Chapter 3: Item Store

Despite his surprise, Zhang Zhiyin still held on to the thought of finding out what exactly was this icon – familiar goods shelves, all kinds of different items, and a list of special offers for the current update.

It was exactly like what he played in <Tomorrow>.

The Item Store was divided into two parts, the “Hypermarket” and the “Trading House”. The Hypermarket was a page for selling Cash Items to the players. The Trading House was a page for players to exchange precious items with each other in yuan. Players could offer the precious items they did not need in the game and sell them directly in yuan.

Zhang Zhiyin first looked at the Trading House. The latest items update was on 13:24 on April 1, XX. It was the day he got hit by a car. He remembered that he seemed to have been hit at about 12:30 at noon.

Zhang Zhiyin touched his chin and fell into deep thought. A moment later, he tapped on the “I want to trade” button and aimed the “Steam Bun” he just acquired at the pop-up trading item box. There was no other problem except that the “Steam Bun” was too big and the item box was too small.

The store system actually recognized it, and it also popped up a dialog box — “An item bound by the system, it could not be traded.”

Zhang Zhiyin squinted and pulled out the Level 1 nucleus which he’d just dug out after killing the zombies. Most of the Level 0 zombies hadn’t yet developed any nucleus, only a few of them had the Level 1 nucleus in their bodies. On the way, Zhang Zhiyin only got this one. When he was digging, Grandma Xu had even advised him not to dig all these unclean and unknown stuff.

This time it was a success. However, no one would buy the lowest level crystal nucleus on the Hypermarket. But Zhang Zhiyin’s intention was not to make money. He thought for a while before setting the price at ten yuan – this was the minimum price set by the Trade House and the price would increase by five percent after the transaction was successful.

Refreshing the page, the latest item had become the crystal nucleus of Zhang Zhiyin, available for sale at 13:28 on April 1, XX year.

To further ascertain the connection with the real world, he would need to have something really valuable to sell. Zhang Zhiyin decided to put this matter aside for the time being and turn to the study of “Hypermarket”.

As long as the Qinglang Company’s pit of wanting money remained unchanged, no matter was it fantasy or reality, the Hypermarket would always be that Hypermarket. Seeing it, Zhang Zhiyin was somewhat moved to see his old acquaintance.

He tapped the “ability” tab shelf he had been longing for in his mind. The most popular items in front of him were ice power and thunder power. The red HOT hung in the upper right corner and the price of 300.00 yuan was listed below.

Zhang Zhiyin pressed purchase.

The dialog box popped up — “Sorry, your balance is insufficient, will you recharge it immediately?”

Zhang Zhiyin looked to the upper right corner of the mall. [User: 130****** 1472 Balance: 19.87 yuan].

That’s right, there was his user information. At the later stage of the game, Zhang Zhiyin mainly went to visit the BOSS. He didn’t care much about equipment, ability level, pets, home, and so on. Naturally, he didn’t need to recharge much money. Most of the remaining 200 yuan were spent on items which were purchased by other players to brush affection, such as “Love Chocolate” and “Crystal Flower Language”. The difference was that he bought them as a gift for the BOSS Lord — which was putting them on the ground in front of the BOSS and wait for the system to recycle them.

Zhang Zhiyin chose to recharge immediately.

Then there was no response.

Zhang Zhiyin thought about it and his memory went back to how this operated on his computer. His default browser would automatically pop up to the recharge interface at this stage and then proceeded on to the web. But where was he going to find a damn browser here!?

Firefox, IE, Tencent, 360, Google, UC… Usually, they all jumped out in joy with each trying to outdo the other. Why didn’t they come out this time? If any of them could appear now… He would be a loyal user all his life. When he returned to reality, he would send a golden banner three meters long to the company!

After waiting for a minute, Zhang Zhiyin finally closed the Item Store’s page in dismay. There were items within his budget of 19.87 yuan in the store, but they were of no use to him now.

In the original <Tomorrow>, Lihua Shopping Mall was the symbol of the novice village. It had NPC functions such as warehouse, store, ability related NPC, task-related NPC, and passer-by NPC. The majority were, of course, the players that came and went. But now those players were all gone, instead, there were many more people whom he had never seen before in the game — those who survived the unexpected apocalypse and fled in a hurry – or those with their families and those who were alone.

It was like the world had been supplemented by unknown forces.

One of the NPC in-charge, Uncle Yun, saw Zhang Zhiyin staying silent for a long time. He came over and patted him on the shoulder. “Young man, you’re the only one left in your family?”

This set of taboo words normally left unspoken seemed to be so commonly heard in this world.

Zhang Zhiyin quickly answered, “No, I go to school at this side by myself. I don’t know how my family is doing.”

Uncle Yun nodded. “It will be all right, they will be all right.”

Then he said to Zhang Zhiyin, “What about your ability? It doesn’t matter if you don’t awaken any. Only one-tenth of the people here could awake an ability.”

Sure enough, this was different from the game. As a player, it was guaranteed to wake up an ability, even if it’s the least powerful ability.

Zhang Zhiyin laughed and said, “As the sister said just now, I should have awakened. There’s something here.” He stretched out his left wrist and showed Uncle Yun the pale grey mark on his hand.

When Uncle Yun saw it, he was happy. “This is good. Go to Ah Lan and find out what the enhancement is.”

Zhang Zhiyin went to Ah Lan. She was the one who told them at the beginning about the method of checking out their abilities. The result showed that it was indeed a precision enhancement. Ah Lan asked him to find Brother Fei to join the Convey Team and told him that he would get extra rewards for killing the zombies nearby.

This segment of development was similar to the game, where Uncle Yun had a water ability and was similar to the existence of village leader. Ah Lan was an ability-related NPC, Brother Fei was the captain of the Convey Team and was also the game’s reward task publisher — like those “Eliminate a number of XX level XX zombies or other monsters and be rewarded XX” tasks. Previously, in the game, many players who didn’t like to run the main quest and branch task only took the task here from Brother Fei. After receiving the task, they farmed the zombies, took the reward, and immediately left after they reached Level 10.

The difference was that in the past, no matter what thoughts you held when you open the dialog box with Ah Lan, you would always see this one sentence: “Is there anything else that you don’t understand? Everybody must work harder!”

But now —

Zhang Zhiyin tentatively said, “Sister Lan, you are beautiful.”

Ah Lan immediately returned, “You dead brat shouldn’t pay lip-service and go work now!”

It was the reaction of a real, straightforward, and hot-blooded beauty.

Leaving Sister Lan, Zhang Zhiyin was perplexed and wondered what would happen if he really met the BOSS Lord.

If he said it like in the game, “Give me a kiss, okay?”

The result was probably direct strangulation.

What if he went up and hug him directly?

He would probably be kicked to death.

It was very likely that the BOSS wouldn’t care about meeting him at all. He would instead order a zombie to directly tear him apart.

Zhang Zhiyin felt that this was not feasible. He had to plan how to behave when he saw the BOSS starting from today. He needed to at least hear the BOSS say a word before he died.

Zhang Zhiyin touched his chin and pondered over whether it was feasible to say “I love you” immediately when they meet.

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