Cave Refuge

Perhaps it’s true what the old saying goes, the more you lack something, the more you treasure it. Once you have an abundance, even the finest goods become worthless and despised.

The Officials of Magic City were quite interesting. When selling experimental instruments, they had no interest in verifying the identity of the purchaser. Yet, if anyone were found conducting experiments within Magic City, they would take no action against the experimenter but simply confiscate the equipment being used.

This might be similar to the electric tricycles before the disaster. When the sellers sold electric tricycles, the sale was legal, but the moment a buyer rode the tricycle on the road, they’d be detained by constables for operating an illegal vehicle.

Upon hearing Franklin was selling experimental equipment, apart from Yara and Gordon who already knew, Dong Tianyu and Ye Liuyun were both very interested.

Ye Liuyun was purely thinking of having another product that could help stabilise her monopoly in Pengcheng’s market.

On the other hand, Dong Tianyu thought about transforming them in Cave, curious about the mysterious items that could be obtained.

The reason why Dong Tianyu seldom used the ability to transform technology or biological items to mystical ones after having Cave was firstly to save more Survival Points and secondly because he hadn’t encountered anything suitable for transformation.

When Dong Tianyu first acquired the instruments from the Pengcheng laboratory for zero cost, the Storage space he had was too small, and based on past experiences, he didn’t even consider that option.

By the time Dong Tianyu realized the value of the experimental instruments, the places that had them were already occupied by others.

If you ask if he regretted it, the answer is truly no. After all, even if the experimental instruments were valuable, they weren’t essential for Dong Tianyu. Knowing the situation, he felt at most some regret.

Now that there was an opportunity to acquire experimental instruments again, Dong Tianyu was even more reluctant to let it go. Furthermore, Franklin’s presence here suggested that he had significant influence in Magic City.

Mrs. Thompson had been fixated on the Clarke family’s only grandson, Dong Tianyu’s cousin, who had disappeared without a trace after the disaster. So, once Dong Tianyu became more familiar with Franklin, he might ask for Franklin’s help to search for his cousin.

Whether his cousin was alive or dead, a definitive answer was needed.

As it was their first transaction, they didn’t pay too much attention to profit or loss when setting the price.

The agreed-upon price was:

Five bottles of nutritional supplements (each bottle 100 millilitres),

Fifty grams of flower stamens,

Five bottles of Concentrated Hallucinogen (each bottle 50 millilitres),

One piece of experimental equipment with a pre-disaster purchase price exceeding ten million.

These items were to serve as the benchmark value for the trade.

The flower stamens might only weigh fifty grams, but they are extremely light. Take saffron as a reference; a minor wound on a normal person’s body needs just one stamen for rapid healing, and for a Martial Artist in the Body Tempering Realm, a dozen or so stamens would suffice for a not-too-large wound.

The group only tentatively set a standard for trade, and the actual trade had to be confirmed after they returned. As for how to contact each other afterwards, they would each have to rely on their own methods.

After all, no one would trust them to handle such a big business if they couldn’t even guarantee communication upon return.

After they finished discussing business, since there was nothing else to do, they started chatting about romantic escapades.

Men, when idle, tend to converse on a few common topics.

All of them were currently single, having wandered through a myriad of romance but leaving without attachment.

After all, everyone’s situation was quite similar during those times, and some things were simply unavoidable.

The conversation drifted to the situation in Kyoto, from the widely known Celestials..., to the various Leisure Manors that had changed their names and closed off to the public after the disaster, to Platforms providing house-call massage services.

Such luxuries could only be found in the national centre of Kyoto and the dazzling Magic City; they were hardly available elsewhere.

However, Howard Village in Pengcheng was also widely talked about among the LSP community nationwide, as a village entirely committed to that line of business was rare throughout the country.

In Howard Village, not only were prices low, but honestly, the quality wasn’t too bad. While it couldn’t reach the peak quality of those cities, their best was comparable to the upper-middle tier in those places.

Detailed travel guides (click to view all content).

Post-disaster, Howard Village had disappeared, presumably replaced by Peach Blossom Paradise, which took a high-end approach. Although Peach Blossom Paradise had a name very similar to Dong Tianyu’s Cave, it truly had nothing to do with him.

When Dong Tianyu just mentioned Peach Blossom Paradise, not only Gordon but also Yara and Franklin showed surprised expressions.

It turned out that not only in Pengcheng, but their cities too had places called Peach Blossom Paradise. Moreover, like Pengcheng, they chose to build at the foot of a mountain and hollowed out nearby mountains to create a biomimetic zone inside.

After exchanging information, they were astonished to realize that Peach Blossom Paradise was not unique to their own cities. This leisure manor, seemingly low-key to the average person, turned out to be a nationwide chain.