After all that trouble, the group finally completed the first step of their second mission. They had successfully infiltrated Austin and officially become citizens of the Castle. The next step was to sneak into the heavily guarded tech building and steal a batch of dehydrated vegetable machines and other sophisticated equipment.
"Buddha have mercy, sins, sins," Monk muttered, pressing his thick palms together in mock repentance before grabbing a metal fork and digging in. The potato beef stew Jing Shu made was way too good to resist, the savory scent filling the small apartment.
They were assigned a first-class residence, where everyone ate and turned in early to recover their strength. It's a bit cramped for a group of their size, but the castle gave off a soft, persistent glow that never faded, and the temperature inside the corridors felt like a perpetual spring. There were even small, whirring street-cleaning robots patrolling outside on the smooth floors. For the first time in ages, it felt like living in a clean, peaceful high-tech city from before Earth's Dark Days, a stark contrast to the mud and rot outside.
Of course, the steep entry fee only bought them first-class citizenship, which was the most basic level of residency. Above that were second and third tiers, structured just like VIP memberships; the more you paid, the better the privileges and access you were granted.
To survive in Austin, the food you brought wouldn't last long. You still had to work, just like before the apocalypse began. Physical labor was left to the desperate drifters living outside the walls, who would do anything for a single meal. The once expensive American labor had become incredibly cheap; give them food, and they would work themselves to the bone without complaint. That's why the middle-class folks inside the castle had to wrack their brains for new ways to earn food just to keep living comfortably.
Entering the castle didn't mean you would be set for life. Every transaction came with ridiculous service fees, there were monthly management costs and taxes to pay, and citizenship was only the first step, not the finish line. It's like buying a high-end car but not being able to afford to maintain it. Many people thought they could live safely in the castle just by paying a hundred pounds—about 45 kilograms—of food. They were wrong.
On the other hand, tech developers got great treatment from the administration. To boost production, they had even started creating all kinds of experimental foods in their labs.
That reminded Jing Shu of Wu City, where, a couple of years into the apocalypse, a new profession had appeared: taste testers. These people ate newly developed foods in front of the public every day to prove they were safe. If they survived three months of testing, they got a bonus. If they lasted a full year without dying, they would become full-time employees. It was a way to make people accept strange, disgusting foods that came out of research labs, since animals had become too rare for testing purposes.
"Plenty of them ended up with problems," Jing Shu sighed, recalling the reports. "Some went insane, others grew... extra parts. But they did contribute a lot to food research during those years. I didn't expect the U.S. to start doing it so early."
Then a thought hit her. "If the Americans already began this research, then bringing back some of their data would count as contribution points, wouldn't it?"
Oh, and Austin had another strange policy: maternity workers. They were women paid to give birth for citizens. The benefits were great—food and housing included—but they couldn't choose their partners. One year they would live with one household, the next year they would move to another to keep having children for the state. Jing Shu honestly didn't know what to think about that arrangement.
After the Tyrant took power back home, he had introduced a similar population recovery policy. Women aged twenty to forty-five could become official birth employees, with full worker benefits and autonomy. They could choose any single or widowed man they wanted to pair with, and the man had no right to refuse until conception succeeded. Some men even had multiple partners at once.
Refusal was allowed, but it cost a significant amount of food. The Tyrant himself, cold and handsome as he was, had apparently paid quite a bit of grain to refuse all the women trying to have kids with him. Still, that kind of left pocket to right pocket accounting was hard to untangle.
After birth, children could be raised either by the state or by the father. The system was pretty flexible, but it still caused plenty of controversy among the citizens. If a man wanted a kid, he had to pay for a match. There were still plenty of single men who couldn't afford the fees.
In her past life, Jing Shu had never thought of surviving by having children, and she sure wasn't about to start now.
Setting aside politics and national borders, Austin was hands-down one of the best places to live in the apocalypse. First, it was incredibly safe; only the Civil Security Force was permitted to carry firearms. Second, it was comfortable; the castle emitted its own light and warmth in a world without sunlight. Third, food was relatively easy to obtain if you had a skill.
As for Jing Shu, she had already set her own objectives for this second mission:
- Find suitable plants for cultivation to stock her upgraded Rubik's Cube Space.
- Visit the high-tech districts to steal or scout useful materials that didn't exist back home.
- And most importantly, figure out the secret behind the castle's glowing walls.
She had already examined the structure closely. The walls glowed like giant LED panels and gave off mild electric shocks when touched. Each panel could light up independently and maintained a steady warmth of over forty degrees Celsius. It's like living inside an enormous radiant heater; it was bright and cozy at the same time.
When she scraped off some powder from the surface, it glowed too. That alone made her greedy to take more. If she could smuggle some back home or find out how it was made, it would be a huge achievement. Maybe then she would even get to hold her head high again.
"For ten years in my last life, I wasn't exactly ignorant. I kept up with major world news. But I have never even heard a whisper about such a material. In a world this desperate, something that precious should have spread like wildfire. Don't tell me the person who invented it also transmigrated into this world? And if they can build entire walls and ceilings out of it, maybe it's not even that rare..." Jing Shu frowned. The more she thought about it, the less sense it made.
The next day, the team split up to cover more ground. Jing Shu, Monk, and Xiao Hei headed to the Agricultural R&D Center inside the castle. This place handled everything related to farming, including Austin's main cultivation facilities and Jing Shu's current target, the new dehydration cultivation technology.
They were there to scout the place, but also to find work as a cover. When the staff learned that Jing Shu was a Chinese doctor skilled in cultivating medicinal herbs, she was quickly welcomed by a blonde researcher with a harried expression.
"Oh, thank God," the woman said excitedly as Xiao Hei translated her words. "There are so few private doctors in Austin, and even fewer who actually know how to cultivate medicine! We have been stuck extracting antibiotics for so long, we have run out of everything else. We can't just use antibiotics for every illness! You came at the perfect time. If you can really grow medicinal herbs, I will personally apply to have you promoted to a third-class citizen!"
Jing Shu arched a brow. "Forgive me for being blunt, but you have got all the equipment and conditions you need. If you can grow vegetables, why can't you grow medicinal herbs?"