No, seriously... Kiri is from the Empyrean, so she spent her whole life dodging mortar shells and surviving war zones. I can totally accept her snoring. It makes sense that someone from a war-torn background would have terrible sleep hygiene. Plus, she drank beer. But why on earth...
Li Ke shifted his bloodshot eyes toward Tsunade. She was splayed out carelessly on a single mattress, her legs and arms tossed wide apart in a display of total relaxation that left her completely indifferent to her surroundings.
You're a ninja! Aren't ninjas theoretically supposed to be covert black-ops agents? Why the hell are you snoring too?!
Staring at the legendary medic-ninja sleeping like a complete log, Li Ke finally reached his absolute limit and firmly clamped his hands over his ears.
Under the soft glow of the moonlight, both women looked peaceful now that they had washed up, but the synchronized snoring contest was getting louder by the minute. It was physically impossible for Li Ke to even catch a wink of sleep.
But the absolute lethal blow struck right as he was finally, miserably drifting into a light slumber—
SLAP!
"Hey, wake up! Sun's up, time to get to work."
Kiri delivered a stinging slap to his backside, jolting him awake.
"Huh...?"
Li Ke stared blankly at Kiri, then blinked blearily at the dawning sky. In that exact moment of pure exhaustion, he made a solemn, unshakeable vow to himself:
We are absolutely building separate bedrooms today!
"Ah... right, okay. You guys head over to the trader and sell those ammo piles first. I'll make breakfast. Once we're done eating, we plunge straight into digging out the fortress layout."
Groggily forcing himself upright, a completely soul-drained Li Ke began his morning chores. He kept aggressively shaking his head back and forth, desperately trying to force his brain to wake up.
The two women paid his zombie-like state no mind. They casually walked off to wash up, headed into the compound to sell their surplus robotic turret ammo, and strolled back over to watch Li Ke stir the breakfast pot.
Today's menu was a repeat of yesterday: cans of chili peas simmered with small chunks of meat. Zero culinary surprises, save for a pinch of salt Li Ke had managed to scavenge earlier. Still, it was a solid meal, and neither of the women showed any intention of complaining about the taste.
"Alright, time to handle our own business."
Li Ke slapped his own cheeks hard. He currently possessed eight unallocated skill points—four earned from clearing recent quests, and the remaining four gathered from leveling up. He planned to dump them all into his skill tree in one go to overhaul his capabilities.
This massive stat-dump was the precise reason he had sent the two women away to the trader's shop to wash up first.
"Sure thing, boss. Go do your thing. We'll keep digging according to the blueprint we mapped out," Kiri waved dismissively.
They had already finalized the core strategy: they were going to excavate a massive trench right along the perimeter of the Trader's bedrock walls. The goal was to force the incoming zombies to plunge into a pit, while they built a secure base suspended above it.
To ensure structural integrity, they still needed to leave a substantial amount of natural earth and rock intact to serve as defensive pillars. Their blueprint included a ladder system, a secret underground escape tunnel for emergencies, and secondary scaffolding for quick repositioning.
For a crew with their combined physical strength, pulling off this level of heavy excavation wasn't going to be difficult at all.
The tactical plan was solid: if their reinforced concrete structures held up against the zombie assault, they would hold their ground in the suspended base. If the defenses collapsed, they would fall back toward the cliffside tunnel and retreat into the underground bunker.
Crafting ladders was a breeze since they only required basic wood, and hollowing out the entire perimeter around the trader's compound wouldn't be much of an ordeal either. After all, with Tsunade's boundless stamina allowing her to swing a pickaxe all day without breaking a sweat, the heavy lifting would take her a single day at most.
Sinking two separate underground bunkers wasn't a major issue either. It simply required them to dig deep enough, line the shafts with ladders, and optimize their anti-zombie chokepoint strategies. With the game system's building blocks at their disposal, they could easily engineer a solution.
In fact, if Tsunade focused on digging tunnels while Li Ke and Kiri stood guard to mow down incoming threats, a single narrow chokepoint would be more than enough to hold off an endless horde.
It took the trio a brief strategy session to lock down this exact layout.
Li Ke kept his head down, deliberately slowing his eating pace. The moment he confirmed Tsunade and Kiri had descended back into the pits, he bolted toward the trader's shop at top speed.
Engrossed in his mad dash, he completely missed the highly meaningful, knowing glances the two women shot at his retreating back. After all, his mind was entirely hyper-focused on allocating his stat points. The women had zero interest in spectating his business anyway; they shared a quick laugh at his expense before diligently resuming their heavy excavation.
Slamming the shop door shut, Li Ke swiftly secured the entrances before bringing up his character UI. He began dumping his hoarded skill points into his stats.
As point after point flowed directly into Fortitude, a sudden, violent surge of raw power rippled through his veins, making him feel phenomenally strong. Not only that, but the crushing exhaustion and sleep deprivation plaguing him just moments ago vanished into thin air, leaving him brimming with explosive energy.
However, he quickly ran into a bottleneck. The moment his Fortitude hit level six, he noticed that raising it to level seven now demanded two full skill points instead of one. He frowned, hesitating for a fraction of a second as he calculated his remaining balance. Gritting his teeth, he took the plunge and bought the upgrade.
In the very next instant, a wave of pure, overwhelming euphoria—farsurpassing all his previous level-ups combined—flooded his entire system. Overpowered by the sudden rush of physical sensations, he instinctively lunged forward and grabbed onto the frozen female trader, gasping for breath as the energy surged through him.
He felt as though his physical body had never been in a more pristine, sublime state.
Yet, that exact abundance of vitality brought its own bizarre torment. He was so ridiculously charged with energy right now that he felt like a total fraud if he didn't immediately go map out a thirty-mile marathon!
To put it bluntly, he felt like he had completely transcended normal human limits!
Moving his limbs felt entirely weightless, requiring zero conscious effort. Even after he opened and closed his inventory menus five or six times to rapidly process the high-tier resource crafting, causing the trader's storage container beneath her counter to swell to maximum capacity from the sheer volume of output, he didn't feel a single ounce of fatigue or muscle strain. In fact, it barely felt like he had exerted himself at all.
"This is a total qualitative breakthrough..."
Li Ke took a deep, centering breath. Looking down at his hyper-charged body, he ultimately didn't dare to dump his remaining skill points into the attribute.
He had already lost track of time and spent nearly an hour inside the shop. If he could previously excuse his long absences by claiming he was micro-managing the forge inputs, staying locked in here any longer was going to look incredibly suspicious.
"Dammit..."
Li Ke took a deep breath. He was forced to purchase a roll of duct tape from the trader's shop and tightly strap his unwieldy "limb" against his right thigh. This was the only way to prevent the over-energized appendage from taking heavy collateral damage while he sprinted.
With that sorted out, he practically exploded out of the shop, kicking off his next questing run at a breakneck speed.
This time, however, he realized his running speed had transcended ordinary logic. Previously, he was a total couch potato who struggled to clock a fifteen-second hundred-meter dash. Now, his sprinting speed wasn't much slower than those terrifying mutant Usain Bolt zombies. In fact, he could clearly feel that if his leg wasn't currently encumbered by a massive, heavily taped object, he could fly even faster!
"Did that guy light his own ass on fire?"
Kiri stared blankly at Li Ke's frantic, blazing departure, feeling thoroughly puzzled. But the moment her sharp eyes locked onto the suspiciously rigid, club-like object taped flush against his thigh, her gaze turned incredibly intense.
"This guy..."
Granted, Kiri had never personally attended her military comrades' wild parties or gone on weird romantic dates, but she had seen absolutely everything in the local bars. While she had occasionally encountered men boasting far more imposing sizes than what she was looking at right now, this was the first time she had ever witnessed anyone maintaining such an aggressively active state under these conditions.
A second later, she let out a disdainful smirk.
"Hey, Miss Tsunade, we seriously need to find a way to craft a couple of beds today and split this place into separate bedrooms. Otherwise, there's a real chance this kid is going to cave into his instincts and try to launch a nighttime raid on us. I definitely don't want to wake up in the morning and see something bizarre sticking in my face."
"Agreed," Tsunade replied, her voice remaining as quiet and stoic as ever. To her, everything in this world felt exactly the same anyway.
Li Ke's first three quests went off without a hitch, completely devoid of any unexpected drama. Those sluggish, shambling zombies didn't stand a ghost of a chance against a hyper-charged, peak-stamina Li Ke. Honestly, if he wasn't so deathly afraid of accidentally inflicting friendly fire upon his own "little brother," he would have happily waded into the thick of them swinging his fire axe to burn off his explosive excess energy.
However...
The real nightmare began with the final quest of the day.
Li Ke: "..."
Staring down into the abyss, he found himself looking at a colossal crater. Thanks to the relentless, industrial-grade excavation efforts of Tsunade and Kiri, the area had been transformed into a massive pit measuring forty meters deep and fifty meters wide.
And floating right there in the empty, dead center of the yawning void, was the glowing orange quest marker exclamation point.
A literal question mark popped up above Li Ke's head. How on earth was he supposed to activate the quest like this?
After pacing around the edge and racking his brain, a thoroughly helpless Li Ke scrambled down the wooden ladder they had left behind. He quickly slapped down a vertical stack of three wooden frame blocks in the middle of the pit, climbed to the top, and firmly pressed the 'E' key to initialize the quest.
In the very next instant, a full-sized, two-story wooden house materialized out of thin air right before his eyes.
And in the absolute next microsecond, gravity took hold.
Since the natural earth beneath it had been completely excavated, the structure had zero foundational support. Li Ke watched in absolute horror as the massive wooden house plunged straight down like a stone. The very moment the falling house breached the quest radius boundary, a massive red "QUEST FAILED" notification flashed across his vision.
CRASH!
The entire two-story house slammed into the bottom of the forty-meter pit, shattering into a million splintered pieces. Desks, chairs, cabinets, and random loot containers erupted everywhere, scattering debris across the floor.
Then, right before Li Ke's eyes...
The glowing orange quest exclamation point reappeared in midair, floating placidly in the exact same spot.
Dumbfounded, he tentatively reached out and tapped the marker again.
The exclamation point vanished, and a second, perfectly identical two-story wooden house materialized in midair. It promptly plummeted straight down to its doom.
CRASH!
And the orange quest marker flickered back into existence once more.
Li Ke: "..."
A game bug?!