After Waking Up I Inherited the Earth [Interstellar] – CH3

Chapter 3

Holding the freshly issued divorce agreement, Xie Xingchen looked “heartbroken” as he watched his ex-husband’s departing back. In reality, he was so excited his tears almost spilled from the corner of his mouth.

Unable to help himself, he opened his light-brain. After checking the latest message from the Civil Affairs Office and confirming that his marital status had indeed changed to “single,” Xie Xingchen stopped pretending. He burst into delighted laughter and rushed excitedly back to the study.

“Young master, young master… is he… has he gone mad?”

The servants who’d been quietly watching nearby were startled by Xie Xingchen’s sudden loud laughter. Afraid and nervous, they exchanged looks, wanting a coworker to go check on him.

But thinking of how much Xie Xingchen used to value and adore Fu Yunzhou, no one dared to risk their life. Even the deputy butler—Xie Xingchen’s favorite and widely recognized as the best at soothing people—didn’t dare step forward.

Some of them, seeing Xie Xingchen’s radiant, almost possessed smile, even trembled a few times in fright.

In the end, the servants outside the study scattered in a rush, uneasily pretending to be busy.

Inside the study, Xie Xingchen’s hands trembled. He still hadn’t fully stepped out of the persona. He “reluctantly” opened the inheritance list.

Xie Xingchen: !

Staring at assets worth trillions, Xie Xingchen’s happy heart nearly stopped beating!

Compared to the first list, this one could only be described as clean and comfortable.

Aside from properties and estates in various places, there were only shares in three highly profitable companies. All other assets had been converted into cash! Not to mention anything else—he’d received more than fifty billion in cash alone.

This was a straight-up overnight fortune! And what was even more pleasantly surprising was that Fu Yunzhou didn’t drag his feet.

They had only just divorced, and the other party had already started wiring him money.

Hahahaha, converting businesses into cash really was great—everything was clear at a glance and easy to divide.

Once the money arrived, the hassle of dividing assets after divorce instantly dropped by more than half. As for the remaining properties and shares, Xie Xingchen planned to hire another lawyer to handle them.

The light-brain’s notification sounds beeped all night long, and Xie Xingchen’s account balance soared from eight digits to eleven digits.

Having never been this rich in his life, Xie Xingchen couldn’t hold it in anymore.

With tears of excitement at the corners of his eyes, he endured the “heart-piercing pain” and did what he’d always wanted to do in his last life but could never afford—clear out his shopping cart!

Xie Xingchen: Ah~ so satisfying!
[Ding-dong~]

[StarNet Mall: Dear Mr. “Xie Xingchen,” after detection, your cumulative spending on StarNet Mall has reached 20 billion star-coins. You have now been upgraded to an SVIP user. Please go to the User Center to claim SVIP skin effects and a special title. If you ignore this message, the system will automatically claim a random effect and title for you at midnight tomorrow.]

Xie Xingchen: Wait, SVIP?

What the hell is that?

When did he ever accumulate 20 billion star-coins in spending at the mall?

Xie Xingchen stared at the message in complete confusion.

If he remembered correctly, the original owner wasn’t even a VIP user on StarNet Mall!
Don’t ask him how he knew. The original owner’s account name was displayed in the default black font, while VIP users had fonts in colors other than black.

As for SVIP? Those people used rainbow-colored fonts.

So… can someone tell him what the hell happened? He only cleared one shopping cart. Even if the things in that cart were expensive, at most it should’ve been one hundred million?

Why had he become an SVIP user?

The number “20 billion” successfully turned his face green.

He hurriedly switched back to the account page on his light-brain. Seeing that a large chunk of star-coins had inexplicably vanished from his balance, Xie Xingchen’s heart went cold.

When he opened the detailed deduction record, “cold” immediately turned into bone-chilling cold.

[Mechanical Bank: Your account completed a proxy payment transaction of 3,256,987,5896 star-coins at 23:23 on April 13. Balance: 2,035,478,9652 star-coins.]

Seeing this newest deduction message, an ominous feeling rose in Xie Xingchen’s heart.

When he clicked into the transaction details attached to the deduction and saw the words “M215 Wasteland Planet,” Xie Xingchen’s smile stopped being bright, and tears instantly fell.

Though he’d only been in this world for less than a month, he’d learned everything he needed to learn, and he’d also seen plenty of what he shouldn’t know from the novel.

So he knew he was truly done for this time.

Not to mention the amount of money—just the fact that it was a wasteland planet.

What did it mean to spend thirty billion to buy a wasteland planet?
Even throwing money into water for fun would be more rational than that!

In the interstellar era, the most popular “profession” was planetary lord, so it made sense that anyone with money wanted to buy a planet.

But suitable planets were limited, and the major civilizations couldn’t possibly put all of them up for sale. So even if the Alliance had countless planets, the price of habitable ones still wasn’t low. Thirty billion couldn’t buy a damn thing.

On top of that, buying a planet required contribution points. Even if the original owner’s parents had been saving contribution points for him from the day he was born—spending eighteen years building bridges and roads, funding education, helping the poor in his name—after pouring money in for so many years, they’d only managed to save the minimum ten thousand contribution points needed to buy the lowest-grade wasteland planet.

Now it was Barbie Q.

Ten thousand contribution points, and thirty billion star-coins—used by him to buy a low-grade wasteland planet!
Without even clicking in, Xie Xingchen knew it was going to be a massive headache.

You couldn’t sell it, you couldn’t return it, and you didn’t have money to develop it. In the end, it would just rot in your hands.

“Why is there a wasteland planet in the original owner’s shopping cart?”

Xie Xingchen wanted to cry, and he felt inexplicably panicked.

Wasteland planets couldn’t be returned—once purchased, the star-coins and contribution points were deducted immediately. And now, the minimum amount of star-coins and the minimum amount of contribution points had been deducted?
What that could buy was either a planet so remote there was no sign of life and you’d have to invest to build even the shipping lanes yourself, or a “dirt planet” so barren it had no greenery at all.

A planet like that not only couldn’t be sold—you even had to pay a fee every year.

Xie Xingchen was so mentally exhausted he didn’t even want to talk. 

With trepidation, he opened the planet description. The first line of text nearly gave him a heart attack.

[After detection, Planet M215 is located in the Virgo Supercluster. It is a habitable planet, with high oxygen content, moderate gravity, mild climate, sufficient water sources… Planting difficulty: medium–high]

It was stuck in his hands.

Even if he didn’t understand the universe’s regional divisions, Xie Xingchen still knew the Virgo Supercluster was famously remote. There were barely any starships there—supposedly only one ship arrived each week.

He wasn’t some ultra-billionaire on the Star Alliance rich list. Where was he supposed to find that kind of money to develop infrastructure in such a remote place?
Xie Xingchen went blank. Was he fated to be poor?
Every time he felt like he was about to turn his life around, some accident would appear and snatch away his good days.

He’d just gotten a pile of money—then in an instant, three-fifths of it was gone, and every year after that he’d still have to spend one billion to “raise” this little thing.

Thinking of that, Xie Xingchen’s face turned gloomy.

But soon, he pulled himself together again.

“It’s fine. I still have shares. The shares in those three companies probably bring in about one billion a year. I’ll use that money to support that planet, and with the remaining twenty billion, if I spend carefully, I can still live comfortably.”

After setting a flag for himself, Xie Xingchen cheered up again.

No matter what, he was definitely going to live more comfortably in this life than in his last. He’d already endured days that were that poor—now he had food, shelter, and money, so what was there to worry about?
After thinking it through, he set the matter aside and, full of enthusiasm, opened the StarNet Mall user center.

“Let me see just how gorgeous the skins and titles are for an SVIP user.”

Xie Xingchen was all smiles.

Only people with cumulative spending of twenty billion could become SVIP. With a title that valuable, it had to come with major perks, right?!
However—luxury goods never scam the poor.

Looking at the SVIP user center, which contained only twelve skins and a single rainbow-style multicolored title, Xie Xingchen was instantly dumbfounded.

That’s it?

This is the legendary SVIP user center?

He spent hundreds of billions and this is what they show him?
Even as optimistic as Xie Xingchen was, at this moment he felt like he couldn’t breathe smoothly.

A newly rich former poor person who wasn’t yet used to being scammed by luxury goods, Xie Xingchen claimed the April-exclusive skin and the rainbow title with a complicated mood. Then he silently exited the mall, not wanting to open this scammy app again anytime soon.

With no job and no need to study, Xie Xingchen successfully developed a hellish sleep schedule within a month.

After spending more than thirty billion in just one hour—and having to throw away one billion every year for nothing—Xie Xingchen decided that while he still had so much money, he should hurry up and find a truly livable planet.

As a peace-lover, he didn’t want to stay on the central planet, the main battlefield of the novel, nor did he want to stay on any of the secondary battlefields.

So when choosing a place to live, Xie Xingchen kicked out all the familiar-looking planets without a second thought, then removed a bunch more with bad environments and poor welfare benefits, until only a few options remained.

Having narrowed it down this far with elimination, any of the remaining choices would do.

But considering he might live there for the rest of his life, he planned to thoroughly look up information and understand the situation before deciding.

Sunlight filtered through white window gauze onto the greenery beside the floor-to-ceiling glass. The scattered speckles signaled the arrival of a new day.

At 8 a.m., Xie Xingchen left the study and returned to his bedroom to sleep.

At 3 p.m., the still-sleeping Xie Xingchen was woken by a continuous series of beeps.

A minute later, out of habit, he patted his cheeks. Like he used to when doing part-time work, he forced himself awake.

[Beep-beep~]

[StarNet Mall: Dear Mr. “Xie Xingchen,” your [M215 Wasteland Planet] is pending shipment. Please verify the information for this order (please verify carefully; after verification, if you wish to modify the information, please go to the relevant department).]

Seeing this message, Xie Xingchen thought again of the money he’d thrown away. The corners of his mouth, which had been slightly raised, drooped in dejection.

Though he didn’t think he’d have any connection with that planet in the future, since he’d already bought it, he still had to deal with the follow-up.

He didn’t want to leave the central planet only to be dragged back by some department to handle all kinds of weird matters.

Gathering all his focus, Xie Xingchen carefully verified the planet information and personal information, then did iris verification, fingerprint verification, and genetic fragment verification.

However—

[StarNet Mall: Dear Mr. “Xie Xingchen,” your [M215 Wasteland Planet] has been shipped. Please go to the Planet Transaction Center in the central urban district of the central planet to update the planetary lord information.]

Xie Xingchen: life is hard, kitty sigh.jpg
Fine—he still had to make a trip.

Xie Xingchen sighed: Seriously. Even spending money can’t make me happy.

With the deputy butler hesitating to speak, Xie Xingchen ate an afternoon tea in melancholy, then lazily walked to the Planet Transaction Center.

The Planet Transaction Center wasn’t far from Xie Xingchen’s villa. Even though Xie Xingchen stopped now and then to curiously watch the aerial tracks, it still only took him half an hour to arrive.

After arriving at the Planet Transaction Center, Xie Xingchen found the correct counter. After completing another detailed genetic test, he gained a new title: “planetary lord.”

While opening the planetary-lord-exclusive section for Xie Xingchen, the staff member smiled and congratulated him: “Congratulations on becoming a planetary lord. We hope your planet becomes a holy land everyone longs for.”

Though Xie Xingchen had no intention of developing a wasteland planet, he still smiled and nodded. “Thank you. I will work hard to develop Planet M215.”

As if that sentence were a trigger, the moment it fell, a burst of machine-startup sounds rang out in Xie Xingchen’s head.

At first it sounded like a rusty, poorly lubricated machine stuttering. After a few seconds, the sound inexplicably became smooth.

[Ka, ka, cha… ka, cha… kacha… ding…]

[Ding-dong, system activated… Infrastructure Maniac System welcomes you. Detected that the planet you purchased, M215 (Earth), has been delivered. Please bind your territory within one week, and you may begin the game!]