The End of the Universe Is Live-Streaming E-commerce – CH50

Chapter 50: The 50th Day of Livestream Selling

“Completely no upper limit?” Lin Zhao confirmed with 1114.

“Yes.” After living too many stingy, penny-pinching days in the past, 1114 was deeply moved now. It did not forget to show Lin Zhao the backend of its disposable funds. “Zhaozhao, we’re rich.”

Because this was also part of the test. The expert team was always happy to explore every possible upper limit of the system, including but not limited to the system’s transportation limit, livestream duration, and now, they were curious about how many planes the system could connect to—or rather, how many planes existed in this world at all.

Think about it. Without the need for any elaborate calculations, without needing any wildly imaginative foresight beyond reality, merely by spending money—an amount far, far smaller than the astronomical funds poured into aerospace—you might learn the boundary of the world. Would you spend it?

The expert team’s answer was: they could let Lin Zhao press that lottery button until it broke.

Unfortunately, it was unknown whether the Mastermind itself had limitations, or whether it had long anticipated the possibility of preventing this kind of exhaustive cheating, but the number of planes Lin Zhao could draw had an upper limit.

There was actually an upper limit.

The faces of one man and one system were written with exactly the same shock.

None of the plane-trading novels they had read mentioned this.

Lin Zhao drew a total of eighteen planes that day. Including the four he had drawn before, that made twenty-two. Obviously, it was impossible that only twenty-two planes existed in this world. Rather, the Mastermind only allowed Lin Zhao to connect to these twenty-two.

Was there some unique significance or deeper meaning behind it?

A group of experts fell into a brainstorming storm.

Only Lin Zhao was calculating money stingily. He had not paid much attention to how much he spent while drawing the lottery, but now he could easily calculate it. Even using his unluckiest probability as the standard, the total investment for these eighteen planes would not exceed two million. Even including his previous spending, twenty-two planes would probably cost around two million.

The stingy Mastermind was actually so principled?

1114 was also shocked, but it proposed a possibility: “Maybe the Mastermind’s ability is just like this. Just like with Host’s current level, you can only choose one more plane to bind. After exceeding five, if you want to bind a new plane, unless you level up to a higher rank, you’ll have to unbind one of the original ones first before connecting to a new one. Please choose carefully this time, Host.”

Lin Zhao: “!!!” You never told me there was this kind of restriction before.

“Because I can only sense it once we reach the critical point,” 1114 said. This system truly had many incomplete functions.

Then, while they were talking, one of the eighteen candidate planes drawn for selection suddenly grayed out.

Lin Zhao froze. “What does that mean?”

1114 also triggered the critical point and updated its information again. “It means this plane can no longer be selected due to force majeure. As compensation, Host will receive one item.”

“…What force majeure?”

“Force majeure means force majeure.”

“Tell that dog Mastermind to refund the taxpayers’ money, ahhhhh!” Lin Zhao had previously thought the Mastermind had finally acted like a decent being for once. Now he realized the Mastermind was still that same sneaky, dog-like Mastermind. “I don’t want an item. I want my hundred thousand yuan!”

The Mastermind indicated that it was outside the service area, and unfortunately could not serve him at this time.

—

Plane Number: C—12517.

Codename: Beastman.

Civilization Level: Planetary Civilization.

Civilization Type: Ancestral-worship-based integrated pluralistic civilization.

Status Overview: A pyramid-shaped society with an enormous gap between rich and poor. True believers in the law of the jungle and natural selection. A world that has combined muscles tempered to the extreme with combat techniques understood through hunting and natural spirituality, dancing on the blade between civilization and savagery.

Mastermind Comment: A group of hardcore survival experts who have engraved “hacking people down” and “honor” into their DNA. If you like fluffy things, pretend I said nothing.

Pagar Grassland, meaning “the place where fluffy fruits grow.”

This was already the eighty-ninth day since Wei An had transmigrated to this place of fluffy fruits. He had no choice but to acknowledge one reality—or rather, a reality he should have accepted long ago. He had become…

A prairie dog.

As an ordinary adult human male from Blue Star in his previous life, Wei An had opened his eyes and become a member of the very bottom of the food chain on the Pagar Grassland. Scientific name: marmot. To put it more commonly, he was the mobile buffet breakfast of prairie foxes, prairie wolves, golden eagles, peregrine falcons, slightly larger owls, and even certain snakes.

Yes, the couple ounces of meat on his body were not even enough to count as the leftover scraps of one meal for a large carnivore. He only qualified as breakfast.

When Wei An first transmigrated, all he felt was hard earth pressing against his soft belly, dry grass blades scraping his not-so-delicate skin—or, well, fur? After so many years of effort, he had finally bid farewell to polyester fiber and put on real fur.

The thick smell of soil, the bitter scent of crushed grass juice, and the endless, desolate openness in one glance all combined to form this incomparably real and incomparably absurd world.

For the first few days, Wei An basically lived in terror. Any fast-moving black dot in the sky could become the source of terror that split his liver and gallbladder. Any unusual rustle in the grass meant a fatal attack that could send him farewell from this place. His “home,” the shallow pit where he had hidden when he first woke up, had half-collapsed on the third day after a passing wild rhinoceros, which had not noticed him at all, stepped on it.

Truly very impolite.

And all Wei An could do was dig harder. Digging holes was an instinct carved into animal genes, while his human consciousness directed him to design the burrow more intricately. After all, this was his only fortress on this vast and danger-ridden grassland, his only reliance against the night, the cold, and all predators.

After enormous hardship, he chose a good “feng shui treasure land” that was not easy to collapse again. He dug the entrance very deep, designed branching paths and emergency exits, hid the entrance beneath the crevices of several weathered rocks, and cleverly disguised it with dry grass and broken stones.

This cost Wei An countless days and nights of terror, but it finally gave him a fragile bit of peace.

In theory, prairie dogs were supposed to be social animals. Some rested while others stood guard.

Unfortunately, he was probably the most unconventional prairie dog in all of Pagar. To this day, he had only himself, along with a careful store of grass roots and shriveled berries in his burrow, enough to last several days.

Life flowed by amid vigilance, being chased, being driven around, and being frightened.

Wei An gradually became familiar with his territory. The higher grassy slope to the east was a place where a family of red foxes often appeared. Near the pile of rocks to the west hid a lazy rattlesnake, which would come out to sunbathe leisurely when the weather was warm. The north had an open view, but it was also the golden eagles’ favorite hunting ground. The south… was relatively safer. There was a small puddle there, but he had to drink as fast as lightning.

He also learned to use a prairie dog’s sharp hearing and sense of smell to avoid danger in advance. He learned which plants were barely edible and which would give him stomachaches.

In his previous life, when Wei An watched wilderness survival competitions, he had thought that if it were him, he would probably be eliminated in three days. Now, reality proved that humans were truly a species with resilience and extremely strong adaptability. These days, he had even learned to observe the movement patterns of large herbivores such as bison herds and antelope herds, using them like a moving, noisy barrier to provide himself with a little cover.

He felt that his current life was actually not bad. After all, the berries he picked up would not send him WeChat messages in the middle of the night asking why he still had not completed the watering task assigned to him before getting off work that evening.

The only regret was that he still lacked a partner to take turns standing guard with him.

The prairie dog’s social instinct had been restlessly urging him to find a partner. He could not stand guard alone for his whole life.

Until this afternoon. The weather was oppressively hot in a strangely abnormal way. The clouds over the grassland hung so low that they almost reached the extreme, bringing with them a suffocating feeling of an incoming storm. Wei An had just narrowly escaped a chase from a fox cub and drilled into a temporarily dug narrow tunnel, still panting hard from the terror of surviving disaster.

There was a strange fishy smell in the air. It was a little like blood, and a little like something richer, heavier, carrying the unsettling aura unique to the decline of a majestic creature.

Wei An should have immediately fled far away from any unusual scent. His grassland adventure over these days had already taught him that he did not have even the tiniest ability to bear risk. But by some strange impulse, even he could not explain why. In the end, he followed that smell and pushed aside a cluster of unusually dense needlegrass.

It was lying there.

A lion cub.

But its body nearly occupied the entire hollow. Its golden-brown fur was covered in dark red blood and black-brown mud, having lost the satin-like luster it should have had under the sunlight. A bone-deep tear extended from the cub’s shoulder blade all the way down to beneath its ribs. The flesh had rolled outward, the blood scabs had dried, and the surrounding fur had clumped into hard patches.

This king of beasts, who had not yet had time to grow up, was breathing so weakly that the rise and fall of its chest could barely be seen. Only from deep in its throat did an occasional thread of dying breath escape.

At this moment, it was like an abandoned rag, lying in the dust, quietly waiting for death—or worse, vultures and hyenas.

Wei An froze in place, all his fur standing on end. His instincts wanted to scream, to shout at himself to run, to get far away from this predator cub that still radiated a terrifying aura even on the brink of death.

But… those tightly shut eyes, that breathing so faint it was nearly severed, and those shocking wounds…

Wei An thought to himself, yesterday a fox nearly took my life, the day before yesterday an eagle carried away my neighbor—if that fat snake that always suns itself on the neighboring mound counts as a neighbor. This is a lion! Even if it’s a little lion, it can probably eat a prairie dog like me without even getting anything stuck between its teeth! I have to leave right now!

His claws were nailed to the ground.

Maybe it was because he truly wanted a partner to take shifts with. Or maybe that tiny shred of ridiculous compassion belonging to a “human” had, within this prairie dog shell, risen at a very inappropriate time.

I must be insane, he thought.

Then he gritted his teeth—if a prairie dog’s teeth could make the expression of “gritting” at all. He turned and shot back into the tunnel.

He did not go far. He merely knew that a kind of thick-leaved grass with fine serrations along the edges grew nearby. A very long time ago, when he was still not a prairie dog, he had glimpsed something similar in a survival variety show. Similar plants had hemostatic and anti-inflammatory effects. More importantly, once when he had been scratched by a badger’s claw, he had accidentally brushed against the sap of this grass, and the wound had indeed healed faster than usual.

Wei An risked being discovered by the fox family patrolling their territory and gnawed off several stalks as fast as he could. He dragged them to the water source and carefully washed the mud from the roots—heaven knew whether the lion would die faster from eating something dirty.

Then he carefully chewed the stems and leaves into pulp, trying his best to mash them into a paste. This was not easy work. Prairie dog saliva might have some use, but it was far inferior to a stone mortar.

Next came the most dangerous part. Wei An dragged that precious, green, mushy “ointment” back to the lion cub’s side. It was still unconscious, but its breathing seemed even shallower. The sweet, fishy smell of the wound beginning to rot almost made the prairie dog vomit. Wei An forced himself closer, trembling as he applied the grass paste bit by bit onto the most terrifying wound on its shoulder blade.

The lion’s muscles unconsciously twitched beneath Wei An’s claws. He was so frightened that his soul almost flew away and he nearly fainted on the spot.

But he did not stop. Little by little, like completing a delicate and terrifying work of art, he smeared the chewed grass leaves onto those deeper claw marks.

By the time he finished all this, Wei An was nearly exhausted, because every little while, he had to lie down a few steps away and cautiously observe first.

It was unknown whether it was his luck or the little lion’s luck, but for three days afterward, they did not attract the attention of scavengers.

On the afternoon of the fourth day, when Wei An quietly approached again, he met a pair of eyes.

The lion cub had woken up.

Those eyes were golden, like melted honey, and like sunlight from the deepest place. Although they were covered with a layer of weakness and fatigue after serious injury, its gaze was still sharp, clear, and carried a power that seemed to pierce through everything. It lay quietly on its side, its eyes locking precisely onto Wei An hiding behind three stones—Wei An had thought his hiding was flawless.

Wei An froze. His blood seemed to freeze instantly. His brain screamed: Run! Run now! But his body was pinned in place by those golden eyes and could not move.

At this critical moment, the lion cub opened its mouth and spoke. It said, “Was it you who saved me?”

Wei An: ?

But this was not even the strangest thing that happened that day. As the lion spoke human words, accompanied by a crackling static sound, a screen like a light curtain finally synchronized its audio and visuals. With a whoosh, it unfolded before their eyes.

In the image was a beautiful black-haired young man. He said, “Hello there, world.”

Wei An: !

He had seen this streamer before. On DouX, teaching everyone to practice something called the First National Radio Calisthenics Set. Because he always promoted unknown small brands, he had been scolded terribly. In fact, during these days when Wei An had nothing to do on the vast grassland, he would occasionally practice that calisthenics set from time to time.

He did not know whether it was his imagination, but although his current prairie dog body could not perform the movements correctly, every time he finished, he felt stronger than the day before.

He felt that he was now simply the fastest-running prairie dog on the entire Pagar Grassland.

And now, someone from his hometown had come!!!

Author’s Note:

Nonsense Mini Theater:

Wei An: I thought I’d transmigrated into Animal World.

Lin Zhao: It’s plane trading. Didn’t expect that, did you?

Little Lion: ??? Isn’t this a beastman world?

P.S. The time Wei An transmigrated was when Lin Zhao had just started leading everyone in the national calisthenics, before Country A exposed the truth of world evolution. He doesn’t know what happened later because… he came to the grassland to become a prairie dog, hahaha.

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