Chapter 10: Tear It Down!

More than two hours later, everyone had returned to the train.

Zhou Wei stood by the door counting heads one by one. Only after confirming that all thirty-plus people had made it back did she finally let out a breath.

"Everyone on board."

The girls climbed into the carriage one after another, bare feet padding over the sheet-metal floor. Some crouched down to rub their soles; others simply leaned against the metal seats and slid down to sit on the ground.

After a hectic morning, hungry and exhausted, the carriage finally fell quiet for a while.

Gu Siyu squatted in the middle of the carriage and began tallying the supplies each group had brought back.

"We’ve got more than four hundred bags of bread total, just over three hundred bottles of water. All of it came from Lu Yuan's crits." She looked up at Meng Wanqing. "What about your side?"

Meng Wanqing pushed up her glasses and counted on her fingers. "The hardware store gave us a few iron pipes, about two units of iron. Behind the general store there were a few boards and a broken door frame, roughly three units of wood."

"That’s it?" Lin Shiyu crouched nearby, disappointment written all over her round face.

"That’s it." Meng Wanqing spread her hands. "There wasn’t much in this little town to begin with."

Gu Siyu nodded and used her fingernail to scratch a few marks on a plastic bag as a tally.

"More than four hundred bread, over three hundred water, three units of wood, two units of iron. No clothes, no weapons, nothing else."

The carriage was quiet for two seconds.

"Four hundred bags of bread is enough for several days," Zhou Wei said, trying to keep her tone light. "Let's fill our stomachs first. We can figure the rest out slowly."

Lu Yuan leaned against the carriage wall, opened his backpack, and started taking out the bread and water.

Bag after bag of bread appeared beside his feet, piling up into a small mountain. Bottles of mineral water popped out one by one as well, rolling across the metal floor.

"Whoa!"

A few girls' eyes lit up. Gu Siyu and Meng Wanqing walked over, each gathering up a stack of bread and water and beginning to hand them out through the carriage.

"Two bags of bread and one bottle of water per person. Eat first."

"Thanks, monitor!"

"I'm starving! I'm starving!"

The carriage finally came alive. Since they had been teleported here, nobody had eaten a thing, and everyone had gone nearly six or seven hours without food.

Lin Shiyu finished off a bag of bread in two bites, her cheeks puffed out like a hamster's, and mumbled, "Why does this bread taste so good?"

"You're hungry enough to think tree bark tastes good after three days," another girl shot back.

"That's different! This is bread from Lu Yuan's crits! It comes with a buff!"

"Get lost."

Lu Yuan ignored them and leaned back against the carriage wall, tearing open a bag of bread and eating it.

At some point, Su Yao walked over and sat down right beside him.

Without hesitation, without a hint of awkwardness, she just naturally sat to his right, her shoulder less than a fist's width from his.

Then she picked up a bottle of mineral water and held it out to Lu Yuan.

"Open it for me."

Lu Yuan glanced at her, took it, twisted off the cap, and handed it back.

Su Yao took the bottle and lowered her head to take a sip.

Several girls in the carriage glanced over.

Su Yao was usually the least social person in the class. She never took the initiative to talk to anyone and never took the initiative to sit with anyone. Her presence was so low that sometimes they even forgot to call her name.

And now she had sat directly next to Lu Yuan, close enough that their shoulders were almost touching, and had even asked him to open her bottle.

Lin Shiyu stopped chewing for half a second, rolled her eyes twice, exchanged a look with the girl beside her, and the corners of her mouth lifted.

Gu Siyu was standing in the middle of the carriage, still holding a few bags of bread. She looked at Su Yao's position, then at the side of Lu Yuan's face.

She said nothing, just turned and passed the bread to the classmates behind her.

Shen Nian was curled up with her arms crossed at the other end of the carriage, gnawing on bread. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Su Yao moving over, and her chewing slowed by half a beat.

Su Yao ignored everyone's stares and quietly ate her bread and drank her water, calm and unhurried.

"Lu Yuan! Teacher Zhou!"

Meng Wanqing's voice came from the front of the train.

She was standing in front of the control panel, still holding half a piece of bread in her mouth, one hand pointing at the interface.

"Come take a look at this!"

Zhou Wei set down the water bottle in her hand and stood up, heading toward the front. Lu Yuan followed.

Meng Wanqing swallowed the bread in her mouth and pointed at a new tab on the panel.

"There's a crafting list here."

Lu Yuan leaned in to look.

A new "Crafting" tab had appeared on the panel. When opened, it displayed several lines.

[Basic Clothing Set (long-sleeve top + long pants + shoes) - Required materials: fiber x100]

[Stone Axe - Required materials: wood x1 unit, iron x1 unit]

[Stone Pickaxe - Required materials: wood x1 unit, iron x1 unit]

Farther down there were several grayed-out options that couldn't be viewed because there weren't enough materials.

"How do you get fiber?" Zhou Wei asked.

Meng Wanqing tapped the fiber icon, and a line of explanatory text popped up.

[Fiber: Can be gathered from weeds. 1 unit of weeds = 1 fiber.]

"Weeds," Zhou Wei repeated.

"The dead grass along the roadside should count," Meng Wanqing said, pushing up her glasses. "One hundred fiber for one set of clothes. For thirty-odd people, that's more than three thousand fiber, which means more than three thousand units of weeds."

"That's going to be rough," Zhou Wei frowned. "If we just pull it by hand, we may not have enough time left."

She turned to look at Lu Yuan. "What do you think?"

Lu Yuan didn't answer right away. His gaze drifted through the carriage window toward the outside.

The hardware store's iron shutter was half rolled down. The general store's wooden door frame was cracked. The convenience store's shelves were made of iron.

A little farther away, there were a few dead trees growing by the roadside and behind the houses. The trunks weren't thick, but they were wood all the same.

There was plenty of dead grass in the cracks of the road.

"Teacher."

"Hmm?"

"I'm thinking about something."

Zhou Wei looked at him and waited for him to continue.

"Can we tear that little town apart?"

Zhou Wei froze. The second piece of bread Meng Wanqing had just stuffed into her mouth nearly made her choke.

"Tear... tear it apart?"

"Look at those buildings." Lu Yuan lifted a hand and pointed out the window. "The doors are iron. The shelves are iron. There are iron pipes and iron frames everywhere. The general store and breakfast shop have wooden door frames, and there are dead trees by the roadside we can chop down."

He paused.

"We searched for more than two hours just now and only got three units of wood and two units of iron."

"But if we first use the wood and iron we already have to make an axe and a pickaxe," he said, pointing at the crafting list on the panel, "then go use the tools to tear down buildings, cut trees, and pry apart iron frames, the efficiency will jump several times over."

Meng Wanqing swallowed her bread and her eyes lit up. "And when you pick things up, you can still trigger crits."

"Right." Lu Yuan nodded.

Zhou Wei was silent for two seconds as the idea clicked into place.

"There's one more thing," Lu Yuan went on, looking at Meng Wanqing. "Can the train be upgraded?"

Meng Wanqing blinked, turned back to the panel, flipped through a few screens, and opened a new interface.

[Train Upgrade - LV1 -> LV2]

[Required materials: wood x100 units, iron x100 units]

[Upgrade effect: carriage space increases, basic rest area unlocked, all passengers gain a passive recovery effect.]

"One hundred units of wood and one hundred units of iron," Meng Wanqing read aloud. She looked up at Lu Yuan, her expression complicated.

"One hundred units," Zhou Wei repeated, frowning. "We only managed to get five units after searching for more than two hours just now. If we need one hundred..."

"That's why we have to tear things apart." Lu Yuan's tone was calm. "After we do, we should get more than one hundred units. The wooden door frames and the trees by the roadside will be enough to start with. The key point is that Shen Nian and I both have attributes more than twice as high as normal people now. With tools, tearing stuff apart won't be hard. And with my crits..."

He didn't finish, but the meaning was already clear.

Zhou Wei and Meng Wanqing exchanged a look.

"Feasible," Meng Wanqing said first, nodding.

After thinking for a few seconds, Zhou Wei nodded too. "Let's try it. Make the tools first."

"Then I'll go get Shen Nian." Lu Yuan turned and headed back into the carriage.

Shen Nian was curled up in the corner at the back of the carriage, gnawing on bread. Chen Keke and Xu Zhaozhao were sitting tight against her on the left and right, the three of them murmuring about something. Lu Yuan walked over.

"Shen Nian."

Shen Nian looked up at him, bread still in her mouth, her expression less than friendly.

"What."

"There's something. Come here for a second."

"If you have something to say, say it."

"We found a crafting system on the control panel. We can make tools and clothes. After talking it over with the teacher, we're planning to tear down the buildings in town and farm resources. You and I are going to do it. Our stats are high enough, and the two of us can break things fast."

Shen Nian stopped chewing.

She swallowed the bread, stood up, and brushed the crumbs off her hands.

"Fine, let's go."

Straightforward, no nonsense.

She strode forward, and when she passed Lu Yuan, she straightened her chest and slapped a hand against it.

"Leave this kind of physical work to me. No problem."

The slap landed with a sharp sound.

The two mounds beneath her hand bounced once.

Lu Yuan's gaze dropped involuntarily.

Shen Nian's hand was still on her chest. Sensing his look, she lowered her eyes to the place she had just slapped, then looked back up at Lu Yuan's face, then followed the direction of his gaze back down...

"You fucking...!"

She kicked at him. It landed on Lu Yuan's calf, not too hard, not too light.

"Can't you control yourself for once!"

Lu Yuan took a step back, his expression innocent.

"You were the one who slapped it."

"I slapped my own chest, what the hell does that have to do with you!" Shen Nian's ears turned red again, her voice rising half a pitch. "Where are your eyes looking?"

"On my face."

Shen Nian's fists clenched.

Chen Keke was covering her mouth and laughing in the back, while Xu Zhaozhao poked her blond head out, her eyes darting back and forth between the two of them, the corners of her mouth already stretched nearly to her ears.

"Alright, alright," Zhou Wei's tired voice came from the front of the train. "Cut it out. Hurry up. We have less than five hours left before the stop."

Shen Nian glared at Lu Yuan one last time, then turned and headed toward the front.

After taking two steps, she looked back.

"You walk in front."

Lu Yuan didn't say anything and moved ahead of her.