My Romance Game Updated – Chapter 76
by Little PandaGroup Action
Within the base, Mu Ning and Qi Sheng were naturally recognized by everyone as the strongest espers. Therefore, if Mu Ning’s team or Qi Sheng’s faction took a trip to the beach and the 7th-order mutated octopus in the sea happened to vanish immediately afterward, it would naturally spark all sorts of bold speculations. People would easily link the disappearance of the octopus monster to such a formidable team.
Mu Ning didn’t want to expose the fact that Ren Chenxi possessed high-tier crystal cores, nor did she want Ren Chenxi drawing any unnecessary trouble within the base. Because of this, even though Chen Gu and the others were perfectly capable of going to the beach to gather or even catch mutated seafood, they had to wait until more survivors started frequenting the area.
Mu Ning had never planned to monopolize the beach anyway. Every so often, there were always some starving survivors in the base who grew desperate enough to brave the shore. Sooner or later, everyone would realize the greatest danger in the ocean was temporarily gone. It was a truth that simply couldn’t be hidden! Besides, with so many struggling people in the base who couldn’t get enough to eat day after day, she had to leave them a way out.
Since the survivors in the base would inevitably notice the mutated octopus’s anomaly, rather than sneaking off to the beach from the start and arousing suspicion, it was better to wait quietly until the main crowd started heading to the coast. It wouldn’t be too late to follow the masses then.
By that time, no one would connect the mutated octopus’s disappearance with Mu Ning’s team. Everyone would just be thrilled to have new food to fill their stomachs, making wild, imaginative1 guesses about why the beast had vanished.
Hearing Mu Ning’s reasoning, the group immediately understood. No one clamored to visit the beach that afternoon anymore; everyone accepted Mu Ning’s arrangement without a single objection, Ren Chenxi included.
Ren Chenxi had to admit that, when she was actually being serious, Mu Ning’s mind was quite sharp and clever.
That afternoon, having received fifteen bottles of gasoline from Ren Chenxi, Chen Gu and the others enthusiastically drove the bus even further past the outskirts of the base, going all the way to a neighboring town to hunt. Returning with a rather decent haul, they opened the BBQ stall as usual that night, and once again, all 500 meat skewers sold out completely.
They continued selling barbecue like this for four consecutive days. On the fifth day, a major customer visited their BBQ stall, bringing their own ingredients.
“Boss, could you help us grill these razor clams and oysters? We’ll give you a ten crystal core processing fee for each one~”
Hearing this, the ‘head chef’ in charge of grilling, Huo Keyu, quickly exchanged glances with Zhang Tongqi and the others helping beside her.
Someone had finally gone to the beach to gather seafood!!!
As over a dozen massive shellfish were dropped onto Huo Keyu’s BBQ stall, the other survivors lined up nearby didn’t even mind the group cutting in line. Instead, they were incredibly intrigued and started chatting them up. And the topic of conversation, naturally, revolved around why these people had risked going to the beach and the thrilling details of their adventure.
This was a small team of barely ten people, a mix of ordinary survivors and espers. A minor squad like this normally wouldn’t dare hunt too far from the base. That day, they hadn’t managed to hunt any mutated beasts nearby all morning. Instead, they had been chased by over a dozen zombies that popped out of nowhere, leaving them howling in panic. Exhausted and starving, someone in the group had angrily made an offhand complaint—since everywhere was dangerous anyway, they might as well test their luck at the beach. At least taking a gamble at the beach yielded results. Out here, even if they managed to spot a wild pheasant, they had to fight other survivor teams for it.
Thus, battered by prolonged hunger and the frustration of coming up empty-handed, this incredibly demoralized group actually gave in to despair and collectively agreed to the proposal of gathering seafood at the beach. At the very least, if they braved the beach, there would be all sorts of seafood scattered across the sand for the picking!
Under the grip of starvation, the temptation of food was infinitely magnified. At the time, their minds had been completely filled with visions of large crabs scuttling across the beach and various shellfish buried in the sand. So much so, that they completely ignored the threat of the 7th-order mutated octopus in the ocean.
Fortunately, the 7th-order octopus monster that kept everyone on edge never appeared.
The group had stayed on a stretch of sand very, very far from the water, cautiously luring out mutated crabs and digging for mutated shells in the sand. They spent the entire afternoon walking on eggshells, yet the 7th-order octopus monster never showed up. In fact, faced with such a bountiful harvest, they nearly lost all sense of danger. They forgot about the mutated octopus in the sea, forgot the perils of the apocalypse. If a cautious member hadn’t spoken up to remind them that it was getting dark, they probably would have kept digging for seafood indefinitely!
Naturally, right up until the group safely left the beach, the legendary, highly dangerous mutated octopus—capable of wiping out multiple esper teams—never surfaced.
Of course, when these people bragged to others, they certainly didn’t frame it like that.
After all, they were people who cared about their pride. If they told everyone their group had just stumbled into some dumb luck2 and spent a smooth afternoon picking up seafood without encountering any danger, there would be nothing to boast about. The atmosphere was lively, with various esper teams—big and small—gathered around the BBQ stall. Amid the intense aroma of the food and the jeering encouragement of the survivors, the group inevitably exaggerated the details of their afternoon trip.
For instance, they claimed they had been attacked by a 6th-order crab by the sea.
And they claimed they had been chased by several 5th-order mutated fish.
The most outrageous claim was that they had seen a shark in the ocean—and from the looks of it, a high-order shark.
According to their story, they had started fleeing the beach the very second they spotted the shark, giving it no chance to rush ashore and attack them.
Listening to the spectacle from the sidelines, Ren Chenxi only found it amusing. However, she was more than happy for them to describe the reality of the beach as outrageously as possible. That way, no one would connect the vanished octopus monster in the ocean to her and Mu Ning.
That evening, the 500 meat skewers at the BBQ stall sold out as usual. At the same time, they helped process 100 portions of shellfish. One hundred portions, not one hundred pieces. Offering a mere ten Level 1 crystal cores to cook a single massive razor clam or oyster—one had to admit, this esper team had some very wishful thinking.
The team had gathered a huge haul that afternoon, but returning to the base exhausted and starving, they had no energy left to fuss with dinner themselves. Wanting a good meal to reward their efforts, they instantly thought of the BBQ stall currently booming in the base. Even though these people had earned quite a few crystal cores from the seafood today, they were used to hard times. Driven by their mindset to scrimp and save wherever possible and take advantage whenever they could, they wanted to provide the ingredients and have the BBQ stall cook them, paying only the price of a single meat skewer as a labor fee.
Although the BBQ skewers had generous chunks of meat, a single skewer only contained four pieces of meat! The sheer size of one of these razor clams or oysters was equivalent to who knew how many meat skewers. Thus, the group was immediately met with a bout of mockery from Zhang Tongqi. Goaded by the jeers of the surrounding onlookers, they could only bite the bullet and agree to chop up each razor clam, calculating the cost by individual portions.
As a result, a single gigantic oyster or razor clam was forcibly divided into ten portions. Huo Keyu, Du Tian, Yue Yue, and the others cooked ten whole pieces in total, billing them for 100 portions.
Naturally, the extra 1,000 Level 1 crystal cores earned that night weren’t enough to make Chen Gu and the others particularly thrilled. What did excite them was the pattern: whenever a survivor team successfully braved the beach, the very next day, a restless fervor would sweep the base, prompting other esper teams to entertain thoughts of testing their own luck by the sea.
They waited patiently for another two days. On the third night, the BBQ stall welcomed its second major customer bringing their own ingredients. This time, the customer was far more straightforward, outright offering 100 Level 1 crystal cores as a fee to cook a single piece of seafood. Furthermore, this was an all-esper team with considerable strength. All twenty members of their team happily feasted on an incredibly delicious piece of grilled seafood prepared by Huo Keyu.
With survivors returning from the beach with massive hauls twice in a row, by the fourth day, four different teams formed an alliance and headed to the coast together. That night, Huo Keyu’s BBQ stall helped cook seafood, and in addition to their fixed 500 meat skewers, they raked in 10,000 Level 1 crystal cores just from the cooking fees. At the same time, the survivors in the base all crowded around the BBQ stall that evening, listening to the various rumors these teams brought back from the beach.
One of those rumors was told with such increasing conviction that by the fifth day, over ten teams grouped up to brave the beach. Chen Gu and the others naturally wouldn’t miss this perfect opportunity to follow the crowd. Under Mu Ning’s leadership, they also made a trip to the sea.
On the way to the beach, many survivors repeatedly asked about the rumor they had heard the night before, a trace of anxiety in their voices.
“Hey, is it true? Is the 7th-order mutated octopus in the sea really dead? Was it really eaten by an even higher-level mutated shark?”
“If that’s the case, isn’t everyone afraid of being attacked by the mutated shark?”
“Oh, come on! The mutated octopus attacks way faster! Plus, its eight octopus tentacles are long and thick—one sweep and an entire team gets wiped out. As for the mutated shark, heh, with its massive size and that highly visible dorsal fin, we’ll spot it the second it breaches the surface. We can just run the moment we see it. By the time the shark charges ashore, we’ll have long since escaped to safety.”
Spurred by the rumor of the mutated octopus being eaten by a mutated shark, and the general consensus that escaping a shark was easier than escaping an octopus, a growing number of base survivors began setting foot on the once-forbidden sands.
The moment the beach became crowded with survivors picking up seafood, Mu Ning grew impatient. Ren Chenxi also disliked competing with a massive crowd for scavenged seafood. Since she wasn’t short on gasoline anyway, she suggested to Mu Ning that they drive further down the coastline to an empty stretch of beach.
Right now, the majority of survivors in the base were extremely stingy with their fuel and reluctant to drive. For a trip to the beach like today’s—roughly over an hour’s drive from the base—many teams had woken up at the crack of dawn to pedal over on their modified three-wheeled flatbed carts. Even poorer teams without any vehicles at all had started walking before the sun even rose.
Very few survivors had the luxury of acting like Mu Ning, who, relying entirely on Ren Chenxi’s Greasy Card, capriciously detoured to a more distant beach purely because the main one was too crowded. Very few, but that didn’t mean there were none. For instance, when Mu Ning finally selected a stretch of beach that looked decent, a single glance revealed a very familiar RV. That’s right, it was also an RV, albeit not as massive or luxurious as the Fan family’s RV.
This RV belonged to Qi Sheng. Unexpectedly, even a base leader as cautious as Qi Sheng couldn’t resist the temptation of seafood and had personally come to the beach to gather it.
“Forget it, let’s drive a little further down!”
With Qi Sheng’s people around, and considering how incredibly crafty Qi Sheng himself was, using Ren Chenxi’s spatial esper ability would be far too inconvenient.
Thus, just as Qi Sheng spotted Mu Ning’s bus from afar—and before he even had time to worry about whether this brutal squad would compete with his brothers for the 3rd-order and 4th-order seafood—their bus simply drove further away.
Fine, they don’t even deign to fight us for the seafood anyway.
The author has something to say:
Why has the pandemic suddenly spread so much across the country again! Shenzhen is in lockdown now, right? Everyone needs to protect themselves well, please stay safe! Absolutely do not get infected! They say that even if you recover from COVID, there are a lot of really bizarre lingering aftereffects…
Footnotes
- An idiom (tiān mǎ xíng kōng), literally meaning 'a heavenly steed soaring across the skies.' It is used to describe thoughts, ideas, or writing that are bold, unconstrained, and wildly imaginative.
- A common Chinese slang term (zǒu gǒushǐ yùn), literally 'stepping in dog shit luck.' It means having incredibly good, unearned, or dumb luck.
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