WEF - Chapter 6
Chapter 6: Open the Fridge. I'll Take a Look...
After reassuring Zhuang Yuezhen, Ning Dali and Wang You set out again.
As the window rose, she sat inside the vehicle and admired her new ability.
[Strongman]
You have the name Dali, so naturally you are a strongman.
Skill One: As your name suggests, you possess tremendous strength. The upper limit of your strength depends on your understanding and imagination of the human body's limits.
Skill Two: I eat beef at all three meals of the day. Once you have eaten enough beef, your body can grow enormous for a short time. Your strength doubles, and your agility doubles.
Skill Three: I keep myself in good shape. Every twenty-four hours, I can refresh my own condition, clear all negative effects, repair damaged limbs, and forcibly restore myself to peak condition.
A versatile ability that could both fight and heal.
Yet it had one deadly flaw... The moment Ning Dali saw the description of Skill Two, the corners of her mouth twitched downward.
The three daily servings of beef required by Skill Two put it at odds with the Countdown that kept her from eating.
Wasn't that just making the skill useless?
"Is this the trouble of having too many abilities?" Ning Dali rubbed her fingers together.
Setting aside the conflict with the Countdown, she still felt that the effects of [Strongman] differed too greatly from those of [Old Liar].
An ability won through deception was still an ability. There was no way a Three-Character Ability could be this weak.
Ning Dali pressed one finger to her temple, replayed the effects of [Strongman] from beginning to end in her mind, connected the pieces, and found the key to the problem.
Skills One and Two were meant to be used together.
Skill Two would double her strength, broadening her imagined sense of the human body's limits. She could then use it again, doubling the result a second time.
Seven uses of Skill Two would multiply her strength by 128, and ten uses would multiply it by 1,024!
With a hundred uses, or ten thousand, she could flip the universe upside down.
Whether or not she had enough beef to double her strength that many times, merely imagining it made her future look bright.
Ning Dali rubbed her hands together and decided to test the skill at once.
First, every time she ate, the Countdown reset to zero. It had not been running for long, so eating now would cost her the least.
Second, there was the question she had kept turning over in her mind.
Ever since she had transmigrated, Ning Dali had been wondering where she should go from there.
Not a blade of grass grew in the wilderness here, so she had no way to survive outdoors for long.
She could go to a Base, or she could pitch a tent outside one.
But then there was the problem of her RV. What was she supposed to do with it, and with the food inside?
Ning Dali glanced at the unconscious "friend" in the passenger seat.
People here would kill for a bite to eat. If they learned how much food was in that refrigerator, they would lose their minds.
The food in her fridge was both a fortune and a death warrant.
After acquiring two Three-Character Abilities, Ning Dali had not grown more arrogant. If anything, she had become even more cautious.
The fact that she was strong meant that others could be strong as well.
She could acquire abilities and a defensive shield by lying, so surely others possessed methods beyond her imagination.
Beyond the food, there was the RV... Ning Dali gazed at it with a pang of regret.
She had paid for everything in the RV by hauling one bag of cement at a time, and her fellow prisoners had sponsored quite a bit of it.
They were all fine things, just not products of this world.
Other people's clothes read "Produced at XX Base."
Her own clothes read "Made in the Federation."
Other people's seats were made of polyester fiber.
Hers were covered in top-grain cowhide.
All of it was damning evidence that she did not belong. Even if she blamed everything on her abilities, she would need someone to believe her.
The longer any of it remained in this world, the longer Ning Dali remained in danger.
She did not deliberate long. Within a few minutes, she had made a decision: eat some beef, save some food to buy a house, then blow up the RV!
It was no easy decision. Barely three hours earlier, she had encountered her first Airdrop and only begun to understand this world.
She had saved for the RV's down payment for three full years.
But Ning Dali knew she would not regret it.
Better to go bankrupt than lose her life!
She switched the RV back into automatic following mode and headed for the refrigerator while mentally running through every detail to make sure she had missed nothing.
She reached out to enter the password on the refrigerator's surface, but her fingers suddenly stopped.
Her shadow had not followed her.
Ning Dali stiffened and turned sharply. Her shadow now sat quietly at the seat she had just vacated, "watching" her.
The pitch-black shadow was only a thin layer, with no facial features or discernible details, just the outline of a person.
It had one leg crossed over the other and propped its chin on one hand. She had no idea how long it had been watching her like that.
"!!!"
A cold sweat broke over Ning Dali.
When had this happened?
Was this shadow the same person as Ying?
Had it been there all along, or had it just arrived?
Had it noticed her during the airdrop, or online?
After staring at Ning Dali for a while, a smile split open across the shadow's pitch-black face.
It was an anime-style smile, with no mouth, merely a single curved white line.
Even after everything she had seen in prison, Ning Dali could not read the other party's emotions from that kind of anime smile.
All she could do was smile back.
The shadow rose from the seat and moved toward the kitchen where Ning Dali was.
It picked up the pan Ning Dali had used to fry steak a moment earlier.
The pan was still coated with butter. Now accustomed to local ways and careful with food, Ning Dali had meant to save it for dipping bread. Now it had become another of her crimes.
The shadow shook the frying pan in its hand, and a line of white text appeared across its body.
[You seem to be enjoying yourself.]
"..."
It was not so much a treat. The beef was synthetic, and it had passed the Federation's 315 inspection.
Leaning against the refrigerator with the frying pan in its hand, the shadow asked, [Do you really eat beef three meals a day?]
"..."
So you are the food blogger Ying. It turns out the two of us had already met at the airdrop. What serendipity.
Ning Dali felt a chill creep over her scalp.
If she were still living in the Federation, she would never in her wildest dreams have connected a food blogger with the Federation's leader.
The thought was too absurd.
Yet in this world, that was exactly the sort of bizarre thing that happened.
She had thought she had found an internet celebrity to ride the wave of publicity. Instead, she had found a powerful but petty Base Lord. They had already crossed paths, and now the Base Lord had come to settle the score in person.
Was it really that serious?!
If it were merely a matter of settling the score, that would be one thing... but if the shadow discovered the secret hidden in her RV...
[Open the fridge. I'll take a look.] The shadow silently urged her.
Its attention seemed entirely fixed on the beef. It had not noticed any of the other details inside the RV.
It had not noticed.
Ning Dali's wildly pounding heart finally steadied.
That was right. When she looked at herself, she could see flaws everywhere, but that did not mean someone else would.
Not everyone was as cautious as she was, pulling open other people's collars to inspect the labels.
The contents of her RV would not survive close inspection, but the shadow was not examining it closely.
If she could send the shadow away, she might still have a chance to blow up the RV and save herself.
The problem was how to send it away.
Ning Dali reached slowly toward the refrigerator.
She entered the password, but it was incorrect. The refrigerator locked itself automatically.
"Please try again in five minutes." The smart refrigerator issued a cold warning.
The shadow said nothing, but Ning Dali could read a look of speechless exasperation on its pitch-black face.
It turned its head to look at the refrigerator, then at Ning Dali, and made a thumbs-up gesture with its paper-like hand.
[Nice job.]
Then the shadow tore open the door to the upper refrigeration compartment with its bare hands.
Its anime smile appeared again, accompanied by a pair of slanted, manga-style eyes.
It looked into the refrigerator with evident pride.
The first things to meet its gaze were two rows of anesthetic needles.
Ning Dali had bought the veterinary anesthetic needles from a fellow prisoner. They were hardly regulation-grade, with not a single printed word on the outer packaging. Someone had written the expiration date on them by hand with a marker.
The date was just as crude, with no year, only the month and day.
Beside the needles lay several bags of pills in every color, equally dubious in origin and just as unlabeled.
There were also several bowls.
The shadow took the bowls out, only to find every one perfectly clean, with no greasy residue.
Every expression on its face vanished in an instant.
Pitch black, it looked rather frightening.
Ning Dali gave an innocent smile.
A refrigerator compartment normally held fresh vegetables and fruit, along with eggs and milk.
All of those things were too expensive. Ning Dali could not afford them, and even the milk she drank was kept at room temperature.
The RV was small, and there was no point wasting an empty refrigerator compartment, so she stored every bowl and utensil that had nowhere else to go inside it.
Was that not perfectly normal? Did everyone who lived in an RV keep things so clean?
Ning Dali pointed to the lower freezer compartment herself, indicating that there was food inside.
The shadow stared at her for a moment, then reached out and patted her shoulder lightly twice.
The gesture was small, but Ning Dali watched the shield covering the surface of her body dim rapidly.
A moment ago, her shield had shone as brightly as the midday sun. After two light pats from Ying, it had faded to the glow of a sun about to set.
"..."
No? The shield she had stacked up by lying to all those netizens was about to set after just two pats? Was that reasonable?
Ning Dali stared blankly. She had no idea that Ying was equally shocked on the inside.
There was actually a Three-Character Ability that could withstand her attack without a scratch or any other change? Was that reasonable? If word got out, people would laugh the King of Shadows to death. She might as well give up being a Base Lord and become a full-time food blogger.
The shadow instinctively looked at its hand, then at Ning Dali, and seemed to consider giving her two more pats.
"Two more pats and I really will die," Ning Dali hurriedly said.
As she spoke, she bit her tongue, trying to make herself spit up blood so she could look pitiful. But the shield blocked even harm from her own side, and after two seconds she felt nothing at all.
The shadow watched Ning Dali's little trick in silence. After a while, text finally appeared on its body.
[You're a little interesting.]
In fact, three hours earlier, near the airdrop, Ying had noticed this strong woman.
She had been in a hurry to update her midday video then and had not investigated at once. She had merely made a note of Ning Dali, planning to return after a while to see what was going on. If Ning Dali belonged to the Extremist Eaters, she could take care of her while she was at it.
But before long, Ning Dali had come at her in a vicious online post, mocking her from every angle.
[You'd better really have a lot of beef, and really have the Strongman ability.]
If there was no food in the refrigerator, she could not possibly be a member of the Restraint Faction.
Her muscles could not have come from an ability, either. They would have come from eating without restraint, like those of the Extremist Eaters.
Then she would have every right to kill this Ning Dali.
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