Chapter 255 The Weakness of the Game's Core

Day 28 of the road survival game!

Following Morofushi Kagemitsu's suggestion, the group first chose the largest gold vault in Japan, which was closest to them. They had expected to have to outwit the security personnel or security system there.

To his surprise, the most important vault was completely unguarded, and even the door that should have been locked was wide open. Seeing this, Bourbon had a bad feeling.

It is speculated that before the disaster struck, some people may have disregarded their jobs and professional honors, seized state assets, and prepared to make a comeback by relying on the gold after the solar storm ended.

Of course, there is another possibility: the assets here have been emptied. Japan had actually known about the solar storm for a long time, but it concealed the information from most of the public and secretly moved the gold and silver reserves here to places they felt were safe.

“It seems that most of this place has no value left to protect, which is why there’s no need for a chain.” Shuichi Akai mentioned the possibility that Bourbon least wanted to see.

This possibility made Bourbon's face turn very ugly.

Morofushi Kagemitsu looked at him with concern. Last night, he and Zero had a private conversation in the room, and from that conversation, he learned why Zero was still in the organization.

He neither helped the police completely eradicate the organization, nor did the police arrange for him to leave the organization and return to Japan. The reason was that Zero had leaked information about their former superior to the organization by taking advantage of the Ferris wheel incident.

The organization investigated and, after discovering he was a member of the Symbiosis Cult, silenced him. His death was considered the most suspicious by certain privileged figures in the high command of the Public Security Bureau because he had failed to report the organization's relevant intelligence on the operation to them.

As a result, he is currently the highest-ranking undercover agent in the organization, and the police officer who has a personal conflict with the other party is considered suspicious. Since then, Zero has been sidelined in the police force, and his authority is strictly limited in all aspects except for organizational investigations.

Previously, some pending government affairs from the Ministry of Public Security would be sent to him via email for processing on weekdays. Since then, those affairs have not been entrusted to him anymore. Even Supervisor Kuroda seems to have doubts about his professional ethics and no longer entrusts him with 100% trust...

So Zero stayed in the group without leaving or receiving any further missions. In reality, it was the Ministry of Public Security giving him the cold shoulder, probably to see if he still had any value to be used in the future.

If he has any value, he'll still be the Ministry of Public Security's Rei Furuya. If he has no value, then he might only organize Bourbon in the future. Recalling all this, Morofushi Kagemitsu couldn't help but sigh deeply and looked at Kazesei no Mori: "Let's try to see how much stock we still have here!"

“Hmm!” Feng Xingshou had no interest in Japanese affairs, and she didn’t care whether the Japanese government was good or bad. Therefore, when she heard Morofushi Kagemitsu’s words, she naturally didn’t stand on ceremony and directly released her spiritual power to cover the entire vault.

She tried to collect the silver inside remotely, but after covering it with her mental power, she said to the group while collecting the silver inside, "I don't know how much gold and silver a country can have in its reserves."

However, the amount inside doesn't seem to match a country's reserves. The entire warehouse is less than 1% of its total area, or even less. Fortunately, these materials are enough for our vehicle upgrade parts and some materials needed for future star upgrades. If we can find more surviving materials elsewhere, we should have a surplus.

As expected, Bourbon took a deep breath, feeling somewhat helpless and disappointed, but he couldn't show it in front of Gin, especially since he didn't know what the situation was.

He knew, however, that ordinary vault security personnel could not so quickly open the vault doors and move out large amounts of national reserves after the staff on duty had left...

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Morofushi Kagemitsu couldn't be too close to Bourbon, so even if he noticed Bourbon's disappointment, he naturally couldn't offer him words of comfort at this moment. He could only sigh and say, "Alright."

Whatever the state of the world is, what's meant to happen has happened. All we need to do is collect all the usable resources in this world to gain greater benefits for ourselves.

So everyone sprang into action again, quickly heading to the car market to collect enough vehicles to upgrade or star up those that could be upgraded.

So Feng Xing Shou used her backpack to move the vehicle to the back of her vehicle, took the vehicle out and attached it to the vehicle's tow hook, and then completed the previous star-up operation, upgrading and star-upping the vehicle on the tow hook.

This is truly cutting-edge technology. Upgrading vehicles, whether it's parts or star rating, takes less than a minute. It feels like it can be done in a few dozen seconds, which is quite amazing. With her actions, a large number of vehicles and various materials are being consumed by her.

Her vehicle's star rating kept increasing, and all sorts of rewards appeared before her. She collected the rewards that would be useful later, and left the ones that could be used now outside, such as the universal blueprints for level 5 parts, etc...

After finishing all that, she started trying to upgrade his vehicle. However, the only downside was that the blueprints for the parts needed to upgrade the vehicle could not be obtained entirely through rewards, such as the general parts upgrade blueprints obtained through star-up rewards.

The level 5 component blueprints they obtained through previous competitions were only enough to upgrade their vehicles to level 5, not to the maximum level. Even so, Wind Star Guardian was already satisfied, because her vehicle improved in all aspects after the upgrade...

After finishing all that, her backpack was much freer, allowing her to collect more supplies. At that moment, she had an idea: in these five hours, she would collect as many supplies as she could, whether useful or not.

Anyway, they'll be completely destroyed by the solar storm in this world's disaster if we don't collect them. Instead, we can collect them and sell them for copper coins, which can then be used to buy more rare items and game props.

Furthermore, she could use her backpack space to collect supplies, sell off all the useless items, and make sure no one else found out that she could sell items for copper coins using her backpack space.

If others discover my hand, the existence of the gift shop will be exposed. However, I can tell my brother about it when we return to the Survival Highway after the event.

With this in mind, as Hagiwara drove the vehicle again, taking them to other resource-rich areas in Japan to collect supplies, she also continuously released the storage capacity of her backpack through the vehicle.

After storing everything within the surrounding area into the backpack space, store items with resale value in the backpack and sell them to prevent them from taking up backpack space. Items without resale value should either be thrown back or sold cheaply.

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While the group was busy during this short period of time, they arrived at their destination – Japan’s largest shopping mall and supermarket, where they needed to collect a large number of clothes.

They used supplies related to clothing, food, shelter, and transportation to ensure that there would be no shortage of supplies in the future during their survival in the game. However, because they collected supplies in places such as shopping malls and supermarkets, they gradually began to encounter other survivors.

Given Gin's habits and personality, he would naturally hunt down these survivors and collect their vehicles to upgrade the Wind Guardian's vehicles. However, since the Wind Guardian has a backpack function, it can upgrade its own vehicles by collecting various vehicles in the real world.

There was no need to steal other survivors' vehicles, so all of Gin's plans in this regard were thwarted by Wind Guardian. Instead, while they were gathering supplies, they witnessed several instances of survivors killing each other, from various countries, fighting over each other's vehicles to upgrade their rank...

After gathering a batch of supplies, Feng Xing Shou said to everyone, "Why don't we take advantage of this opportunity..."

Before she could finish speaking, the large shopping mall in front of them suddenly shook violently again. This time the situation was even more dangerous, with a huge crack appearing right next to their vehicle.

It felt like if the shaking continued, their vehicle would crash into the second and third basement levels of the supermarket below the crack. In this critical moment, Feng Xingshou didn't know what had happened to cause this situation.

Still hoping for a chance, he reached out and tried to store the vehicle in his backpack. To his surprise, it worked. After Feng Xingshou stored the vehicle in his backpack, the violent shaking of the shopping mall and the underground cracks stopped.

At this moment, everyone watched as she stored the vehicle in her backpack, not bothering to check what had happened around her that caused this situation. Only Gin reacted very quickly and said to her, "Try it. Open the game panel."

Feng Xingshou initially didn't quite understand what Gin meant by that, but the others understood instantly.

"Listen to your brother, Kaze-chan!" Hagiwara urged quickly, then explained to her, "If you can open the game panel now, it means that the game panel should have been connected to you by the game organizers in some way."

If you can't access the game panel right now, it means the game developers have likely placed the core of controlling and communicating with survivors on vehicles. This means that in the future, if the threat is the first type (vehicles), we'll have more confidence in fighting this survival game.

Upon hearing Hagiwara's explanation, Kazesei quickly tried to open the game panel, but this time, no matter whether she used her mind or voice to directly command the game panel, it did not appear in front of her.

Seeing the result of this attempt, Gin, Hagiwara, and Matsuda all showed happy expressions: "It seems that the game's threat to us is not completely invincible. Kaze's ability naturally counters their game mechanics."

"Alright, we can leave these things for later. Right now, let's get away from this dangerous place as quickly as possible. By the way, shall we take out the vehicle now?" Feng Xingshou was also pleased to hear this.

However, seeing the surrounding earth torn apart even more horribly, and even seeing thick smoke billowing from the clearly visible crater of Mount Fuji not far away, she quickly asked Gin, exclaiming in shock, "Mount Fuji has erupted?"

Before Gin could speak, Akai Tsutomu shook his head and said, "Don't take it out yet. I estimate that the vehicle is under his surveillance for everything we do. Only when the vehicle loses contact will our communication be free from their surveillance."

Now is a good time to secretly discuss our future plans. As for traveling and collecting supplies, we have your backpack space capacity, and with you there, we don't need a vehicle because of your folding design. We can just find any medium-sized vehicle that can seat eight people on the roadside.

Only when they heard Akai Tsutomu say this did everyone understand why he had always been the most taciturn one since he appeared, with his son often speaking on his behalf.

Either he mentioned it in ambiguous or suggestive ways and then never brought it up again, because he was wary of the game's monitoring and eavesdropping functions...

Fuusei no Mamoru didn't want to be under the game's surveillance for long, so when he heard Akai Tsutomu say that, he naturally didn't object. Thus, Hagiwara, who was more skilled in car-related matters, committed a crime for the first time in his life.

He used his skills to drive a car, or get an unclaimed vehicle, to take everyone to another supply collection point. This time, Akai Tsutomu no longer remained silent in the car, but actively expressed his observations of the game over the past day.

And some of my thoughts on the game: "Based on the information I gathered from the real-world symbiosis cult, this game is clearly plotting to seize the spiritual power of Earth's humans, and the game's control panel is an example of this."

Whether it's the vehicle that Gin-san seized or the information displayed on your current vehicle, some key and main functions are marked with a font that looks like classical Chinese.

Just like bilingual markings, this often means that the vehicle was made by someone whose native language is ancient Chinese characters. The other language marking below is the native language of the survivor whose origin is related to the vehicle.

In this case, it means that the game organizer should also be a civilization that extends from a parallel world on Earth. However, the other party's civilization may focus on developing spiritual power. So, should we tentatively assume that the game organizer is actually a spiritual civilization?

Most civilizations reach a certain level of sophistication and then reach a limit. I speculate that their spiritual civilization has already reached its limit on its own, which is why they developed unorthodox methods like survival games.

Then, by extracting the spiritual power of people in other parallel worlds, they can cultivate it and use it to improve themselves or their family and relatives, just like how we buy nutritional supplements to give to friends and relatives in need.

If this speculation is close to the most realistic situation, then it is estimated that when Feng Sang raises your mental strength to the standard they require, or when they raise your mental strength to the point where they can seize it without giving you a chance to resist them.

When they come to take your spiritual fruit, if you don't want to be eliminated by them, you either have to suppress your spiritual growth so that you can't grow to the point where the survivors can take your spiritual fruit until the end of the game.

Alternatively, you could end up like Jerison, having your mental energy taken away and all memories related to it erased by the game organizers until the game ends, allowing you to continue living a normal life in the real world—assuming you manage to achieve a top-three finish among all survivors…

"Are these the only two options? Are there no other choices? I really hate the organizers of this game," Feng Xingshou asked somewhat unwillingly upon hearing this.

Although the existence of this game gave her the opportunity to change her brother's fate and allowed her to reunite with Hagiwara, Matsuda, and the others, the more she learned about the game, the more she loathed it.

Countless people are victims of this game. The constant merging and damage of those parallel worlds are all crimes of this survival game. She doesn't know how many parallel worlds this survival game has harmed over the years.

On a parallel planet, she didn't want to see this survival game continue to run rampant on Earth, so rather than running away or pretending to know nothing and continuing to survive, she hoped to completely drive this game out of her world.

Hearing Feng Xingshou's question, Akai Tsutomu shook his head and said, "I'm sorry, but in terms of technology and civilization, we are no match for survival games."

Feng Xingshou asked with distress, "Don't they have any weaknesses?"

"Not necessarily. I've never seen anything perfect in the world. Everyone and everything has weaknesses, and I think the game organizers are no exception." Hearing Feng Xing Shou's unwillingness to give up, Gin thought for a moment and replied with this sentence.

He himself also hated those aliens, those game organizers, and those audience members, because they were the ones who made his fat pig suffer a terrible death once. Given his personality, he naturally had to get revenge before he was satisfied.

Therefore, over the past few years, based on the information provided by Feng Xing Shou, he has been figuring out the weaknesses of the game organizers and behind-the-scenes audience. Then he thought of something and said to Feng Xing Shou, "If we have a way to increase our physical strength, perhaps we can restrain them."

Hearing Gin say that, Akai Tsutomu nodded. Since this game has always focused on cultivating mental strength, it seems that there isn't much improvement or evolution effect in terms of physical constitution, according to what you've said.

Therefore, their real weakness might be physical enhancement. Perhaps those whose physical abilities have evolved to a certain extent will be able to counter them, making them helpless, or even causing them to disappear...

"I have a way to improve physical fitness!" Upon hearing this, Feng Xing Shou's heart suddenly stirred, and she exclaimed in surprise. She couldn't explain the function of her gift shop in front of outsiders, since there were more than just Hagiwara and her brother present.

There were also their friends and the Akai Tsutomu father and son who were unrelated to her, so she concealed the fact that she owned a gift shop, saying, "I have a special way to create a potion that can awaken a person's constitution."