Infinite Days

"None, aside from one treated scratch, hunger, and thirst—I don't have any other conditions."

"Ah, that really is..."

Li Ke's mouth twitched. He never would have guessed that Erina Nakiri hadn't been infected...

"No, she did have symptoms like fever and dizziness earlier, signs that her immune system was working. So is it that my immune system just can't compare to hers?"

That left him a bit speechless, but thinking it over, it made sense.

She had all kinds of nutritious gourmet meals every day, plus healthy exercise, and even a secretary who specialized in medicinal cuisine. Meanwhile, he was ordering takeout day in and day out, sitting in the office working overtime, barely seeing the sun for a few hours...

It would be strange if his physical fitness were better than hers!

"Looks like you don't have my troubles, Erina."

Li Ke smiled helplessly, opened the door, and stepped outside.

Erina didn't quite understand why Li Ke looked so disappointed, but she still quickly followed close beside him.

"Perverted old man! Do you think we can still go back?"

Erina Nakiri grabbed Li Ke's clothes. Even after chopping off the heads of over a dozen zombies, her hands were still spotlessly clean, unlike Li Ke, whose hands were covered in blood and grime.

Li Ke casually wiped his hands with a few scraps of cloth and shook his head.

"No idea. Nobody knows what the person who threw us here really means. If they're just giving us a trial, maybe we really can leave this world once we clear it. But maybe we'll never be able to leave... And what's with that 'perverted old man' thing? I'm not old enough for you to call me that!"

Li Ke tried to defend himself, but Erina Nakiri just stuck out her cute pink tongue at him, then immediately pulled it back in because of the stench of corpses in the air.

"Because you really are a pervert! Not only did you strip me naked, you did that kind of thing to that scary female merchant!"

Erina Nakiri couldn't help getting angry just thinking about Li Ke grabbing the female merchant's chest earlier.

But she didn't even know why she was angry.

Author's note:

Author's note: emmmm

That should be about enough.

Chapter 7: System and Non-System

"Now that you mention it, she really is kind of scary."

Li Ke didn't pick up on Erina Nakiri's thoughts, but he did agree with her saying that female merchant looked terrifying.

Because that was the uncanny valley effect.

When you see a face that's completely expressionless and unchanging, especially when the lighting is kind of hellish, you naturally feel a wave of fear.

But.

"Her chest is really big, though, and it had body heat when I touched it, so I wasn't actually that scared."

Li Ke stated his feelings very directly.

"See, that's exactly why you're a perverted old man! You stop being scared just because of something like that!"

Erina Nakiri seemed to have recovered a bit mentally now that she realized she could kill zombies too, so she couldn't help blurting out a retort to Li Ke's words.

"But being scared doesn't help anything. We need that merchant, so we have to find a way to not be scared of her."

Li Ke shrugged.

That was his honest opinion. If he had been the only one to discover this, he might have done even more depraved things.

Like trying to see if that female merchant's pants could be taken off or something.

Because even though there was that uncanny valley feeling, you had to admit one thing—that female merchant was no different from a real human, except for being unable to take effective damage and lacking self-awareness.

She had saliva, her tongue was soft, and her skin felt real to the touch.

A creature that looked, felt, and smelled human—honestly, Li Ke thought that if he were alone for long enough, some depraved things were bound to happen.

But...

Glancing at Erina Nakiri's chest swaying as she walked, and her snow-white legs, Li Ke couldn't help sighing.

He felt like he might go depraved faster with this teammate than if he were alone!

No help for it.

If he were alone, he'd definitely have to find all sorts of ways to relieve his loneliness—constantly keeping busy, making all kinds of defensive tools, and so on.

Now, he still had to do those things, but he'd be much faster and more efficient.

Take looting houses, for example. Without Erina Nakiri, searching a house felt like playing a stealth game—terrified that one or two zombies might pop out from somewhere and catch him off guard, forcing him to throw in the towel.

But now that he had Erina Nakiri, he was much bolder when searching houses, and a lot faster too.

It was just that this teammate was too pretty, with too good a figure—it was really easy to let his mind wander to those kinds of things.

"Anyway, you always come up with some weird excuse."

Erina Nakiri blushed and turned her head away. She was still a bit angry, but she still carefully observed their surroundings, looking for anything useful.

Unfortunately, there was nothing.

Li Ke, on the other hand, discovered something interesting on his way to the Store.

"Oh, I'm already level three? I leveled up pretty fast." Li Ke looked at his character interface and smiled. He tried opening the options above again, but tasks, skills, and the map still wouldn't open. However, the recipe section could be accessed.

"Oh?"

The moment Li Ke opened the recipe interface, he saw his inventory, but this time his character model was gone, and so was his status bar. In their place was a long list of strange items on the left.

"Wooden frames, chests... Huh? This is pretty similar to the crafting lists in other survival games, just a bit weird. Does that mean I can make guns?" Li Ke scrolled through his crafting list, finding it quite interesting because there were many items, including things like stone axes.

Above the icon, Li Ke saw a wooden-handled stone axe with a rock tied on by a rope, but in the crafting interface, it was made from branches, grass, and small pebbles.

"Hmm, if I craft it, will I be making the rope from grass with the system's help, or will the system just synthesize it directly?" Li Ke was curious about these details.

Fortunately, these materials weren't hard to find, so Li Ke bent down and picked up some stones. In the process, he noticed something very strange.

The stones on the ground were all the size of bread or eggs—almost none were the size of a fingernail or a soybean.

"Interesting..."

Li Ke didn't think too much about it. After collecting enough stones, he turned to gathering the plant fibers described in the recipe.

Although it was called plant fiber, the icon showed weeds, so Li Ke tried pulling up a clump of grass. Sure enough, the system registered it as a success, showing he had collected plant fibers—twenty of them, no less.

"That's way too casual?" Li Ke couldn't help but complain, but something even more baffling happened.

When he tried to use his axe to chop at some wooden objects, he came across a withered bush. He attempted to store it in his system space, and the next moment, an icon flashed in the corner of his vision.

A plank icon, with a number beside it.

Li Ke's eye twitched. He grabbed another bush, snapped it, and tried to store it in his inventory.

Whether it was a bush as tall as a person or one that only reached his shins, after being broken, the system classified it all as wood.

"So, what are you doing?" Erina Nakiri watched Li Ke's actions curiously, not understanding what he was trying to accomplish or why he had suddenly started collecting these strange things.

"Hmm, I hit level two and unlocked a recipe system, so I wanted to try it out. You should be close too—you killed way more than me in that zombie horde just now." Li Ke explained to Erina Nakiri. The next moment, he selected the stone axe in his inventory to craft.

Nothing flashy happened, no experience points suddenly appeared before Li Ke. He only saw the stone axe icon appear in the bottom left corner of his recipe list, and then a stone axe with a "1" on its icon appeared in his inventory.

That fast? Li Ke skeptically took out the stone axe and found it looked exactly like the icon. But when he tried smacking it against a roadside tree, cracks immediately appeared on the axe, and a chunk broke off.

"What a piece of junk..." Li Ke looked at the axe in his hand speechlessly and put it back in his inventory. But then, staring at the row of empty slots in his inventory, he hesitated for a moment before placing the axe—now with half its durability gone—back into his inventory.

Nothing happened. So Li Ke looked at the stone axe in his inventory, thought about using it, and the next moment, a stone axe appeared in his hand.

Li Ke closed his inventory and swung the axe at the big tree again. Something amazing happened.

This time, the tree showed no damage at all, but in Li Ke's vision, a number appeared: 536/600.

Not only that, but a prompt for wood gained appeared on the right side, and it directly added five units of wood!

"So that's how it works. I understand now." Li Ke nodded, a cocky smile spreading across his face. He swung the stone axe at the tree repeatedly, chopping continuously, and on the tenth hit, he completely depleted the tree's durability!

He thought the tree would topple over and had already prepared to dodge, but to his surprise, the moment the durability hit zero, the tree instantly turned into a pile of debris and vanished into thin air.

Leaves, branches—everything disappeared. In their place, the wood count increased not by five, but by twenty-five.

"Really fits the game logic." "I want to argue, but this is seriously amazing..." Erina Nakiri nodded in agreement. She was gradually getting used to this absurd world, but she still opened her mouth wide in amazement.

Li Ke licked his lips because he saw something in his inventory called a "wooden frame." His intuition told him this was probably the same as the basic blocks in other games.

Crafting one wooden frame required ten units of wood and took two seconds. Li Ke happened to have several dozen units of wood, so he decided to make one and see what it was.

Two seconds passed quickly, and two small items he had high hopes for appeared in his inventory. He immediately took one wooden frame out of his inventory.

A small bag appeared again. Li Ke opened the bag, revealing a one-meter-by-one-meter wooden block that looked like plywood.

He frowned and tried to push it—sure enough, it had the feel and weight of plywood.

So he placed the other wooden frame into his inventory bar, the action bar below, and the next moment, a phantom outline of the wooden frame appeared in his field of vision.

"Right-click, I'm guessing."

Li Ke aimed it at the asphalt road and tried using the wooden frame. The next moment, the frame materialized out of thin air on the asphalt. Not only that, but when Li Ke attempted to push it, he couldn't budge it at all—it was as if it were embedded there, with no possibility of lifting it.

"This is starting to feel more and more like a game."

Li Ke couldn't help clicking his tongue. This thing was practically a divine artifact by any measure! If he could place it in midair like in Minecraft, what would he and Eriina have to fear from zombies?

Just find a river, farm and draw water in the sky, and live out their cozy little days!

So he crafted another frame block, stacked it on top of the first one, then pressed the E key in his mind to retrieve it.

But the next moment, the third frame block, on which he'd pinned his hopes, fell straight to the ground. Before he could do anything, it shattered into pieces, turning into a pile of pixelated garbage.

Li Ke had a bad feeling.

So he placed another wooden frame, pulled out his iron axe, and swung it at the plywood beside him.

The axe lodged into the plywood but didn't cut all the way through—only halfway.

But when he swung the axe at the frame block placed via the system, the frame block shattered into pieces on the spot.

"..."

Li Ke put down the axe, stared at the mess on the ground, and helplessly summed things up for the curious Eriina.

"Looks like there's a big difference between things authenticated by this game system and things that appear directly in reality. Using stuff through the game system gives you some amazing abilities, but on the flip side, there are also places where it falls short compared to real objects."

Li Ke kicked the real-world version of the wooden frame. Even though it looked like plywood, its durability was surprisingly much higher than the frame block placed via the action bar.

Taking out the stone axe again, Li Ke used the system's perspective to chop at the real-world frame block. The next moment, a durability value suddenly appeared on the real-world frame block.