Chapter Forty-Six: All Is Ready

By the time the plan to gather talented individuals had been thoroughly discussed, it was already ten o’clock at night. Not wanting to waste the opportunity to use the spatial watch’s teleportation, Xie Han returned to his room, locked the door, and initiated the transfer. The destination was still the bedroom of his apartment. Once there, he took out all the gold sand from his spatial vault, packed it into a snakeskin bag, and tossed it into a corner of the kitchen. Xie Han wasn’t the least bit concerned about thieves; even if one broke in, they would never notice a humble snakeskin bag. After all, Xie Han had deliberately left some cash in the bedroom to serve as a decoy, which would be enough to catch any thief’s attention.

In most modern cities, shops typically closed between 10:30 and 11:00 PM. Seeing he still had time, Xie Han decided to fill his spatial storage with refined flour. However, the two cubic meters of space required him to visit four different city districts, sweeping up all the refined flour available to fill the vault to capacity. Calculating it out, the amount that two cubic meters could hold was quite considerable.

Not daring to linger any longer, Xie Han hurried back to the apocalypse. Pausing to listen for sounds within the base, he confirmed that everyone seemed to be asleep and allowed himself to relax. The events of the day had left him feeling a trace of fatigue, so after briefly organizing his thoughts, he collapsed onto the bed and quickly fell into a deep sleep.

In the days that followed, Xie Han no longer participated in the hunting expeditions. Chen Liu, however, joined one such outing. The more than eighty tons of refined flour their hunts had brought back deeply shocked everyone in the base, including the management. In the hunts that Xie Han did not attend, the operations became grand affairs, with Huang Mao and the management each providing a heavy-duty bulldozer, forming a convoy of nearly two hundred vehicles. Even under the cover of heavy machine-gun fire, they still achieved impressive results.

What puzzled Xie Han was that, during these hunts, they had not encountered a single R3-type evolved zombie. According to the files, even if he had injured an R3, its self-repair abilities would allow it to recover fully in just a few days. Could it be that these people simply didn’t arouse the R3’s interest? Or was there some other unexpected change?

The repeated successes began to thoroughly stir the nerves of everyone in the base. The hunting expeditions, which had originally been open for anyone to join, started to become restricted, and the management seized the opportunity to raise their share of the spoils to thirty percent. Refined flour, along with small amounts of rice, wheat, and other grains, began to appear on the market, and the exchange rate between gold and grain fell by a third.

Amid the unprecedented fervor sweeping the base, Xie Han couldn’t shake the feeling that something was amiss, though he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. All he could do was focus on his own plans. On the ground floor of an uninhabited building in the residential community, Xie Han stored his refined flour. Over the past few days, he would deposit around a ton of flour there each day. After assigning several people to guard the place and having Glasses design a smart alarm system, he no longer worried about anyone targeting his stores of flour.

Taishan’s efficiency was as reliable as ever. Within a few short days, he had gained a thorough understanding of all the personnel in the base who could be considered experts. In fields such as genetics or biology, not to mention experts—even ordinary researchers had been completely recruited by the base. Most of the experts in manufacturing had been assigned to various machinery factories. Those who remained, such as car mechanics or electrical and computer specialists, were now scraping by on the base’s relief supplies.

After compiling the information, Xie Han estimated there were only about fifty or sixty people who could truly be called experts—a rather modest number. He instructed Taishan to record all their names. In this apocalypse, Xie Han felt no concern over their pride; facing the threat to their survival, he knew what choices they would make. Fully aware that administrative matters were not his strength, Xie Han simply delegated the negotiations—regarding their treatment and conditions—to Qi Feiwu and Taishan, trusting that these two would know exactly what to offer.

In this world after the fall, laws such as patent rights had been obliterated. Xie Han’s principle was simple: any technology not currently patented was to be obtained by any means necessary. All forms of technology fell within his net.

After several days of preparation, Taishan easily used two hundred pounds of refined flour to legally obtain an office suite of over eight hundred square meters from the staff responsible for housing. The suite had originally belonged to a large trading company, and much of its equipment was still intact—there were more than fifty fully functional computers. Other office supplies were all present and accounted for, so the only thing that needed to be done was a thorough cleaning and the removal of some useless documents.

With matters in the apocalypse handed over to Qi Feiwu and Taishan, Xie Han had nothing to worry about there. In the present day, however, he was incredibly busy, his three hours each day consumed by phone calls and networking. He never revealed that he had a large quantity of gold sand, but vaguely mentioned knowing of a place that specialized in buying such things. Many of his friends, aware that he was starting a business, asked if he was planning to make gold jewelry.

Xie Han found himself both amused and exasperated, repeatedly explaining that he was merely doing a favor for a friend. He had considered his circle of friends, but none of them were familiar with that line of work, so he simply began making rounds in Chaoyang City himself. As the provincial capital, Chaoyang was not on the level of Shanghai or Shenzhen, but it was a bustling metropolis by inland standards. In cities like this, gold and silver jewelry were highly sought after, commanding a vast market.

After several days of reconnaissance, Xie Han began to understand the business. Reputable companies like Zhenbao Gold always required proof of origin for gold, especially for larger quantities. For anything under a hundred grams, however, they would purchase without much fuss. Xie Han, of course, had no intention of selling his gold sand in such small quantities—it would take forever to move his stock that way. So he set his sights on less reputable companies or stores, which had far fewer requirements and would buy anything, no questions asked. The downside was that their prices were much lower—sometimes only two-thirds of what the official companies offered.

After some painful calculations, Xie Han realized that if he sold through these underground channels, his thirty bags of gold sand would fetch, at most, around eight million—almost half what they were really worth. Xie Han’s family was solidly lower-middle class; his parents had saved barely two or three hundred thousand over their lifetimes, and had even spent 150,000 to help him land a government job. For that reason, several million was already a huge sum for Xie Han.

After the trials and bloodshed of the apocalypse, Xie Han’s character had become much more decisive. Though it meant losing out on several million, he resolved to sell the gold sand anyway. Once his plans were set in motion, that loss would mean little in the grand scheme of things.

He had already chosen his target—a nondescript little gold jewelry store. Despite its modest location and small storefront, Xie Han, no ordinary person, had thoroughly investigated it. The shop was actually a front for the city’s largest jewelry company’s underground acquisition operations, and there were many others like it in Chaoyang. So Xie Han had no worry at all that they wouldn’t be able to handle such a large shipment.