Chapter 51: Gaining Experience

When Yunqing turned to another section of the wall, she tried to gather clay bricks, but realized she couldn’t collect the uncollapsed ones into her backpack. She had no choice but to keep fleeing while looking for suitable targets. The intact walls couldn’t be gathered, but the collapsed bricks could; in this village of ruins, crumbling structures were everywhere.

Below, a large-nosed soul corpse was in pursuit. After several attempts, Yunqing discovered that the creature found it difficult to leap onto high walls or move from one house to another. Reassured by this, she boldly collected bricks and tiles to use as backup weapons.

Once she had amassed 300 clay bricks, Yunqing wondered if she could lose the large-nosed soul corpse. Perched atop the wall, she waited for it to arrive beneath her. True to form, the creature appeared quickly, roaring and leaping in an attempt to snatch the prey above.

Yunqing extended her right hand and murmured, “Withdraw three sets of clay bricks.” In an instant, hundreds of heavy bricks rained down, each weighing dozens of pounds. Many struck the soul corpse, and Yunqing’s screen filled with numbers:

-2;
“Combat experience +12!”
-2;
“Combat experience +12!”
...

Below, the bricks formed a tall mound. There was no sign of a final blow, indicating the soul corpse wasn’t dead—merely trapped for now. It might break free before long.

She hurried away, collecting more bricks in preparation for the next enemy. The village was full of houses, and as she gathered bricks, Yunqing entered the villagers’ homes. Inside the abandoned dwellings, she found an assortment of items: pots, kitchen knives, farm tools, small weapons. Though these tools were all worn-out, in the eyes of a blacksmith’s apprentice they could be repurposed.

Night fell swiftly. Some villagers had escaped, others hadn’t; the tools they left behind were useless to the soul corpses and remained where they were. Yunqing also wanted to search for valuables left behind, but with soul corpses roaming everywhere, time was short. She could only quickly check likely hiding spots for silver.

In the first house, she found a rusty kitchen knife and hoe; in the second, a rusty axe, kitchen knife, and twenty taels of silver; in the third, she took away two hundred bricks and several firewood-grade logs.

Just as she exited the third house, she ran into a sluggish soul corpse.

With a roll and a leap, Yunqing deftly scaled the wall to dodge its attack and hurled bricks down at it.

-10;
“Combat experience +52!”
...

After a hundred bricks, a string of damage notifications appeared. The soul corpse was buried up to its head, its health bar nearly halved. Wanting to end the fight quickly, Yunqing jumped onto the pile and used the hoe she’d recently found to strike its head repeatedly. Though the hoe was rusty, it dealt more damage than wood, and before long, she emptied its health bar.

Every village was laid out much like Ye Family Village. It was hard to find valuables in homes, but there were always some hidden treasures. Yunqing set her sights on the village chief’s house, the central warehouse, the blacksmith, the tailor, and the general store. These places, usually at the village center, likely had more people—and thus more soul corpses.

She picked out whatever seemed useful, moving slowly toward the village center. Whenever she encountered a lone low-level soul corpse, she’d turn it into experience and take its body. For stronger foes, she’d bury them under a mountain of bricks.

The road was thick with soul corpses. From the village entrance to the center, it took Yunqing a full half-day, by which time her combat level had reached twenty-eight.

Contrary to her expectations, the village center didn’t have many more soul corpses than the rest of the village.

In the tailor’s shop, she found only a few machines too broken to use—no linen, cotton, gauze, coarse or fine cloth, nothing to take. The blacksmith’s had a smithing table, a forge, and some scrap tools needing to be reforged; there were no finished weapons or quality goods. After braving the soul corpse horde, Yunqing didn’t want to leave empty-handed, so she swept up everything left in the blacksmith’s.

The general store looked as if it had already been looted—nothing of value remained. The village chief’s house was stripped bare except for large, immovable furniture.

At last, clinging to a shred of hope, Yunqing went to check the village warehouses. There were several, each storing different supplies. But from a distance, she could see the warehouse doors were wide open.

“Liu Liu, I was too greedy. The villages in the poison wheat fields have been overrun for years. Surely many experts have come before me. With a storage pouch, anyone could haul away the village’s resources. The good stuff was never going to be mine.”

“You seem to enjoy scavenging. Didn’t you have fun picking through the villagers’ junk?”

“I’ll check the warehouses one last time. If there’s nothing left, I’ll go look for the villagers I was supposed to rescue.”

“And you actually remember your mission—impressive.”

One after another, the warehouses proved empty. The last was also open, but unlike the others, it contained two-thirds of its space filled with timber—hundreds of logs at a glance.

The wood was similar in length and size to what she’d chopped before. Unsure if it was suitable for building, Yunqing focused intently:

“Low-quality wood, suitable for heating, burning, or charcoal-making.”

This timber was originally prepared by the village woodcutters for building houses. It had been stored too long without treatment—no insect-repellent tung oil—so it was riddled with worms, fit only for firewood, though still good for charcoal production.

Turning wood into charcoal meant crafting experience, and that meant leveling up.

To avoid a soul corpse attack, she closed the warehouse door and began collecting timber.

After gathering a third, her system backpack ran out of space.

She had to sort it out—all her miscellaneous items could be put into the energy converter.

Yunqing first retrieved the soul corpse bodies she’d killed, searching them for silver. Of more than a dozen, only four had silver, totaling just eighty taels.

With a thought, she entered her cave-dwelling, tossing the soul corpse bodies and all the polluted resources she’d dug up that day into the energy converter. Instantly, over a dozen backpack slots opened up.

Still not enough. The pile of junk she’d picked up from villagers’ homes took up a lot of space. Any wood that could be made into charcoal was processed immediately.

The two simple wooden cabinets made earlier by the low-level crafting machine were finished. Yunqing took them out and placed them inside her wooden house.

The cramped little house was even more crowded now, with barely enough room to maneuver.

Everything she’d scavenged from villagers' homes and the blacksmith’s went into one cabinet; usable wood was stored in the other; the timber from the warehouse was all fed into the low-level crafting machine for charcoal production.