Chapter 235 — The Trade Fair
Luo Xun and the team didn’t dare bring too many supplies on this trip. Instead, they packed a substantial volume of crystals, using metal manipulation to conceal them thoroughly inside the hidden hollow layers of their vehicle frames. Unless someone completely dismantled their trucks or a metal-type user explicitly scanned and tore open the chassis, it was absolutely impossible for anyone to discover the hoard.
Besides, even if someone harbored malicious intent and wanted to smash through their truck bodies to check for hidden treasures, they would have to be capable of breaking the metal first! The structural density Yan Fei fabricated now was so formidable that even if Zhang Su and Xu Mei joined forces to pelt it with their combined wind-and-fire exploding fireballs, they couldn’t breach it anytime soon, let alone ordinary survivors.
The inventory they prepared as cargo for this trip consisted entirely of the Otaku Team’s regional specialties—various kinds of dried vegetables and a small volume of fresh, long-shelf-life fruits. Aside from that, there were some pots, bowls, ladles, and basins Yan Fei had casually molded from scrap metal. The dried vegetables occupied the largest volume, but the overall quantity wasn’t cartoonishly exaggerated either.
Driving through the main exit of their secret tunnel and sealing the iron barrier behind them, the group was just about to steer the convoy onto the primary highway when a heavy, earth-shaking vibration rippled through the air. Two massive silhouettes came trotting over with an elegant, bouncing stride, leaving Luo Xun with a forehead covered in black lines.
Over the past few weeks, although Luo Xun and the team had essentially been holed up at home without venturing out, they housed these two idiot wolves in their immediate perimeter. Ever since their last cooperative hunt, the pair had actually taken to letting out synchronized wolf howls not far from the base entrance during the dead of day, howling line after line until their own puppy inside the house joined in, barking and whining along to join the festive racket.
Left with no alternative under this persistent disruption, the bewildered group had finally walked down to the tunnel exit, only to find the two wolves wagging their massive tails with absolute, fawning sycophancy…
There was no helping it; the density of alternative mutated animals drawing near the ponds to drink, lounge, or pass through was far too high, and a significant portion possessed terrifying combat capabilities. The two wolves faced immense difficulty mounting a successful hunt on their own, so for the sake of their personal safety, their brains had finally clicked into gear once more, and they realized they could summon outside reinforcement.
Trailing behind the two wolves to the coordinate they had targeted, the team helped them capture a few dimwitted mutated ducks. Luo Xun and the guys systematically harvested the crystals and the fine feathers exactly as before, and the success of this secondary collaboration brought a predictable result… the absolute moment they ran out of food lately, they would start howling outside. Occasionally, if they spotted Luo Xun and the team rolling out, these two creatures—possessing incredibly sharp noses—would excitedly trot over to act cute and curry favor, exactly like their current display.
Luo Xun turned a helpless gaze toward Yan Fei beside him, and Yan Fei could only return a resigned, bitter smile. They could only huddle to discuss a strategy with the rest of the crew. Coincidentally, a few wild mountain goats were currently wandering and grazing a short distance away. The physical bulk of these specimens wasn’t anywhere near as towering as the monstrous goat they had encountered early on, nor were they as ferociously aggressive.
Luo Xun and the team deployed a temporary pitfall trap nearby and successfully captured two specimens. Skinning the carcasses, they casually unmounted two goat legs to stash inside the truck freezers, handing the rest of the meat over to the two wolves. Luo Xun pointed toward the distant horizon, then back toward the entrance of their secret tunnel: “We are leaving. You guard the house. We’ll return in a few days, so do not follow us!”
With so many commercial caravans sent out by major bases congregating ahead, those survivors might lack the power to handle a massive zombie tide, but packing a punch against two silly wolves whose intelligence was severely concerning and whose combat parameters weren’t exceptionally fierce would pose absolutely zero issue.
Luo Xun didn’t dare allow these two intimidating yet dimwitted creatures to trail behind their convoy, lest it invite immense danger to their own team along the way.
Perhaps the cognitive capacity of the two wolves wasn’t anywhere near as tragic as Luo Xun and the team estimated; at the very least, they joyfully clamped their jaws around the carcasses and bolted, leaving nothing but two massive, furry tails wagging merrily out of sight.
The walkie-talkie crackled once more with the teasing grumbles of the boys from the alternative trucks: “Look at those tails wagging so happily—they are definitely just dogs, right?”
Who cared if they were wolves or dogs? At the very least, they could handily watch the property for their family—uh, evaluated from a functional standpoint, they could technically be classified as guard dogs.
Shaking the foolish displays of the two wolves from their minds, Luo Xun and the team finally directed their convoy toward the Southwest Base.
Thinking back to the early days of the apocalypse, at least four massive regional bases had been established across City A in rapid succession. Yet by now, only this lone base remained—the one boasting the absolute largest spatial footprint and the highest baseline population.
The ruins of the urban core were bound to host compact independent bases or scattered loose survivors, but currently, everyone lived out their days with absolute caution, none daring to expose their exact coordinates. Whether those hidden factions possessed functional satellite signal receivers to harvest data like the Otaku Team remained completely verified by no one, meaning this trade fair was bound to remain an institutional affair centered around the existing major bases.
As for whether Luo Xun recalled the base ever hosting a trade fair across his past life… it had to be said that a great number of historical threads had completely shifted. When he lived out his days inside the base in his past life, even the protocol to systematically partition and manage the inner and outer cities separately hadn’t manifested yet, let alone an event of this caliber.
Inter-base communications had certainly existed, but those were institutional operations confined to the high-ranking military officials. At most, ordinary civilians would intermittently catch wind that a transport convoy from a certain base had arrived at the gates, but alternative commercial interactions between ordinary civilians were exceptionally rare. Luo Xun had only ever heard rumors of a few independent merchant caravans that traversed the landscape to trade between the various bases, but he had never heard of a full-scale trade fair operating on a dimension this massive.
Consuming two days of steady driving, the group finally caught sight of the towering, majestic ramparts of the Southwest Base looming in the distance once more. The outer perimeter walls of the base appeared to have been raised slightly, but visibly, the extension wasn’t anywhere near as cartoonishly exaggerated as the inner city’s fortifications.
Directly east of the moat flanking the exterior base gates, a sprawling loop of high concrete walls had been newly constructed, enclosing the exact designated coordinate for this trade fair.
Luo Xun and the team first evaluated the layout from a distance, observing that a stream of commercial convoys had only just arrived today, their vehicles queuing up before the main entrance as they waited to settle the entry fees and clear a path inside to set up their stalls. Dawn had only just fully broken across the horizon, and the main gates of the Southwest Base swung wide open as a crowd of local residents out to purchase or barter for supplies began streaming toward the marketplace.
Verifying that the safety parameters bore zero immediate threats, Luo Xun and the team steered their vehicles forward to merge smoothly into the queuing column.
Before long, it was Luo Xun’s turn at the gate. The registration clerk didn’t explicitly interrogate them regarding their background or origin, merely asking how many vehicles they were driving and whether they intended to purchase or liquidate goods.
Luo Xun ran a few inquiries, learning that if a party intended to set up a commercial stall, they had to register right here and clear a baseline fee, after which a specific patch of ground would be allocated to them. Factions entering purely to browse and purchase goods were also levied a minor tariff, but they were strictly forbidden from parking their vehicles within the designated market tracks, mandatory parking spaces allocated for them inside a detached lot instead.
In reality, the entry tariff here wasn’t assessed per individual head; pedestrian traffic streaming out from the base gates to browse the market was exempt from fees. The administration exclusively collected stall rental fees from merchants and parking tariffs from vehicular traffic.
The financial overhead wasn’t steep, calculated linearly based on the footprint of the vehicle or stall size across the absolute number of operating days.
The Otaku Team’s current column consisted of only two operational vehicles—one large truck and one small car—which combined perfectly to occupy two standard stall spaces, logging a daily overhead of twenty level-one crystals.
Receiving their entry tokens, they steered into their designated slot and parked the vehicles. Emulating the display strategies of the surrounding merchants, they retrieved a fraction of their cargo to array across the earth-molded counter built before their parking spaces.
These earth counters lining the front of the stalls had been fabricated by earth-type superpower users deployed by the Southwest Base when structuring the marketplace. If a merchant possessed specific display demands, they could casually layer additional wooden boards or racks over the earth platform to expand their display capability.
After a brief discussion, Luo Xun decided to extract merely a fraction of each product type for display, liquidating and replenishing the stock on the fly. In any case, since this was their very first time visiting the market, they desperately wanted to take a stroll to browse the alternative stalls as well.
Retrieving their various dried vegetable packs from the vehicle containers, Luo Xun explicitly extracted a small pinch of each variety, using custom metal basins Yan Fei had fabricated to rehydrate them in fresh water to serve as operational samples. Across the adjacent section of the earth platform, they arrayed their assortment of fresh melons and fruits alongside the pristine metal pots, bowls, and cups Yan Fei had molded, rounded out by the plates, storage baskets, and straw hats the crew had woven out of rice stalks to pass the idle hours at home.
Once these chores were finalized, Luo Xun casually fished out his personal cell phone and booted it up. The SIM card sealed inside this terminal happened to be the exact same line he had utilized back when they resided inside the Southwest Base; because it housed integrated GPS tracking capabilities, they had strictly forbidden themselves from ever turning it on while holed up at their secret base. It wasn’t until this exact moment that he pulled it out to check the network.
This coordinate sat strictly outside the base walls, and logic dictated that the domestic cellular grid inside shouldn’t extend out here. Yet to his surprise, the moment the terminal booted up, the network bar connected seamlessly! Following that, a rapid succession of delayed internal notifications and base-wide automated text messages came flooding into his inbox!
“Huh?”
Catching Luo Xun’s sound, the rest of the crew crowded over in unison.
“We can actually catch a signal out here. The administration probably installed fresh signal relays to accommodate the civilian traffic coming out to shop,” Luo Xun analyzed. Given the immediate proximity to the base proper, mounting a few signal towers wasn’t particularly difficult.
Hearing this, the rest of the boys hurriedly fished out their own terminals, booting them up to check for lingering messages.
Because the Otaku Team had formally filed for dissolution long ago, their system hadn’t received any squad-sanctioned mission directives. Instead, their inboxes were packed with a massive medley of internal base notifications, administrative decrees, public safety warnings regarding hazardous zones flanking the perimeter, data sheets introducing newly discovered mutated plant species, and research updates regarding mutated animal traits.
In contrast, when Yan Fei booted up his personal cell phone and scrolled through a few notifications, his eyebrows arched slightly, and he handed the screen straight to Luo Xun.
Luo Xun caught the terminal and skimmed the contents, discovering a succession of messages dispatched by Captain Guo. They detailed various assignments where the military’s metal-type squad had received official directives to execute field missions outside the base gates, asking if Yan Fei wanted to join the column. The messages ceased completely after a certain point, indicating that Captain Guo’s squad had likely departed from the Southwest Base long ago.
Aside from those, there were several text messages sent by Yan Fei’s biological father. Scanning these lines, the early transmissions appeared to display a superficial level of concern regarding whether his son was living comfortably, before rapidly degenerating into bitter complaints about why his son kept his phone turned off and ignored his text messages. Toward the end, the tone escalated into absolute, hysterical vitriol—viciously condemning his son for being completely irresponsible and abandoning his filial obligations to support his elders, before shifting into unhinged speculation that his son had likely driven outside the base to court death. The final messages declared that since his son refused to obey his directives to remain inside the base and climb the political ladder, he had better stay dead; even if he unluckily survived, he shouldn’t expect a single shred of patronage or care from his father ever again…
This torrent of toxic, erratic content left Luo Xun’s forehead covered in black lines, and he slanted his eyes toward Yan Fei: “Do you want to block him for good?”
Yan Fei let out a cold snort: “I already blocked his number before handing the phone to you, but these few text messages had already logged into the inbox before the block took effect.” His original intent was merely to let Luo Xun look at Captain Guo’s updates, completely forgetting that these lingering text messages hadn’t been systematically deleted yet.
The moment the Otaku Team’s inventory was properly arrayed across the counter, it didn’t take long before a steady stream of passing shoppers began circling their stall to browse. Dried vegetables weren’t an exceptionally rare commodity in the marketplace, but the absolute majority on display elsewhere consisted of mutated plant varieties, and the flavor profile of those…
Yet the dried greens Luo Xun and his team showcased carried an explicit guarantee of being non-mutated vegetation, and they had even boldly arrayed rehydrated samples in fresh water for the public to inspect, which was a remarkably rare sight in the current era.
Thank you for reading 🙂 I hope you all liked my translations. If you enjoyed my work, please consider buying me a Ko-Fi 😉
