Published: February 7, 2025
Shasha left Ye Zhongming's room in a daze. As she stepped out, she saw Xia Lei leaning against the pillar of the villa's porch. Feeling awkward, she gave a shy smile.
Although there was nothing serious between her and Ye Zhongming, Shasha was certain that he had spied on her while she was bathing; otherwise, how could he know what her body looked like? In fact, Shasha had once kissed Ye Zhongming with an ulterior motive during a night when Poppy Roulette had vanished. Now, seeing his legitimate girlfriend made her feel a bit uneasy.
Xia Lei crossed her arms and glanced at Shasha. Not finding anything worth commenting on, she ignored her and walked straight into the villa.
Shasha pursed her lips, shrugged, and quickly left.
She didn't want to hear anything that would make her blush.
Once inside, Xia Lei's expression shifted from the slightly aggressive demeanor she had shown towards Shasha to a calm one. She quietly held the man who was gazing outside in her arms, resting his head on her ample chest, and began to gently massage his scalp with her hands buried in his thick, dark hair.
Ye Zhongming sighed contentedly.
"Those people have cleared out the surrounding areas just in time. We can send people to occupy these places, establishing our base of operations for Cloud Summit," he said.
"Mm." Xia Lei responded, now that her man was back, she felt he could say whatever he wanted. She was too lazy to think.
"We're short on people. This will be a priority for the time being. Starting tomorrow, we will halt hunting and send people out to the surrounding areas to find more recruits. We need ordinary people, not warriors," Ye Zhongming explained.
This was not a baseless statement. He had been away for some time, causing many matters to be delayed. Starting this year, the food crisis of the apocalypse would become evident. The food reserves from the peaceful times had been greatly diminished over the past year. The items obtained from the roulette could not meet the consumption needs of all survivors worldwide, and the meat obtained from hunting could only solve part of the problem; the rest still required farming.
Ye Zhongming had not felt an urgent need to address this issue before. After all, the food crisis was relative. Stronger factions were usually less troubled by it. Under his leadership, Cloud Summit would never face starvation.
However, after recent events, Ye Zhongming realized the necessity of taking this problem seriously. He would soon be facing the hostility of several major factions, and violent conflicts could erupt at any moment. Although he claimed not to need warriors, the reality was the opposite. In comparison to those super factions, Ye Zhongming's current disadvantage was not in high-end combat power or weaponry, but in manpower.
Currently, the number of warriors at Cloud Summit was equivalent to just one or two divisions of the zero commerce association or Radiant World Army.
This was unacceptable; if war were to break out in the future, it would, to some extent, boil down to sheer numbers!
Moreover, Ye Zhongming had already begun planning to build a super faction. His earlier elite strategy would need some adjustments, focusing on solving the population issue immediately.
Once the population was established, warriors would follow.
"But if there are too many ordinary people, what about the evolution potions?" Although Xia Lei was lazily in the mood to cuddle with Ye Zhongming, after spending so long in Cloud Summit, some things came to her mind regardless.
Currently, it was the period of evolutionary tide, and the Grade 1 zombies and mutated creatures were diminishing in scale. With fewer of them, there would be fewer Grade 1 magic crystals and, consequently, fewer One-Star Evolution Elixirs. At times, the underground market in Ying City even saw the exchange value of One-Star Evolution Elixirs approaching that of Two-Star Evolution Elixirs. It seemed unreasonable, yet it was very reasonable; many ordinary people had no choice but to pay more to become evolvers and willingly allowed those who possessed One-Star Evolution Elixirs to exploit them.