Ji Li followed Old Pengka out of the collapsed building and, after a moment’s thought, took out a bottled drink and handed it to the old man.
“Old Pengka, there’s one more thing I’d like to ask you. What’s a Cold Front Passage?”
Old Pengka took the drink, twisted it open, and took a sip, his voice brightening with delight. “This is good! Got more? I’ll buy.”
Ji Li actually had plenty, but they were all in the big Wristband; the small wristbands’ limited space held only a dozen or so bottles.
So he answered vaguely with a question. “How many do you want? At what price?”
Old Pengka smacked his lips, savoring the flavor, and thought for a moment. “Ten points a bottle. That’s a fair price, right? How many have you got?”
Ten points? That was indeed good. Ji Li almost blurted “however many you want, I’ve got,” but caught himself in time. After some mental arithmetic, he said:
“I don’t have much on me. These can’t be opened and stored in the Wristband or they lose their flavor, and the little bottles take up a lot of space. I’ve only got twelve. If you like them, I’ll sell you ten—but I don’t want points. Just get me one stalk of Ice Crystal Grass.”
“Deal.” Old Pengka pocketed the drink and returned to the topic at hand. “A Cold Front Passage is a climate phenomenon unique to this planet. Are you cold right now?”
When Ji Li nodded, Old Pengka sneered. “And this is nothing. A Cold Front Passage—that’s real cold. When it hits, the temperature instantly plunges to over eighty below zero. If you haven’t built up your insulation and stockpiled energy for heating before then, just wait to freeze to death, slow and alive!”
“Eighty below?!” Ji Li was stunned. “How long does it last?”
“Varies. Never more than twenty-four hours at most; as short as ten-odd hours.” For whatever reason, Old Pengka was quite thorough.
“A Cold Front Passage is a bit like a gust of wind sweeping through—except this wind is brutally cold. Sometimes it blows longer, sometimes shorter, but once it passes, it’s gone. It doesn’t circle back.”
“Then when’s the next Cold Front Passage? How do you know it’s coming?” Ji Li pressed.
Old Pengka tilted his head back to study the sky, muttering, “Last one was seven days ago… Cold Fronts come roughly every twelve days… so the next should be in five days. As for how to tell—watch the flags.”
Old Pengka raised a hand to indicate their surroundings. “The Guilds erect flags around the ruins. A Cold Front flash-freezes them, fixing them in place. That’s the signal.”
At that, he snorted coldly. “Some young people, who knows what they’re thinking, deliberately go out on that day and only turn back once they see the flags frozen stiff—racing the Cold Front for thrills. There’s something wrong with their brains.”
Ji Li nodded in deep agreement. With the Inn now in sight, he considered a moment and said, “Since the Cold Front is still three days out, I’m thinking of browsing the market, seeing if I can pick up anything useful. Care to come?”
Old Pengka waved a hand. “I’m hungry. I’m going back to eat. You remember the way, right?”
Ji Li nodded, and the two parted ways. Ji Li headed for the market alone while Old Pengka descended the stairs to the great hall, sat down at the round table, and removed his mask and scarf.
Built underground, the hall was considerably warmer than outside, holding steady at around minus ten-something degrees. On a planet where daytime temperatures stayed below minus thirty year-round and nights could plunge past minus sixty, that counted as warm and pleasant.
So Old Pengka didn’t bother returning to his room. Basking in the glow of the Mutant Beast eyes, he took out the instant noodles and drink Ji Li had given him and ate with great relish—a bite of noodles, a swig of drink.
Just as Old Pengka was crunching through his noodles, a man suddenly appeared beside him, pulled out a chair, sat down, and asked with a smile:
“Why are you alone? Where’s that new lodger?”
Old Pengka glanced at him. “Gone to browse the market.”
The man nodded, then asked, “Will he come back?”
Old Pengka snorted. “If not here, then where? Back to his Safe House to lead the Guild crowd around by the nose?”
“True.” The man smiled. Seeing Old Pengka’s sour face, he said playfully, “Don’t be mad. You know my field got destroyed by the Rats. The Main Quest reward is out of reach for sure—I have to make up my losses somehow.”
“And whose fault is that?” Old Pengka slammed the drink bottle down on the table with a bang. “You were too greedy! You kept putting off submitting the quest because you insisted on saving seeds to expand your planting—and lost everything!”
Slandered to his face, the man didn’t get angry at all, just smiled and admitted it. “Yes, all my greed. So bear with me—I leave in two days. You wouldn’t want me unable to pay my room fees, would you?”
Old Pengka said nothing, biting off a piece of noodle cake coated in powder.
Seeing his silence, the man smiled in satisfaction, stood, and patted Old Pengka’s shoulder. “Thanks, boss.”
With that, he looked up toward a certain room, met the eyes peeking through the door crack, and vanished on the spot.
Only after the man disappeared did Old Pengka swallow the noodle he’d been chewing forever, pick up the drink to take a sip—and find the liquid inside frozen solid.
Old Pengka stared at the bottle for a while, cursed “this damned weather,” gathered his leftovers, and returned to his room.
Time crawled by. As the temperature sank past minus forty and Ji Li still hadn’t shown, the man lost his patience, blinked down to the hall, and his accomplice opened the door and came out as well.
“What’s going on? Could he have noticed something?” the accomplice asked.
The man shook his head. “Unlikely. We never showed ourselves. Even if he’s suspicious, it’d be Old Pengka he suspects, not us.”
“Could Old Pengka have said something?”
The man hesitated, then rejected the guess anyway.
“Impossible. Old Pengka wouldn’t dare even hint at it. This isn’t our first time doing this. If the mark reported us to the Guild, Old Pengka would be expelled from the Safe Zone too. The Guild treats plundering as a resource; they’d never tolerate anyone poaching on their turf.”
“Can’t be this, can’t be that—don’t tell me that kid’s some hidden master?”
“Can’t rule it out.”
“…Damn it. Watched a Fat Sheep slip right through the Guild’s fingers and all we got was a whiff! Better off not knowing!”
The accomplice stormed back into his room, slamming the door. The man glanced at the stairs, still unwilling to give up, went back to his room, wrapped on scarf and hat, and left the Inn.
Only after the man’s footsteps on the stairs faded did Old Pengka relax and take a sip of the remaining drink.
In his room, the temperature held at around plus ten degrees; the drink had long since thawed, even gone lukewarm. The source of all that heat was nothing more than a glowing light tube about a meter long.
It stood upright in the center of the room, its base connected to a machine resembling a shrunken suitcase—rounded corners, silver-white—with a glass tube about five centimeters thick and thirty centimeters long slanted into one corner, its orange-red liquid half gone.
The machine ran almost silently, which was why Old Pengka had heard every word of the conversation between the man and his companion.
Watching the man’s plan come to nothing, he chuckled softly. “Not entirely stupid, at least.”
Meanwhile, the not-entirely-stupid Ji Li sat in the Safe House’s driver’s seat, thinking through his next move.
He’d never intended to stay at Old Pengka’s Inn from the start. He’d only pretended to agree in order to gather information, then used “browsing the market” as an excuse, found an unoccupied corner, took out the Safe House, and drove it out of the Safe Zone.
His reasoning was simple: with a Safe House of his own and a Camouflage Card this effective, why spend eleven hundred points on an Inn?
He didn’t even know if he could earn that much!
Food and Water was worthless. Energy was hard currency, but producing too much of it at once made him look too much like a Fat Sheep. After weighing everything, he decided to skip out on the bill.
But this drive wasn’t aimless wandering—he had come to the Mandalay Plantation Old Pengka had mentioned.
Partly to gauge how brutal the fighting was and whether he could stomach it; partly to scavenge.
But before the car even got there, Ji Li swerved and headed for the plain beside the canyon.
For one simple reason: too many people, and the battlefield was far too gruesome.
Who knew what weapons the Natives had deployed—the entire canyon had been blown to pieces, even the Frozen River stripped to its riverbed, blue ice shards scattered everywhere.
The wounded were being carried out of the canyon wave after wave, and every so often the words “Execute Medical Service” could be heard.
There were plenty of corpses too, all piled at the canyon mouth, next to scattered supplies and a small patch of Ice Crystal Grass.
Through his high-powered binoculars, Ji Li finally got a clear look at what this hundred-point treasure actually looked like.
Slender, elongated leaves interspersed with a few thin, curling tendrils, about as long as a person’s palm, the whole thing crystalline and translucent, a beautiful translucent white.
Hard to imagine that the Natives would kill so many people just to exterminate something this fragile. And this fight-to-the-death atmosphere left Ji Li in a dilemma.
Abandon the quest? Looking at his RV with nothing in it, he couldn’t bear to give up the [Safe House Construction Module] in the Main Quest rewards.
Defy the ban? He genuinely lacked the ability to go head-to-head with the Natives.
Fortunately, on exactly this kind of situation, the Great Leader had long since rendered his verdict.
“It’s just guerrilla warfare, isn’t it? That’s our people’s time-honored specialty!” Ji Li smacked the steering wheel, resolve firming.
First, find one stalk of Ice Crystal Grass, then plant the seeds it bred in different places, spreading the risk.
With luck, he’d harvest a large quantity in ten days. Even if luck ran out and the Natives found him, as long as one stalk slipped through undetected, he could still complete the quest.
Mind made up, Ji Li grabbed Eno from the console and poked its screen. “Eno, want an upgrade?”
Eno: [••]!
Eno: [☆☆]
“Great. Then starting tomorrow, we’re going to work hard on memorizing routes, okay?”
Ji Li flashed the proprietary “I believe in you” smile that bosses reserved for hustling their workhorses—promising nothing, yet successfully obtaining a little robot pumped full of adrenaline.
Eno: [☆☆]ゝ
Navigation: Get!
Ji Li smiled in satisfaction, set Eno back on the Charging Dock, and got up to fix himself something simple to fill his stomach.
By now complete darkness had fallen outside, and the temperature had dropped from the minus-forties into the minus-fifties, marching steadily toward minus sixty.
Fortunately, the upgraded Safe House was well insulated against the cold; all components ran normally, and between the air conditioning and the electric heater, the indoor temperature held steady at around twenty degrees.
Maintaining such a high temperature in this environment burned fuel at an astonishing rate. If not for the fifteen hundred–plus liters of gasoline in the tank and his Duplication Skill as a safety net, he wouldn’t have dared such luxury.
Gasoline was sufficient for now—no rush to duplicate. The wristbands could wait too. He’d duplicate the [Safe House Camouflage Card] and [Hallucinogen] first.
The Camouflage Card probably couldn’t be exploited for bugs, same as the Repair Card, but the Hallucinogen should work—better to stock a few extra. Then he’d consider duplicating wristbands and gasoline.
Two uses of the skill a day was still too few. He had no idea what it would take to upgrade it.
“At least give me a hint…” Ji Li sighed, tossing a towel into a stainless steel basin to scrub it.
As he washed, a warm stream suddenly flowed from his nose. Blood-red liquid dripped into the steel basin and quickly dissolved into the water, vanishing.
Almost the instant the blood flowed, a burst of mechanical sounds came from the driver’s area.
Eno: [⊙⊙]
Eno: ヾ[ಠಠ]ﾉﾞ
“It’s fine, Eno. Just a nosebleed. Papa’s fine.” Ji Li tilted his head back to stop the flow, wrung out the towel by feel to dry his hands, then stuffed tissue into his nostrils.
Only once the blood was plugged and wiped away did Eno calm down—though its expression remained full of worry.
Eno: [ಠಠ]
Seeing this, Ji Li walked over and patted its head, comforting it in a muffled voice. “It’s just the air being too dry. The lining of my nose cracked. It’s nothing. Relax.”
Eno: [˘˘]
Watching Eno relax and nuzzle his hand, Ji Li felt warm inside—and a little guilty, because Eno was this worried purely because of his earlier reaction.
In the Safe Zone, Ji Li had kept his scarf, mask, and goggles on, his face hidden completely. Only after returning to the RV and turning on the heater did he peel off the layers one by one.
But when he removed the mask, he felt an odd pulling sensation on his skin—the mask seemed stuck to his face.
He’d assumed it was condensed breath freezing, but one look in the rearview mirror told him it was blood.
He’d had a nosebleed at some point. The mask had kept it off his scarf, but dried blood crusted his cheeks, lips, and chin.
With a face like a murder victim’s, it was hard not to let his imagination run wild—especially since he had no injuries, no illness; he’d just gone out shopping and come back looking like this.
Radiation. Terminal illness. Not long to live. The guesses piled up one after another, scaring Ji Li half to death as he wiped away blood with wet wipes, sobbing uncontrollably.
He was only nineteen. He’d never even been in a relationship; his first kiss and first night were still unspent when the Game yanked him to this godforsaken place. Living on the edge of death every day was bad enough, and now he was going to die for no reason at all?
