RHWHEG – Chapter 85 Food City

Yu Qunqing dumped all the shelter’s work onto Tang Qianjiang and went off to ponder the one thing he would never understand: humans.

“Why did they have to go to the Fourth Ring? Aren’t their feet freezing?” Yu Qunqing tried checking the game logs. Sure enough, he found one or two conversation records.

“It’s getting colder and colder! We have to support the Catastrophe Community! Charge! Go feed the Fourth Ring disaster stones so it can grow!”

Yu Qunqing: ?
Had the system suddenly turned into a baby being collectively fed by everyone?

He continued reviewing the process. The road from the community to the Fourth Ring had become much safer, but with the bitter cold and the long distance, how exactly had the residents made the journey?

He switched between multiple game perspectives and finally pieced together the truth bit by bit.

The community residents had made use of the remains of the Eight-Legged Frostfall, discovering a shortcut that led straight to the Fourth Ring.

But the route was far from smooth. First, the interior of the remains was filled with barbs. The residents ran simulations countless times before finding a way to harvest the barbs quickly. Second came the ventilation problem: the tunnel was far too long. If someone went in and suffocated before reaching the end, what then?

The residents proposed two solutions. One was to pass through at high speed—race to the end before oxygen deprivation set in, and no one would suffocate! The second was to punch ventilation holes along the way. Since they hadn’t successfully reached the Fourth Ring yet, they naturally chose the second option.

The remains of the Eight-Legged Frostfall were sturdy, but there was nothing that the combination of superpowers and high technology couldn’t solve—and if there was, just add some catastrophe tech. So they began drilling a ventilation hole every two hundred meters.

The third difficulty—and the most severe one—was the cold.

This time, the residents thought even longer, testing and discarding countless plans, until someone finally had a flash of inspiration.

“We can make something like a heated kang setup. Burn a fire on one side of the tunnel, then use earth for insulation. As for the smoke, we can vent it out through those small barbs we collected earlier!”

Those barbs happened to be hollow, making them perfect as exhaust pipes.

Thus, another round of experiments began. The biggest issue with this plan was fuel—what could burn for that long? They searched everywhere and eventually found discarded coal at an old coal plant.

Fuel was also scarce in the community. So time and again, they overturned previous plans. While building the road, they adopted an energy-saving heated-kang mode—just enough to maintain a basic temperature—saving the remaining coal for community use. Once they confirmed the road was passable, they could switch to the “run fast enough and death can’t catch me” mode. It was said that the Fourth Ring had an auto repair shop, and most of them had obtained the benefit of a “one-time repair right.” Now it finally came in handy.

Through repeatedly overturning their own plans, humanity found the most unbelievable path of all, arriving safely and intact at the center of the Fourth Ring.

Directly overhead, the main body of the Eight-Legged Frostfall loomed like a meteor about to crash down.

Within the frozen commercial city, they searched for a spark of hope.

Thump! Thump!

They pounded hard on the ice encasing the buildings. It was far too cold here! They had to get inside quickly and find work!

“I think I understand now…” Ever since the system started learning from the AI, it couldn’t help spouting something profound now and then. “The essence of humanity… is creating original games…”

“Player! There’s a limit to reskinned mini-games—I’m done stitching them together!” the system declared grandly. “I’m going to eat more things!”

“Alright, alright.” Yu Qunqing reached out and gave the air a few affectionate ruas. “I’ll be looking forward to your original game.”

Then he asked, “Can you manage your mini-games better now? For example, adjust the temperature a bit?”

System: “Games are based on logic. I can’t violate logic. But I can maintain the game’s appearance.”

The next second, the ice covering every building in the Fourth Ring vanished. People entered the Food City and the auto repair shop smoothly, warming up a little. If they could activate the shops, the built-in temperature regulation would warm them even more. Yu Qunqing’s in-game mailbox instantly hit 99+, all of them job applications from residents.

“O great Catastrophe Community, please grant me the right to work here! I’ve been a hotpot restaurant server for eight years, skilled at hosting public birthday celebrations for every customer, with an excellent service attitude! Please accept my résumé!”

“All-knowing and almighty Great Catastrophe, I am your faithful believer. I respect crocodiles in my daily life, love small animals, and actively cooperate with the community’s home-buying activities. Please allow me to serve in the noodle shop and offer you the joy of my hometown cuisine!”

The applications were all well-reasoned—though the wording felt a bit odd…

Yu Qunqing approved them all, while also stating that if the temperature dropped below a certain point, or after nightfall, they were not allowed to come to work.

At last, the vast Fourth Ring grew lively.

The auto repair shop could operate unmanned, so no job positions were opened. One wrecked car after another was delivered, linked together, and sent back. This made travel between the community and the Fourth Ring far more convenient! They just needed to plan a dual-lane road to avoid head-on collisions.

The Food City had four floors in total. For now, two floors were sporadically open. Each shop required a full staff—owner, servers, and chefs—before it could be activated. Once activated, the shop would receive a daily supply of initial ingredients. To get more, a shop either had to reach a certain revenue threshold and upgrade, or supply ingredients itself.

Currently open were a hotpot restaurant, a wide-noodle shop, a dessert stall, a mixed-grain pancake stand, and a barbecue restaurant. The Fourth Ring merchants even set up a small publicity team to draw advertisements for their shops. The hand-drawn ads were a bit crude, but simply listing what kinds of meat they could cook was more than tempting enough in the apocalypse. The publicity team immediately sent the flyers to the community, bringing back orders like falling snowflakes.

The first business the newly opened shops handled was—takeout.

“Hotpot delivery… what should we use to pack it?” the manager pondered. “Plastic containers straight away? Or should we cook everything first and send it without the broth?”

“Are we going to keep doing takeout? It’s still pretty cold,” someone asked casually.

Wen Zhi, the spokesperson of the Fourth Ring merchants’ association, answered firmly, “This place will become even livelier sooner or later… just as spring will surely come.”

“Humans” were indeed an uncontrollable variable in the game. Yu Qunqing had no reason to stop them, so he could only play through Match-Three and Penguin Farm and other games to maintain the community’s daily operations. In the second server of Match-Three, he drew another three-star building: a “Clothing Specialty Store”—somewhat useful, but not useful enough.

“As expected, you can’t rely on games to draw a hospital…” Yu Qunqing quickly placed the new building next to the zoo, then zoomed in on the Food City icon.

To be honest, after last night’s charcoal-grilled meat… he was actually feeling a bit hungry.

“Brother Yu!”

Tang Qianjiang suddenly shouted.

“Some ability users and researchers downstairs say they want to submit résumés…”

……

Night fell. The shelter’s medical camp was upgraded once more. People received treatment in a cleaner environment. The heating was strong, so no one had to fall asleep enduring pain and cold.

“Strange. Our border defenses took forever just to reach LV2, but as soon as the new administrator took office, so many areas upgraded. Did our shelter really have that much electricity? And there are so many new machines, plus higher waste utilization. Guess that’s why they say the new administrator is a professional.”

“But the research center and ability hall are closed. There aren’t many places to spend credit points. I don’t even know what working for credits is for… sigh, we’ll take it one step at a time.”

The two chatting figures gradually walked away, hurrying back to the residential area. After dark, the shelter had almost no light sources, and they didn’t want to crack their heads open from a fall.

Inside the medical camp, Yu Yanlan’s attention couldn’t help drifting along with their conversation. Ever since the new administrator was announced, the research center and ability hall hadn’t reopened, and Yu Qunqing hadn’t appeared in public either. Could he be the new administrator? His companions showed up quite often, though—for example, the young people who dragged others off to solitary confinement.

Like Li Yuebei in front of him.

Li Yuebei didn’t bother hiding the fact that he had defected from the shelter to the community. Using connections, he even obtained the highest level of access to the medical camp and openly began conducting research. His first project concerned the parasitism of the “Book of Parasites.”

“This catastrophe hides inside the human brain, so no one noticed anything abnormal about his radiation levels. They thought Han Shuzhu was still an ordinary person without abilities. Humanity’s research into catastrophes is indeed still very shallow…”

In the medical camp, a group of previously parasitized people were bound. Li Yuebei used his ability to slice their brains into 24-hour continuous sections for display, then had Yu Yanlan use “Liquefaction” to precisely flush the foreign matter hidden in their brains out through the eyes, ears, mouth, and nose. The process was extremely painful. Yu Yanlan exhausted his abilities several times before completely clearing the parasites.

“This is a catastrophe with extremely high activity. It’s tiny in size, can rapidly reproduce disaster stones, and then quickly be born from the disaster-stone state, clinging to human brain matter to absorb nutrients.” Li Yuebei took the liquid for analysis and concluded, “Even after liquefaction, it still maintains vital signs.”

“It should be a mental-type catastrophe… capable of disrupting the host’s perception of the world. Just my guess.” Li Yuebei reasoned based on the testimonies of several parasitized victims.

Yu Yanlan suddenly asked, “So was Han Shuzhu already dead long ago?”

He recalled the first time he met Han Shuzhu—how warm and friendly he seemed, and how he’d always treated him as a friend.

“That depends on how you define ‘human.’ Do you think the human Yu Qunqing is dead?” Li Yuebei replied. “Han Shuzhu harmed many people. But you can’t attribute everything to the subjective will of the human body or the survival instinct of the catastrophe. Often, when humans encounter hardship, it’s simply because… it was destined.”

After saying this, Li Yuebei himself was a bit surprised by his conclusion, and added, “Well, the end of science is metaphysics. Looks like I’ve fallen to that level too.” He continued with his experiment.

“So where did Han Shuzhu go?”

Elsewhere, Yu Qunqing assigned new tasks to the idle ability users and researchers. Then, together with She Lulang, he patrolled the surrounding area, searching for missing shelter residents by following bent branches and footprints. They found nothing, and the patrol gradually turned into a stroll.

Yu Qunqing told She Lulang all of Doctor Chen’s secrets and commented, “This world is really fascinating. Maybe humans in the catastrophe era need a new name—broad-sense humans and narrow-sense humans—to accurately describe this mixed concept of humanity.”

She Lulang said, “Human evolution might head in the same direction as your ability.” He was merely guessing that humans might one day coexist peacefully with certain catastrophes.

But Yu Qunqing’s expression suddenly turned strange. He hesitated and said, “My ability is… a bit special. The system started out as just a small disaster stone, then it ate my ability. And then… it became very special.”

Why did being honest with the person you liked about having a ‘kid’ make you feel especially guilty?

Probably because they were still in a Platonic stage of love…