WEF - Chapter 10
Chapter 10: Wasting Three Seconds of Everyone's Time
After settling accounts with Accountant Li, signing the electronic contract, and shaking hands, the two went their separate ways.
Accountant Li burrowed into the shadow on the ground and was taken away by her superior.
Ning Dali stood alone in the scorched wilderness, counting the zeros displayed on her smart device.
Fifteen million.
15000000.00
Eight zeros, a little longer than Ning Dali had imagined.
Besides the fifteen million, there were 1,000 Points, plus the Points for the food that had been blown up, which were still awaiting settlement.
Ning Dali had no idea what those Points could actually buy. Judging by the anguished look in Accountant Li's eyes, she conservatively estimated that she had built her fortune from nothing.
For the first time in her two lives combined, she had made it.
Ning Dali had imagined more than once how triumphant she would feel after getting rich. She had imagined it while gnawing on cornbread buns at a Federation foster-care center, while burning the midnight oil in the school study room, and even while beating up an ousted senior Federation official in prison.
She had fantasized about it many times, but when wealth really arrived, her entire bearing became more composed.
The newly minted tycoon, worth ten million, crouched on the ground and personally inspected the wreckage of the RV.
Thanks to the blessings of a demolition bomb and some small, high-powered explosives, the RV had been blown to bits. Ning Dali inspected it carefully and found only two crystals still intact.
Everything else had been split into pieces and was unrecognizable...including her "friend."
Ning Dali fished out her "friend" and set it aside.
According to online accounts, the Farming Folk had a dedicated corpse-collection team. No matter where people died, they would brave mountains of knives and seas of fire to come in their hearses and collect the bodies.
It was just unclear how they located the bodies so precisely.
Ning Dali guessed it had something to do with abilities. Just as Ying could use shadows to locate the Airdrop immediately, the Farming Folk had their own ways of using abilities.
Abilities really were wondrous.
Ning Dali picked up a small shard of glass from the ground and found herself wondering whether an Ability could restore a damaged object.
Maybe if they found a small piece of broken glass, they could restore an entire car window. If they found a piece of unburned top-grain cowhide, they could restore a whole cow or a complete seat made of genuine leather.
Ning Dali lowered her gaze and stared warily at the shard in her hand, wishing she could grind all these things into fragments and wash them into the sea.
But she couldn't.
For one, there was no sea here. For another, excessive caution would invite unnecessary suspicion.
She couldn't look too guilty.
To act with righteous confidence was the first lesson prison had taught her.
After letting her thoughts run wild, Ning Dali finally took a deep breath and dispelled her paranoia.
After packing all the food into the hiking backpack Accountant Li had given her, she was about to place a call to Zhuang Yuezhen.
She entered the number and, just as she was about to place the call, her fingers paused.
Would Zhuang Yuezhen come to pick her up? After witnessing the RV explosion with their own eyes, would they still risk angering the Shadow King to come for her?
It was hard to say.
Human nature cannot bear being tested. The best approach is not to test it.
Ning Dali opened her social media app and uploaded a photo of herself with Accountant Li as her profile picture.
Out of respect for Accountant Li, and to keep everyone from noticing the bewilderment on her face, Ning Dali cropped the photo so that only one-third of Accountant Li's face was visible.
After changing her profile picture, she sent Wang You a message.
"Do you have a refrigerator in the car? My meat can't stay out for too long."
Ten minutes later.
Ning Dali spotted an off-road vehicle tearing along wildly.
Before it even stopped, Zhuang Yuezhen furtively poked her head out of the window and turned it this way and that as she surveyed the situation.
"No unusual shadows in sight for now. Ying seems to have left, Sis Dali is alive too, and the RV is dead. Great, everyone is safe for the moment! We can stop the car!"
"Got it." Wang You, who was driving, made a hand signal and slowed down.
The off-road vehicle pulled up steadily in front of Ning Dali.
Wang You got out and asked with concern, "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine." Ning Dali shook her head and said casually, "It's all been settled."
She wasn't saying this to reassure or deceive Wang You. Ying had snatched the Airdrop, while Ning Dali had committed Food Waste. Both sides had something to hold over the other, so each could only back down. They really had reached an agreement.
For once, Ning Dali had told the truth.
But to Wang You, those words meant something entirely different.
She looked at the explosion site behind Ning Dali, then took in Ning Dali, who had a hiking bag on her back, with no trace of combat on her and not even a single hair out of place. She drew a sharp breath.
She knew Ning Dali was strong.
Ning Dali not only had impressive muscles, but according to the notice posted by Fertile Base, she was also a powerhouse who possessed a Three-Character Ability.
To ordinary people, a Three-Character Ability already made someone a top-tier powerhouse, surpassing ninety percent of Ability Users in strength.
But now, Ning Dali's strength had reshaped Wang You's understanding of her.
She had actually managed to negotiate with the furious Shadow King.
The RV had exploded, yet Ning Dali was uninjured, wasn't she? At most, her clothes had gained a few creases.
What did that prove?
It proved that the Shadow King had no way to deal with Ning Dali and could only vent her anger on the RV!
No wonder she had dared to provoke the Shadow King online. She had something to rely on and had been confident she could retreat unscathed...Wang You suddenly understood, then remembered the half bottle of milk Ning Dali had casually taken out.
The milk had been stored at room temperature and had not spoiled, so it had been opened only recently.
She had drunk 500 milliliters of it not long after opening it. That was how strong people ate.
In a world unknown to Ning Dali and Zhuang Yuezhen, Wang You had filled in a great many details with no logic whatsoever.
So when she spoke, she was extraordinarily respectful, her humble, warm tone like that of an old butler who had cared for Ning Dali for eighteen years and watched her grow up.
"I knew you'd be all right."
Zhuang Yuezhen, who had heard this, gave her a look of pure confusion: "?"
She glanced at Wang You in profound confusion, thinking, Have you lost your mind? Are you putting on a TV drama?
Ning Dali was momentarily stunned as well, thinking, Has the halo of a rich person actually become tangible?
Or perhaps... after a moment's thought, Ning Dali knew exactly what Wang You had imagined.
She tugged at the corner of her mouth. "Act normal."
Then she steered the conversation back. "Do you have a refrigerator in the car?"
Given how highly this world valued food, a refrigerator should be standard equipment in every car.
"We do." Zhuang Yuezhen said, glancing at the obviously heavy hiking bag on Ning Dali's shoulder. "Um, Sis Dali, is everything in your bag food?"
Ning Dali, so poor that she had only meat and money and not even a change of clothes, asked, "Yes, why?"
Wang You, who had just started to regain her composure, heard that everything in Ning Dali's backpack was food and immediately began imagining again.
If she wasn't mistaken, that hiking bag seemed to be a product of the Shadow King's base.
Could it be that the Shadow King had blown up the RV and, as compensation, given her so much food... Then the Shadow King's strength and resources were far greater than she had imagined. A wicked Base Lord... Wang You immediately furrowed her brow slightly.
Unable to stand it any longer, Zhuang Yuezhen elbowed Wang You, who kept drifting off.
"The refrigerator in this car can't hold that much food," she said. "Should we switch to a different car?"
"Huh? A different car?" Wang You pulled herself back from her thoughts, glanced at the bag on Ning Dali's shoulder, and nodded. "We should get a different car."
They should switch to a luxury car befitting Ning Dali's status.
Wang You rubbed her hands together, then she and Zhuang Yuezhen moved the refrigerator and fuel tank out of the trunk.
Then she snapped her fingers.
In the blink of an eye, the dust-covered off-road vehicle disappeared before Ning Dali.
The clutter inside the vehicle hung in the air for half a second, then fell to the ground one after another, and Zhuang Yuezhen put each item away.
Ning Dali watched quietly for a moment and noticed that some things on the off-road vehicle had disappeared along with it.
For example, the protective charm hanging from the rearview mirror.
Could the charm also have been part of what Wang You's ability summoned? Did it disappear when the vehicle did?
"Can't you keep the things your ability creates?" Ning Dali asked curiously.
Wang You, who was just about to summon a new car, immediately had her eyes go unfocused again and fell into another storm of speculation.
"You..."
Ning Dali interrupted her. "If you have something to say, say it directly."
Don't fill in the blanks all by yourself. Say something useful so I can hear it too.
"All right, boss." Wang You nodded. "It's like this. Things summoned by a Seven-Character Ability have to be returned."
Her ability could summon one vehicle every day. If the summoned things could be kept, she would have bought a house long ago.
"The vehicle I summon can exist for at most 24 hours, and I can't summon two vehicles at the same time."
Summoning one before midnight and another after midnight would not work.
"The summoned car isn't brand-new. Sometimes there are all kinds of things in it," Wang You added. "Sometimes a pack of tissues, sometimes a pillow, sometimes a truckload of cement."
When her luck was especially good, there had even been food in the car.
"But after 24 hours, those things disappear along with the vehicle," Wang You said. "Because my ability has seven characters... you can't judge its power by the standards of Single-Character Ability, Two-Character Ability, or Three-Character Ability. It isn't that powerful."
Back then, she ate the food in the vehicle. Twenty-four hours later, the vehicle and the food disappeared together, and she nearly starved to death.
So can items summoned by abilities with fewer characters be kept?
Ning Dali thought to herself that she had learned something she couldn't find online.
"Is my strength a little too weak for you?" Wang You asked sensitively.
"No." Ning Dali said slowly. "Your movements are a little slow."
She still had not summoned a car.
Wang You was even more hurt.
It wasn't that she was slow. The process of summoning a vehicle was simply that slow. Her ability was not instantaneous; she needed time to develop and visualize it.
"What kind of car do you want?" Wang You asked, developing the image as she spoke.
"Can you specify the car you summon?" Ning Dali became interested.
Could Wang You summon a Federation police car, one with a laser cannon...? Wait, what about an aircraft carrier? Does an aircraft carrier count as a vehicle?
Wang You: "..."
Whenever she talked to people whose abilities were so powerful, every careless remark could leave someone hurt for half a day.
"I can't specify it. I'm saying this again, this is a Seven-Character Ability. I can only pray, make wishes, and imagine!" Wang You said weakly.
"Unless my ability upgrades, from seven characters to five, or even three!"
"Understood." Ning Dali nodded, gaining a rough understanding of the power of a Seven-Character Ability.
"Sis Dali." Zhuang Yuezhen leaned closer. "Do you want to hear what my Ability, which is as long as a poem, does?"
Might as well hear it.
"Go ahead."
"Ahem. My Ability is called..." Zhuang Yuezhen said.
"Thank you for listening to me. That will waste three seconds of your life."
Ning Dali said nothing.
"What is the effect of this twenty-character Ability?"
"It makes everyone waste three seconds." Zhuang Yuezhen said cheerfully.
"Are you sure this is your Ability?"
Ning Dali narrowed her eyes and slowly recited Zhuang Yuezhen's Ability. She noticed that Old Liar's second skill had become triggerable.
The effect of Old Liar's second skill, Passing Lies as Truth, was that if enough people believed her, she could make a lie pass as truth.
The fact that she could now activate Passing Lies as Truth meant that what Zhuang Yuezhen had just said was a lie, a lie believed by many people.
It meant that Zhuang Yuezhen's Ability was not the twenty-character phrase she had claimed.
She was lying.
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