A Surface Girlfriend

Chen Xi stood at the door and peered into the yard. "How can you plow the land all by yourself and enjoy it so much? Is farming really that fun?"

"It's all right. Farming makes me happy," Xu Zhi said.

"Always trying to be funny. Does acting cheeky make you that happy?" Chen Xi shot Xu Zhi a glance, then froze in surprise again.

"How did you...?"

She stared blankly at Xu Zhi, as though she had been utterly shocked.

Xu Zhi instantly felt awful. Could she have caught me editing my photos again? I obviously changed it back. I still looked the same as before.

"What is it?" Xu Zhi asked, forcing himself to stay calm.

"I just feel like your temperament has changed. You seem so much more refined. You really turned on cheats, didn't you? I'm certain of it now." Chen Xi's eyes widened.

Although Xu Zhi had changed his appearance back, the detached aura he had gained after witnessing three mass extinctions and three world-ending disasters was difficult to erase. He merely touched her forehead. "Are you sick? Are you hallucinating? What nonsense are you talking about?"

Chen Xi was stunned. Could it really have been a hallucination? After being thoroughly talked around by him, she could only change the subject. "By the way, aren't you bored staying in the yard all day? Do you want to go shopping with me sometimes, maybe go on dates?"

Xu Zhi looked at her in surprise. "Hey, a date? Are you serious?"

"Of course." Chen Xi hesitated for a moment, then raised her chin high. She was not coy at all. "What about your previous girlfriend? The pretty one!"

Xu Zhi said, "We broke up. She was originally a colleague from work. After I got sick, I quit my job and broke up with her too."

"So you got a terminal illness at the height of your career, lost your job, and your girlfriend left you too. All you can do is return to the countryside and spend the rest of your life alone. That's pretty pitiful," Chen Xi said. "I can be your girlfriend and stay with you before you die."

"Pitiful?" Xu Zhi's eyes widened.

He had once thought he was pitiful too.

With little time left to live, his world had been gray. He really had fallen from the height of a flourishing career into rock bottom.

But now, his life was full of hope. After all, even with late-stage cancer, he could live for at least a few more months. That was equivalent to several thousand years in the Sandbox World. Over such a long span of millennia, he refused to believe he could not evolve a way to survive! "I feel sorry for you. Consider it fulfilling a childhood wish of mine."

Chen Xi had probably hesitated for a long time. Now, she did not hide anything. "I've thought it through! I'll stay with you before you die, fulfilling my wish while also making sure you aren't so lonely. I'll give you some warmth."

"I used to volunteer at a hospital. I'm very good at taking care of terminally ill patients." She held up her fingers and began counting. "I can cook for you, go shopping with you, talk with you, and make sure you're happier before the end."

Before the end? Xu Zhi was speechless. Then he looked at her with a faint smile. "Are you serious? You're going to fulfill a girlfriend's duties?"

Chen Xi shuddered and hurriedly backed away several steps, clutching her clothes with extreme vigilance. "What are you thinking? This is just a pure relationship! You're already dying, and you still want to ruin my innocence?"

Xu Zhi: "..."

So all those meals she had brought him, all the times she had looked around the place, had been part of some ulterior motive. Girls these days were even bold enough to chase boys.

Chen Xi hurriedly added, "People talk about surface brothers. We'll be surface lovers. Let's have a beautiful romance. If you don't say anything, I'll take that as you agreeing."

"Fine." Xu Zhi was quite straightforward.

He did not have especially strong feelings for the little girl. They were probably too familiar, so there was none of that heart-fluttering sensation. Still, he acted very calm.

"Then, in a few days, our high school classmates are having a summer reunion. Come with me."

Chen Xi counted on her fingers and smiled. "You're so handsome that people can't help looking twice. With this temperament of yours, you look even better now. Girls won't be able to take their eyes off you for even a moment. If I bring you along, I'll definitely look good. Everyone's eyes will be on you, and the girls will be insanely jealous of me."

Xu Zhi: "???"

So that was what this was about. Finding someone to make her look good was the main point, wasn't it?

"Let's go! Come shopping with me and buy clothes. For the class reunion, both of us need a set of respectable, expensive new clothes. We'll show them off and make them die of envy!" Chen Xi winked at Xu Zhi and casually slapped his shoulder. "You've been farming all this time, so you probably have plenty of money. You're dying anyway, so there's no use keeping it. We might as well live it up together."

Listen to that. Was that even something a person should say?

One look was all it took. I had fallen right into her trap.

This girl had come looking for him because she needed money for clothes and a boyfriend to make her look good.

Xu Zhi accompanied Chen Xi into town again on the Electric Scooter.

The two of them carefully watched their spending. After browsing more than half the street, he bought her a beautiful outfit for three hundred yuan. Under her guidance, he also bought himself an outfit for a little over three hundred yuan. Completely exhausted, they finally rode the Electric Scooter back to the countryside.

"I somehow ended up with a surface girlfriend."

Xu Zhi felt dazed, then laughed helplessly. "She's basically an extra little maid. This girl's enthusiasm probably won't last long, but if she can eagerly prepare meals for me every day, I won't have to keep going into the county to eat during the day."

After all, he had stomach cancer and needed to watch his diet. The food outside was too dirty and lacking in nutrition.

He did not care too much about that. He returned to the Sand Table in the yard and continued studying the Evil Eye creature from before. Although he had crushed the individual to death and driven it out, the species itself was still in the Sand Table.

It was now close to extinction.

And why wouldn't it be? Two-thirds of its body was made up of eyeballs. When a creature devoted all its nutrition to its eyes just to see a little more clearly, wasting most of its bodily energy, it was destined to be eliminated by nature.

"Does it have the potential to become an extraordinary species?" Xu Zhi asked.

The Zerg Mother Nest replied, "Yes. According to analysis, this creature has simple thoughts and is violent and evil, but because its eyeballs are enormous, its mental power is exceptionally strong."

If he left it alone, that clumsy, malformed species would certainly go extinct.

But perhaps it was like the Insect Ape, merely too weak in its early stages. If it did not go extinct, perhaps this malformed system of the "Big Eye Monster" species could develop and become powerful.

Should he put it into the Great Sandbox and give it a try? Xu Zhi thought for a moment and decided to introduce the species into the Great Sandbox.

He planned to carve out a swamp within the hundred-acre Great Sandbox. The environment there was too monotonous, after all. There were no swamplands and no deserts.

He would add a ten-square-meter swamp.

To ants, that was already a vast swamp comparable to a mountain range.

"As for how this terrain appeared? After the Great Flood, seawater accumulated and formed swampy mudflats. That counts as a natural swamp terrain. First comes the muddy terrain, sticky, boggy, and fertile. As for making it fertile, I need to find some fertilizer!"

Xu Zhi's first thought was farm manure.

In the countryside, many people fertilized their fields with their own feces. It was natural and pollution-free.

But he found it a little revolting. Just imagine it: when Insect Apes and all sorts of other races eventually explored that patch of Black Swamp mud, they would actually be wading through a Septic Tank. What a beautiful image!

Human waste was out of the question. So he went outside the village, found Chen Xi next door, and asked Li Shen for some rural fertilizer—chicken droppings and cow dung—saying that his fields needed fertilizing.

After bringing it back, he took a large shovel and began transforming an area of ten square meters.