Even though they had only eaten leftovers for breakfast, the heat radiating from Erina's cooking was still intensely strong. A lingering, restless warmth coursed through Li Ke's entire body, supercharging his focus.
Driven by this surge of energy, he cleared the rooms at a blistering pace—practically triple his speed from yesterday.
Of course, the lightning-fast efficiency was also made possible by the fact that the local neighborhood had been thoroughly depopulated. The initial wolf pack had drawn out a massive chunk of the residential dead, their previous day's scavenging runs had systematically eliminated the stragglers, and the Screamer's glass-shattering wails from this morning had successfully pulled out whatever remaining infected were hiding in the blind spots.
Li Ke and Erina kept a tight formation as they ransacked the interior. Moving from room to room, Li Ke systematically hammered his primitive Stone Axe against various objects, carefully recording what kind of raw resources the engine would yield upon structural destruction.
The mechanics proved rigid. Smashing apart premium leather sofas yielded a predictable handful of Leather and Scrap Polymers, but after clearing multiple rooms, they didn't uncover a single mechanical Wrench, let alone loose plumbing materials.
Frustrated by the dry spell, Li Ke marched over to the wall and aggressively applied his Stone Axe to the house's exposed radiator pipes. After a shower of loud, metallic clangs, the system engine finally validated his persistence, rewarding his grid with a dozen [Short Iron Pipes].
Aside from the piping, a thorough sweep of the main closets only yielded a heap of basic Cloth Fragments, generic Wood planks, and a few Brass door hinges.
As for the highly elusive rolls of Duct Tape? Not a single one materialized.
And the firearms that pop culture claimed every single American family kept locked under their mattresses? Absolutely non-existent.
"Seriously, movies and television back on Earth lied to me. I thought everyone in this country slept with a rifle," Li Ke grumbled all over again. They had completely turned the building upside down and walked away with virtually nothing to show for it. They hadn't even found a single pristine bottle of clean water—only a handful of empty tin cans and glass jars.
Their food returns were equally dismal. After ransacking the kitchen pantry, their grand prize was a couple of cans of premium cat and dog food, alongside a few shriveled, heavily withered ears of dry corn.
"Look on the bright side. At least we walked away with something," Erina offered, letting out a weary, sympathetic sigh. "And under extreme survival parameters, canned pet food is entirely fit for human consumption. It... just won't taste particularly pleasant."
Even the elite heiress was forced to lower her standards. Her high-society relatives back in Japan frequently traveled to the West for commercial business, so she was well aware of how astronomical the domestic firearm ownership rates were supposed to be.
Yet here they were, having thoroughly swept roughly ten independent residential properties since spawning into this world, and their weapon count was still sitting at zero. Even with the supernatural harvesting properties of his Stone Axe, the only rations they could secure were low-tier, near-expired scraps.
If they weren't staring down a literal apocalypse, neither of them would have ever given these tinned pet goods a second glance.
"The resource density in these standard residential zones is entirely too low," Li Ke muttered. He pulled up his character UI, his eyes narrowing as he locked onto a specific statistic stamped into his dashboard labeled [Loot Stage].
His gaming instincts told him their abysmal drop rates were directly linked to this numerical value. In a digital sandbox video game, a low loot stage was just a standard mechanical hurdle—you simply forced your avatar to grind through a hundred more containers until the RNG favored you, since a digital character's stamina was functionally infinite and recovered in seconds.
But actual flesh-and-blood humans had limits.
He had only swept two or three independent residential structures, yet the physical fatigue was already setting in heavily.
"If push comes to shove, we're pivoting strictly to mining," Li Ke muttered, a weary sigh escaping his lips. "Trader Jen buys raw Stone, so we might as well just grind out mineral nodes and sell the bulk materials for raw currency."
He felt completely out of luck.
The resource scarcity in this sector made it feel exactly like playing Minecraft with a custom "Extremely Rare Loot" mod packed into the engine [System Search]. The actual physical returns they were clawing out of these cupboards simply didn't justify the heavy calorie expenditure they were burning through.
According to Trader Jen's purchase layout, a stack of five raw meat pieces only yielded a measly 60 Dukes. Meanwhile, a bundle of 50 Small Stones fetched a consistent 10 Duke's Casino Tokens—a quantity Li Ke could easily harvest with just a few swift, effortless swings of a basic tool.
When they crunched the numbers, they realized they had burned an entire morning running a dangerous looting circuit, only to walk away with less net wealth than he could have generated by simply smashing a boulder on the side of the road.
"But Duct Tape is ridiculously expensive in her store," Erina noted, shaking her head as she adjusted her backpack, which was currently packed with a chaotic assortment of salvaged kitchenware. "She charges 75 Dukes a roll, and her active storefront inventory is missing half the fundamental components we actually need."
She felt equally helpless. After spending hours systematically flipping mattresses and checking drawers, they had practically nothing functional to show for it.
The singular, bright milestone they had uncovered—a baseline bicycle leaning against a residential fence—turned out to be a complete bust. Both of its rubber tires were completely shredded and rotted through, rendering it entirely useless until they secured a matching set of patch kits or replacement wheels.
"It is what it is... Come on, let's make a push for that automotive repair garage down the street. Let's see if we can scavenge a mechanical Wrench from the service bays."
Li Ke turned his gaze toward the commercial garage. The immediate intersection was completely clear of any active infected. Slipped through the tattered metal rolling gates of the service area, their eyes were instantly rewarded by the sight of massive, industrial mechanics' tool chests lining the walls.
And then, reality caught up.
They systematically tore through the heavy drawers, unearthing pairs of rusty wire cutters, various slotted screwdrivers, and random socket sets.
But not a single Wrench materialized.
There wasn't even a basic Claw Hammer to be found.
It was completely absurd. A sprawling, multi-bay commercial automotive repair shop miraculously lacked a single, basic Wrench, as if the tools were short-lived consumables that the previous mechanics had literally swallowed whole. They turned the entire facility inside out, checking every single tool rack, yet their Wrench count remained sitting at dead zero.
Worse still, they didn't even uncover a single rubber tire model. Instead, the system engine repeatedly rewarded their searches with heavy, low-tier car engines.
"......"
Li Ke stared at the absolute structural chaos they had unleashed inside the ransacked garage, his blood pressure spiking dangerously. Feeling entirely defeated, he collapsed heavily onto a massive iron tool chest stamped with a vintage graphic illustration of a working mechanic. He let out a long, hollow groan.
"This world is seriously twisted. I guess that's the absolute beauty of being stuck inside a survival sandbox engine."
Erina stood beside him, completely speechless. She stared down at the heavy car engine resting inside her active system grid, utterly unable to comprehend the coding logic that would fill an auto shop with massive industrial drivetrains while completely omitting a single matching tire or hand tool.
Looking at the profound look of exasperation clouding Li Ke's face, she simply lacked the words to comfort him.
"Forget it. We're going mining," Li Ke sighed heavily, pushing himself back onto his feet. Their number-one survival priority was to buy into high-tier firearms, which meant they needed to generate a massive bankroll of Dukes as fast as humanly possible. The absolute lack of adhesive tape was a massive wrench in his machine-gun blueprints, forcing him to pivot to the single most reliable, flat-rate extraction loop available.
Mining.
If you want to get rich in a sandbox game, you start by punching the terrain. The baseline progression route never lied.
The two organized their gear and executed a swift, final sweep through the commercial gas station Li Ke had scouted earlier.
The good news was that their efforts yielded a healthy stash of intact canned rations and several bags of heavily dried, shelf-stable sliced bread. Behind the station's rear perimeter wall sat a quiet, placid little pond, and peering past the brush, they could see the banks of a massive, rolling river winding through the valley.
The bad news, however, was that the station's underground reservoirs were completely bone-dry.
Every single fuel pump interface displayed a flashing digital 'Empty' notification, completely executing his brilliant Molotov cocktail defense plan before it could even get off the ground. They had zero accelerant.
Because they had abandoned the dry looting run early, the sun hadn't even cleared the meridian by the time Li Ke selected a massive boulder at the edge of the clearing to begin his mining test. He and Erina established a strict tag-team protocol: one would hammer the node for a set interval while the other kept watch, swapping stations the moment physical fatigue set in to ensure both of them maintained enough raw stamina to instantly sprint if an ambush occurred.
But the moment Li Ke brought his Stone Axe down, reality delivered another sharp reality check. It took less than ten continuous, mechanical strokes to completely shatter a boulder the size of a millstone—only for the system engine to dissolve the debris and reward his inventory grid with a measly flat drop of exactly ten pieces of Stone.
Li Ke froze, his tool hovering in mid-air as he stared at the meager resource payout. A cold realization settled deep in his chest: mining raw surface boulders was a complete waste of time.
"Are you freaking kidding me...?"
Li Ke stared at his half-broken Stone Axe and the scattered remains of the rock, thoroughly speechless. If the resource yield stayed this abysmal, he would have to excavate a crater the size of a stadium just to hoard a thousand pieces of Stone.
When you factored in the physics, the actual return on investment wasn't much better than running their dry scavenging circuits. The only real advantage was that it didn't require scanning dark hallways for sleeper zombies.
"It just... dissolved into that tiny pile?!"
Erina walked up, stepping into the shallow pit. She experimentally brought her own tool down a couple of times, instantly arriving at the exact same conclusion. Her expression soured immediately.
"Yeah. There's no way the baseline programming is this punishing," Li Ke analyzed, rolling his stiff shoulders. Even though the system tools did most of the heavy lifting, manually driving the blades into the earth still burned real physical calories. "We must be missing something obvious. In every sandbox game under the sun, harvesting raw building blocks is a breeze. We aren't using the right extraction node, that's all."
His eyes scanned the immediate perimeter, locking onto a jagged, dark rock formation poking through the grass. The surface had a distinct, rusty reddish tint to it. Intrigued, Li Ke strode over and cued up a heavy, power-attack swing.
[Scrap Iron +3]
Li Ke's eyes lit up. He immediately dropped into a crouch, tapping his axe against the base of the node. A clean, ringing metallic clang echoed out of the soil.
"Exactly as I thought! We hit an actual subterranean mineral vein!"
His gaming memory was functioning flawlessly. While raw Scrap Iron had the exact same baseline liquidation value as regular Stone—fetching a measly 2 Dukes for a bundle of ten—the engineering recipes told a completely different story. If he used three units of Scrap Iron to manufacture a single batch of [Robotics Turret Ammo], that single box of ammunition could be resold to Trader Jen for a clean 1 Duke profit!
This was their ticket to a fortune.
"Erina! Forget the rocks, start digging right here!"
Hoisting his tool with renewed energy, Li Ke systematically hammered the iron outcrop. With every swing, crisp system alerts chimed in the corner of his field of view, confirming a steady stream of minerals dropping straight into his grid.
To his absolute delight, every single mechanical stroke rewarded his grid with three pristine units of raw ore. His mining rhythm accelerated, his tool striking the node in a blur of motion.
Fortunately, he maintained enough composure to monitor his active stamina bar. The moment his forearm muscles began to throb with lactic acid, he smoothly stepped out of the lane, signaling Erina to take over the mining node while he transitioned strictly into sentry duty.
The psychological shadow of the morning's Screamer zombie ambush was still fresh in his mind. He had absolutely zero intention of letting a roaming pack blindside them while their heads were buried in the dirt.
Erina's manual tool form was infinitely more practiced and powerful than his own, meaning preserving her baseline physical stamina for a potential fight was their highest tactical priority.
The moment beads of sweat began to roll down her pale forehead, Li Ke smoothly swapped back into the rotation, driving his tool right back into the core of the iron vein.
By this point, their collective tag-team efforts had aggressively hollowed out a massive crater in the clearing. Because the ore vein dipped deeper into the earth with every harvested block, they were forced to use a primitive wooden shovel to aggressively clear out the surrounding topsoil. They needed a wide, sloped ramp to ensure they could instantly sprint out of the quarry if an emergency struck.
The extra infrastructure work added a heavy layer of labor to their afternoon.
Li Ke kept mechanically hammering the node, breaking away the bedrock while using his shovel to reshape the pit. As the midday sun cleared the meridian, the heat radiating down from the sky became suffocating, driving a desperate urge through his senses to strip off his heavy coat and layers.
But a quick self-assessment of his soft, sedentary office-drone physique forced him to abandon the idea.
If he were running this sandbox loop completely solo, he wouldn't have hesitated to work shirtless. But standing right next to a peerless, high-society anime heroine, Li Ke possessed enough vanity to avoid exposing his distinctly unathletic form.
Yet, just as he locked into that exact train of thought, Erina—who was feeling equally baked by the blinding sunlight—didn't hesitate. She smoothly unbuttoned her tattered winter coat, shedding the heavy outer layer onto the grass to reveal a pristine white uniform shirt, already visibly damp with sweat along her back and collarbones.
"Hey, pervy mister! Aren't you burning up in all those layers?!"
Erina wiped her brow, her head spinning slightly from the combination of intense manual labor and the scorching midday sun. The sheer physical exhaustion was finally starting to dull her royal demeanor.
"I'm doing alright..." Li Ke managed to choke out.
He stole a quick glance at her, and his voice immediately trailed off. The thin, white fabric of her uniform shirt had become heavily dampened by sweat, turning partially translucent under the harsh midday sun.
Black lace...
The realization hit him like a physical blow. Suddenly, the suffocating heat radiating from the sky wasn't the only thing causing his temperature to spike; the core energy inside his own veins began to boil all over again.
Steeling his focus, Li Ke forced his arms to move, grinding out another continuous thirty minutes of manual labor before finally calling a halt to the rotation [System Logic vs. Reality]. Their forearms were throbbing with lactic acid, and their physical stamina bars had officially scraped the absolute bottom of their limits.
"Let's pack it in," Li Ke grunted, wiping a layer of grit off his brow. "We'll head back to the perimeter, grab a quick lunch, and make a run to the trader compound. My inventory grid is currently holding twenty-two hundred units of raw Scrap Iron. How's your haul looking?"
Climbing out of the massive quarry—which had aggressively dipped to a staggering depth of five meters—Li Ke stared back at the void they had hollowed out. Back on Earth, a commercial excavator crew would have taken a full hour of continuous operation to move this much topsoil and bedrock. Taking a deep, ragged breath, he shook his head.
The sandbox physics of this system engine were utterly ridiculous.
Erina stepped up beside him, lightly brushing the caked dirt and mineral dust off his shoulders as she answered, "I didn't track the raw iron counts. I cued the entire batch into our crafting line and converted it straight into Robotics Turret Ammo. The toolbar is showing four hundred and fifty rounds."
"You already processed the entire batch?" Li Ke asked, thoroughly surprised by her multitasking speed.
"Of course," Erina replied, her voice dipping as she subtly turned her face away, her cheeks flushing slightly as she avoided his gaze. "We still need to purchase a few vital assets from her store. Besides, I wanted to showcase my actual culinary abilities tonight... I want to see exactly what the raw meat from this world tastes like when it's handled properly!"
"No need to get defensive," Li Ke chuckled, completely missing her hidden bashfulness. "The ammo yields are perfect. Besides, it's not like we can utilize the raw ore without a active Forge anyway... Come to think of it, Erina, do you want to take a detour to that small pond by the gas station to wash up?"
He pointed toward the placid little lake bordering the intersection. The rear yard of the station was littered with clean, empty metal oil drums that could easily be repurposed into a makeshift privacy stall, saving them a dangerous trek out to the wide rolling river in the valley.
"Let's just scrub our hands for now," Erina murmured, her posture stiffening with a sudden wave of intense shyness. "We still have to run another heavy mining circuit this afternoon anyway."
Deep down, she was acutely aware of the logistical reality. In a lawless, zombie-infested wasteland, stripping down to bathe in an open clearing meant someone absolutely had to stand sentry to scan the tree line for threats. And right now, Li Ke was the only human companion she had.
Keeping a tight formation, the duo marched back across the threshold of Trader Jen's safe zone. Erina immediately accessed the storefront UI, liquidating her entire mass-produced stack of turret ammunition into a clean pile of Dukes, before dumping the currency right back into the food tab to clear out every single unit of [Raw Meat] the merchant had in stock.
"Please let the rendering model be decent... please let it be decent," Erina whispered frantically under her breath.
Before executing the system command to materialize the purchase into physical reality, she went so far as to press her palms together, offering a silent, desperate prayer to whatever cosmic coder was running this world.
With a soft system click, a heavy package wrapped tightly in generic burlap material materialized on the counter. Peeling the rough canvas back, she uncovered a thick, palm-sized cut of raw red meat, letting out a massive sigh of relief.
But the moment her fingers pressed into the flesh to check its structural elasticity, her perfect brows furrowed in deep culinary confusion.
"How bizarre... what animal did this meat actually harvest from? The muscle fiber structure is incredibly unnatural. Why does the marbling mimic multiple completely different proteins all at once?"
Li Ke couldn't map the elite chemical nuances of her palate. Staring at the thick, substantial block of raw protein, a wide, triumphant grin simply spread across his face.
"Honestly, who cares what the code says it is? As long as it cooks up safe, it's a goldmine."
He was genuinely ecstatic. Securing a reliable, mass-purchasable supply of raw meat meant their long-term nutritional parameters were officially solved. Starvation was permanently off the table.
"I suppose you're right," Erina nodded, forcing her professional perfectionism to take a backseat as she turned toward the exit. "I'll run a few experimental searing techniques back at the campfire to see how to coax a decent flavor profile out of it."
But as she stepped through the door frame, Li Ke's eyes caught a lingering view of the motionless merchant woman. His throat tightened, and he instinctively swallowed a hard breath.
Trader Jen's digital character model was still rhythmically swaying on her feet, her pleasant, static smile staring blindly into the void. The tattered fabric of her medical lab coat—which had been left completely disheveled from his frantic rapid-clicking glitch earlier—remained visibly parted, exposing a massive, completely frozen expanse of pale skin to the room.
The absolute second Erina's back was turned, a primal, hyper-restless impulse flared up in Li Ke's chest, tempting him to reach out and manually test the physical texture of the NPC's uniform one more time.
Ultimately, his moral boundaries held the line. Forcing his hands back into his pockets, he violently choked down the urge.
Control... pure self-control...
Muttering the mantra like a protective shield, Li Ke hurried his stride to keep pace with Erina's heels.
But as his brain mapped the upcoming timeline—realizing that within the hour, he was going to consume another hyper-potent, mind-altering masterpiece cooked fresh by the legendary Food Wars heroine—a cold sweat broke out across his neck.
If her leftover spam broth threw my senses into a wild food-gasm hallucination... what is a premium cut of raw steak going to do to my brain?
For the first time since unlocking his player interface, Li Ke felt a genuine, deep-seated terror settling into his soul.
Am I about to turn into an absolute monster?