Feng Mengyue: Since I had no tool for measuring time precisely, I estimated it by the sun's angle. I entered the ruins at around eight in the morning.
Feng Mengyue: The outside of the ruins was shrouded in a layer of mist, but after getting closer, I could barely make out what was inside.
Looking at Feng Mengyue's private messages from two days ago, Su Mo nodded.
Judging by the timing and the ruins' appearance, everyone seemed to have had roughly the same experience. Su Mo dragged his thoughts downward and continued reading.
Feng Mengyue: After entering the ruins, once I came to my senses, I found myself standing inside a building. All around me was the bulletproof glass you traded to me. I tried looking outside through the windows, but the mist blocked my view. After that, I didn't dare go out. I held on to several pieces of bulletproof glass and waited until two hours later, when I was automatically ejected from the ruins.
Feng Mengyue: After leaving the ruins, about two hours had passed as well, exactly the same as inside the ruins.
Feng Mengyue: Although there was no way for me to leave the ruins, I can say with certainty that these ruins definitely aren't on our Earth.
After reading Feng Mengyue's private messages, Su Mo's expression darkened. He sensed that something was wrong.
The time when the first two ruins appeared and the ruins' appearance still matched up.
But the last three points were completely different. It wasn't just Feng Mengyue—everyone in the chat records who had entered the ruins and come back said they had appeared inside a building.
Only Su Mo had appeared in a barren wasteland, and he had even needed to break through a farmer's wall to enter the courtyard.
Moreover, Su Mo was ninety-nine percent certain that the place he had entered was definitely connected to Earth.
Su Mo: What makes you so sure?
With a thought, he sent the message. Su Mo's mind churned as he held the White Porcelain Tea Cup and pondered in silence.
Elsewhere, inside a slightly damp underground base, a woman leaning against a wall panel laughed as she looked at the message on the screen.
Bathed in the firelight, the woman had bright eyes, pearly teeth, and a radiant smile. She looked nothing like the other survivors in their sorry state.
If Su Mo could see her now, he would certainly recognize that the woman before him was Feng Mengyue.
Feng Mengyue did not reply immediately. Instead, she sent messages to several others through the private-message interface.
Before long, four people entered the underground base.
Three men and one woman, all tall and sturdy, with resolute expressions. None of them looked like ordinary people.
"How did it go, Yueyue? What did that Su Mo say?" the woman who had entered asked anxiously at once. The other three men also showed expectant looks when they heard Su Mo's name.
"It's hard to say. Su Mo is extremely cautious. I believe he's very powerful, and he's already left his safehouse to explore." Feng Mengyue shook her head slightly.
Everyone fell silent.
Feng Mengyue continued, "He bought glass earlier to reinforce his shelter, and he also has a constant supply of water. Normally, an ordinary person would guard a gold mine and slowly develop, but Su Mo didn't. He still entered the ruins despite the risks. That proves he isn't an ordinary person."
"What do we do, then? Can we still recruit him into our team?" The scar-faced man on the left was unable to hold back his anxiety and asked urgently.
"We'll take things one step at a time. None of us has a means of transportation right now, so moving around is practically impossible. We were only able to get in touch because we're relatively close to one another."
Feng Mengyue: Su God, come on. You saw the properties of that glass yourself. Where on Earth do we have technology like that? It's practically magic. Besides, other members of our team have also left their buildings and seen what lies outside. If you're considering joining our team, we can share all this information with you.
Reading Feng Mengyue's reply, Su Mo shook his head and laughed wryly.
It wasn't that he feared loneliness, nor was he afraid these people would harm him. At this stage, forming a team was basically impossible unless they were close to one another.
And if he joined a team, the only value he could provide for the time being was the Psionic Water in his hands.
That would be a terrible trade.
After privately sending Feng Mengyue information about 100 milliliters of Psionic Water as payment, Su Mo closed the private messages.
"Next time I enter the ruins, if my situation is still different from everyone else's, I'll try buying information from other people. There's no need to rush for now."
The greatest danger at present was still the disasters whose cycles were unknown. The prerequisite for exploring the ruins was ensuring the shelter's safety.
If he prioritized the wrong thing, the shelter might be breached by a disaster before long. Then he would lose both his shelter and his gains.
After thinking for a while, Su Mo gathered his thoughts and continued building the shelter.
His acquisition of iron was nearly complete, but the initial shelter could not be made entirely of iron.
An iron shelter was not very strong. Although it would form a Faraday Cage to resist lightning, it was actually of very limited practicality. Under ideal circumstances, reinforced concrete was the optimal solution.
Opening the supplies panel, Su Mo began sorting through the resources he had purchased.
First was iron. He had collected 130 units intermittently before, used 6 units to build the Iron Stove, and had 124 units remaining.
Next was wood. Because he had entered the ruins, he had not chopped any trees today, leaving only one unit in stock.
Plant fibers and stone were completely depleted.
He had 6 units of soil.
After using Psionic Water to scrub the pot, buy meat, cook, and pay Feng Mengyue, he had 1.8 liters remaining.
Su Mo did not plan to save this water.
Psionic Water had a fixed daily output, but the other materials required manual gathering before they could be taken out and sold.
Su Mo kept one thing in mind: the trading system was seriously flawed at this stage. Not only did it have practically no restrictions, but it could even transfer goods across space.
This mechanism might not matter much in the short term, but as time went on, financial professionals would inevitably take control and manipulate it.
By buying and selling, and profiting from price differences, those financial players could toy with ordinary people until they were completely lost.
The survival game naturally would not sit by and allow them to destroy the rules like that.
After the novice stage, the trading system would certainly have restrictions added, or perhaps be abolished altogether.
More importantly, the exchange ratios for water and food—the key trading goods—would definitely return to normal as time passed.
By then, using resource asymmetry to gain a developmental advantage would be far more difficult.
Having figured this out, Su Mo opened the trading panel and began sweeping up goods.
No one had listed any rare items for sale yet.
He switched to ordinary materials and sorted them by unit price.
Leaving aside wood, soil, and plant fibers, stone was currently the cheapest resource on the market.
Gathering one unit of stone on the Great Plains took approximately fifteen to twenty minutes.
Miners near a mine, on the other hand, could extract a piece in about five minutes.
Therefore, calculating the value of resources by labor, one unit of stone required 5 milliliters of water.
After doing the math in his head, Su Mo couldn't help shouting angrily, "This really is a black mine! No, even a capitalist black mine wouldn't dare exploit people this badly!"
After digging stones under the blazing sun for a full hour, one could only exchange them for 60 milliliters of water.
That amounted to only two mouthfuls of water!
That was why so many miners rested during the day and came out to mine at night.
The scorching daytime sun consumed far too much energy. Sixty milliliters of water could not make up for an hour's expenditure at all.
Only at night could that amount of water just barely sustain a miner's basic need to live.
The more he analyzed things, the more Su Mo understood the circumstances of the other people stranded in this apocalyptic world.
Su Mo suppressed his irritation, took a deep breath, and said, "A game of human lives!"
In essence, this was a survival world disguised as a game, but behind it were countless gazes yearning to stay alive.
Mining meant living in utter misery! Not mining meant death!
Of course, these miners were still among the more comfortable ordinary people. Those living on the Great Plains like Su Mo had no mines to work.
They could only chop trees, earning even fewer resources. It was probably not enough to sustain one person's daily needs.
Shaking his head with a hint of dejection, Su Mo pretended to forget the many scenes that had flashed through his mind and said quietly,
"When poor, one should cultivate virtue alone; when rich, one should help the world. Consider this my small contribution."
According to market prices, the exchange ratio between his Psionic Water and ordinary water was 1:1.3.
However, Su Mo did not exchange it directly. Instead, he used Psionic Water to sweep up goods.
Monopolistic trading was far too profitable. After spending only 1 liter of Psionic Water, he bought as much as 200 units of stone.
Of the remaining 800 milliliters of water, Su Mo took out 500 milliliters and exchanged it all for food to store.
When choosing food, Su Mo followed the principles of easy storage, filling, salty, and resistant to spoilage. He chose bread exclusively.
Including the 8 jin of Large Rye Bread left over from before, he now had 14 jin of bread in total.
Looking at the supplies piled high in his inventory, Su Mo's spirits, which had been dampened by humanity's circumstances, gradually recovered. He said steadily,
"Although relying on the system isn't truly my own ability, who can say what the future holds? As long as I'm alive, humanity will never become extinct."
"One day, I'll become stronger and live longer!"
"Perhaps I can build a super shelter that even any natural disaster will find difficult to shake!"
Su Mo's tone grew steadier and steadier.
Nearby, Oreo, who had been lying down on guard, turned around at the right moment and began barking, signaling that he had a share in shouldering this heavy responsibility too!
Before you continue