A Broke God's Road to Making Money
After leaving school, Su Bai didn't head straight to the garbage disposal plant in the west of the city. Instead, he went home first.
Linhai City, old district, shantytown.
The streets were narrow and muddy, and the air was thick with the sour stench of cheap nutrient solution mixed with sewage.
Compared to the godly skyscrapers towering into the clouds downtown, this place was like a corner the world had forgotten.
Su Bai pushed open a rusty iron door and entered the dim house.
The house was small, just over thirty square meters. Apart from a bed and a rickety table, it had hardly any decent furniture.
A gaunt-faced woman lay on the bed, coughing violently.
"Mom, I'm home." Su Bai softened his footsteps, walked to the bedside, and poured a cup of warm water for her.
His mother struggled to sit up and took a sip. A faint smile appeared on her pale face. "Xiao Bai, you're back... Did the awakening ceremony go smoothly today?"
Seeing the anticipation in his mother's eyes, Su Bai felt a pang in his heart.
He knew his mother had always hoped he would awaken a good divine kingdom and escape life at the bottom of society.
"It went well, Mom." Su Bai lied without changing expression. "I awakened a very special hidden divine kingdom. The teacher said it has great potential and told me to develop it carefully."
"Really?" His mother's eyes lit up, but then she began coughing violently again, even coughing up a trace of blood.
"That's wonderful... If your dad knew, he'd be so happy..."
At the mention of his father, Su Bai's eyes dimmed.
Twelve years ago, his father, an intermediate god in Linhai City, had taken a mission to clear mutated beasts from a high-risk contaminated mining area to earn more money for the family.
He had never come back.
The city's conclusion was that he had encountered a high-level dark matter storm, his divine kingdom had shattered, and his divine soul had been destroyed.
But Su Bai had always felt there was something suspicious about it.
Not long after his father disappeared, unidentified people had searched their home several times, seemingly looking for something.
"Mom, don't talk anymore. Get some rest." Su Bai tucked the quilt around her. "I have to go out later. The school has arranged special training, so I might not be home much these next few days."
"All right, all right. Go do what you need to. Don't worry about me." His mother nodded repeatedly.
After settling his mother, Su Bai went into the outer room and dug the family's remaining savings out of a battered tin box under the bed.
A total of 352 Great Xia Currency.
That wasn't enough to buy even a cup of the lowest-grade spiritual energy water downtown.
But to Su Bai, it was the startup money for creating his urban legend.
"Broke. So damn broke." Su Bai sighed and stuffed the money into his pocket.
He left home and headed straight for the garbage disposal plant in the west of the city.
An hour later.
Su Bai stood at the back gate of the western incineration station. The stench of the scene before him nearly made him throw up last night's dinner.
Beside mountains of piled-up garbage lay hundreds of mutated giant rat corpses.
Each rat was as big as a village dog, covered in coarse black fur and giving off a sickening stench of rot.
Because of dark matter contamination, the rats' flesh was completely inedible and wasn't even worth extracting spiritual energy from. They could only be burned as garbage.
An elderly gatekeeper at the station was wearing a gas mask and holding a large iron pitchfork, preparing to shovel the corpses into the incinerator.
"Sir, wait!" Su Bai hurried over.
The old man stopped and eyed Su Bai warily. "What do you want? This is a heavily contaminated area. Get lost if you aren't wearing protective gear!"
Su Bai pulled a crumpled pack of cheap cigarettes from his pocket and pressed it into the old man's hand, smiling broadly. "Sir, can we make a deal? How about I take all these dead rats off your hands?"
The old man froze and looked at Su Bai as if he were crazy.
"You'll take them? What do you want them for? Eat that meat and you'll mutate!"
"I'm not eating them. They're for a biology experiment." Su Bai spun the lie without batting an eye. "It's a school project, studying the effects of dark matter on rodent cells."
The old man looked at Su Bai's No. 3 Middle School uniform, half convinced, and muttered, "Students these days sure have strong stomachs."
"If you can haul them away yourself, take as many as you want. I'm tired of shoveling them anyway." The old man waved a hand, pocketed the cigarettes, and happily went aside for a smoke.
Su Bai was overjoyed.
He'd gotten the hundred corpses he needed for free, just like that!
He quickly found an empty blind spot and, with a thought, opened a passage to his ten-square-kilometer wasteland divine kingdom.
A pitch-black vortex appeared in midair.
Su Bai put on a pair of battered gloves he'd picked up by the roadside and, fighting down his nausea, began throwing giant rat corpses into his divine kingdom.
One, two, three...
[Ding! Low-grade animal corpses detected entering the divine kingdom. They can be used as base materials for an urban legend.] [Current progress: 12/100]
[Current progress: 56/100]
After a full half hour of hauling, Su Bai was drenched in sweat, but he'd finally gathered a hundred giant rat corpses.
Just to be safe, he threw in another twenty as spares.
A hundred and twenty dead rats were piled on the wasteland in his divine kingdom. The sight was so beautiful he hardly dared look.
"System, I have enough corpses. What do I do about the resentment?" Su Bai wiped away his sweat and asked inwardly.
[The host can activate the Low-Level Resentment Collector. These mutated giant rats were slaughtered by humans on a massive scale. A faint trace of resentment toward humans remained when they died. Little by little, it adds up and can be extracted.]
Su Bai immediately retrieved the vacuum-cleaner-like device from the system space and flipped the switch.
Bzzz-
The collector vibrated faintly.
Visible to the naked eye, wisps of gray-black mist drifted from the giant rat corpses and were sucked into the machine.
[Resentment +1] [Resentment +1] [Resentment +0.5]
More than ten minutes later, the machine stopped running.
[Ding! Collection complete. Current resentment: 32 points. The conditions for creating the "red-clothed female ghost" have been met.]
Su Bai let out a long breath.
The two most troublesome materials had somehow fallen into his lap for free.
Now all that remained were an "abandoned building setting" and "bloodstained red clothing."
As for the abandoned building, his divine kingdom already came with a dilapidated school building, so he didn't need to find one elsewhere.
But to connect the school building to the urban legend, he had to find a "bloodstained school uniform" in an abandoned school in the real world to serve as a medium.
Just then, Su Bai's phone vibrated.
It was a message from Lin Que.
"Brother Bai, I've got a lead on what you asked me to find out!"
"There's an old school campus in Linhai City's eastern suburbs called Red Star Middle School. It's been abandoned for ten years."
"I heard there was a serious dark matter leak there ten years ago, and several students died. The school moved afterward, and the place was completely abandoned and designated a low-level danger zone."
"I just checked the underground forums. Rumor has it people often hear a woman crying there in the middle of the night. I reckon some kind of low-level Anomaly was born there."
"Brother Bai, whatever you do, don't go there! Even homeless people don't dare get close!"
Reading the messages on his phone, Su Bai's mouth curled up uncontrollably.
There had been an accident?
Students had died?
There was a woman crying?
This was a fucking treasure trove of supplies tailor-made for the "red-clothed female ghost"!
"Fatty, nicely done. I'll treat you to a jianbing with two extra eggs tomorrow."
Su Bai sent the reply, put away his phone, and looked toward the eastern suburbs.
There were still a few hours until dark.
He had to get his hands on the final medium before tonight.
Gu Chengfeng, your ten thousand berserkers will have a new instructor very soon.