill, new ones show up every single day, I can easily kill even more!” Xue Xiaobai said, a light shining in his eyes. “And besides, this way it’s more convenient too. My mom and little Nan sharing a room means they can look out for each other more easily.”
As he kept talking, he’d already begun imagining a bright future ahead.
Killing more mutants, earning more points, exchanging them for even more powerful abilities.
Giving his mother a better life.
If he’d never come across the inn, he’d probably still be living day to day with no security at all, forced to watch helplessly as his mother’s illness slowly took her life.
But now, thanks to the inn and its innkeeper, everything had finally turned around!
He would never, ever forget everything the innkeeper had done for him.