Faced with his glaring poverty, Li Ke was forced to start pulling random items out of his bag to see what else he could liquidate.
He had deliberately brought along a few lightweight, easy-to-carry electronics like a toaster, hoping these relics of civilization might fetch a decent price from the merchant.
But his hopes were instantly dashed. Trader Jen barely glanced at the appliances, valuing them at a measly ten Duke's Casino Tokens each. Lugging them all the way across town was a complete waste of physical stamina.
Surprisingly, raw small stones proved to be a much more reliable source of income. A small stack of ten stones fetched a consistent, flat price.
"So this engine relies on a strict sandbox progression loop just like Minecraft?" Li Ke muttered, nodding to himself. "Mining and logging are going to be mandatory if we want to stay afloat."
Well, manual labor wasn't an issue. With his Tier 4 steel axe and a primitive Stone Axe at his disposal, all he had to do was grind. A bit of hard work wasn't going to break him.
"It looks like we can't afford a single piece of high-tier gear," Erina remarked, taking a quick glance at the pricing index before closing her trader UI with a sigh.
She knew all too well that with their current penniless status, the advanced weapons and armored schematics on the shelves were entirely out of reach.
"Yeah. We're going to have to run a serious, high-efficiency looting circuit tomorrow," Li Ke agreed, a strategic timeline instantly forming in his mind.
"Here's the plan: tonight, we head back to the RV and use our new system tools to reinforce the immediate perimeter. Tomorrow morning will be a dedicated food run. By tomorrow afternoon, we transition strictly into heavy logging and stone-mining to bank up our Dukes and upgrade our defenses."
Li Ke laid out the blueprint for their schedule. Erina raised no objections. The late afternoon shadows were already lengthening across the asphalt. Once night fell, the local infected would break past their daytime speed limit and transform into hyper-aggressive predators. Even though she had proven she could comfortably decapitate a walking zombie, she had absolutely zero desire to test her blade against a sprinting monster moving like an Olympic athlete.
But as they turned to leave the fortified compound, the thought of returning to their base brought a genuine, brilliant smile to Erina's face.
"Since we're heading back, I can finally show you a glimpse of my actual culinary skills tonight!"
Remembering the assortment of salt, pepper, and dried herbs she had carefully salvaged from the kitchen cabinets earlier, she couldn't help but feel a surge of creative excitement. Processed canned spam was undeniably a terrible base ingredient, but their afternoon haul had netted them a few cans of sweet peas and chicken chunks. Combined with the proper spices, she was entirely confident she could simmer a remarkably savory stew over a campfire.
More importantly, it meant she wouldn't have to force herself to choke down raw meat cubes. Now that they knew honey was a critical, lifesaving anti-viral counteragent, she couldn't justify wasting their strategic medical supply just to mask the flavor of a bad meal.
"Are you serious? Man, I have been dying to taste your cooking since day one!"
Li Ke grinned, his eyes lighting up. Erina was a legendary prodigy from a world entirely governed by elite gastronomy; he had been incredibly curious about how mind-blowing her dishes would taste in reality.
Up until now, their primitive living conditions and their paralyzing fear of drawing a horde had kept them from lighting a fire. But now that they held a stack of life-saving anti-viral counteragents in their inventory slots, the psychological pressure was gone. They could afford to live a little.
"Hmph! Just make sure you prepare your palate!" Erina huffed proudly, a classic flash of her regal confidence returning to her eyes.
Keeping their footsteps light, the duo kept close to the tree line as they navigated back toward the coordinates of their abandoned RV.
But as they took a calculated detour through a block of tattered buildings, a specific structural layout caught Li Ke's eye. Sitting right at the edge of the intersection was an abandoned commercial gas station.
The gas station's massive canopy was built from heavy structural steel, anchored firmly to the ground by four solid, reinforced iron pillars. Staring up at the perfectly flat, sprawling roof, Li Ke's tactical gears immediately began to spin.
Getting up there wouldn't require any manual construction labor. They could easily stack a few Wood Frame blocks to create a temporary ladder, scramble onto the roof, and then simply use their system commands to pick the blocks back up [System Search]. That would leave the local infected completely stranded on the asphalt below, utterly unable to reach them.
If I built a fortified base up there, wouldn't it be infinitely safer than an unmoving RV?
Li Ke logged the mental blueprint for later. He didn't bring it up to Erina just yet; deep down, he still believed a mobile transport vehicle offered a far more reliable safety net for long-term survival.
Scanning the immediate vicinity, his eyes caught a large tattered storefront sitting just across the intersection from the pumps—a dedicated automotive repair garage. He made a mental note to bring Erina back here tomorrow morning to scavenge for tools, patch kits, or a fresh set of tires compatible with their RV.
Granted, a baseline blueprint for wheels existed inside his system's crafting index, but Li Ke couldn't guarantee those digital items would perfectly match the physical specifications of their vehicle. Running a dual-track strategy—relying on game logic while actively hunting for real-world parts—was the smartest path forward.
The duo quickly covered the remaining distance back to the RV. After performing a thorough sweep to ensure the perimeter was clear of any hidden infected, they used a bar of salvaged soap and a shared bottle of water to scrub the dirt and dried blood off their hands. With the safety chores out of the way, dinner preparations officially began.
Erina moved with practiced efficiency, laying down a circle of stones to clear a fire pit and stacking a bundle of salvaged wood frames to build a campfire. She unearthed an old, clean metal kettle from the RV's cabinets to serve as a makeshift stockpot. As the sun dipped beneath the horizon, painting the sky in deep shades of crimson and violet, the two of them sat side by side near the crackling flames, watching the ingredients gently simmer and bubble in the pot.
Li Ke had to admit—in Erina's hands, cheap processed spam and stale kitchen spices were transformed by a literal miracle. She worked with effortless grace, utilizing specific boiling techniques and a calculated blend of dried herbs to neutralize the metallic, artificial tang of the preservatives. Step by step, she coaxed out and concentrated whatever genuine savory flavor the meat possessed.
Back on Earth, she would have sooner starved than touch such "plebeian rations." Food of this caliber could never pass the unforgiving standards of her God's Tongue.
But tonight, as the chemical artificiality of the tinned meat drifted past her nose, Erina glanced sideways at Li Ke, who was quietly focusing his gaze on his floating recipe screens to organize tomorrow's crafting queue. A soft, gentle smile touched her lips. Suddenly, the harsh smell of the post-apocalyptic ingredients didn't feel quite so unbearable anymore.
Her eyes drifted past the firelight toward the edge of the tree line. On their trek back, she had spotted several wild blueberry bushes and blooming cottonwood flowers, harvesting a handful of them to use as natural aromatics and tea leaves for later.
Yet, her mind was drifting far past a single evening meal.
If we can scavenge some raw potato eyes, wheat stalks, and corn seeds, Li Ke and I could clear out a massive plot of soil to start our own farm. We wouldn't ever have to stress about running out of food again.
The reality of being the only two living humans around, the crushing uncertainty of whether they would ever return home, and her innate baseline instincts as a master chef all converged, driving her thoughts toward agriculture and sustainability.
Even though her hyper-sensitive palate still actively rebelled against the poor quality of the rations—and even though a part of her still felt an involuntary wave of nausea with every breath of the soup—she couldn't stop herself from sketching out a quiet, beautiful vision of their future together.
Li Ke had risked his life to save her on day one. He was undeniably a good person with a surprisingly resilient mindset, even if he was a bit average—not particularly handsome, just a regular guy.
Yet, this exact ordinary man was the one who had pulled her out of her spiral of absolute panic and blind terror.
Even Erina found her own rapid transformation staggering. Yesterday, she was weeping and fleeing for her life; today, she had personally chopped off the heads of over a dozen rotting monsters.
Maybe it's precisely because Li Ke is so ordinary... she thought, staring into the flames. Seeing someone so average push forward made me realize that if he could do it, then someone as peerlessly talented as me had no excuse to freeze.
That was the core catalyst. Li Ke's calm, completely unbothered attitude in the face of despair had acted as a stabilizing anchor, forcing her own chaotic mind to settle.
"Live every day like it's your last, huh? Ugh, what a thoroughly cliché, overused piece of advice. It's completely useless!" Erina muttered under her breath, aggressively stirring the metal kettle.
The clattering noise didn't break Li Ke's concentration, however. He was completely locked into his floating system overlays, systematically breaking down the mechanics of the crafting index.
Wow... you can actually manufacture heavy machinery like augers, motor vehicles, and even gyro-copters through this thing. But this workbench requirement...
Li Ke stared at the locked blueprint for a standard [Workbench], a slight grimace hardening his features.
If they wanted to scale up their baseline survival odds in this wasteland, mastering the game interface was their only viable path. But looking at the structural tech tree, it was clear that without a functional Workbench, they couldn't produce a single piece of mid-tier technology.
Their immediate hand-crafting options were strictly limited to primitive tier-one gear: woven plant fiber shirts, crude grass shoes, basic wooden bows, primitive arrows, and basic stone armaments.
Even a simple iron spear required heavy manufacturing.
Once a proper Workbench was successfully assembled, virtually every advanced item in the game became fair game. But that required secondary stations like a [Forge] to smelt raw iron ore into clean ingots.
The catch was that both of these critical industrial blueprints were tightly locked down.
The interface listed two independent unlocking conditions: leveling up the [Advanced Engineering] attribute skill, or successfully looting a specific [Schematic].
Li Ke couldn't verify whether he needed to check off both prerequisites or if finding a single schematic would bypass the lock entirely. But since his full Skills allocation tab was still completely blocked behind the permission errors, he had absolutely no way to manually allocate skill points into engineering.
So I really am forced to rely entirely on the Pipe Machine Gun for now?
Li Ke bit his lower lip. He still hadn't cracked the code on how to initialize the locked system menus. His primary hypothesis was that he needed to hit a specific zombie kill count milestone, but relying on melee combat to grind levels was a high-risk gamble. Turning to firearms was the logical leap, but unless they unlocked a Forge to pump out mass quantities of ammunition, guns would quickly become expensive paperweights during a sustained siege.
"What a massive pain in the ass..."
Li Ke kept scrolling down through the massive chemical sub-menus until a specific ingredient icon caught his eye.
[Gunpowder]
He expanded the recipe. The system offered multiple production pipelines. For instance, manufacturing gunpowder inside a specialized Chemistry Station yielded a highly efficient one-to-one conversion rate using raw Coal and Nitrate Powder.
However, the item menu explicitly stated that the recipe could also be processed entirely by hand—the only penalty being a strict double-material tax to synthesize a single unit.
Wait. That means even without a complex Workbench layout, I can still manually hand-craft raw gunpowder anywhere in the field?!
Staring at the glowing gunpowder thumbnail and the locked ammunition molds, a remarkably sharp, borderline villainous grin slowly spread across Li Ke's face.
If I can't manufacture high-tier bullets yet... what's stopping me from mass-producing pipe bombs, landmines, and Molotov cocktails?
If his memory of sandbox survival optimization served him right, crafting a primitive [Molotov Cocktail] was incredibly cost-effective. All it required was a glass bottle, a strip of cloth, and a liquid accelerant.
Against living, intelligent human opponents, basic gasoline fire-pots were relatively low-tier weapons because people possessed the basic cognitive reasoning to drop and roll or put out the flames.
But who was he fighting out here?
He wasn't squaring off against agile, tactical tactical squads! He was fighting a mindless, pathfinding zombie horde that possessed absolutely zero self-preservation coding! If they ever got cornered by a massive running crowd at night, all he had to do was bottleneck them in an alley, dump a massive drum of raw fuel over the front lines, and drop a single match.
Boom. Complete and absolute structural incineration.
Wouldn't the zombies just burn to a crisp?
There was just one catch.
"My own safety."
Li Ke felt a massive contradiction.
If they were swarmed by a massive horde, he and Erina would definitely have to fall back to the gas station canopy for high-ground safety. The RV was too cramped; if they couldn't patch it up, they wouldn't have a reliable extraction vehicle [Travel Skill].
But throwing fire-pots around an active gas station...
Honestly, that was crossing a dangerous line. Li Ke had never contemplated a strategic play that completely unhinged. This was a environment where a single stray ember could trigger a chain reaction. The pumps looked rusted and tattered, but heaven only knew how many gallons of live fuel were still trapped under the pavement. And since he couldn't read a single word of the technical English signage...
"What a massive headache," Li Ke sighed, shaking his head.
He pulled himself out of his tactical notes just in time to see Erina deftly hoist the steaming metal kettle off the fire, settling it safely onto the grass. She smoothly replaced it with a fresh metal canister, bringing clean water to a boil to steep their salvaged herbal tea.
"Dinner is served! Taste the work of a master!" Erina beamed.
She began portioning out the stew, and the rich, savory aroma hitting his nose caused his stomach to growl fiercely. He eagerly accepted a bowl and didn't hesitate for a single second, digging right into the hot food.
The absolute microsecond the stew touched his tongue, an unbelievable wave of flavor exploded across his palate. He had consumed his fair share of processed spam back on Earth, but this was the first time in his life he genuinely perceived canned meat as an absolute masterpiece.
"This is... mind-blowing culinary mastery, Erina! You are seriously incredible!"
Li Ke praised her with total sincerity. Erina absorbed the compliments with the casual elegance of someone who received them every day, proudly raising her chin.
"Hmph! Of course I am! But a plebeian palate like yours is easily satisfied. Just wait until we secure a real kitchen. I'll make sure you understand what true premium ingredients taste like when they're backed by my real technical skills!"
She wasn't trying to maliciously demean his taste; she genuinely, physically detested relying on low-grade, industrial base ingredients. Garbage like processed spam usually lacked the clearance to even enter her sight, let alone her kitchen.
To her, tinned meat was nothing but cheap starch, massive chemical preservatives, and offal scraps blended together to trick commoners into thinking they were eating meat. Erina couldn't wrap her brain around why anyone would willingly choose to love it.
Worse still, modern canned spam was notorious for being almost entirely devoid of real meat fibers! It was a chemical illusion spun out of industrial additives—a text-book brick of gelatinized food coloring and starches. She simply couldn't respect a dish that lied to the consumer.
"Well... it's a literal masterpiece to a guy like me..."
Li Ke swallowed another heavy spoonful, and a violent wave of heat instantly radiated from his core through his veins. His stiff muscles suddenly felt remarkably light, and a profound sense of mental satisfaction washed over his consciousness.
This was a sensory reaction he had never experienced from a meal before. While Erina's post-apocalyptic stew might not be the most expensive dish he had ever eaten, its supernatural psychological side effects caused an involuntary groan to escape his lips. His vision began to swim, and a vivid, hyper-realistic hallucination of a peaceful, domestic farm life erupted across his mind.
In the dream, he was a hard-working homesteader. He spent his days tilling the fertile earth, and when dusk fell, he returned to a warm, cozy cabin to find his beautiful, adoring wife greeting him with a radiant smile and a hearty, home-cooked meal.
After finishing their dinner, the scene smoothly transitioned into a steaming bath. The warm, therapeutic water caressed his skin as he and his wife leaned into each other, the smooth friction of their bodies triggering an intense surge of intimacy that left him wanting to cross every remaining boundary.
His dream-wife had an exceptionally voluptuous, pillowy chest. But just as Li Ke reached out to fully immerse himself in the beautiful fantasy, the vision violently snapped out of existence. He blinked, shaking his head as his consciousness crashed back into reality. The story hadn't reached a premature end—he had simply scraped the bottom of his physical bowl! His food was gone.
No wonder they call it Shokugeki no Soma... the food-gasm anime tropes are completely real...
Silently setting his bowl and chopsticks down onto the grass, Li Ke bent forward, aggressively fighting to morph his expression from a dazed, completely flushed look of pure ecstasy into a composed, stoic poker face.
But the roaring, feverish heat pulsing throughout his entire body told him the chemical reaction wasn't going to fade anytime soon.
"Honestly... that dish was straight-up magic," Li Ke muttered, a lingering daze in his voice.
He looked over at Erina, who was currently eating her own masterpiece with an expression of sheer tolerance, looking as if she might actually gag at any moment. It was a bizarre sight—the chef who had just sent his consciousness into a euphoric, romantic hallucination could barely stomach her own creation.
Shaking his head, Li Ke reached into his inventory grid and pulled out a fresh jar of honey. "Want to wash it down with this?"
Erina's purplish-red eyes immediately narrowed into a fierce glare.
"Are you looking down on me? This is a critical medical resource!" she snapped, her voice laced with elite disapproval. Yet, despite her pride, the lingering chemical aftertaste of the processed spam left her body practically begging for a burst of pure glucose.
Watching her struggle, Li Ke just chuckled and pushed the jar closer to her anyway. He was being completely pragmatic. As long as they maintained a baseline level of caution and didn't suffer a catastrophic run of bad luck, they were past the stage where a single scratch meant an uncurable death sentence.
"Come on, think about it," he reasoned. "Trader Jen's catalog has plenty of other pharmaceuticals listed under her medical tab. Plus, it's not like we've cleared out every house in this sector. We can always loot more."
Erina hesitated for a few seconds. Reluctantly, she reached out and took the jar, but she didn't pop the lid. Instead, with a crisp system shimmer, she stashed it directly into her own inventory grid and turned her back to him with an annoyed huff.
"I refuse to be as reckless and foolish with our assets as you are!"
Li Ke rubbed the back of his neck, a sudden wave of guilt washing over him. He kept his mouth shut, though his shame wasn't actually driven by giving away a piece of their strategic anti-viral medicine.
Rather, it was because the sudden angle of her turning around had treated him to another prominent view of her voluptuous contour and pale legs—sending a violent jolt of primal interest straight down his spine, which was instantly followed by the phantom, throbbing ache of his actual physical concussion.