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Chapter 672: 420: Fake Social Death
Chapter 672: 420: Fake Social Death
Chapter 672: Chapter 420: Fake Social Death
In the 31st century of the Eighth Timeline, most human settlements had a large population, so cities on Earth were sparsely distributed. The distance between a city and another large city could be thousands of kilometers, with vast empty spaces and fields in between.
Although there were Quark Devices, people still maintained a basic psychological need for natural crops.
However, in the 26th century of this timeline, perhaps due to the large population on Earth or the fact that people hadn’t fully formed the habit of living in large urban settlements, Harrison Clark would always come across towns of varying sizes along the way.
The larger cities could accommodate at least 10 million people, while the smaller ones had a population of several hundred thousand.
Together with the constant encounters with shipwrecks along the way, these things seriously affected his speed in approaching Oxfordshire. A half-day’s journey took him six days to complete.
After becoming a scavenger, he unknowingly developed an obsession.
This obsession was the same as when he played single-player RPG games many years ago.
Whenever his gaming character arrived at a new map, he would enter every house, regardless of whether it belonged to an NPC or not, rummaging through their chests, smashing their pickles jars, and always hoping to find hidden items.
Seeing shipwrecks, he always wanted to go inside and take a look, hoping that there might be something well-preserved inside, and when he saw a town, he couldn’t help but explore, fearing that he might miss some crucial items.
For example, what if he found a Sophisticated Gravitational Wave Detector that can perform regional scanning in some corner of a city?
Although the possibility was infinitely small, what’s the difference between a person without dreams and a salted fish?
Even if all encountered detectors were destroyed, not every single component inside could be broken, right? Taking down the seemingly usable parts might just be enough to piece together a complete one.
He continued walking and rummaging, sweeping at least eight cities and more than 30 shipwrecks along the way.
Unfortunately, he didn’t find a single hidden item that could change the world; instead, he picked up a pile of garbage.
The Floating Motorcycle took off with several tons of packaged items hanging underneath.
Moreover, he encountered a bunch of “monsters” that were annoying.
At this point, he was fighting with an inexplicably frenzied giant elephant under the central building of a small city with a population of 5 million.
The giant elephant was 15 meters tall with rough, thick skin, and it was fierce, agile, and insensitive to pain.
It took Harrison Clark nearly half an hour to gradually drain the blood of the giant elephant in successive slashes, causing it to ultimately collapse to the ground.
He sat down on the ground, panting heavily.
He was overwhelmed.
When he came out of the building with a large and small bag in his hands, he had no intention of doing anything when he saw the giant elephant far away.
At that time, the giant elephant was just taking a nap at the other end of the city center square.
In Harrison’s memory, elephants, as herbivores, were usually not aggressive as long as they weren’t provoked on purpose.
Harrison wasn’t interested in elephant meat, so he turned and was about to leave when a box of communication equipment components fell out of the package in his hand and metal parts scattered all over the ground.
As he prepared to bend down to repackage them, the giant elephant opened its eyes, looked at him, stood up, and charged towards him with a scream, moving at an alarmingly fast speed.
Harrison had no choice but to grab his knife and confront it, which led to the current situation.
The intense battle between a man and an elephant left the entire area in disarray.
Harrison was exhausted.
Seeing the sun setting in the distance, he decided not to leave and to stay here tonight.
He rode the Floating Motorcycle over, parked it carefully inside the building, put the Military Training Combat Knife into the newly assembled self-repairing energy device to repair the notches, and then took out his pots, pans, and knife.
He wouldn’t eat the elephant meat as it didn’t taste good.
In his prepared food bag, there were tasty items like a large bag of bullfrog legs and several plump wild rabbits.
Charging the small Quark Device, he also took out two precious peppers that he had struggled to find. The Quark Device replicated a few.
He then took out a small bottle containing peanut oil.
It was not easy for him to obtain this peanut oil.
Having only salt and no oil made the dishes tasteless.
At the end of October, fallen flowers matured and fell to the ground, so he spent half a day collecting a handful of wild peanuts, then carefully ground them, eventually accumulating a few milliliters of oil. He duplicated it repeatedly until he had this small bottle, which was enough to use for frying every time.
Within an hour, he cooked two full plates of red braised bullfrog legs and spicy rabbit and took a taste. His eyes lit up.
He quickly took out two vacuum-sealable bottles, each filled with about 50G of food.
Harrison opened the storage box on the Floating Motorcycle and carefully placed the two small bottles inside.
At this point, there were nine of these small bottles in the box, containing dishes such as Kung Pao chicken, red braised bullfrog legs, spicy rabbit, cauliflower snake soup, grilled wolf leg meat, braised wild boar elbow…
These were all dishes he had painstakingly prepared over many days.
Whenever he made a new dish, he would taste it, and if the flavor was satisfactory, he would store it. If he couldn’t find ingredients in the future, he would have to resort to mildly wasting the Snake Gallbladder Battery energy of the Quark Device to synthesize it directly.
Life was hard enough for one person. Without some delicious food to satisfy his cravings, he found it hard to keep going.
After eating and drinking to his heart’s content, Harrison cleaned up the pots and pans, then returned to the building to set up a camping tent he had found in another town.
The tent was set up in the entrance hall of the building.
Since being bitten on the lips by a cauliflower snake while sleeping a few nights ago, he felt the need to provide some shelter for himself when sleeping.
Thinking of that shameless cauliflower snake, Harrison was furious.
Thankfully, he had the Resurrection Factor, or he would have been disfigured.
If it weren’t for the decent taste of the snake soup, he wouldn’t be able to get over his anger.
The mosquito bites and insect harassment were making his life miserable.
He even did an experiment: if he placed a fresh bowl of wild boar blood on the ground, mosquitoes would happily swarm to taste it.
But as soon as he appeared next to the wild boar blood, all the mosquitoes would immediately abandon it and head straight for his face like bomber planes.
Now, this high-quality outdoor tent with bulletproof protection was truly a lifesaver.
Harrison Clark then lay in the tent with his hands behind his head as a pillow, staring at the night light on the ceiling of the tent, and his mind began to ponder.
After a long period of thorough searching, he was certain that the damage rate of equipment in towns and city buildings was far less than that of ships.
The force that annihilated humanity seemed to prioritize the destruction of spaceships with space travel capabilities, while it didn’t care as much about the contents of buildings, only destroying certain key core components.
Moreover, the way energy batteries were damaged in town buildings became varied, not just simply being blown up, but also pierced, torn, corroded, and so on.
This suggested that during the war, human ships fought against the enemy first, were defeated, and then suffered devastating attacks.
As for the enemy’s actions in town buildings, they were more like cleaning up the battlefield after the war.
There was also another important piece of information.
Animals seemed to have an inexplicably strong hostility towards him.
As long as these animals noticed him, they would show a strong tendency to attack.
This was the case even for docile herbivores or non-hungry carnivores.
For example, he once encountered a male tiger that had just finished feasting on a cow.
Normally, a non-hungry male tiger wouldn’t be particularly interested in smaller, less meaty humans, but as soon as Harrison Clark approached, the lazy sunbathing tiger roared and pounced on him.
As a result, Harrison Clark’s collection now included another tiger tail.
Besides the tiger tail, he had collected many more snake gallbladders, wolf fangs, rabbit ear cartilage, bullfrog tongues, peanut roots, and the recently acquired ivory.
If this were the 21st century, with his collection, he’d probably be thrown in jail for decades without batting an eye.
Now, collecting these items wasn’t intended to create a glorious history as an illustrious hunter for him.
There was no one left in the world to witness his trophy collection, so no matter how many hunting trophies he had, there would be no opportunity to display them.
These different parts taken from different animals all shared a common feature: they had clearly identifiable positive and negative poles, and they could discharge electricity.
This was fascinating, as if all the animals in the world had become electric eel-like creatures.
Even peanut roots could discharge electricity, showing that plants were not immune, though their voltage was too low to be used as a power source.
He was discovering more and more anomalies.
Each new piece of evidence was telling him that something was off with these things.
But he was frustrated by the lack of analytical instruments, so he could only try to crudely scan and replicate them with the Quark Device, which ended up breaking it. Fortunately, he found a few spare high-voltage capacitors to repair it, and then he stopped trying to mess with it.
Yes, after hitting the wall multiple times with BOOMs, he could now barely distinguish between different high-voltage capacitors.
At this moment, Harrison Clark was holding a wolf fang in his hand.
The wolf fang felt cold and sharp, like metal, and it emitted a shimmering glow.
If he pinched the root and the tip of the fang with his fingers at the same time, he would get a pleasant electric shock. It was unclear how the giant wolves’ bodies could slowly and stably draw electricity from the fangs.
Putting down the wolf fang, he took out a cauliflower snake gallbladder, occasionally bringing it to his mouth, but after hesitating for a long time, he didn’t have the courage to swallow it and obediently put it back in the box.
It wasn’t that he was reluctant to give up the small cauliflower snake gallbladder, but he wasn’t sure if his body could withstand the electricity inside it.
This time he didn’t want to accidentally electrocute himself to death before he even found the truth.
Looking at his handmade mechanical watch, it was already ten o’clock at night, so Harrison Clark took out his notebook and pen.
“November 5th, 3019, the tenth day.
There are more and more things that puzzle me.
Today, I killed an elephant. I feel ashamed.
I can now confirm that animals in this world have a mysterious hostility towards humans.
I can feel that I am getting closer to the truth.
Also, today I made braised bullfrog legs and rabbit in a dry pot. The taste was amazing.
In a sense, I have already died a social death.
It’s not that I was isolated by society or that I became autistic, but society died before I did.
Being the only person representing human society feels quite special.
I really wish I had someone to talk to.
I have never tasted this kind of loneliness before.
I even think that those classmates who used to ridicule me when I was studying have become cute.”
Harrison Clark coughed lightly, closed his notebook, turned off the night light, and went to sleep.