Five Crystal Cores

“A total of three second-tier crystal cores and forty first-tier crystal cores. Here are your seven entry and exit permits.”

The clerk at the city wall’s side office gave Ren Anhua’s group seven cards bearing the emblem of Su City.

These were the entry and exit permits she mentioned.

“Additionally, since there are two ordinary people in your team, an extra six first-tier crystal cores are required for this entry into the city.”

This time, entering the city cost the team a total of three second-tier crystal cores and forty-six first-tier crystal cores.

When they walked out of the small room marked “South District Office,” a pained expression appeared on Tang Yunxuan’s face.

“This is robbery, absolute robbery.”

Entering the city once had basically used up more than half of their income from hunting since their time in the Mutual Aid Society.

If it weren’t for the resources Ren Anhua still had, Chen Shu’s team would have been severely weakened.

Due to the military’s blockade, Ren Anhua did not enter the city from the West District as Meng Fanhai had predicted, but instead took a fancy detour to the South District.

The entrance fee for Su City was extremely expensive.

For a single entry, one needed to pay five first-tier crystal cores, which was a heavy burden for ordinary people.

However, one could also spend ten crystal cores to obtain this ‘entry and exit permit.’

A holder of this permit, if they were an Awakened, would be exempt from the crystal core payment.

But if they were an ordinary person, they would still need to pay three crystal cores.

As soon as he entered the city, Tang Yunxuan experienced what class discrimination meant.

This discrimination was even written into the laws of Su City.

The Awakened would enjoy extremely privileged treatment in this place, while ordinary people were in a position of being exploited.

The rulers of Su City were quite clever.

It was precisely this differential treatment that allowed the Awakened to feel their own superiority.

Then these precious talents of the apocalypse would stay in Su City and strengthen it.

And for such Awakened, they were not short of money, so there was naturally no need to fleece them for entry and exit fees.

They would spend a great deal of their consumption on entertainment within Su City; those were the places where they spent their money.

And ordinary people, of course, would not spend money on luxury entertainment.

They were very poor and would want to hold on to any money they had.

So they were only charged in these places of essential need, forcing them to hand over the pitiful crystal cores they had.

After the Awakened enjoyed themselves, they would naturally go out hunting again.

And ordinary people, if they did not dare to go hunting, could only pitifully work in the city, earning a little money from the wealthy Awakened masters, and then use this little money to fill their stomachs and pay for entry and exit fees.

In fact, to save money, they would also try to minimize the number of times they entered and exited the city, even if they had no place to live inside.

Class differentiation also arose from this.

The rich became richer and enjoyed all kinds of rich material life.

And the poor were constantly exploited, only able to rely on the leftovers of the Awakened masters to survive, and also needed to provide various services for the Awakened.

Ordinary people like Liu Shi and Tang Yunxuan, who could find an Awakened organization, were the happiest ordinary people in Su City.

Ordinary people, in general, lived quite miserably.

Just like what Ren Anhua’s group had encountered at the city gate earlier, an Awakened had forcibly broken up an ordinary person’s family, pulled their daughter into the city, and then paid five first-tier crystal cores for her.

Five crystal cores, that was the price of a third-ringer.

When a third-ringer was forcibly pulled into the city, she could not leave without crystal cores, and her parents outside the city could not enter due to the crystal cores.

Her parents cried their hearts out outside the city, but were powerless against the interception of the city guards, and if they continued to “disturb the peace” like this, they would even be killed on the spot.

In fact, that Awakened could have just killed the woman’s parents directly, and he would not have borne any responsibility for it.

But people always needed some weakness, and the weakness this Awakened left for the woman was her parents.

Using this rule, without much effort on his part, he could both physically separate the family and make the woman worry and dare not act rashly, which was perfect.

The rules of entry and exit, under these ulterior motives, had become a protective umbrella for population collection.

For ordinary people without permits, the Awakened could be said to have free rein.

In contrast, if an ordinary person had a permit, they would be protected by Su City, and even the Awakened could not act casually.

This was also why, even though it cost an extra sixteen crystal cores, Ren Anhua’s group had to get entry and exit permits for Liu Shi and Tang Yunxuan.

Although the Awakened in Su City were not completely unable to act against ordinary people with permits, for such ordinary people, they would have to go to some trouble.

Of course, under Chen Shu’s watch, these petty thieves had no chance to lay a hand on the people in the team.

Anyone who dared to commit evil in front of Chen Shu would be met with his fierce killing intent.

Just like the Awakened who had just forcibly taken a civilian woman, Chen Shu’s killing intent had already left a clear mark on him.

Next, even if he just wandered around, Chen Shu would find this person he wanted to kill.

So Ren Anhua was not worried at all.

They properly obtained their entry and exit permits, and then Chen Shu led the way, letting the car wander freely in Su City.

As soon as she entered the city, Ren Anhua felt the fundamental difference of Su City.

There were just too many Awakened.

Although due to the base number, they still couldn’t compare to the number of ordinary people, it was close to half.

Ren Anhua had never seen such a proportion of Awakened in other human settlements.

It seemed that Su City’s ability to take root here as a non-military city was not without reason.

This place was probably a paradise for the Awakened, but at the same time… this was probably also a paradise for criminals.

It seemed Chen Shu would be busy.

Ren Anhua took a rough look.

Currently, most of the Awakened were second-tier, a stage that Chen Shu could suppress.

There were very few third-tier people.

At this stage, third-tier was still a very high Awakened rank.

As for fourth-tier, Ren Anhua hadn’t found anyone who was fourth-tier yet, but she guessed there should be a few fourth-tier Awakened in Su City.

The thing about Awakened, in a sense, was also very similar to zombies.

When they gathered in large numbers, some elite monsters would always appear.

After all, Su City was a jungle where strength was supreme, so its power structure was bound to be a pyramid structure, and a pyramid must have a peak.

To make so many third-tiers obey the rules of Su City, one must have the power to suppress all third-tiers.

However, such an existence was obviously not something they needed to consider at the moment.

Ren Anhua just wanted to find the RV team as soon as possible.

As for Chen Shu, he would probably be busy “dealing with trash” for a while.

The powers in Su City were deeply entrenched.

Ren Anhua instinctively felt that Chen Shu would get into a lot of trouble.

For example, what they were doing now, strictly speaking, they were breaking the rules of Su City.

However, Ren Anhua had never been a person who cared about rules.

She was very spontaneous, and it was quite normal for her to occasionally act as an agent of heaven.

As for Chen Shu, not to mention him, he was a person who could be described with the word “hating evil as one hates an enemy.”

The Awakened who had forcibly taken a civilian woman eventually died, but this final result did not make Chen Shu happy at all.

Because the woman also died.

Ren Anhua’s group did not get a chance to show their strength, because before they arrived, both of them were already dead.

The Awakened man’s eye socket was pierced by a dagger.

That dagger should have been his own, because the style of the hilt looked very matching with the knife sheath on his waist.

But that dagger was now not in his eye socket, nor in his knife sheath, but coldly inserted into the woman’s heart.

This scene seemed a bit difficult to understand.

If one were to deduce according to common sense, one could quickly understand what had happened.

The woman drew the dagger from the Awakened man’s knife sheath, killed him with one blow, and then used the same knife to commit suicide.

She killed an Awakened man, which was very surprising, but she had the motive.

This man not only separated her from her family, but was also about to do something very inhumane to her.

But why did she commit suicide?

The woman’s final act could not be deduced with common sense, but had to be considered in the context of Su City’s background and social environment.

She had killed an Awakened, but she was an ordinary person, and a lowly third-ringer at that.

What did this mean in Su City?

It was equivalent to a lowly commoner killing a noble aristocrat.

She couldn’t have survived, so she committed suicide.

To be precise, the Awakened man couldn’t be said to have been killed by her.

The probability of an ordinary woman killing an Awakened was too small.

Ren Anhua guessed that this was probably Chen Shu’s ‘Fate Killing Intent’ at work.

And the woman couldn’t be said to have committed suicide.

She was killed by the despair rooted in her heart.

So to be precise, Chen Shu’s Fate Killing Intent killed the Awakened, and Su City killed the woman.

Looking at the two corpses in front of them, Chen Shu was silent for a while, not knowing what he was thinking.

He was probably thinking about what kind of despair could kill a person like this.

“I don’t like this city,” he finally said.

“I don’t like it either,” Ren Anhua tried her healing.

As expected, she couldn’t resurrect a dead person.

Before her was a completely dead person, probably with both spirit and body thoroughly dead.

“Let’s go. Let’s find a place to stay first, and get something to eat.”

The place where the two died was in a small alley.

Heaven knew what this man was planning to do.

If it weren’t for Chen Shu, Ren Anhua’s group really wouldn’t have found this place.

The Awakened were like a group of gun-wielding nobles without legal constraints, with a dual advantage in status and force when facing ordinary people.

They could kill ordinary people not only without pressure, but also completely reasonably.

These two corpses would probably be discovered tomorrow by patrols or someone else.

This kind of thing was quite common in Su City.

In this era, it was not at all strange for one or two people to die, especially in Su City, where the death of a few ordinary people was even more so.

Perhaps the only thing that would make the people of Su City strange was the fact that the Awakdned man had been killed.

After all, a human life worth five crystal cores was really not enough to attract their attention.