It had to be that she had been using the wrong, far too passive approach for the past few days. That was the only logical reason Jing Shu hadn't managed to find a single new blood mushroom cluster or a viable leech swarm.
Over the last ten-plus days of watching from the sidelines and chatting during surface intervals, she had gotten to know, or at least recognize, about half of the regulars in the salvage team working this sector. Her enhanced night vision let her see their faces clearly even in the gloom, and when she saw the same tired, determined expressions every single day, a rough familiarity inevitably followed. She even knew, from casual observation, roughly how long each diver stayed underwater on a typical dive before coming back up for air, some were cautious two-minute men, others pushed it to three, lungs burning.
Earlier, while ostensibly looking for bounty items, she had only waited passively, almost idly, for someone to vanish, treating a potential tragedy as her opportunity. But the system was flawed: when a diver failed to resurface, a teammate would shout a rough location, "Over by the old bank building!", then by the time she geared up and drove the sub over, descended, and began a search, the missing person had already been gone too long, and there would be no living trace left to find, only perhaps a body or an empty tangle of ropes.
"Little sister, you again?" Liu Xing, the harried sector supervisor, held his forehead as if warding off a headache, his expression a mix of genuine fondness and deep professional dread.
Jing Shu, ignoring the ladder, nimbly climbed onto the listing salvage boat from her sub. The broad deck was piled high with a chaotic mountain of salvaged items, a chandelier, a dentist's chair, bundles of copper pipe, waterlogged books, and the loaders were already sorting them piece by piece, tossing the useless into a growing reject pile to be dumped later.
A week ago, the organized salvage teams had already finished their primary sweeps of the easier targets. They had gone through the half-submerged residential high-rises and pried up whatever was left bolted down in every unit: beds, toilets, sofas, wardrobes, doors, window glass, even light fixtures. Anything they could pry loose with a crowbar, they took. They really had plucked every last feather from the wild goose as it passed, then rushed to install it all in the still-bare apartments of the resettlement blocks. At the very least, everyone needed something to sleep on that wasn't a concrete floor, and the window frames needed glass or plastic to block the biting wind.
Most of it had been waterlogged for weeks and was close to ruined, warped, or mildewed, but it would do for now. With nighttime temperatures hovering just a few degrees above zero, people sleeping in damp clothes on cold, hard surfaces, many had already fallen ill with racking coughs and fevers. A bedframe, any bedframe, was a luxury.
And every unit desperately needed a toilet. Water wasn't acutely scarce at the moment thanks to the rain, but if the taps ever ran dry… better not to think about it. The government had to solve this sanitation problem at a systemic level, otherwise the stairwells and surrounding areas of every overcrowded building would be, well, artistically decorated with golden piles.
"Brother Liu, how's it looking today? Let me see the updated assignment list. What new bounties have been posted lately?" Jing Shu asked, offering a bright, harmless smile that didn't fool him for a second.
With Jing Shu, Liu Xing both loved and dreaded her presence, a conflict that played out visibly on his weathered face. But he still wore a strained professional grin and handed over the day's detailed operations log, a laminated clipboard with smudged pencil notes. She was a walking God of Fortune, a golden goose not to be offended. In just these ten-odd days, she had begun with little apparent experience and often returned empty-handed. Later, once she had learned the patterns of the currents and the layout of the major structures, any bounty with a roughly known location seemed to fall miraculously into the God of Fortune's hands.
Her bounty completion rate was terrifyingly close to one hundred percent. Plenty of private requestors, hearing rumors, even began naming her specifically in their job postings: "Prefer diver 'Shark Sub' for retrieval."
Just the "juice", the administrative fees and goodwill, dripping through this God of Fortune's fingers in the past few days had amounted to several hundred virtual coins for Liu Xing's operation, and his overall business volume and prestige had multiplied. Never mind special requests, even if she asked for something slightly excessive now, he would probably applaud and run to make it happen.
There was only one, persistent, headache-inducing problem. This particular God of Fortune had a bizarre, inconvenient hobby: she loved diving in to drag people out. Somehow, in her frenetic searches, she always managed to fish up four or five half-drowned divers who weren't fully dead yet. He, as the supervisor, couldn't just stand by and watch them die after she'd gone to the trouble. If he did, the other divers would probably stuff him headfirst down their own pants and use him for a makeshift soccer ball.
Not only could he not show reluctance to save people, he even had to profusely thank this living Lei Feng with all his might. It made his career as an efficient, output-focused manager much harder. Even the on-site medics had their hands full, all because earlier, fortunate recipients of those precious blood mushrooms had leaked some tantalizing inside info.
The rumor was that the famed blood mushrooms were all found in areas with large, dense swarms of leeches. But several greedy divers who had specifically gone hunting for them in such areas had promptly vanished. Search teams went down after them and found nothing, no bodies, no gear, just silence.
So the working theory was: blood mushrooms might indeed grow in leech swarms. Or they might not. And the water was complicated. Some people disappeared because of entangling waterweeds, some were trapped in collapsed structures, others met all kinds of mundane, horrible accidents.
Liu Xing had tried reasoning with her. "Seriously, little sister, you have to stop diving in to save every single person who's thirty seconds late. It disrupts the whole operation's rhythm."
Jing Shu had looked at him, her expression unreadable. "No," she said simply. "Don't think about it."
So Liu Xing had changed tactics, deploying his divers more strategically. He began assigning them to act in smaller pairs or alone, and spreading them out over a much wider operational area. That way, the ancestor couldn't possibly stare at one small sector all day, tracking every individual.
It had worked surprisingly well for a while. With so many people in constant, scattered motion, that ancestor couldn't possibly track who was where or who had been down exactly how long. Human memory had limits, right? How many faces and timelines could she remember anyway? Still, watching her scan the boat today with those unsettlingly sharp eyes, he had a bad, sinking feeling.
Jing Shu quickly scanned the day's assignment sheet. It listed which two-man team was covering which compass bearing, what each diver had reportedly pulled up on their last dive, and what new bounties had been requested by civilians or other departments. Some offered a mere 100 virtual coins to move a full set of waterlogged furniture out of a third-floor apartment. Some offered a few hundred to clear out all the remaining supplies in a certain grocery store's basement cold room.
She usually ignored the petty bounties worth only a few hundred coins, the time-to-reward ratio was poor. She only seriously considered those over a thousand, since she didn't have the time or inclination to run bounties like a full-time courier. She only completed them incidentally while searching for the specific materials she needed, like lab equipment, certain chemicals, or now, leeches.
"Uncle Wang is on the seven o'clock bearing today," she muttered, her eyes flicking over the list. "How long has his partner, Xiao Li, been down? Why isn't he up yet? Oh, right, Hong Hong is on the twelve o'clock line. That place near the cinema is dangerous, isn't it? Lots of loose wiring."
She looked up and called out to a diver just hauling himself over the gunwale, dripping and panting. "Hey, Ah Bao, you're up. How'd you do today? You're teamed with Wang Mazi and Gou Sheng, right? How long ago did they dive? Shouldn't they be up by now?"
The divers, for the most part, were fond of her. They knew there was this strange, capable young woman who drove a futuristic amphibious submarine and showed up every day like clockwork, and who often, inexplicably, jumped into the black water to save their skins. She usually didn't say much, just watched. Only when someone shouted that a diver had truly vanished would she rocket into the water like a launched torpedo. Lately she'd changed, chatting more, asking more questions, but they still greeted her warmly, seeing her as a kind of eccentric guardian angel.
They were secretly shocked at how preternaturally sharp she was. Jing Shu could match faces to names and dive schedules better than their own supervisor. Liu Xing always had to call roll from his clipboard because, to him, everyone in a wetsuit and hood was just another shaved-headed, goggle-eyed figure who looked essentially the same.
Liu Xing's mouth twitched as he watched her work the deck. He still didn't know what game she was really playing when she suddenly exclaimed, her voice sharp with false alarm, "What? Wang Mazi has been down for over two minutes already? That's past his usual! Alright, give me the exact bearing and I'll go check!"
Before he could sputter a protest or check his own timer, Jing Shu had already whooshed back into the cockpit of her amphibious shark submarine. The electric throttle hit maximum with a high-pitched whine, and in the blink of an eye, she was a fading wake of bubbles.
"Burning electricity like it's free," Liu Xing muttered to the empty space where she'd been. Then, impossibly fast, she reappeared at the boat's side, the sub bobbing violently. "Wang Mazi's fine. Just found a nice set of wrenches. He'll be up any second. What?" She pretended to check an imaginary watch on her wrist. "Er Gouzi on the other side has also been down two minutes? That's not right!"
The submarine streaked away again before anyone could confirm.
That was her new, meticulously calculated strategy. To better carry out her real plan today, Jing Shu now flew the banner of: rather miss it than let it slip. If anyone, anyone, failed to surface within ten seconds of their estimated dive time, she would dive in instantly to "investigate." Rather miss a hundred false alarms than fail to act on the one real disappearance that might lead her to a leech swarm. She was manufacturing her own opportunities through hyper-vigilance.
This operational zone today was the old commercial district. The government buildings and residential blocks had been mostly picked clean. Now it was the turn of the busiest pre-flood shopping and entertainment area. Before the apocalypse, luxury goods and clothing had surely been moved to higher ground by their owners, but large restaurant equipment, industrial generators, and boutique inventory still sat in basements and backrooms, and plenty of wholesale goods were hidden in shops' storage areas.
If she tried to search this vast, tangled area alone, Jing Shu would need weeks. But with hundreds or even a thousand divers swarming over it like ants, the systematic sweep would be done in a day or two. If she really wanted to find the specific, elusive blood mushrooms, or more importantly, the leech colonies they might be associated with, she couldn't rely on solo exploration. She had to leverage the power of the masses.
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Lei Feng was the name of The God of Fortune