Chapter 53: 50-50
Lin Huai pulled the war scythe from her inventory, resting the long handle comfortably on her shoulder. She turned toward the young man standing a short distance away. “Once this bone-crushing box is opened, I want half of all the basic supplies! As for the special items, I get first pick of any three. If you agree, I’ll crack it open right now.”
Thanks to the Blessing of the Earth God, any chest she opened yielded twenty percent more supplies, and she had a much higher chance of finding the rare materials she urgently needed. Asking for a half split was more than fair.
Tchaikovsky Driver, however, had no idea about her hidden blessing. His brow furrowed. He knew very well how rich the loot inside a bone-crushing box could be, and giving away half made his heart ache. He had hoped to use this single chest to upgrade his car straight to Level 3 and shock everyone in the zone.
Yet he didn’t dare open it with his own hands. Caught between greed and fear, he was paralyzed with indecision.
Lin Huai was in no mood to wait. She twirled the scythe with one hand, letting the blade slice through the drizzle. “You don’t have much time to think. The teleportation talisman only lasts ten minutes, and you’ve already wasted two. Fighting whatever is inside takes time too. I’ll give you sixty seconds to decide.”
Her voice turned cool. “Otherwise, I’m leaving with the Heart of Amber right now.”
Tchaikovsky Driver looked like he was about to cry. “Boss, can we do a seventy-thirty split? I really want to reach Level 3…”
Lin Huai raised an eyebrow. “Fifty-fifty. No negotiations. Take it or leave it.”
The driver clenched his teeth, nodding desperately. “Fine! Fifty-fifty it is! Open it!”
The moment they reached an agreement, Lin Huai stepped forward and swung her scythe, splitting the latch of the bone-crushing box clean open.
A figure tottered out from inside. It was an elderly woman wearing a faded yellow headscarf, looking small, frail, and completely harmless.
The acid rain drizzled steadily from above, passing straight through her spectral form and splashing harmlessly onto the wet ground.
The ghost seemed entirely unaware that the acid rain had already given away her supernatural nature. She curled her wrinkled lips into a gentle, grandmotherly smile, speaking in a raspy, quavering voice: “Pardon me, little girl… Which way is the Mass Grave? My husband died there, and I need to go collect his bones.”
Lin Huai smiled faintly. Slipping a Yang energy crystal into the socket along the scythe’s haft, the steel blade flared with pure, golden light, transforming into a luminous edge that could cut through evil spirits.
“I don’t know the way to the grave,” Lin Huai said smoothly, “but I know the way to send you to the next life!”
The old woman’s kindly face contorted instantly into a hideous, vicious snarl. Dropping onto all fours like a beast, she sprang sideways to dodge the glowing blade. Her milky eyes turned blood-red, fixing a hateful glare on Lin Huai. Then, her jaw unhinged, tearing open in an ear-piercing, cackling laugh!
Lin Huai was already prepared. She had tightly plugged her ears and shut her eyes beforehand, refusing to see or hear the spirit.
Her earlier swing had been made blindly by sheer instinct, designed solely to force the Yellow Father Ghost into blowing its ultimate attack right away.
In ancient ghost lore, if a Yellow Father Ghost screamed and wept at you, the victim would bleed from their eyes, nose, and mouth, dying instantly.
If it cackled and laughed, anyone who heard the sound would immediately catch a bizarre, rotting sickness, wasting away until their breath stopped.
Even worse, once the victim died, a brand-new Yellow Father Ghost would rip out of their belly to be born anew.
Thinking back to her past life, Lin Huai still felt that an infamous monster like the Yellow Father Ghost belonged at the end of a dungeon, or guarding a major outpost as an elite gatekeeper, rather than hiding inside a Level 4 chest just to torment unsuspecting survivors!
Across from her, the ghost was pouring all its spectral power into that horrific laughter. Because her ears were plugged, Lin Huai barely heard a whisper. At the same time, she brought out the soul-capturing bell she had crafted earlier. Shaking the bronze bell, its crisp chimes echoed through the rain, scattering the dark curse carried by the ghost’s laughter.
Once the sound attack was spent, the Yellow Father Ghost would need three full minutes to recover before it could shriek again.
Seizing that golden opening, Lin Huai surged forward, spinning her war scythe with blinding speed. With a few crisp slashes of pure light, she severed the spirit into drifting gray smoke, putting it down for good.
Tucking the scythe away, she turned around to split the loot with Tchaikovsky Driver—only to realize she had completely forgotten to warn him to cover his ears!
The young man was already sprawled flat on the wet road. His face was deathly pale, looking as if every drop of vitality had been sucked clean from his marrow. His eyes stared blankly at the dark sky, his chest barely rising as he gasped for air like a fish out of water.
His cheap raincoat was twisted open, and the falling acid rain was dripping onto his bare skin, hissing softly as it burned painful red pits into his cheeks.
Lin Huai gave a helpless shrug. She hurried over, pulled him up against the car tire, and rummaged through the newly opened box to grab several guiyuan restoration pills.
It took six full restoration pills before the young man’s breathing finally stabilized and color returned to his cheeks, pulling him back from the edge of the grave.
Clutching his aching chest, Tchaikovsky Driver looked at Lin Huai with wet eyes, his voice trembling with genuine remorse. “Boss, I’m so sorry… I was wrong. If you hadn’t been here today, I would have died a horrible death.”
He swallowed hard, shivering from lingering terror. “It’s true what they say: having wealth you can’t protect is just asking to be killed. You could have easily taken the box and left me to rot in the rain, but you didn’t. You saved my life.”
He looked at the open crate on the asphalt. “As thanks, Boss, this entire chest is yours. I don’t want a single thing inside. It was never meant for someone like me anyway.”
Lin Huai didn’t waste time with polite refusals. She swept all the supplies into her inventory without hesitation.
She walked back toward her hearse. Having been upgraded with heavy armor plating, the vehicle sat high off the ground, requiring a small step to climb up to the door.
Grabbing the metal handrail with one hand, she opened the reinforced door. Before stepping into the driver’s seat, she glanced over her shoulder and offered a light, encouraging laugh:
“If you truly want to turn your luck around, hurry up and get that car to Level 2, then floor the gas. Once you reach ten thousand kilometers, a district-wide rally race will unlock. Managing to survive this long in a tiny compact car proves your driving skills can’t be bad, right?”
The moment she closed the heavy door, the ten-minute limit expired. The extra lane vanished like mist, returning Lin Huai and her hearse to her own solitary stretch of highway.
Back inside her familiar cabin, Lin Huai pulled out both the Heart of Amber and the Azure Water Jade.
Looking at the floating, diamond-shaped jade interface hovering above the dashboard, her heart raced with genuine excitement.
“Finally! Every single component needed to upgrade the Yellow Springs Road Guide to the intermediate tier is ready!”
She tapped the glowing prompt to confirm the upgrade. The familiar, smooth mechanical voice chimed through the speakers:
[The Yellow Springs Road Guide is currently upgrading. Estimated time remaining: 3 hours…]
Three hours was nothing to worry about. Lin Huai settled behind the wheel, put the hearse in gear, and drove onward through the rain, scanning the shoulders for loot.
Ever since the acid rain disaster began, yellow talisman chests had spawned along the highway in greater numbers.
Lin Huai didn’t even bother stopping to crack open low-tier chests as she drove; she simply tossed whatever boxes she scooped up into the rear cabin.
She navigated a treacherous mountain stretch featuring eighteen continuous hairpin turns before finally pulling onto a wide shoulder to inspect her haul.
Piled inside the rear compartment were eight battered wooden crates and six yellow talisman boxes.
With a wave of her hand, she transferred all fourteen chests straight into the green jade coffin, stepping inside after them.
She popped open every chest within the coffin’s interior. Eight translucent Safety Ambassadors drifted up from the boxes. The moment they entered the coffin’s space, the lingering resentment in their forms was instantly scrubbed clean, transforming them into harmless, glowing spirit orbs that floated playfully around her like curious fireflies.
Lin Huai found the little orbs endearing. She gently patted each of them on the head before nudging the heavy stone lid open, releasing the purified spirits into the sky.
Purifying the dark energy from the eight spirits condensed a pure Yin energy crystal inside the bottom of the casket.
Picking up the crystal along with the basic resources, she returned to the driver’s seat and restarted the engine. Even with the Blessing of the Earth God granting a twenty percent bonus, low-tier crates offered mostly everyday necessities like bottled water, dried rations, and common scrap.
Her odometer already read over eighteen thousand kilometers. According to the rules of her past life, the district rally race would only trigger once one thousand drivers within the zone crossed the ten-thousand-kilometer milestone.
Lin Huai had no way of knowing how many survivors had reached that distance so far, so she pulled up her screen to drop a message to Jiangzhehu Inheritor to check in on the zone’s progress.
