A Wild Hundred Million

After ten, Ming Jiu drove to the seafood stall. Normally, this was when customers started pouring in and the place was at its liveliest, but the recent temperature drop had been too severe, so there were not many people.

Ming Jiu ate without tasting anything, while Ming Rong ate happily, even taking the time to type on her phone and ask whether B City had any seafood stalls like this.

Thinking about the future, Ming Jiu kept adding dishes throughout the meal. The stall owner and his wife were practically swinging their ladles hard enough to throw sparks, and nearly fifty dishes were packed up in total.

Ming Rong blinked but asked nothing, quietly lowering her head to battle the typhoon shelter crab.

Before Ming Rong finished eating, Ming Jiu had paid the bill and asked the owners to help load the food into the car. She then climbed into the car and fiddled around for a while—putting all the takeaway containers into storage boxes and stowing them in her backpack slots.

To make storing crops easier, the backpack slots provided by the system froze time, so storing hot food was no problem at all.

After supper, Ming Jiu followed the navigation toward the highway entrance. She stopped halfway to fill the tank, then kept driving until she reached the road behind the destination villa complex.

This road had always been secluded. At past eleven at night, it was completely empty.

Ming Jiu said, "I'm going to see a friend. I'll be back soon. Xiao Rong, wait in the car for me for a while, okay?"

Ming Rong nodded repeatedly.

"If you get scared, call me anytime. If someone passes by, pretend no one's in the car, understand?"

Ming Rong used simple sign language to tell her sister not to worry.

Only then did Ming Jiu get out of the car. The system had started working as soon as she drove onto this stretch of road. With the system around, she did not need to worry about surveillance cameras at all.

Even so, Ming Jiu made every possible preparation. The moment she left Ming Rong's line of sight, she pulled a long trench coat from her backpack and put it on, swapped her baseball cap for a knit hat, and put on a mask.

At this hour, the complex's security guard was sleeping in the guardhouse with the air conditioning on. Disguised, Ming Jiu entered the complex without issue.

She was not worried about the complex's cameras capturing her. She was worried about being seen by people.

Ming Jiu was looking for a row villa. She remembered the approximate location and exact house number—Building 4, Row 3, East District.

That villa hid a large amount of cash and gold bars. They had not been discovered until the earthquake near the end of the second year of the natural disasters in her previous life.

Back then, she had only recently bound herself to the system and had already fully realized the importance of gold. Her punishment of hard labor for killing had just ended, and she had become unemployed, so she simply joined other survivor teams leaving the base to search the city for remaining supplies.

For several months, she had wandered through various urban areas with those teams almost every day.

The supplies in the city had long since been searched and collected by the authorities, then picked over again and again by survivors. There was pitifully little left.

After wandering around for months, Ming Jiu had not even saved enough coins to convert a single plot of farmland in the system.

The system in her previous life had been incredibly rigid. She could not even take out a "loan" to farm and could only slowly gather enough starting capital herself.

Just when she had run out of options, the earthquake came.

She happened to be nearby at the time. After the earthquake, she joined an official rescue team and discovered a large amount of cash and gold bars inside this damaged villa.

The worst part was that she had been acting with the rescue team, so she could only look at all those gold bars a few times.

She did get a box of cash, though. Honestly, it was too stiff even for wiping her ass.

The good news was that her hands had been fast enough. While helping dig and take inventory, she had secretly pocketed some—not much, not little, just two kilograms. It could be exchanged for 200 coins, exactly enough to convert two plots of system farmland.

From then on, her system had truly upgraded from a "gold-eating beast" and a limited-space backpack into a farm system she could run and manage.

Now, Ming Jiu stood before the still-intact villa. After putting on gloves and shoe covers, she took some effort to climb over the fence and enter the yard.

At the villa entrance, the system unlocked the door while dealing with the camera on the visual smart lock. Delighted to get free unlocking service, Ming Jiu pushed the door open and went inside.

The house was pitch-black. She did not dare turn on the lights and used the glow of her phone screen to feel her way to the staircase, heading down to the first basement level.

The villa had only been furnished simply. The furniture was covered with dustproof plastic sheets, and the sheets were coated in dust. It had probably been left vacant ever since the renovation was completed.

This was also the biggest reason Ming Jiu wanted to try this place. She did not know whose house it was or who exactly the cash and gold belonged to, but judging from the way the money had been hidden, it was probably not clean money.

Of course, even if it had been clean money, she had no intention of letting it go.

The gold in the villa had not been discovered until the earthquake. Either the owner had forgotten money was hidden here, or they had died in the natural disasters.

The first basement level was an entertainment area, with a private theater and a gym containing only a treadmill. Based on the marble pattern of the decorative wall, Ming Jiu confirmed that the money was hidden in the gym, but a problem arose—where was the entrance?

When it came to hiding money, Ming Jiu's knowledge was limited to safes. She had only ever seen hidden mechanisms and secret passages in novels.

Ming Jiu felt over all four walls. The mirrored wall panels fit together seamlessly. She pushed hard against the treadmill—but it did not move.

She was not particularly strong, but pushing a treadmill was no problem. Clearly, there was something wrong with it.

It was a non-motorized treadmill that did not need to be plugged in. Ming Jiu cautiously stepped onto it and walked a few steps. The console lit up, and less than a minute later, a soft "beep—" sounded from the ceiling.

Immediately afterward, a hidden square panel, about one square meter in size, popped down from the suspended ceiling in one corner of the gym. A retractable ladder descended from it, revealing something like an attic.

Ming Jiu: ...

She truly did not understand how rich people thought.

Still, it was kind of interesting.

Come to think of it, wasn't an attic on the first basement level just the villa's first floor?

The rest of the process went very smoothly. At the top of the ladder was a small platform meant for standing, followed by a door.

Perhaps whoever designed the mechanism had been too confident in it. The door only had the same kind of visual smart lock as the villa entrance.

The smart lock quickly fell to the system. Ming Jiu opened the door. The room was very small, with only two rows of shelves against the walls. Two cameras hung from the ceiling, already interfered with and controlled by the system.

Bundles of cash worth one hundred thousand each sat directly on the shelves, so numerous that Ming Jiu had the illusion they were all funeral money.

The shelf below the cash held the gold Ming Jiu had been longing for—even under nothing but the light from her phone screen, it gleamed dazzlingly.

They were all 200-gram gold bars, piled haphazardly on the shelves. Ming Jiu ignored the cash and went straight for the gold bars.

Amid the system's frequent exchange notifications, the coins in Ming Jiu's account steadily increased until she had searched beneath and behind the shelves, making sure not a single bar remained.

There were five hundred 200-gram gold bars in total—100,000 grams of gold, contributing a full 10,000 coins.

Ming Jiu could already see the Gene Optimization Potions for herself and her sister waving at her.

All the family's real estate had only earned them a little over 6,000 coins. At current gold prices, the gold here was worth more than ninety million yuan.

Then there was the cash—more than two hundred bundles of one hundred thousand each, over twenty million yuan.

Oh my god, a wild hundred million yuan. At last, this overwhelming fortune had come to her!