Chapter 222: Swamp Area
The team advanced for a morning, and as expected, various resources on the road had become scarce.
Tall tree canopies covered the sky, making the ground below damp and dark. The once dense shrubs and plants had turned into swamp area, full of poisonous mushrooms everywhere. Visibility had improved, but searching for supplies was still very difficult.
Even wearing fishing wetsuits wasn’t safe. The swamp area rarely saw sunlight year-round, with poisonous gas everywhere. Not only were there all sorts of poisonous insects and parasites, but you could also sink in with one step.
Having teammates along was fine, but being alone and sinking in was terrifying. The more you struggled, the faster you sank, and you’d end up buried alive in the end.
When going deeper to pick up boxes, it was best to prepare a reliable rope tied to a tree trunk. Therefore, climbing ropes had also risen in price.
Previously, a fairly sturdy rope could be bought for just a few dozen crystal coins, but now it cost over a hundred.
Yu Jiang had autopilot on, browsing the public screen while advancing and observing both sides of the road. To not miss any supplies, the driving speed slowed down.
Approaching noon, the public screen had more help requests and angry rants.
Leng Leng De Bing Yu: [I’ll be damned, the guy selling old ropes, your conscience must’ve been eaten by a dog. Damn, the rope suddenly snapped, scared me so much I jumped three meters and ran out of the swamp area.]
Salty Duck Egg: [Look at my ‘picture’, who’s more miserable than me? The key is, this was my last decent set of clothing. I just stepped on some animal bones and face-planted into the swamp area. No water to clean up, just a bucket of murky domestic water, now selling for 50 crystal coins!]
Clicking on the picture, he was covered in thick black mud, like a mud man. His whole body screamed one word: miserable.
Palace Fine Wine: [Falling like that and you’re still alive, count your blessings. Just saw on the road someone sink into swamp quicksand. After teammates pulled him up, he was covered in strange worms, screaming his lungs out, skin red and ulcerated, no way to fix it.]
Fei Tie Shi Zen Yang Lian Cheng De: [That scary?! But some boxes are right in the swamp area, can’t just leave supplies behind.]
Taro Boba: [Bought a detector made by Ye Wuyou, regret it to my guts, totally useless. Scans inaccurate, and it keeps glitching out.]
Ye Wuyou: [I told you it’s made from scrap parts, so it’s discounted. For 200 crystal coins, what good stuff did you expect?]
Yu Ni Bo Bo: [You didn’t say the detection results were inaccurate. You’re a high combat power player, yet you scam people like this!]
Ye Wuyou: [You didn’t ask either. After so long in apocalypse survival, you still don’t use your brain?]
Luò Tuó Xiángzi: [Everyone, better not easily contact people from other areas. I’m pissed, saw them driving a beat-up vehicle, kindly answered their questions, turned around and the bastard punctured my car tire.
Took the chance to rob my supplies too—my self-heating rice that I don’t even bear to eat myself! Plus some barely used insect bite cream. When I tried to get in the car to chase, two tires were busted, couldn’t catch up. The leader had ‘Nu Li Huo Zhe’ from 006 area on his head.
They’re the ones surviving hard, by robbing my stuff! Don’t let me run into them again!]
Player 83654 (006 area): [LOL, you 002 area folks are really that naive?]
Money Leopard: [We in 005 area have no insect bite cream, and can’t use your trading platform yet. Any way to buy some? We can pay 400 crystal coins, really need it. No wonder it’s the place with the all servers first alchemist—medicines everywhere, so enviable.]
This person sounded very sincere, but no one in the merchant caravan responded to him.
005 area had so few survivors, yet they offered high prices—too risky to deal with him.
003 area was truly miserable, only two or three in the top 50 combat power ranking, and low-ranked at that. Even their survivor count was higher than 005’s.
But not everyone could resist the temptation of crystal coins. Some had wishful thinking. Yu Jiang listed limited insect bite cream for 150 crystal coins, while the merchant caravan sold for around 240 crystal coins.
If you had extra stock on hand, you could make a fortune in one go.
But these past few days, people from different game areas couldn’t team up. Whether you’d meet depended purely on luck. They figured the other side wanted to wait for server merge in a few days, then trade.
Money Leopard looked at a few private chat messages, then irritably cursed,
“Damn it, all small fry, just one or half portions each. Didn’t hook a single one from the merchant caravan.”
Their Black Wind Stronghold team planned to go big after server merge, splitting into five teams advancing separately to increase chances of encountering 002 game area players.
Who’d have thought after a whole morning, not even a 002 area person, no one on the road at all—not a ghost in sight. Just scorpion monsters, centipede monsters, and spicy strips.
These things were tiring to kill, and getting bitten meant they only had primary detox pills. Their bandit underlings had all this pent-up energy with nowhere to vent, frustrated.
“Still a few days left, don’t believe we won’t run into any. If not, after official server merge, track them one by one from the wealth ranking. That The King Called Me to Patrol the Mountain is just a healer.” Black Wind Stronghold Ghost Worrier said in the team.
Their 005 area teams on the same road were already discussing—002 had so many big shots. Three-star difficulty instance just came out, and in under 36 hours they got first kill.
To chew this bone, best to team up. Gotta act fast, or the other areas would eventually make their move too.
“Yo! Boss, a few cars ahead merging onto the parallel road. Look like level 3 vehicles.”
The player in the lead vehicle shouted excitedly, flooring the accelerator to catch up first.
The few level 3 vehicles noticed the movement behind and accelerated to flee, but standard configs couldn’t outrun modified off-road vehicles. Soon they were blocked.
Bloodthirsty fighters had eyes and vibes unlike regular players. Seeing the cruel smiles on their faces, despair appeared in the eyes of the few 002 area players.
Those with prop cards had a chance to escape; those without barely got far before being taken down.
One rounded two-door mini car was sandwiched left and right by two off-road vehicles, its car doors squeezed deformed.
“In the apocalypse, still driving such a pretty car?”
The two-door car’s entire frame was smashed deformed, fuel tank busted too. Screams and crazy laughter mixed together, then only metal collisions and laughter remained.
——
2 PM in the afternoon.
Yu Jiang’s Team rested in place for nearly 2 hours, gathering medicine, grinding monsters for some crystal coins. Yu Jiang even ventured into the swamp area, digging up a pink lingzhi.
This was a plant NPC, hallucinogenic mushroom.
[Hallucinogenic Mushroom: Eh? I hid so well and you still found me.
My spore powder can stop bleeding in emergencies, just with a slight side effect—blood stops, but you’re poisoned and pass out. Can’t sleep? Come get some.]
Got it, feed it fertilizer cards to get sleep spores, but Yu Jiang had no fertilizer cards left. Put it aside for now, keep it by the golden skin tree.
After resting, they set off. In the afternoon, Yu Jiang’s Team still didn’t encounter anyone from other game areas. But the public screen was already in chaos.
More than one player team had been hit. Victims from 003 game area and 009 game area, even a second echelon from 003 area took heavy losses, nearly wiped out.
