"I have to say, I think what I've harvested today will bring about an explosion of growth to my shelter!"

Su Mo was in a familiar space.

He laid down as usual.

Oreo offered her body as usual to support his head.

Big Spark and Little Spark zoomed through the room toward him, looking for a comfortable position before lying down beside him.

Looking at the gleaming treasure chests and the pile of safehouse cores in his storage space, Su Mo was smiling from ear to ear.

As a fellow lone wolf, Magoo showed a good example of how difficult it was to develop the shelter.

The Deep-sea shelter had been developing for nearly 400 days, but the walls were still barely a meter thick.

Although it may have been upgraded to concrete, the Deep-sea shelter's overall security was still no match for the Underground Shelter.

In terms of facilities, other than the few larger machines, Su Mo could not even find a decent bed there.

Entertainment was totally out of the question.

In comparison, the Underground Shelter was now protected by a nearly eight-meter-thick stone wall, had two televisions, a cozy little bed, and even had air-conditioning facilities!

"If Kento Maeda and the rest had not been so eager to die by my hands, my development pace would probably be much slower, but now…"

With a thought, Su Mo brought out all the safehouse cores from his storage space and piled them on the floor.

It was difficult for one's eyes to peel away from the pile of rustic, colorful cores once they had appeared.

[Record]: Player has been detected to possess complete safehouse cores. Option to assimilate available. Proceed?

The prompt on the game panel may have been slightly delayed, but it eventually appeared. 

Su Mo tapped "no" on the prompt, sat up, and started examining the pile of safehouse cores in front of him.

Sixteen humans totaled up to three complete safehouse cores and thirteen incomplete ones.

"Hmmm, that's weird. Why are there shelter cores that can be directly assimilated, while some others are sealed?"

He separated the complete and incomplete safehouse cores into separate piles and picked up the biggest, most expensive-looking core.

This turtle armor may be incomplete, but it was at least two times bigger than the rest of them and had more intricate carvings on its surface.

When Su Mo held this particular turtle armor in his hands, it felt as if invisible strings connected it to the rest of the turtle armors.

This was an odd feeling. Since everyone had the same things, why did it feel like this one had an obviously higher status?

"It was as if this turtle armor was in charge of the rest?"

This odd hypothesis gave Su Mo a headache.

There were no prompts from the game panel regarding this. It was up to Su Mo to explore these things that did not seem to abide by scientific reasoning.

Running his hand over the carved designs on the turtle armor, Su Mo summoned the game panel and tried choosing the option to assimilate.

However, a prompt quickly appeared:

[Record]: The shelter associated with the selected incomplete core is still intact. Assimilation request denied.

[Record]: Player can first examine the items in the core. When the associated shelter is destroyed, the player will receive ownership of the items once the assimilation process is completed.

"There it is. Even though I've finished these people off and taken their safehouse cores, as long as their shelters are still standing, I can't assimilate them just yet."

"Looks like a trip to the saltpeter mining camp is required then. I gotta figure out how to destroy Kento Maeda's shelter."

"I can also look for Ying Xiong while I'm there then. How can people that scheme against me not pay some interest for what they've done to me?"

As Su Mo remembered the accomplice's name he had forced out of Kento Maeda before he died, Su Mo was reminded of the president of Tundra Shelter, Ying Tianlong.

Su Mo had a vague idea of what was going on.

The first time he went to Huaxia Shelter for blueprints, someone from Ying Tianlong's Self-Rescue Association must have been involved with Shen Yitian's designing process.

What came next should be that Ying Xiong found out where Su Mo's shelter was and, in his communication with Ying Tianlong, information was exchanged.

Unfortunately, Ying Xiong was an idiot who believed in Kento Maeda's lies, so the news got out.

Su Mo had no idea how many people were involved in this entire process. It would be hard to pinpoint due to the distance between the two locations.

If Shen Yitian was involved in this too, then this would mean a whole lot of other things.

"Don't panic. It's already late now, and to travel far in this kinda weather is basically asking for trouble. I'll go to the saltpeter mining camp first thing in the morning tomorrow!"

"I don't think they'll run, since their shelters are are all there anyway. Where else can they go?"

Suppressing the intent to kill these "incompetents", Su Mo chugged a big mouthful of water to calm himself down.

After a while, Su Mo chucked these messy thoughts to the back of his mind and started examining the items that came with Kento Maeda's core.

Before he looked, he had not cared, but as he stared at the expensive collection of items that were inside the core, Su Mo could not believe his eyes.

It was not the size or the price of the core and its items that stunned him.

On the contrary…

There was a heaping pile of safehouse cores in the storage space of the initial core!

Nearly 30 incomplete safehouse cores were thrown together in a pile, like a mountain of trash, right at the corner of the storage space.

There were also seven complete safehouse cores at a different part of the storage space.

All these accumulated cores were sufficient to instantly build a mini military base.

"Sh*t, who knows how many people this old dog killed to be able to collect such a large amount of cores? Well, I shouldn't be too surprised. From the looks of it, he probably planned to rob me of my 'treasures' and use these cores to build another haven?"

"Too bad, it's too bad that all of these ended up in my hands!"

Nuzzling the turtle armor, Su Mo's foul mood at being targeted in someone else's scheme faded significantly. The hard edges on his face softened.

All he needed to do was to head to the saltpeter mining camp and burn it all down!

Now Su Mo finally had more than enough cores to transfer the oil well in the Deep-sea shelter and to build a garage!

"Let's see, Kento Maeda's storage space should be about one and a half cubic meters. There's quite a lot of resources in there too!"

"A bottle of mineral water, five catties of hardtack, two catties of beef, a bottle of soju, two boxes of flu medicine, a bottle of anti-inflammatory medicine, a bag of rice…"

Kento Maeda did not have as large a storage space as Su Mo, but he definitely used up every inch of it efficiently.

All the emergency supplies in the core were mostly unopened and locked up in a corner.

Kento Maeda's thought process was crystal clear. Things that were in his storage space generally did not take up a lot of space, but were extremely useful in event of emergencies.

Items like hardtack and medicine supply would have been just enough to get him through most of the emergencies that could happen in this doomsday world!

"Instead of excessively hoarding supplies just to survive like Kento Maeda, I prefer to do things my way. I'm thankful that I can plant vegetables in my shelter, and that will give me an endless supply of fresh goods!"

"I also have a natural anti-inflammatory item—the psychic energy water—at my disposal, and that has saved me the trouble of exchanging my resources for medicine in case I fall sick."

"So these are all reasons why I progressed so fast!"

It had always been Su Mo's strength to be self-analytical and self-aware when analyzing someone else's supplies and figuring out how things worked in this doomsday wasteland.

Once the location of the main shelter was confirmed, it would have meant that moving around was "temporarily" not an option. As such, he would have to maximize his advantages to cover for the shortfall of not being able to explore the world freely.

"When I'm strong enough, I can still figure out how to expand my exploration area, so that I can dig up more underground treasures to fortify my survival capabilities! Well, at least that's one of the reasons I have to explore further."

"More than that, I'd like to find out more about the people that had been transported to this world earlier, learn about how they fared and how they handled the disasters that were happening and, most importantly, dig out the truth behind why we were sent to this world."

Before he forgot, Su Mo quickly opened up the game panel, clicked on his private message channel diary, and jotted down all the possible directions of growth for his shelter.

After every battle, he would harvest different rewards and gain different perspectives.

The act of putting all the new perspectives into words allowed him to revisit it, dwell on it, and glean new understandings from it when he was free. It was an essential skill for lone wolves like him to survive the doomsday wasteland.

At the same time, Kento Maeda's reserves reminded Su Mo of something.

"Even if safehouse cores aren't allowed to be sold through the trading channel, other affluent alliances would most probably have similar reserves. If we ever meet each other, I can choose to exchange them with the resources I have, and it would expedite the speed of my shelters' development."

"Food supply may not be a problem right now, but I should probably still stock up on them, especially food items with long shelf life, just in case if I ever encounter a calamity too unbearable for me."

Closing the diary, Su Mo continued to take stock of the items that were there.

Excluding the cores and the food supplies, the rest of the items were Kento Maeda's personal belongings.

A hardcover notebook with a ballpen, and a rainbow feather of unknown origin.

A seemingly sharp knife that still had blood on it.

A shovel, two unused system-made torches, and a battered metal axe.

A half-filled ammunition box. Su Mo roughly counted 14 bullets remaining.

Two unidentified maps, one large and one small. It was hard for Su Mo to tell where they led to since he was not able to take them out for a closer look.