Cave Refuge-Chapter 241 - 239 Collecting Supplies_1

Therefore, Dong Tianyu now wants to upgrade his cave mansion as soon as possible and see what new changes will appear in the next level cave mansion.

Since he can’t stir up trouble in Pengcheng, he can only scout in the neighboring province.

Due to the radiation range of the Shadow Space, Dong Tianyu heads west first to explore the area within the free use of the Shadow Space.

Nameless Mountain is not far from the border between Pengcheng and the neighboring province. Under normal circumstances, it takes about twenty minutes by car to reach the border.

The county town at the border of the neighboring province and Pengcheng is Saxon County, which mainly relied on growing grapes and brewing wine for livelihood before the Catastrophe.

Although Saxon County belongs to the neighboring province, the reality is that the nearest city to Saxon County from the neighboring province is far more than twice the distance from Saxon County to Pengcheng. Therefore, residents living in Saxon County generally come to Pengcheng for whatever they need, be it shopping or medical treatment.

Hence, the road between Pengcheng and Saxon County is not only regularly maintained by both sides, but also designed as a dual eight-lane road when it was first constructed.

The black car drives at a fast speed on the Peng-Saxon highway. When it is not far from the Peng-Saxon border, Dong Tianyu’s Divine Sense discovers many discarded vehicles piled up on the road not far away.

Even without his Divine Sense scanning the people ambushed around, Dong Tianyu can clearly see that the road blocked by the abandoned cars is man-made.

’I’ve run into highway robbers.’

As Dong Tianyu becomes a bit curious, the black car’s speed gradually decreases.

Because of his Divine Sense, the black car doesn’t need to turn on the lights in the pitch-black night, and thanks to the magical weapons, the black car doesn’t make any noise while driving.

Even when the black car quietly stops in front of that pile of obstacles, the ambushed people are still chatting without noticing Dong Tianyu’s arrival.

In the scan of the Divine Sense, the difference between martial artists and ordinary people is not very obvious, but it can be differentiated through heartbeat rate.

During non-combat periods, the heartbeat rate of martial artists is much slower than that of ordinary people. The more advanced a martial artist, the slower their heartbeat rate during a non-combat period. Dong Tianyu has even seen a martial artist who only had one heartbeat per minute.

But when a martial artist enters a combat state, their heartbeat speed increases sharply. At this time, the stronger the martial artist, the faster their heartbeat speed.

Through heartbeat judgment, Dong Tianyu determined that among those ambushing robbers not far away, there are only three martial artists, and the rest are ordinary people.

The car door on the black car’s side silently opens. Dong Tianyu has several ice needles in his hand. Since he killed Liminghao easily the last time, he has practiced the Art of Controlling Objects more frequently.

Dong Tianyu doesn’t want to fight hand-to-hand. He thinks, why would he put himself in danger if he could settle it simply?

Maybe because they have been ambushing here for too long, those people are not very vigilant. The three martial artists are maintaining their divine senses while only two ordinary people are on the lookout for any changes in the surroundings.

But the others don’t have much night vision equipment, so they can only rely on their ears to detect the surrounding environment.

The ice needles silently fly towards them under the control of the Art of Controlling Objects.

’Thump! Thump! Thump... ’

After several consecutive sounds of bodies falling to the ground, all the robbers ambushed on the side of the road are dead.

Dong Tianyu casually collects all the abandoned vehicles on the road into the Shadow Space. After using his Divine Sense to confirm that there is nothing valuable on these robbers, he drives away directly.

The area near Pengcheng in Saxon County is mostly grape plantations. After several waves of the Catastrophe, this place has become a wasteland with nothing valuable left.

Dong Tianyu heads west straight into the county seat of Saxon County. Unlike the active reconstruction in Pengcheng, most of the buildings in Saxon County have become ruins. Since entering Saxon County, Dong Tianyu has not detected any survivors with his Divine Sense.

This situation is strange, even if Saxon County is just a county town, there should be air defense facilities according to normal circumstances. So there is a high probability that it was transformed into an underground Refuge Center after the Catastrophe.

Having thought of this, Dong Tianyu decides to find the underground refuge center here first.

Usually, larger shopping malls or high-end residential areas would have underground car parks.

As Dong Tianyu is not very familiar with this area, it’s not easy to find the residential areas, but malls are easy to find. Normally, every city center would have a large mall.

After Dong Tianyu had driven the black car throughout Saxon County, he started to doubt his own calculations. Although there were underground parking lots in the Saxon County shopping centers.

But after confirmation, the underground parking lots had not been renovated, so these were just ordinary parking lots, not the underground refuge centers that Dong Tianyu was looking for.

This didn’t seem right. Despite being just a county town, the population reached over a hundred thousand. Even though it had weathered several natural disasters, Dong Tianyu didn’t believe everyone had died.

Shortly after entering the boundary of Saxon county, they had encountered an ambush, proving there were definitely survivors here. Had Dong Tianyu known that the town would be void of people, he would have taken some of the ambushers alive for information.

As Dong Tianyu drove the black car around Saxon County, he felt increasingly odd. It was understandable that there were no people in the city. Perhaps they had moved to the refuge center with the local authorities.

However, there weren’t even any human bodies. This was an abnormal sight. Even in Pengcheng, one could occasionally find the bodies of survivors who had died post his visit.

Most of the newly discovered bodies were recently deceased survivors, but some had died a long time ago and their bodies were only discovered recently.

Pengcheng, despite making excellent recovery and rebuilding efforts, still would find the bodies of survivors who had died in the natural disasters from time to time. But why wasn’t there a single body in Saxon County? This clearly did not seem right.

Without any bodies other than Dong Tianyu, and no other living creatures in sight, and combined with the pitch-black night sky, the atmosphere here felt incredibly eerie.

After driving the black car around Saxon County again without finding anything new, Dong Tianyu could only reluctantly leave the place.

All the resources in the shopping centers of this small county town had already been taken by other survivors. Moreover, it didn’t have Pengcheng’s ideal geographic location to function as a supply transit center, so the town did not have anything valuable left.

Dong Tianyu realised his judgement had probably been a mistake this time. He had only considered that this place was within the radiation range of Shadow Space, which made gathering resources more convenient. He was not aware that this place was just a county town and did not possess any valuable resources.

However, the current deserted state of the town seemed strange. He wondered if the county’s leadership had done an excellent job and transferred all the survivors to another place in advance, or if something else had happened that had caused the absence of survivors.

When Dong Tianyu was about to embark on his return journey, he accidentally noticed a road map by the side of the Peng-Saxon highway. It showed another road leading towards an industrial park.

Upon seeing this information, Dong Tianyu was quite pleased. If there were physical companies in the industrial park, it didn’t matter what they produced. There would definitely be production equipment which Dong Tianyu could take along, thus, making the trip out here worthwhile.

With this thought in mind, Dong Tianyu’s dejected mood brightened somewhat.

He drove along the highway and soon reached the so-called industrial park, not far from Saxon County.

Perhaps due to its proximity to Pengcheng, Saxon County’s industrial park was concentrated on the eastern side, near Pengcheng.

Upon arriving at the industrial park, Dong Tianyu parked the black car in the Shadow Space and disembarked to proceed on foot into the factory area.

Just as Dong Tianyu had anticipated, there was no one in the entire factory area. However, unlike the county town which had no bodies at all, this factory area had a few scattered bodies inside the buildings.

Looking at the postures of these bodies, Dong Tianyu hypothesized that these were the employees on duty in the factory. Bundled up tightly, they had probably frozen to death during the Cold Catastrophe. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

Contrary to Dong Tianyu’s previous estimations, because this place was somewhat remote, many warehouses still stored a large number of raw materials and finished products. However, after surviving several rounds of natural disasters most of these goods were already scrapped and difficult to put back into use.

But this did not disturb Dong Tianyu; after all, they would be brought back to be recycled in his Cave Mansion. Whether they could be used or not did not affect him.

Perhaps also due to the remoteness, every factory in the industrial park had a large area with massive factory buildings.

This time Dong Tianyu not only took away all the machines in the factory buildings but also dismantled the steel structure of the factories themselves for re-purposing as scrap metal.

Whenever Dong Tianyu left a factory area, except for the concrete buildings, which were hard to dismantle and recycle, the rest of the places were left as barren land.

When Dong Tianyu left, two-thirds of the space in the Shadow Space had been used up, leaving only one-fifth empty.

The amount of goods Dong Tianyu had collected this time was almost nearly equivalent to the time when he had visited the Pengville Port.

Pengville Port was an important inland transfer port, yet this was just an industrial park of a county town.

Under normal circumstances, there should be no room for comparison. However, the enterprises in the small county town were low-end manufacturing enterprises. Their machines were not only less efficient, but each piece of machinery was also bulky.

Such enterprises would never be solicited by Pengcheng’s investment promotion department, regardless of how poor their performance records were.