Chapter 16

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

Without a doubt, this was an incredible profit.

Although he had been mentally prepared, Ed could still not help but be surprised. To be fair, anyone would be shocked at this amount.

He had obtained a large variety of basic resources in quite incredible quantities. It could be said that he had obtained almost every resource he knew of so far.

Furthermore, this was after Ed had already deliberately limited the amount of goods that he had put up on sale. Otherwise, he might have even made double of the resources he had now. That would have been truly terrifying.

The reason he had done so was simple. He did not want to allow any item to be bought repeatedly by one person. If he allowed too much supply to go out, less people would need to buy it later on. In other words, it would depreciate in value. Ed did not want this to happen.

His items were almost sold out, and he had also earned enough.

This could have been considered to be a one-time use bomb. If he wanted to create such a large impact again in the future, he would have to offer some new items. Otherwise, it would be difficult to attract this much attention.

Of course, people would still buy them. After all, food was still invaluable to the other survivors.

At this moment, Ed thought of something.

Salt well!

He still had a salt well.

It had only been a few days, and as such, survivors who had not ingested any salt at all since the beginning would currently only be feeling slightly weaker. In a few more days, the symptoms would become more obvious. Some may even faint, or worse.

It was fine if humans did not ingest salt for a short period of time, but it could lead to serious consequences in the future.

As for whether the other survivors would have salt wells as well, Ed wasn’t worried.

So what if they did? He was confident that his would be the most refined and authentic batch. He wasn’t afraid of crude salt that couldn’t be consumed directly.

As such, he made up his mind to release salt as his big reveal next time. It would definitely create another wave of sensation, which would last for a while.

As salt was something that would have to be ingested almost every day, whoever controlled its supply would come out on top in this apocalyptic world.

More refined salt well forging blueprints may emerge in the future, but at the moment, it was likely that only Ed himself had one, so he wasn’t worried. As long as he put it up for sale, it would definitely be snatched up, allowing him to get his hands on another large pool of resources.

Ed stopped dreaming about his plans.

He had more pressing matters to attend to right now, such as building the processing plant. After this wave of transactions, the materials to build it had all been gathered.

It wasn’t easy, but not he could finally do it.

A notification sounded abruptly in Ed’s mind.

At this, his face grew dark.

[ Notice ] : Lack of construction tools such as hammers, shovels, and rulers. Unable to build. 

Ed now felt helpless. The notification was just as it had warned him before. However, while he had been busy collecting all kinds of resources for the construction of the processing plant itself, he had overlooked this detail, only remembering now that he had been reminded about it.

It was just some construction tools, he shouldn’t have a problem getting them, right?

Opening the forging interface, he started to look for their blueprints. He found them eventually, but they were blacked out. In other words, the tools would each require their appropriate forging blueprints, which was quite troublesome.

He had imagined that the resources would be the hardest to acquire, but now that he had finally gathered them, he found that he would need other blueprints for the construction tools.

“Looks like I can only hope for them from the check-in.”

Ed would have to wait another day. Anyway, the following day would mark one week since he had found himself here, and would allow him to perform his first weekly check-in.

If the forging blueprints he wanted did not appear, then he would have no choice but to use his food and try to trade for them with other survivors.

However, he held on to hope that he wouldn’t be disappointed by the weekly check-in. He didn’t want to resort completely to trade, especially for this type of item, which could be said to be valuable. Those that had it would definitely ask a lot for it, and in the end, Ed would be the one on the losing end.

Therefore, as long as there was any alternative, he wouldn’t go for these loss-making trades.

This would only be his fallback option. Only if there was no other way out would he resort to this.

Night soon fell.

The big trees in the forest once completely transformed, harboring malicious intent. They were like ghosts that wanted to kill, harvesting the souls of any survivors that dared invade.

Most of the colossal woods that had been cut down earlier by survivors during the day had also grown back up, Their strength revitalized by the strange moonlight.

Hungry survivors who had lost their minds rushed into the depths of the forest. Yet, there would only be two outcomes in the night.

Either they die by the hands of the strange trees, or die in the mouths of wild beasts.

Both led to death.

The forest was not at all forgiving at night.

Just like before, Ed held a torch as he patrolled his open ground. He had to make sure that there was no potential danger lurking close that would threaten his safety.

As he expanded his land, the risk of threats also increased. Beasts would move faster on flat open ground. Therefore, the lack of defensive measures had become Ed’s greatest weakness.

From his constant surveying of the chat interface, he knew that there were already many survivors who had been attacked by beasts.

Only a small number of people had successfully survived, relying on their nimble movements to escape the jaws of the beasts as they darted through uneven terrain. Even so, most had also suffered serious injuries. If they were to have another such encounter anytime soon, they would definitely die.

Most who were attacked did not speak again, the most probable reason being that they had met a miserable death by the jaws of some beast.

Ed slept late tonight, after igniting all possible fire sources he had to protect his own safety.

..

Time flew by quickly.

When Ed opened his eyes, the strange moon no longer hung in the sky, the bright sun having taken its place.

A new day had arrived.

The first thing he did after waking up was play around a bit with Little Treasure.

This was also something he had incorporated into his routine over time.

After eating a simple breakfast, Ed started off the logging operation of the day, which was to enlarge this area of clearing, expanding his territory.

Ed stopped in front of a tree before chopping it down directly with his axe.

The giant hit the ground with a thunderous boom.

He ignored notifications sounding in his mind. Instead, his brows were knitted tightly in concern. When he had chopped down the tree with his axe just now, he hadn’t felt as relaxed as before. Instead, there had been a moment’s pause before the axe sliced through.

In other words, the trees had become stronger after their exposure to the moonlight over the past few days.

This would not be good.