ATIGIBTC Chapter 111.1

When the population reaches two hundred thousand, the city will face a crisis. About this kind of thing, He Fang, in fact, is only making a guess based on many strategy videos or record videos found online, and doing a rough tally.

After all, “Ruins Without Restart” is an infrastructure game, and there are many factors that can appear to affect it.

Although it won’t really directly wipe out a city because of this, it’s better to prevent problems before they happen.

Besides, there are usually many situations that can cause a city to be wiped out. First, we exclude the situation where the city is wiped out because the player stops playing.

For example, multiple serial murder cases suddenly appear in the city, or criminal gangs run rampant, or poor city management causes the entire city’s residents’ happiness to drop, and then many residents will move away for safety. In response to this, when setting up the city, He Fang had already developed the police stations to the point where there is only overlap and no gaps, just to ensure that if anything happens, the police can arrive in time. The surveillance cameras are also continuously upgraded.

For example, natural disasters such as mountain floods, torrential rain, catastrophic weather, and all sorts of weather that can bring huge damage to the city can occur. So from the beginning, when doing these things, He Fang made the drainage facilities extremely well, the houses very solid and earthquake-resistant, and the city’s warehouses were always prepared for emergency rescue. When “Ruins Without Restart” first went online, he even had people dig air-raid shelters in the mountains to use as hiding places.

Then, for example, corruption. Subtly and imperceptibly, this kind of city destruction often creeps in unnoticed. Because of this, He Fang is very strict about the labels and controls when appointing people to important positions. He would never let someone who lacks virtue hold a post they don’t deserve.

Different types of cities will have different reasons for being wiped out. For those fantasy-type cities, such as sci-fi worlds and Western fantasy worlds, all sorts of strange reasons for destruction can appear. Because they’re too strange, many city lords simply don’t know how to solve these problems.

For example, in a certain crafted cultivation world, suddenly the dragon vein dies, spiritual energy becomes scarce, and in the end, the NPCs in the city start slaughtering each other on a large scale to seize spiritual energy, leading to the city’s destruction. But the city lord can’t just create another dragon vein out of thin air. “Ruins Without Restart” didn’t give them a pay-to-win option to keep things running normally. After all, the official developers also don’t know how the players build their infrastructure. They can’t just make a bunch of props for every city.

So from the start, He Fang’s creation was built using his own world as a blueprint. This way, at least when something goes wrong, there will be a lot of existing experience to refer to.

He Fang had summed up all the possible ways a city could be wiped out that he could see, so before actually starting to build the city, he made all the preparations in advance. That’s why, in the beginning, his city developed so slowly. It was to stabilize the most basic foundation of a city. As long as the foundation is solid enough, even if a great disaster happens in the future and he’s offline, the game can still safely and steadily get through the crisis.

He Fang placed this crisis, which was very likely to appear when the population reached two hundred thousand, in the present time. Hope City and Angel City are both steadily developing. For now, there are no other cities casually interfering, so he can put all his effort into facing this crisis that is very likely to come.

During the time he’s been playing this game, He Fang has almost developed a dependency on it, as if this world is his real world of living, and the small room he’s living in now is nothing more than a means for him to maintain his physical health.

He’s become addicted. And because he cherishes the city he created too much, during this time, He Fang has spent all his time soaked in the game, observing any tiny thing that could possibly go wrong.

He has gathered a lot of power of faith. For the landmark, this bug-like item, even He Fang couldn’t help but pray to it. This power of faith, he has basically never used it, just to be prepared for any unexpected situation.

He Fang even saw an orange mission appear on the system map. Although he felt it was a pity, he still decided not to casually take on missions. It would be better to proceed steadily with the current situation.

As soon as the population reached two hundred thousand, He Fang was already on high alert, constantly checking the system panel of the main city and all kinds of facilities, making sure no problems would come up.

He Fang is always running back and forth between the three cities, but now he is just in the main city, like he has put down roots here.

“City Lord?” Min Zhizhou, who had always been working, thought he should have already faded out of the City Lord’s sight. But for some reason, this City Lord once again appeared at his side, and… didn’t look like he planned to leave.

“What is it?” He Fang sat under the big tree, next to him was still that old man with graying hair and a scruffy beard. Only this time, the old man wasn’t wearing an old man’s shirt, but a trendy white shirt and black pants. He had clearly dressed up. It was surely because of He Fang’s arrival that the old man had found joy in tidying himself up a bit.

“I’m just watching you work,” He Fang said expressionlessly.

“My work… is there some problem with it?” Min Zhizhou felt his scalp go numb under He Fang’s stare. He couldn’t help but think back to the old days when He Fang kept using him over and over, calling “Min Zhizhou, Min Zhizhou” every day. Now, whenever He Fang called his name, he instinctively felt something bad was about to happen.

Now that He Fang was sitting here, Min Zhizhou felt that eight or nine times out of ten, something was going to happen. There had never been a time when nothing happened when he was with the City Lord, and most of the time, it was the City Lord himself stirring things up.

“You’ve gotten so fat now. Can you still properly sort the trash? Do you even still care about this trash?” He Fang suddenly asked a very profound question. He spread his legs apart, rested his elbows on his knees, and his chin on the back of his hands, looking very serious.

“…” Suddenly being called fat, Min Zhizhou choked for a moment because it was true, then said, “A lot of things can be recycled and reused, and there’s also a bonus for sorting things out. It’s all work. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.”

“Right now, in Hope City and Angel City, a lot of people have already opened small shops and gotten rich. The situation is not the same as back then. Can you still so willingly sort trash like this?” He Fang asked.

Min Zhizhou gave two awkward laughs: “Maybe it’s because I’m useless, or maybe it’s a problem with the education we’ve had since childhood. We were born and raised being taught that there’s no chance to rise. The dreams of making a name for ourselves when we were young… now there’s only the thought left. Since life now is already pretty good, why make things hard for myself?”

He Fang asked again: “Are the others thinking the same as you?”

“That I don’t know. Everyone’s thoughts are different. How could I be sure about what others think?” Min Zhizhou shrugged, then said, “Besides, if everyone didn’t have much ambition to develop, wouldn’t you, City Lord, be even more worried?”

“You’re right. And I’ve also done pretty well so far, at least it looks good now. There shouldn’t be any problems, right?” He Fang listened to Min Zhizhou’s words, but he still stayed silent, looking not serious at all.

Min Zhizhou felt that this He Fang really made his scalp tingle. He looked at the work in his hands, then at the City Lord beside him, whose dark eyes were staring straight at him. He felt that right now, the City Lord seemed very restless and uneasy. That kind of unease was practically written all over his face.

Min Zhizhou had no choice but to shamelessly keep working. But He Fang’s gaze felt like a thorn in his back. He got the trash mixed up several times. After all, it was the City Lord. This stare was really not something an ordinary person could withstand. Anyway, Min Zhizhou definitely couldn’t.

He let out a deep sigh.

“Otherwise, City Lord, how about I take a day off today and accompany you to walk around?” Min Zhizhou stood up and walked over to stand in front of He Fang.

At this moment, He Fang lifted his eyes, straightened his back, blinked his eyes, and said, “That’s not good, is it? I’d be disturbing your work too much. It’s fine, I’ll just watch.”

Min Zhizhou’s mouth twitched. This attitude from He Fang clearly showed he was just waiting for him to offer, so what else could he say?

“It’s fine. Isn’t it just trash-picking work anyway? Honestly, it’s not a big deal. The extra money I earn from going to the research institute once is way more than what I get from picking trash for a whole day.” Min Zhizhou actually felt a bit of a pinch in his heart, too. Every day he worked less was one day less of income. Heaven knows he was planning to buy a house now, and what he lacked most was money.

“That really… aiya, I’m really sorry about that.” He Fang said.

Min Zhizhou helplessly forced out a few insincere smiles. Fortunately, the fat on his face made it hard to see anything unusual: “How could you be sorry? It’s fine, it’s fine.”

After all, this was the City Lord. Who dared not go along with him?

Heaven knows, just for not answering for two minutes, he already felt like his back was going to get pierced through by these people’s gazes.

Min Zhizhou didn’t know what exactly had happened with the City Lord, but that worried expression on the other’s face couldn’t be faked. Yet Min Zhizhou really couldn’t think of anything at this point that would need him to be consulted about.

“City Lord, why did you come looking for me? Haven’t you been spending more time in Hope City lately?” Min Zhizhou brought He Fang over to his temporary wooden shack.

“Mm, everyone’s pretty busy, so I came to check on you.”

Min Zhizhou felt this reason didn’t make him happy at all. He was quite busy himself, too. He asked again, “Is there something recently that the City Lord can’t solve?”

“Is there? Absolutely none?” He Fang said this very matter-of-factly.

Min Zhizhou didn’t reply. He carefully gazed into the eyes of their young City Lord. He could be certain this City Lord wasn’t lying, but he definitely wasn’t telling the whole truth either.

In the end, Min Zhizhou sighed. “City Lord, please wait for me a moment. I’ll go take a shower. Otherwise, running around right after picking trash, I’ll get complaints.”

“Someone complains about you?” He Fang asked curiously. NPCs complaining about other NPCs? Not impossible. After all, there used to be developed commercial cities, too. Where there’s commerce, there’ll be complaints.

“At first, there were lots of complaints; now there are fewer.” Min Zhizhou directly took off his shirt right in front of He Fang. He was about to take off his pants, too, when suddenly, through a side window, he saw someone staring fiercely at him from far outside the window. That gaze looked like they wanted to kill him. He froze, immediately used his clothes to cover his important parts, not daring to dirty the City Lord’s eyes.

He turned back to glance at He Fang, then obediently stepped into the bathroom to take off the rest and shower inside.

He Fang sat inside Min Zhizhou’s wooden shack, casually looking around.

Here, Min Zhizhou was truly living the little life he had dreamed of. Unlike before, when he only had a single room, now he’d added a few more rooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen. The fridge, air conditioner, and TV were all there, and there was even a computer to the side. It was obvious that in these past few years inside the game, Min Zhizhou really had been earnestly living his own small life.

Even though these were things the NPC had bought for himself, He Fang still felt a kind of genuine happiness.

Because it was the space he provided for the NPCs that let them slowly develop better and better. This was his ability.

Normally speaking, one feature of open-world games is the constant exploration process, the randomness. Any small thing that might happen brings novelty.

But “Ruins Without Restart” was too free. Free enough that it could lead to the destruction of a city.

He Fang had searched for many guides, but what made him feel frustrated was that almost every creator who made videos about “Ruins Without Restart” ended up with the same conclusion: their city got destroyed in the end.

This made He Fang, who had finally managed to develop this city to such a large scale, really unable to feel at ease.

If his N-PCs, all of a sudden, just disappeared… passed away… the city got wiped out… everyone left…

Just thinking about this, He Fang simply couldn’t bear this kind of fear, and with hiccuping sobs, he just wanted to cry.

After Min Zhizhou got rid of the smell on his body and came out, he turned his head and saw their city lord at this moment sitting on his bed, with his eyes reddened. This sight immediately made Min Zhizhou’s mind go completely blank from shock.

Don’t. Please, cry anywhere else, just don’t cry in his room. Isn’t that basically fatal?!

“Ci—City Lord, you’ve been busy running around all over the place all this time, so you probably haven’t had the chance to catch up with many people for quite a while, right? How about I accompany you to walk around and have a look?” Min Zhizhou immediately cut off the young city lord’s sorrowful mood. Kidding, if he really cried, Min Zhizhou figured he’d probably get a pay cut!

“Mm.” He Fang’s nose sounded stuffy as he responded, looking like his mood still wasn’t too high.

Min Zhizhou changed into a clean set of clothes. Although he was fat, he didn’t make people find him annoying. At least He Fang didn’t think Min Zhizhou was annoying.

“After you gained weight, your body didn’t have any problems, right?” He Fang asked.

“Mm, no problem.” Min Zhizhou patted his belly. “To eat even tastier food, I take really good care of my body.”

He Fang nodded, showing that he understood.

It was true that Min Zhizhou hadn’t seen He Fang for quite a long time. Although he hadn’t deliberately gone to find out, inside the main city’s network, all the grand achievements their young city lord had accomplished would always be pushed to the network with huge dedicated headlines. Wanting not to see them was practically impossible.

What was even more astonishing was that the people in the main city actually didn’t have any secrets. Whatever anyone had done could be looked up on the network; it was practically like everyone was doing their utmost to maintain the greatest level of openness between people. This kind of openness was also an absolute constraint. Everyone seemed like they were deliberately putting shackles on themselves, which looked very strange.

“Recently, City Lord, you opened up a new city. That side was only just built not long ago, and I haven’t been there yet. But I heard there are suddenly a lot more people over there. I was even a bit puzzled. Where did so many people suddenly pop out from?” This was something Min Zhizhou couldn’t figure out, no matter how much he thought about it. These people seemed to have appeared out of thin air, with no pattern to be found at all. He remembered there was once a period when the population surged, and someone even came next to him to build wooden plank houses.

“Ah, they were generated automatically.” He Fang answered casually. Anyway, a lot of terms he used that didn’t belong in this game would be automatically converted.

In Min Zhizhou’s ears, this simple sentence turned into ‘they came from somewhere else’.

Came from somewhere else? The people who came all possessed extremely strong power, just like the people in this city. What kind of place could people come from to have such terrifying abilities? Obviously, he had wandered among the mobile cities for twenty or thirty years, but had never seen these kinds of monsters in other cities.

“City Lord, you don’t seem to have set up any factories around here recently?” Min Zhizhou asked.

“I put all the factories near Hope City. Hope City has many people who need jobs. It can expand freely, so putting the factories over there is more efficient.” Moreover, because they were factories, even if production was kept in the main city, the efficiency wouldn’t be that much different.

“Then, City Lord, do you have any other plans lately?” Min Zhizhou continued to ask.

“I want to get some land use rights in the areas between those mobile cities,” He Fang said.

“Mm?” Min Zhizhou froze.

“It’s to build some airports. Lately, there have been many people coming to Hope City from thousands of miles away, and quite a few people have died during the long journey. I’m thinking that if we can build airports in various places to make it easier for them to reach Hope City, then the population of Hope City can increase even more,” He Fang explained.

Min Zhizhou thought for a moment. “Mm, that really is something that needs to be considered.”

“But I have to get the approval of other cities first. Otherwise, I don’t have the right to set up airports. Also, even if I do set them up, if these mobile cities reject them, they’ll stop other people from coming to the airports. For now, I can’t think of any way to install airports.”

He Fang wanted to connect the whole world to Hope City as quickly as possible. If possible, He Fang hoped to simply turn Hope City into a transportation hub. The speed of airplanes was very fast. Once the research institute kept developing and researching, they’d become even faster, completely beyond the reach of the current mobile cities’ speeds. That way, the time needed to cross the entire map would be greatly reduced because of He Fang’s airports.

“Indeed, if it turns into a transportation hub, then it could even handle the transfer of goods or information. It’d be useful in every aspect and could instantly increase Hope City’s importance,” Min Zhizhou thought about it and felt He Fang’s idea was very good, and with Hope City’s capabilities, it would be easy to pull off.

“Also, this can directly increase the connections within this world.” On He Fang’s system map, although more than half had already been opened up, there were still quite a few black areas left. Some of these black areas were Nightmare Beast forests, and some were undeveloped zones. His map being incomplete was something that really bothered him as a player. “And I also want to unlock the current terminal’s permissions. I want to connect to the internet, to connect the whole world to the internet. This way, we can launch e-commerce.”

E-commerce? Min Zhizhou froze.

Min Zhizhou knew about the terminal. After all, it was invented by Zhu Yan. Because of experiments, his relationship with Zhu Yan had always been pretty good. He also had a terminal.

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