June 14th, Year 8 of the Doomsday Calendar, five o’clock in the morning.

In the pitch-black night, a dark blue energy car bearing an Academy of Sciences license plate slid silently out through the back gate. With the side window down and the cool night wind blowing in, Su Mo held the steering wheel with one hand, his gaze drifting to where the headlights ended.

Although Ai Jianqiang had said his car was nothing special, it was in fact a top-tier model fitted with a fifth-grade energy engine. Its performance was formidable and its body was sturdy. Even if it slammed straight into a solid wall, the high-grade alloy body and energy-absorbing structure would keep the driver and passengers perfectly safe, enough to earn the nickname “little tank.”

But at this moment, Su Mo did not have a single thought to spare for the car. Looking into the far distance, where the sky had already turned the pale white of a fish’s belly, he felt an indescribable sadness in his heart.

Who could have imagined that overclocking one’s thoughts would require the mysterious alchemy furnace he had once upgraded for the territory’s heating, using energy stones worth sixty thousand survival points and another twenty thousand points? Over the years, the furnace had burned all sorts of strange disaster products, and someone had discovered its miraculous effect by chance. After that, over the following years, the researchers of the Academy of Sciences had one after another used their lives to find out how to use it properly and what it could do.

To use it, one had to walk calmly into the furnace, start the burning device with one’s own hands, and watch with open eyes as the raging fire devoured one’s body, gaining an expansion of thought only after unspeakable pain. When Ji Yang had said this so lightly, Su Mo had been able to answer only with silence.

The alchemy furnace had been upgraded in the real world for far too short a time. He himself had never worked out its true usage and functions. Even Ai Jianfeng, who spent every day studying it, probably did not understand it as deeply as everyone at the Academy of Sciences did in this world. If he wanted to save Ji Yang, even spending all the points the system had left, the chance of success would be one in ten thousand.

And at that moment, having seen through his identity, Ji Yang, with his thought speed raised without limit, had instantly figured everything out. He had shrewdly guessed why Su Mo hid his identity, and so he forcibly suppressed the emotion surging in him and showed nothing strange. Under the game’s surveillance, all he could do in the end was use that time to hurriedly hand over a few important research tasks before drifting away, doing nothing out of line.

But it was precisely this that made Su Mo feel more and more strongly the restrictions the game imposed, and the contradictions of this world. Because of the game, even to the very last moment before his death, Ji Yang could not stand in front of him and properly ask that one question: where had he gone for these eight years!

Also because of the game, this world was like the world in The Truman Show. Everyone lived in a muddle, with no direction left to move forward. Carrying this one regret, Ji Yang had been the first person in this world to learn his identity. He was also the first to go to his death.

Still, from the glimmer of light in his eyes just before he left, Su Mo could just make out that, compared with the others, he had gone in a very “happy” way. Everyone else had left in boundless despair, but he had seen a thread of dawn in the darkness.

“It’s too real. The dungeon world is truly too real.”

“It’s really hard to think of them as simulated characters. Really hard!”

He kept telling himself, almost hypnotizing himself, that this entire world was simulated by the game through its permissions and was not the real wasteland. But the moment he thought of Ji Yang’s last look, and the information Ji Yang had given at the end, Su Mo still found it hard to accept the result.

According to Ji Yang, Tian Yuan Territory now looked like a bed of flourishing flowers, with its people’s lives improving day by day and a promising future. But in truth, the potential of the entire territory had been overdrawn in advance, and its contradictions were becoming more obvious every day.

First, the territory’s energy stone mines had had all their large veins fully mined out half a year ago. Only the last of the stockpile remained to barely keep energy stone research running, and every use left a little less. The territory’s grain output had also basically hit its peak, and the reserves were only enough to feed a million people for about three years. Weapons development had run into a technological wall. The game directly restricted nuclear fission, and humans could not find a new material to replace gunpowder and produce stronger kinetic energy.

As for exploring other regions of the wasteland, the limits set by the disasters meant that the farthest the exploration teams had gone was only into the deep sea. They had not even found a second landmass besides the New Continent. The whole New Continent held only so many resources and was only so big. Unless humanity kept invading and conquering, it could not keep expanding. And in recent years, because of increasingly frequent natural disasters and the contradictions within the territory, expansion had stopped, and the contradictions had become more and more obvious.

In a sense, the murlocs’s sudden outbreak had made Su Mo himself no more than the fuse. The real cause was that someone in the territory was extremely dissatisfied with the status quo, yet could not change it with their own strength alone, and so kept inflaming the conflicts, believing that nothing new could be built without first smashing the old.

After thinking it over for a while, Su Mo found the first point unsurprising. After all, once the game entered its survival version, those cards that restored mineral reserves had been used up one after another. In eight years, the territory had managed to buy up a vast number of such cards to keep output going, push the energy stone engine through several iterations, and spread energy stone vehicles among all the humans of the New Continent. That could already be called a miracle. By now the cards in everyone’s hands were probably used up long ago, which was why the energy stone mines could not recover.

“The energy stone mines... recovering their reserves is naturally extremely tricky in the wasteland eight years later, but I still have reserve restoration cards in my storage space. That’s not a problem.”

He opened his storage space and checked the remaining cards, and Su Mo relaxed. Fortunately, although the game restricted his identity as a drifter and would not let him tell anyone in the territory who he really was, it placed no restrictions on what was in his storage space. Apart from the Mountains and Seas Scroll card, which was banned and could not be taken out because it was too much of a bug, the other low-grade cards could all be used, including that high-grade card for changing terrain. And just like last time, even if used inside the ruins, those cards would automatically recover after he left the ruins.

“One first-level reserve boost card, two first-level 10-reserve restoration cards, and one third-level 50-reserve restoration card.”

“That’s more than enough!”

He pressed down on the accelerator and overtook the slow truck ahead. Feeling the speed jump to 130 in an instant, Su Mo’s brows loosened, and his tense mood eased.

Grain, weapons, exploring outward. None of these were things he cared about. As long as he could unify the territory once again, he would never worry about how to develop afterward. What he cared about were those parasites, the ones who wanted reform and the ones who resisted it.

“These people have to be dug out. If they should be beaten, beat them. If they should be killed, kill them.”

“Especially this damned identity system. It must be abolished at the first opportunity. I don’t have that much time to dawdle.”

As his strength grew and his experience deepened, Su Mo was less and less the peaceful, detached man he used to be. He had noticed that he could hardly stand the things that made him uneasy anymore. Day and night he thought about how to live longer in this world. He racked his brains over how to gain more permissions. On top of that, he carried the future of humanity on his shoulders. Life was already oppressive and exhausting enough, so why keep suppressing himself inside a dungeon? Only by being relaxed yet orderly could one keep one’s spirit calm.

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