The Husband Who Ate Batteries?

Shen Jin rubbed his eyes as he walked into the basement "Secret Room."

Calling it a secret room was a stretch. It was really just a hidden door that could be opened with a key.

If there were any skilled craftsmen, like Xiao Yang trapped underground, it would be completely useless against them.

"What should I do with those three? Handle them like the last few? Or..."

Shen Jin pondered for a moment and decided to starve them for a few meals first, weakening them a little.

Otherwise, if that muscle-bound guy got any strange ideas, things would go badly.

"After all..."

Shen Jin sighed, seemingly recalling something.

"After all, disposing of corpses is a real pain."

And in the apocalypse, it was bad for mental health too.

You had to admit, Shen Jin and Xiao Yang thought alike. They both placed great importance on mental health.

The Secret Room was small.

It had less than twenty square meters of space and contained only a few basic personal items.

A sofa, a dining table, a bed, and a large mural.

Shen Jin carefully crossed the center of the room without touching anything.

He stopped before the mural and gently took it down.

The instant the mural landed in his hands, it shrank into an exquisite model and was absorbed into his palm.

Obtained: Painting ×1

Shen Jin was unfazed. An Iron Pickaxe appeared out of thin air in his hand.

Then he started smashing the wall!

After a few swings of the pickaxe, the wall turned into an exquisite little model and fell to the ground.

Once he was done smashing, Shen Jin held out his hand and sucked it in.

Obtained: Cobblestone ×12

The broken stones all passed through Shen Jin's palm and entered his inventory.

As usual, he glanced at his inventory.

It had thirty-six slots. The bottom row held all kinds of commonly used tools:

Iron Sword, Iron Shovel, Iron Axe, Iron Pickaxe, Flint and Steel, Compass, Torch ×64, Chest ×64.

The row above held Compressed Biscuits ×64, Beef Jerky ×64, Bottled Water ×64, Wood Log ×64, Cobblestone ×12.

"Sigh, I have to use a third of my slots for supplies every time, so I can carry back much less stuff. But for safety's sake, if I ever get trapped somewhere, at least I can start over."

That whole stack of Wood Logs was his confidence to start over.

With the My World Auxiliary System, wood was the beginning of everything!

As long as he had wood, he could make a Crafting Table and a full set of wooden tools.

If he got trapped in the wilderness, he could even directly build a little box house to shelter from wind and rain.

Oh, and he could burn Charcoal for warmth while he was at it.

November in the north was already getting cold.

A passage wide enough for three people to walk abreast appeared before Shen Jin.

The passage sloped downward at a forty-five-degree angle.

Clap! Clap!

Shen Jin clapped his hands, and the sensor lights on both sides of the passage lit up.

After entering the passage, Shen Jin flicked his finger.

Like spatial magic, a tiny Cobblestone model shot from his hand and expanded against the wind.

By the time it landed on the ground, it had become a neat, solid one-meter-by-one-meter stone block.

And it was completely undamaged!

It was as if the pickaxe strikes and cracks from before had all been an illusion.

This was Shen Jin's Blockify Ability!

Everything could be blockified. Shen Jin could completely smash anything into small blocks, as long as his tool was hard enough.

These objects became small models with almost no damage and could be stored in Shen Jin's backpack or special Chests.

But no one else could restore those small models to their original forms.

The backpack was even more absurdly advanced!

Shen Jin felt that it was a treasure left behind on Earth by some great cultivation civilization.

No matter how heavy something was, once it entered his backpack, he could not feel even the slightest weight!

Shen Jin tried to view it through the lens of science, but in the end, he could only conclude:

The end of science was theology.

Inexplicable spatial magic.

Fortunately, Shen Jin was rather thick-skinned mentally. Whenever he encountered something he could not understand, he would set it aside. He would figure it out eventually.

Ever since the sudden outbreak of the Zombie virus, the world seemed to have changed.

Although Shen Jin had spent the past few months hiding at home and tinkering with all sorts of strange things,

he could still feel the changes in the world.

The Zombie virus had erupted instantaneously across the globe without a single blind spot, like a carefully prepared disaster that had slipped past the actions of every human government.

By normal logic, that should have been completely impossible.

Yet it had happened.

"Why am I even thinking about this? If I keep dawdling, it'll be time for dinner."

Shen Jin placed the twelve Cobblestone blocks back. From the outside, there was not a trace of anything unusual. Even if someone knocked on it, it would feel like a solid wall, since it was a full two meters thick.

After climbing ten meters of stairs, Shen Jin arrived at a square platform.

Two long, large Chests sat on the platform.

Shen Jin put the painting into one Chest, then took out a few items before preparing to set off.

Four corridors extended from the platform's center.

Shen Jin chose the corridor marked with the character "East."

He took out a Torch, lit it with Flint and Steel, and prepared to head west.

Shen Jin called out "Mini-map" in his mind.

A square map appeared in the upper-right corner of his vision, marking his current longitude and latitude, as well as the places he had traveled.

It also showed the various markers he had left behind.

"If the system hadn't come with a map, there wouldn't be any reference points underground. I'd probably get myself turned around in no time."

The corridor was three meters wide and three meters high, with a support pillar in the middle at regular intervals.

Shen Jin had dug these underground tunnels to prevent cave-ins.

Although he worked in low-voltage engineering, he still knew a little about the basic common sense of civil engineering.

Along the way, he passed rooms labeled "Yellow" No. 1, "Yellow" No. 2, "Yellow" No. 3, and so on.

At the end of the corridor were still mixtures of stone and Dirt.

"If I dig a little farther east, according to the map... I should be close to the company where I used to work."

Start digging!

Obtained: Dirt ×6

Obtained: Dirt Mixture ×9

He dug as he went and absorbed the blocks as he went.

Whenever his Dirt and Dirt Mixture slots filled up, Shen Jin placed a Chest on the spot.

This Chest was specially used to store the shrunken models. It had twenty-seven slots, just enough for Shen Jin to dump out the "junk" he was carrying.

Every time he placed a Chest, Shen Jin piled up a stone pillar to support the narrow corridor.

"I don't need to be fast, but the route has to be stable. Cave-ins might not exist in the game, but this is reality."

More than ten meters underground, who knew where a problem might arise and bury Shen Jin's shoddy construction project alive?

If Shen Jin died in a tunnel collapse while digging,

he might be the most unreliable system holder ever.

Sometimes, Shen Jin wondered whether anyone else had gotten a system too.

Could they possibly make a group chat and exchange experiences about using their systems?

Maybe there were hidden functions or something?

Or perhaps some programming genius could make a modifier for the system,

with little features like obtaining a dragon-slaying blade with one click or activating invincibility with a double-click.

After digging for more than two hours, Shen Jin compared the longitude and latitude on his map with the Q City terrain map he had brought along.

This should be about right!

"I never thought that when I returned to my old workplace, it would already be the apocalypse. I wonder if the supplies warehouse is still in the same place."

This time, besides expanding his underground territory, collecting supplies was also a major priority for Shen Jin.

Dig upward!

Shen Jin did not dig straight upward. If he needed to flee in an emergency, that would be inconvenient.

Unhurried and calm, Shen Jin found a good angle and dug upward diagonally, leaving steps wide enough for two people to pass through.

Ten meters, nine meters, eight meters.

One meter.

The system's built-in map could no longer offer him much help. It could only provide longitude, latitude, and underground depth.

It could not tell him what was on the surface.

Only terrain he had personally passed through would be recorded by the system.

"There seems to be some movement up there."

Through a large mass of Dirt, Shen Jin could vaguely hear some sounds, but he could not tell whether they were Zombies.

No rush.

Shen Jin calmly put on his leather armor, Iron Armor, Zulijian shoes, leather gloves, and helmet.

Right, this time he had specifically changed into a helmet that was not as airtight.

He took a Dirt model from his backpack.

The instant he used the Iron Shovel to dig open the topmost block of soil—

Whoosh!

The Dirt in his hand filled the hole again.

The movement was so fast that, if someone had been standing above, they probably would not have noticed that they had briefly been suspended in the air.

"Was there no one just now?"

After pondering for a moment, he said, "I don't think I saw clearly either."

One more time!

So he would not be quite so fast, Shen Jin switched to throwing the model with his left hand this time.

Whoosh!

Another smooth sequence of movements, as fluid as if he had performed it thousands of times.

This time, he confirmed that there was nothing strange above, nor were there any strange smells.

Only then did Shen Jin finally dig away that block of soil.

His helmet poked out of the hole.

Shen Jin knew he must look as ridiculous as a groundhog right now.

If someone passed by, they might even want to find a jackhammer and smash him.

But! The safety of being underground was beyond question!

It was a little tiring, but the risk was zero!

After widening the hole a bit, Shen Jin struggled to crawl out.

It was an utterly ordinary courtyard.

He could tell that this was the ground floor of some apartment building.

"There's just a tiny bit of deviation. If I adjust my direction and dig twenty meters southeast, I'll get there."

Shen Jin roughly identified the direction. After all, he had worked in this area before and could still recognize the general layout of the buildings. This residential complex was beside his company, not far away.

Just as he was about to climb back into the hole, he suddenly heard the crisp sound of metal hitting the ground inside the house.

Someone was there!

No, it could also be a Zombie.

Shen Jin grabbed a handful of Dirt models. With the speed of his right hand and all this time training,

he might not be able to scatter beans into soldiers, but scattering Dirt into a wall would not be a problem.

He edged closer. The first floor was connected to the courtyard by a large floor-to-ceiling window, draped with thin gauze curtains.

Shen Jin could only see a blurry figure. It looked like a woman.

At least, no man had such a slim waist and such exaggerated curves, right?

Then Shen Jin heard a mischievous, seductive voice from inside.

"You're so annoying. Hubby's appetite has been getting bigger and bigger this month. He's already eaten thirty of my batteries by the middle of the month."

Shen Jin frowned, realizing that things were not so simple.

"Sure enough, this world has changed too much. Humans are actually eating batteries now? Could he be some kind of artificial human from the movies? A robot?"

"And that woman calls him hubby. They must have deep feelings for each other. Could robots have developed intelligence?"

"No, there's another possibility. That woman is crazy."

No matter which situation it was, Shen Jin did not want to go say hello to the two of them.

He could not get involved in this kind of karma.

Just as Shen Jin turned to leave, the woman tossed two AAA batteries into the courtyard.

Shen Jin froze for a moment.

"Holy—what the hell?!"