Staring down at yet another shattered house that had crushed its own resident zombies into a bloody paste upon impact, Li Ke found himself completely losing his composure.
"Wait... doesn't this technically qualify as some sort of infinite resource glitch?"
Spurred by a sudden wave of excitement, Li Ke scrambled down into the pit, eager to sift through the ruins of the house to see what salvageable materials he could exploit.
Unfortunately, the results were somewhat disappointing. Although breaking through the splintered wooden structures was a breeze, the house itself didn't contain anything particularly rare. All he managed to loot was a small stash of food, some leather strips, a handful of mechanical parts, and a few electrical components. Nothing more.
"Still, this opens up a whole new line of thinking."
Li Ke rubbed his chin, a sudden epiphany striking his mind.
What if he could find a high-tier, reward-heavy building, complete a full sweep of the interior to loot all the valuable containers, completely dismantle the structure, and then use this exact method to infinitely reset the instance?
If that worked, the three of them wouldn't even need to risk their lives searching for supplies anymore; they could just sit at the bottom of the pit and pick up infinite legendary loot!
Determined to test his theory, Li Ke built up another vertical stack of frames to reach the hovering exclamation point. He began repeatedly activating and resetting the building, carefully measuring the exact distance it needed to fall before the system registered a failure.
"So the quest officially fails once the house drops more than ten meters away from the marker?"
Observing a newly spawned house that had crashed onto the pile of debris below but managed to stay largely intact, Li Ke nodded as he figured out the parameters. He extended his hand, pressed the 'E' key once more, and triggered another reset. The freshly spawned house materialized out of thin air, flattening a stray zombie that happened to be shuffling right beneath it.
He repeated this entire sequence seven or eight times. Finally, on his last attempt, a bizarre phenomenon occurred.
The moment his final house spawned, its bottom coordinates clipped into the lingering structural debris of the previous fallen houses. In the next split second, something completely mind-blowing happened.
A solitary pillar made of natural dirt and stone suddenly erupted right beneath the house to serve as a foundation. Not only that, but the massive pile of splintered ruins and crushed zombie corpses from the earlier collapses completely vanished!
It wasn't just the dead zombies trapped inside the debris that were gone; even the lucky ones that had survived the falls were wiped from existence! The entire bottom of the pit had been forcefully reset, turning into neat, flat blocks of natural dirt and stone.
"Ah, so that is how the system's mechanics handle it here!"
Li Ke nodded slowly, finally grasping the logic behind the glitch.
In short, if the newly spawned prefab managed to make any physical contact with the solid earth, the system would aggressively force a complete environmental reload, resetting absolutely everything within the quest zone. But if the structure spawned entirely suspended in midair without touching the ground, the system would only reload the house itself.
"It's pretty bizarre. Going by standard video game logic, the terrain should have been forcefully reset on the very first try. This must be a unique physics bug caused by the game world converting into absolute reality."
He was fully convinced it was a glitch, but that wasn't going to stop him from shamelessly exploiting it to its absolute limit.
"Well, it's not like I can roll for a legendary high-tier quest right now anyway. I'll worry about farming this exploit later."
With a faint grin, Li Ke stared up at the zombies that were currently trapped inside the newly stabilized house, snarling and scratching at the windows toward him. He strode forward, delivered a heavy kick to the already battered front wooden door, and firmly raised his submachine gun.
"FBI, open up!"
A dense volley of gunfire erupted inside the structure, and the zombies were quickly mowed down, collapsing into lifeless heaps on the floor. Li Ke ran a quick sweep through the lackluster building to scavenge whatever meager loot remained. He then used his wooden frames to bridge his way out of the isolated rock pillar, headed back to turn in his completed quest, and immediately regrouped with Tsunade and Kiri. The trio plunged right back into their intense mining routine, stockpiling materials and prepping miscellaneous supplies.
Before they knew it, another day had flown by. Kiri and Tsunade had successfully excavated the terrain along three sides of the trader's compound. However, unlike the first side, they didn't dig all the way down to expose the indestructible bedrock boundary. Instead, they left a massive plot of natural earth intact to serve other practical purposes.
They even went out of their way to preserve the local pond.
During the excavation, the two women stumbled upon a deeply mind-boggling phenomenon: no matter how much water drained or pumped out of the basin, the pond never ran dry. The discovery thoroughly shook both of them to their core.
To be fair, Li Ke was pretty stunned by it too, though he had already grown numb to the game world's bizarre physics anomalies.
"Man, I am completely spent..."
Kiri let out a long, luxurious stretch as she leaned back in her wooden bath bucket. Nothing beat soaking in a hot bath after a grueling day of hard labor down in the pits. But as she relaxed, her eyes drifted over to Tsunade's exceptionally flawless, smooth skin. Unable to rein in her curiosity, she blurted out a question.
"So, seriously—how on earth do you manage to maintain your body like that?"
Tsunade, who was currently scrubbing down her chest, paused in surprise. Misinterpreting Kiri's question as a comment about her massive assets, she gave a perfectly nonchalant, instinctive reply.
"I was born with it..."
Kiri blinked, momentarily dazed. She rolled her eyes, reached her hand through the steaming water, and gave Tsunade's shoulder a playful squeeze. The smooth, velvety texture left her thoroughly brimming with envy.
"Uh, I was talking about your skin! And besides, mine aren't exactly small either, you know."
To prove her point, Kiri gave her own chest a light scoop, causing her heavy assets to sway against the surface and kick up a stunning, mesmerizing splash of warm water.
"Ah, that... Well, it's a combination of Chakra and genetics," Tsunade explained seriously, clearing up the misunderstanding. "My lineage is rather unique, and the medical Ninjutsu I practice also inherently rejuvenates the cells. But unfortunately, it's not something you could ever learn."
She wasn't just making things up to brush Kiri off. Although she wasn't a dedicated sensory ninja, she possessed a solid baseline of sensory perception. She had subtly checked Kiri's physical composition earlier and confirmed there wasn't a single drop of Chakra circulating within her body. Without Chakra, it was fundamentally impossible to master any techniques from her home world.
As for Li Ke...
If Li Ke ever tried to forcefully mold and extract Chakra from his physical cells, there was only one ultimate outcome awaiting him:
Death.
The moment his civilian body attempted to generate Chakra, his cells would instantly suffer catastrophic, widespread necrosis. On top of that, his body's structural conductivity for spiritual and physical energy was horrifyingly inefficient.
If the internal resistance to circulating Chakra inside a regular ninja from her world was rated as a 1, then the resistance inside Li Ke's body was easily a 10. If a standard medical ninja had been tasked with patching him up the other day instead of someone of her legendary caliber, they wouldn't have stood a ghost of a chance at fully restoring him!
Therefore, if Li Ke ever tried to force a Chakra awakening, far from growing any stronger, he would likely end up a complete cripple who couldn't even walk.
"Ah, I see... That's a real shame then," Kiri grumbled, looking thoroughly deflated. "I used to hear rumors back in Arad that mages had secret methods to keep their skin flawless without a drop of makeup. But now that I've ended up in this dump..."
Kiri stared blankly at Tsunade. Taking in the older woman's incredibly voluptuous and mature figure, she couldn't help but let her curiosity get the better of her again.
"By the way... have you ever actually done it? You know, 'the deed'?"
She formed an 'OK' sign with one hand and casually poked a finger through the loop.
Tsunade's face instantly went dark.
"Don't tell me you've actually started buying into that kid's nonsense."
Tsunade shot a flat look in the direction of the trader's shop. Li Ke was currently locked inside, claiming he was organizing resources, crafting ammo, and researching items.
But both Tsunade and Kiri were fully convinced that the hyper-charged, hormone-brained guy was currently using those heavily calloused hands of his to let off some steam.
Frankly, it was a pretty pathetic mental image that they both preferred not to dwell on.
Still, they couldn't entirely blame the guy. The outfits they were currently wearing were incredibly revealing, and neither of them had the means to change into anything more modest yet. Any normal, healthy man would have a reaction under these conditions. The fact that Li Ke chose to forcefully handle his business privately instead of harassing them actually made him a massive gentleman in their book.
But that didn't mean they were going to stop roasting him for it.
"Oh, it's not that," Kiri replied casually, pulling a bottle of beer out of her inventory. "It's just that if we truly end up stuck here forever, there's a very high probability that I'm going to end up in bed with him anyway. Besides, if what he said about his powers is true, shouldn't that eventually give me a ticket back to my own world?"
She casually popped the cap off. Her real motive for bringing this up was to gauge Tsunade's boundaries. If Tsunade minded, or if she already had someone else in her heart, Kiri figured she would just take the initiative herself.
Either way, it was vital to verify whether his promises about returning home held any weight.
"Of course, I'll make sure we use protection," Kiri added, her tone turning surprisingly pragmatic. "There's no way in hell I'm bringing a child into a desolate, hopeless apocalypse like this, only for them to grow up like that kid, struggling to find an outlet for their urges. That's why I want to know if 'the deed' actually feels as amazing as people say. If it is, and I can confirm his promises are legit, I won't bother playing hard to get."
Her words were dead serious, and Tsunade picked up on the weight behind them.
"...I had a lover once," Tsunade confessed softly, a heavy sigh escaping her lips as memories of Dan flickered across her mind. "But he passed away before we ever got the chance to take things that far."
Every single time she looked back on those days, a sharp, suffocating pang of grief would strike her heart. It was a trauma she simply couldn't shake. The moment she pictured Dan's face, an overwhelming wave of sorrow threatened to swallow her whole.
Back during those dark days, Dan had been the absolute anchor for her shattered soul.
Yet, even with him, she hadn't been able to escape her cursed fate of ending up completely alone.
"Oh... I see," Kiri murmured, her face falling slightly in disappointment.