Short-Term Plans

Feng Xue ultimately did not ask about the woman who had been taken away. First, he had pretended in conversation that he had only arrived afterward and had never had the chance to meet her. Second, he had no idea how many secrets were involved.

At the end of the day, he could not fully trust Old Li. Sure, the man had the [Novice Instructor] tag, but who was to say he was not also hiding a [Newcomer Killer] profession?

What was more, when Feng Xue had asked about Phantom Objects earlier, Old Li had clearly hesitated. That meant he would not tell newcomers just any information. Judging by the Administrator Gang's attitude toward that woman, this was probably not knowledge meant for novices either.

On the way home, Feng Xue exchanged 900 Tower Coins for bricks. He ate as he walked back to his house. Now that he no longer had any pressing need for sleep, he could not fall asleep anyway, so he took out his work badge and began studying the functions of its four apps.

The "Contacts" function was nothing worth mentioning. It was a thing that combined WeChat, phone calls, and an address book. It supported voice calls, video calls, and text messages. However, Feng Xue currently had only Old Li in his contacts list.

As for "Account," the name said it all. It was a salary account that could receive wages issued by Infinite City, and he could also put Tower Coins into it whenever he wanted. Stuffing coins directly into a phone felt a little strange, but considering this was a quasi-data world, Feng Xue found it easier to accept.

The "Browser" had already been mentioned before. It was an e-book app used to look up the knowledge included with tags. However, the knowledge contained in the Corpse Collector tag was far too miscellaneous, leaving Feng Xue unsure where to begin.

What truly surprised Feng Xue, though, was the "Map" function.

Following his habit from his previous life, Feng Xue zoomed out on the map. Then he suddenly discovered that this function was not limited to the Landfill Area. As he zoomed out and out, he finally saw the true appearance of the so-called Infinite City world.

At first glance, the large map showed a colossal city built on an isolated island. The entire island was so perfectly round that it seemed to have been drawn with a compass, making Feng Xue wonder whether it had some National Land Alchemy Formation. Yet after checking the scale, he realized that this so-called "isolated island" probably had a real area larger than Australia.

This continent had mountains and lakes, canyons and basins. Nearly every type of terrain Feng Xue could imagine could be found there. At the center of the continent stood a massive complex of buildings nearly the size of a province.

The complex could roughly be viewed as a series of concentric circles. At its center was a skyscraper marked on the map as the "Tower of Babylon," while the urban area surrounding it was labeled "Residential Area."

This "Residential Area," which Feng Xue had heard Old Li mention before, was about the same size as the Landfill Area where he currently lived, roughly the size of a city district. Looking at the map, its layout was almost no different from an ordinary urban district in the real world. It had hospitals, schools, banks, libraries, restaurants, karaoke bars, bathhouses, and, of course, residential compounds of all sizes. If he had seen the map alone, Feng Xue would have thought it was an utterly ordinary modern city district.

To the east, south, west, and north of this district known as the Residential Area stood four enormous Garbage Dumps. How enormous? If the Residential Area was merely the size of one district, then the four Garbage Dumps together formed the entire city surrounding it. To use the place Feng Xue had lived before his transmigration as an example, if the Residential Area were Weiyang District, then adding the four surrounding Garbage Dumps would make up all of Xijing.

Roads extended outward in every direction from those four Garbage Dumps. Those roads continuously branched into smaller paths, and at the end of every branch was a Landfill Area centered around a Garbage Dump.

These Landfill Areas, large and small, were linked by roads as dense as a spiderweb, together forming a vast whole. The Landfill Area where Feng Xue lived was merely an unremarkable one among more than a thousand such areas.

At the outermost edge of this massive complex, he could also see roads gradually extending farther outward, as well as isolated Garbage Dumps where high walls had not yet been built.

As he looked at the map, some of what Old Li had said before slowly became clear, and Infinite City's current situation gradually unfolded before him.

Judging from the map, the Administrator Gang's blockade of the routes was not especially tight. As long as one left from the east or north side of the city and walked around two kilometers, one could bypass the Administrator Gang's blockade and enter the passageway.

However, even in the worst-case scenario—where the administrators of every Landfill Area reached a consensus and jointly blocked the passageways—one could still transfer through Landfill Areas one after another and eventually reach the Residential Area.

The Landfill Area where Feng Xue lived belonged to the batch relatively close to the Residential Area. Using the map's built-in distance-measuring tool, Feng Xue learned that the straight-line distance between them was less than a hundred kilometers.

The only problem was the Omens in the wilderness.

"Maybe the gangs deliberately left this loophole. After all, there are always exceptionally talented powerhouses who are hard to restrain. Rather than stop them from chasing the freedom of Ta Ta Kai, it is better to leave them a path."

Feng Xue muttered as he closed the map, but he could not help recalling the battle from earlier that day.

That administrator had quite a few combat-oriented tags. Even without counting the Phantom Greatsword, his strength and speed alone were far beyond Feng Xue's reach. The Stitched Monster had been even more terrifying. At least against the administrator, Feng Xue could try throwing out a Blade of Suffocation. Against the Stitched Monster, all he could do was run.

After all, his Blade of Suffocation was not like in games, where robots, undead, and even elemental creatures could be suffocated and slowed. His weapon literally just made people suffocate. Even if a Stitched Monster suffocated, it would not be affected in the slightest.

Yet as a Corpse Collector, the enemies Feng Xue might face would mostly be undead Omens like Stitched Monsters, which ignored the suffocation debuff.

"I need to expand the types of Phantom Objects I have on hand." Feng Xue pressed a hand to his brow and made some short-term plans for his future—

Collect more corpses, stockpile as many elements and Tower Coins as possible, then gather a batch of base materials suitable for smelting Phantom Objects on Garbage Day.

And during this period without work...

Feng Xue silently opened the browser. For the time being, he skipped over the specialized knowledge about anatomy and corpse handling, and began learning how to distinguish corpse-type Omens.

"The last time I studied this hard was in my senior year of high school..."