Unsuitable for Travel

With 4,500 basic Silence Points, getting over 5,000 with slightly better completion was perfectly normal. Add the rewards from the subsequent Career Development Task, and Lu Ban's savings would soon break 10,000. He could refine his Last Words.

As for why he chose to refine Last Words instead of buying more crowbars to protect himself, that was naturally because Last Words was an inherent-grade item.

What was the other inherent-grade item? The All In die, which could still take effect when Lu Ban faced a Great Being head-on, making it a miraculous item that could help him survive.

Although Last Words was currently just a repeating machine, Lu Ban believed that once it could be refined, its future would be limitless.

Besides, young people nowadays were always thinking about spending, spending, and spending, yet understood nothing of the value of saving and frugality. They had lost the traditional spirit, and Lu Ban was heartbroken. He decided to set an example with this.

Actually, the main reason was that Lu Ban couldn't afford those useful things.

After he chose the Erosion difficulty, the tiny hole widened until it became shaped like a cat-eye peephole.

Lu Ban glanced inside. It was pitch-black.

Suddenly, an eye opened in the darkness.

It wasn't a human eye, but the vertical pupil of some animal. It was deep yellow, grimy, murky, and dull.

Around the eye, a ring of text appeared.

Enter the Silent Land?

Yes/No

Lu Ban chose No.

He saw that the countdown outside was still continuing.

"So the past two days included both the selection and the preparations."

Lu Ban understood.

However, he didn't have much to prepare.

The country's public security was so good that it was already too late to go abroad. Lu Ban couldn't get any firearms or ammunition. He didn't know how to use those hot weapons, and they were inferior to what he could exchange for from the Silence Department Store anyway.

As for those knives, spears, axes, halberds, swords, ji, hooks, forks, baked buns, fried dough sticks, and twisted dough sticks, Lu Ban wasn't used to handling them either.

He went downstairs and bought some spare ribs, a portable frying pan, a portable camping lamp that could serve as a fire source, along with the corresponding tools, side dishes, water, and other supplies, then packed them into his bag.

He also took a flashlight, a power bank, compressed rations, and so on.

After he finished packing, it was already evening.

Lu Ban sent Qin Tiantian a WeChat message, saying that he was going out to gather material for a few days. After thinking about it, he sent another message to his old class monitor, Feng Yu.

In this world, Lu Ban really didn't have anyone close to him anymore.

He put on his coat, slung his backpack over his shoulder, and held a crowbar in his hand. Text appeared in his vision.

Enter the Silent Land?

Yes/No

Lu Ban chose Yes.

A burst of multicolored hues surrounded him, colors that did not belong to this world.

Lu Ban felt the weight of his body rush to his head, then rapidly shift to his stomach.

He saw those indescribable colors form several lines of text.

Time flowed at a different rate in the Silent Land than in the outside world.

Time ratio for this journey: 3:1

Proceeding to the Ruined City

Just as the text made Lu Ban feel somewhat dizzy, he felt something hard.

The first thing he sensed was a kind of dryness, and air that made his throat rasp.

Then came the jolting steel behemoth beneath him.

Lu Ban discovered that he was sitting in the last row of a bus.

The bus wasn't large, with fewer than twenty seats, and he was the only person in the last row.

Dim lights glowed inside the bus, as if they might go out at any moment.

The seats were made of hard, old wood.

The handrails were rusted steel.

The windows were covered in cracks.

Outside the windows stretched endless ruins beneath the night sky.

Lu Ban saw the broken walls and shattered remains of the ruins, whose age was impossible to determine, intertwine to form a line of text.

Ruined City

Year 20 of the New Calendar. Unsuitable for Travel.

The prohibition on alcohol had not eradicated crime. Instead, it had made the gangs even stronger. In the Ruined City, the gangs were the rulers of the underworld. Murder, bloodshed, and death had turned the once City of Hope into a City of Sin.

Yet there were still people who yearned for the Ruined City and traveled here from all over the world, hoping to unearth wealth of their own.

Everyone wanted to be the one in the story, didn't they?

Task Requirement: Complete the journey to the Ruined City.

Difficulty: Erosion

"Prohibition."

Lu Ban's knowledge of history wasn't particularly extensive. He only knew that in his original world, some countries had also enacted prohibition around the 1920s or 1930s, on the grounds that alcohol caused crimes against women.

In reality, after it was enacted, many people still brewed alcohol under the guise of making medicine. All that alcohol flowed into the underground market, controlled by the gangs, indirectly strengthening their power.

Now that he thought about it, the Ruined City's chaos and the prevalence of gangs were also closely connected to prohibition.

Lu Ban withdrew his gaze from the window and looked around the bus.

The driver was a balding, potbellied middle-aged man in his forties.

Apart from Lu Ban, there were three other passengers on the bus.

At the front left, in the second-to-last row, a frail young man wearing a beret was curled up on the seat, trembling.

At the front right, in the third-to-last row, sat a middle-aged woman. She kept glancing at the others, both hands tucked into her pockets, looking extremely cautious.

Behind the driver sat a two-meter-tall brawny man. He wore short sleeves, and a scar ran from the crown of his head all the way to his shoulder blade, an appalling sight.

So these were his companions this time?

Seeing that the others remained silent, Lu Ban could only move from his seat to the one behind the trembling young man.

"Hey."

He spoke.

"Waaah!"

The young man shrieked and nearly jumped out the window.

His reaction drew the others' attention, but only their attention.

"W-what do you want?"

The young man spoke the same language as Lu Ban, but his accent carried a hint of a rural dialect and wasn't very standard.

"Do you know how much longer we have to travel?"

Seeing that communication wasn't a problem, Lu Ban asked directly.

"T-tomorrow, I think. At least we have to wait until dawn b-before we can see the houses in the Ruined City."

He was timid and seemed none too bright.

"At least eight hours."

The brawny man sitting beside the driver added a remark.

"Oh."

Lu Ban nodded.

With the 3:1 time flow, spending eight hours here meant only a little over two hours would pass in reality. If he was lucky, he could even make it back in time for a late-night snack.

He didn't continue speaking, instead keeping a careful eye on his surroundings.

The ruins outside looked as if they had been abandoned for many years. Rain and vegetation had long since claimed them, making it impossible to tell what kind of buildings they had originally been.

Even this road, when Lu Ban looked behind him, seemed to have been forcibly carved through the rubble.

There were no stars or moon. The entire world was shrouded in darkness, with only the bus's headlights and taillights offering a little illumination.

Lu Ban was just about to withdraw his gaze when he suddenly saw something dart past behind the bus and vanish into the darkness of the ruins.

He had seen it only in passing and couldn't make out its exact appearance. But he could vaguely distinguish four limbs, a body, and a head. Its body was pale.

Was it... a person?

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