Chapter 144

The next morning, Lin Tu had a quick breakfast, then disguised herself and paid for a teleport to Doomsday Town.

She'd gone to the trouble of disguising herself because the Black Factory was scouring the area for her. Even Yelin, the building materials dealer, had recently come to check if she was in trouble, saying someone from the Black Factory had found him and asked if he'd been in contact with her lately.

After getting off the bus, she found Doomsday Town no longer had the stable prosperity of her last visit. Few traders remained selling supplies, and among them, vendors selling food had vanished entirely.

Last night, Dong Huadan had warned Lin Tu to be careful on the road—recently, large groups of people in Doomsday Town had been marching in protest.

So Lin Tu couldn't be blamed for all the disguising. It wasn't that she didn't trust the Black Factory, but even the best wood bred worms. Zhang Bao, who had secretly tried to harm her, was still a Black Factory man—who knew whether there were more bad actors among the people looking for her?

Besides, with Doomsday Town in chaos and hearts turned treacherous, the wicked thrived like fish in water. She could send letters to the Black Factory, but if they wouldn't believe her and wanted to drag her into a little dark room to face a lie detector? That was out of the question.

As for the current unrest, she'd heard there had been signs days earlier. Lin Tu hadn't looked into it, assuming it was misbehavior by organizations like the Black Factory or the Temple.

But as she wove through the streets and lanes, hearing things like "The end of the world is coming!" and "Bring back evolution points!" she knew her guess was wildly off—this was far more serious than she'd imagined.

Lin Tu quickened her pace, passing through the crowds where fear, anxiety, and confusion spread unchecked, and finally squeezed into Dong Huadan's little shop. Since she'd arrived early, as usual only Zhang Zisheng was minding the store.

"Sister Huadan will be here in a bit," Zhang Zisheng said.

"What's going on outside?" Lin Tu asked.

At that, Zhang Zisheng sighed too, anxiety surfacing on his face just like the people Lin Tu had seen outside: "In the last few days, a massive number of low-level disaster worlds have shut down."

"Sister Lin knows, our Doomsday Town resources—building materials, food, water... basically rely on ordinary people hauling them out of low-level disaster worlds, trip after trip."

"Now that a ton of low-level worlds are closed, resources are shrinking and prices are rising—that's the small stuff. The truly awful thing is, many people have no choice but to enter mid-level or even high-level worlds."

"Is it that rumor..." Lin Tu frowned, remembering the prophecy Luo Yongzhi had once explained to her, and murmured, "All worlds are inevitably collapsing, getting worse and worse."

"Yes," Zhang Zisheng nodded heavily. "Han Yu was right. He fought tooth and nail to climb up, he was just unlucky. The rest of us, including me, were dead wrong. The truth now is, the calamity won't give us a single breath. It's a flood of beasts, just chasing us down—no matter where our abilities lie, we have to give everything just to survive."

That was the root cause of the march. If the calamity kept pressing down, Doomsday Town would inevitably be crushed. Players had to fight back. Players had to become stronger.

Lin Tu mulled it over, still puzzled: "But why are these low-level disaster worlds shutting down? There has to be a reason."

"I looked into it. Plenty of people who just escaped say the disasters in low-level worlds turned unusually severe—either the world was destroyed outright, or the locals managed to hold it together, and then it upgraded into a high-level disaster world. I've heard..."

Zhang Zisheng didn't understand much about this either, but one claim she believed firmly: "This is the world we were truly meant to face. [Infinite Calamity] was still maintaining balance at first, but now the god is missing, and even our last hope is on the verge of failing."

---

"If these things really exist... Is there truly no god who can come save us!?"

Not long ago, the map Lin Tu had given the nation had been escorted by armed police to the temporary first-level command center established in the city.

Claims of the "end of the world" came every year, in abundance, but this was the first time someone had provided evidence that held up.

In a country that embraced atheism, seeing a person with superhuman strength could still be explained away with materialist reasoning like "extraordinary fitness," but when they saw someone pull objects in and out of thin air with no blind spots whatsoever, and no technological aid, they couldn't help but question one thing—did gods actually exist?

"Don't say any more. It's classified. We just follow orders." Another person who had just turned in the map replied.

In truth, she was more terrified than her companion. Who could understand—when she'd inadvertently caught a glimpse of that map and watched a red patch appear over her own hometown—that swell of dread and fear?

What did red represent? Given the pale white covering the whole map, the occasional pale yellow, and the rarer deep yellow, Yin Zhi could easily guess that red meant something extremely severe.

And in the office just one door away, the general commander, the secretary of Mulan City, the police chief, and others in various uniforms and plain clothes were all discussing that red patch.

"Zhou Yi definitely checks out. Twenty-eight, from Mulan City, no criminal record. Our visits found her teachers and former colleagues all speak highly of her. She owns two properties and a company with domestic operations—her assets are completely clean. Recently she did move out a large chunk of cash, but it all went to buying rice, flour, grain, and oil. Note—she bought them in massive, bottomless quantities, for no apparent reason."

In other words, her entire person, her every action, matched her ability to produce objects from thin air—no blind spots, no matter how you looked at it. It all pointed to one conclusion—

The end of the world really was coming.

"But the question is, where did she get this information? I find it hard to believe it's so-called gods," the secretary said, fingers interlaced, deep in thought.

If, as Zhou Yi said, it was a gift from a deity, then which deity would place their divine gift in a gym?

The issue now was: where had the map before them really come from, and could it be trusted?

"We looked into her recent movements. When she encountered the earthquake in Qing City, according to residents of that district, a girl with incredible strength rescued her—but the girl left that same day. The severe seismic waves that day knocked out all the surveillance, so we couldn't track down that girl."

"We just pulled the surveillance footage from near the gym last night. Nobody was seen. But based on what this colleague said, it reminded me of a barbecue stall not far from the gym—the cameras caught a girl buying barbecue alone. That should have been perfectly normal..."

The people below kept discussing, until the general commander slapped the table: "Enough."

"Since she was willing to hand these things over, it means she's on our side. Comrades, let's think big! Whoever she is, if she's willing to contribute to our national security, she's one of us! The priority right now isn't outwitting our own people—it's looking at this map and telling me how to act!"

Han City, a small city next to the center of the province to the lower left of Mulan City, sat right in the middle of the red zone. Its permanent population was 770,000—and that didn't count the 100,000 to 200,000 tourists Han City, as a tourist destination, received on average every week.

If what Zhou Yi said was true, then all one million of those people would die.

"Top priority: evacuate the population, move them to surrounding areas," the Mulan City secretary said. "Elderly and children first. Speed is essential, but we can't trigger a major panic. I'll need to discuss that with the Han City secretary general."

The general commander said, "He's on his way. What else?"

The group then ran through analyses on medical response, accident contingencies, and more.

Soon, the Han City secretary general pushed through the door, travel-worn: "Apologies for my lateness."

"Based on your knowledge of Han City, how long would it take to evacuate everyone?"

"That would likely take..."

"With the entire nation providing support," the Mulan City secretary pressed his hand down. "This isn't a joke."

"At the very fastest, three to five days." And that wasn't counting the holdouts.

"Then move now! The faster the better!" the general commander said immediately. "You take charge in Pan City, make sure the population moves out as fast as possible!"

Fear of the unknown was the deepest fear, but when the powerful hand of the state reached in and calmly arranged everyone's destinations, at some point that unknown became a common enemy.

The power of unity against an external threat far outweighed fear.

So when the people of Han City received the government's unified evacuation order and were roughly assigned temporary shelters, they didn't panic much—at least, no one was screaming that the end was nigh and running into the streets to blow themselves up.

Moving important belongings, evacuating from the elderly and children to the working-age—everything proceeded in an orderly fashion.

Far away in Qing City, Zhou Yi sighed in relief upon learning of this, and secretly used the phone Lin Tu had given her to send a message confirming she was safe.

Meanwhile, Lin Tu had just finished her conversation with Guan Suiyue—

"So it was never about repaying me or accompanying me into a disaster—it was to bring your little sister along," Lin Tu said flatly. "This is nearly an S-level calamity. Aren't you afraid Guan Suixing will get hurt in there?"

"You don't understand what it's like to have someone you worry about. You'll understand once you do," Guan Suiyue sighed.

Lin Tu was genuinely speechless: she was worried about an entire nation—did that count as having someone to worry about?

"And you know, recently a lot of low-level disasters have collapsed. The calamities are mutating, the monsters are upgrading. I can't rest easy until she clears an S-level disaster."

Lin Tu stared at Guan Suiyue and said nothing more. She could tell that Guan Suiyue had secrets of her own, which was why she was so desperate for her sister to stand on her own two feet early.

"The disaster hits in six days. If you want to kill him, get yourself ready. I'll gather some intel on him for you and send it over in a couple days. Just don't drag me and my sister into it." Guan Suiyue said no more, waved, and re-disguised herself before leaving.

Seeing this, Dong Huadan walked in and spotted Lin Tu, equally bundled up in a disguise, and felt a bit exasperated.

"Any news on Lin Zhihai, Sister Huadan?"

"Yes." Dong Huadan knew Lin Tu didn't want to be seen, so she twisted through several alleys and led her to the tavern they'd visited last time. Lin Tu had found a team ticket, but she wanted to hold onto it for a while and sell it later when she needed cash, so she wasn't keen on dealing with the tavern owner.

Fortunately, Dong Huadan didn't take Lin Tu to the tavern—but to the street beside it.

"Look at the ground."

Lin Tu: "?"

She looked down. Here, children had drawn hopscotch grids. In the middle of the grids were some old carvings and faint, worn engravings.

"It's been a long time..." Dong Huadan crouched down and brushed away the chalk dust and grime from the surface.

Five or six faces appeared. The leader was an unfamiliar old man, but among the faces behind him, one elderly man was deeply familiar to Lin Tu—

"Grandpa?" She unconsciously parted her lips in a voiceless murmur.

Dong Huadan's ears were sharp—she caught it in an instant and pointed at another young man in the carving: "You recognize him too, right? This is the founder of our Black Factory—Grandpa Yuan, when he was young."

"This road was the grand avenue at the heart of the old town. Carved here are all the great figures who contributed to the player community since the start of [Infinite Calamity]. This group was the leadership of the Evolution Club at its peak."

Lin Tu crouched on the ground, looking at the stone carvings from who-knew-how-long-ago, silently wiping them a little cleaner, listening carefully.

"The Lin Zhihai you mentioned... is him." She pointed at Lin Tu's grandfather's face and smiled. "It just says 'Grandpa Lin' because his name was classified. That's why it took so long to dig up that he was who you were looking for. Why the secrecy? The history books say he evolved a very special skill back then, and after that, he spent his time on a highly secret experiment. It was said this experiment could change the entire world. The histories don't say what the experiment was called, but according to one old man's recollection, people at the time called it the [God-Making Project]."

"But to this day, we haven't discovered what that experiment actually created. Grandpa Yuan, who later inherited his legacy, never found anything suspicious either. So some people began to suspect he had other motives... You know, Yu Zhonglin betrayed everyone for the sake of becoming a god."

"That's not true." Lin Tu shook her head instinctively, rejecting the baseless slander.

"So unfortunately—and I'm sorry—because of the classified files back then... ah, you know, when Yu Zhonglin betrayed everyone, so much was destroyed. Even pulling strings, I couldn't find any information about him, let alone about his descendants. But here's something interesting..."

Dong Huadan smiled at Lin Tu: "When I used to help take care of kids, I often walked around here, so I'd see his carving all the time. The first time I met you, I felt you looked so familiar. Who knows—maybe you're Grandpa Lin's descendant! Look, you're both surnamed Lin!"

Lin Tu let out a long sigh: "If I were, why would I be here?"

"Thank you for helping me look into Grandpa Lin's information." Lin Tu stood up and pulled a handful of corn cobs from her pack, handing them to Dong Huadan.

"Sister, you're being too polite—you're treating me like an outsider." Dong Huadan refused, not taking a single one.

Lin Tu came back to herself. She'd been a bit worked up, but this was the first time she'd ever learned anything about her grandfather's circumstances, so getting excited was only natural.

Still, Lin Tu insisted on pressing the corn cobs into Dong Huadan's hands: "One is payment, and the rest—I still need you to help me buy some items. I agreed to enter a disaster with Guan Suiyue, but you know, lately I don't dare linger around town."

"Whatever supplies you need, just say the word." Only then did Dong Huadan accept the corn.

Lin Tu didn't stay long in Doomsday Town. After finishing her business, she returned home.

Having been busy for nearly a day, she finally began opening the rewards she'd obtained from the disaster.

Lin Tu first opened her pack—one held the leftover "company delicacies." But when she opened it, she didn't see the disgusting flesh chunks. Only handfuls of ash, with some bone fragments mixed in.

Lin Tu closed the pack, planning to scatter them into the sea when she had the chance.

After countless cycles working at the extreme company, surely they'd prefer freedom like fish or birds over being buried in the earth.

That money printer had stopped producing cash, but beside it sat a stack of points—the universal currency of [Infinite Calamity]!

Lin Tu excitedly picked them up and found over two thousand points. She nearly fainted from the rush.

So the side mission to make money was real—literally, no trickery, just pure earnings. The points the company earned all converted into game-wide points. Thanks to the special effect of the [Ex-Convict's Money Printer], the exchange rate hit a thousand to one. And from the earlier settlement, Lin Tu had earned herself a total of 2,350 points!

Speaking of the [Ex-Convict's Money Printer], it was a fascinating item—its function was to cook the books.

[Ex-Convict's Money Printer (Damaged): Can convert any currency, and during conversion 'accidentally' inflates your wealth. For example, if you currently hold one unit of Infinite Calamity currency, it would normally convert to 10,000 yuan in this world. After printing through this machine, you can convert that one point into 100,000 yuan.]

[Note: Because this printer learned some tricks in prison (lol), and to avoid provoking printer-phobia, please strictly limit conversions to no more than 1,000 (Infinite Calamity currency) per seven days. Currency already converted, regardless of what it became, cannot be converted a second time.]

This was unquestionably a divine artifact. No wonder it was an item evolved by evolution points—it was powerful indeed.

After seeing the item description, Lin Tu immediately decided that starting today, she'd convert a thousand points each week. A thousand points would need one million yuan, and one million yuan was a hundred points. Even if she converted a hundred points into a million in paper bills through non-printer means, then converted it back into a thousand points, that still netted her nine hundred points a week—

Lin Tu had found herself a long-term path to wealth.

After enshrining the printer in the living room, Lin Tu turned to the rewards for successfully clearing the disaster. As per custom, she started from the lowest level—

[Congratulations! You have obtained A-grade special item: Power Milk Cup]

[Power Milk Cup: Drink milk from this cup and your strength will double! Duration: 2h. Please note: only by completing the action of 'drinking an entire cup of milk from this cup' will the strength boost take effect.]

For Lin Tu, whose strength was already formidable, a doubling on top was a pretty solid item. She set the Power Milk Cup aside and continued opening.

[Congratulations! You have obtained SS-grade skill: Promotion]

[Promotion: You can now promote one skill. That skill's effect will double.

Note: You can now see a golden plus sign next to each skill in your 'Infinite Calamity' app profile. Click the plus sign to promote that skill.]

Lin Tu opened her phone and found she had quite a few promotable skills. Her gaze moved to [Post-Disaster Economic Reconstruction]. It was a C-grade special ability that originally let her gain an extra 1% of points after each disaster ended; after promotion, she'd gain an extra 2%.

Don't underestimate that 1%. For someone who loved money as much as Lin Tu, that 1% compounding slowly would add up to a huge number!

Still, Lin Tu gave up that slightly misguided idea. Clearly, both Doomsday Town and the real world were in rough shape. Besides, her next disaster was a near-S-level calamity where she'd be killing someone—she urgently needed to boost her combat power. In the end, Lin Tu chose the A-grade skill [Lighthouse], the one she used most and with the highest rank.

A strange surge of power flooded through her body, and Lin Tu continued opening rewards—

[Congratulations! You have obtained SS-grade special skill: God of Wealth]

[God of Wealth: Each time you use an item, you have a chance to randomly distribute an F–D grade item to a nearby friendly acquaintance (someone who has spoken at least ten sentences with you). The higher the grade of the item you use, the higher the grade of the distributed item, and the higher the chance of distribution.

For every ten items you distribute, you will receive one item in return.]

Lin Tu: "!"

This was a god-tier skill! Not only could it strengthen her allies, but it also gave back to her.

If she then used [Promotion] to double the God of Wealth skill, Lin Tu couldn't imagine how monstrous it would become.

But that was just a daydream. Even if she could promote it, she wouldn't. As she'd said earlier, her priority was boosting her strength. Skills like this—money-making, item-granting, and highly uncertain—weren't on her radar for now.

Before she could even open the special achievement items, Lin Tu received a call from Zhou Yi.

"It's bad! What do we do!" The voice on the other end sounded frantic.

"What's wrong?" Lin Tu soothed her. "Don't panic. Tell me slowly."

"Remember the world map you gave me earlier? It marked some places where disasters would happen."

Lin Tu said yes—of course she remembered. She'd just read the item's detailed description last night.

"A disaster is about to hit Han City soon, and it's been marked red. We were planning to evacuate the population, but unexpectedly..." Zhou Yi took a deep breath. "The disaster came so fast. Right now, thousands of people there have already lost contact!"