Chapter 338: Noah's Ark (Patreon)

Chapter 338: Noah's Ark

Farmhouse Compound, Underground Level 5.

North Zone - Remote Control Center No. 02.

A girl with delicate features sat quietly in the operator's seat, wearing the latest model of a sensory helmet.

She was intently controlling an Industrial Mecha located eight levels above ground.

Through the screen in front of her, she could clearly see the rapidly shifting images inside.

Countless streams of dynamic data cascaded like a waterfall, continuously refreshing around her.

For ordinary people, even a brief glance at this overwhelming flood of information would be enough to make them dizzy.

But for the girl, handling it was effortless.

Not only could she easily categorize and organize all the intelligence, but she could also precisely manipulate the Industrial Mecha, inserting herself into the task with the most efficient movements to complete it.

Her proficiency made it seem as though she were playing a game she had cleared thousands of times before.

At one point, the rapidly flickering images paused, and a notification from the Artificial Intelligence popped up.

"Material distribution task for the transit warehouse has been completed."

"Task duration: 13 minutes and 27 seconds."

"Overall evaluation: Excellent (S-rank)."

"Four hours of Labor Points have been awarded."

"Next phase task has been issued."

"Proceed to surface area C-13 to collect a total of 1,000 cubic meters of ice."

A virtual map unfolded on one side of the screen, marking the current location of the mecha she was controlling and the new route needed to reach the mission destination.

"Again?"

Jiang Yunxia sighed slightly as she looked at the newly refreshed task.

She knew this was special treatment reserved for her.

Ever since she had suddenly received a notification from the Artificial Intelligence a few days ago—informing her that she had passed the marriage screening—and her marital status in her personal database had been changed from "unmarried" to "married," the familiar environment she had grown accustomed to had begun to feel strange.

First, at school, everyone seemed to know overnight that she was now a woman with a fiancé.

All her former suitors, whether willing or not, were forced to keep their distance from her under some invisible pressure.

After school, her workplace was relocated from the public hall to a semi-private single room.

The mecha she had been operating, which was originally shared among three people, became her exclusive tool.

She was even allowed to make special modifications to it, including repainting it in different colors and installing various additional components it didn’t originally have.

Even her work tasks were no longer confined to the same monotonous fixed area.

Instead, each time she completed a task, she was randomly assigned to a new location.

Judging by the pattern, it seemed intentional—as if they wanted her to familiarize herself with the entire Shelter.

Not that Jiang Yunxia particularly minded.

She hadn’t planned on looking for a boyfriend anytime soon anyway.

The distance from her suitors was actually a relief, sparing her from unnecessary troubles.

The ever-changing new tasks also felt quite novel and interesting to her.

But to unilaterally assign her a fiancé without even considering her feelings—that was a bit too much.

What was even more absurd was that, to this day, aside from knowing his name was Su Wu, she still had no idea what he even looked like.

After brooding for a while, Jiang Yunxia collected herself and clicked to confirm the new task.

Then she began following the designated route toward her destination.

Unlike previous missions, this was her first time leaving the Shelter to work on the surface.

The young woman couldn't help but feel a hint of curiosity about what the world above looked like now.

Since she could only rely on her Industrial Mecha to travel on foot, she didn’t take the convenient yet busy transport routes.

It wasn’t until over half an hour later that Jiang Yunxia finally maneuvered her Industrial Mecha beyond the Shelter’s perimeter.

Standing on the desolate, frozen ground covered by a thin layer of snow, she turned to look back at the colossal structure behind her.

At that moment, Jiang Yunxia caught sight of a Morning Light-Class Transport Ship, its lights shimmering quietly, slowly docking at the edge of a platform extending from the high outer walls of the aerial port.

"The Shelter’s population is about to grow by hundreds of thousands again."

She had seen that transport ship countless times online and knew it ferried millions of people back to Jianghe City every day.

In fact, many on the net had already begun calling it Noah's Ark—because wherever it appeared, it brought hope of escaping the apocalypse.

In a way, that wasn’t entirely wrong.

The longer she lived in the Jianghe City Shelter and the more she learned about its inner workings, the more she came to appreciate the immense power it held.

Given the sheer scale of the Jianghe City Shelter, Jiang Yunxia found it hard to imagine what kind of cataclysmic disaster could ever truly threaten it.

For ordinary people, entering this place was practically no different from leaving the apocalypse behind.

At most, their material conditions might still fall slightly short of pre-apocalyptic living standards—for now.

With that thought, she pulled her gaze away and continued driving her Industrial Mecha across the surface.

With a top speed of sixty kilometers per hour, the Industrial Mecha could already be considered a high-speed transport vehicle.

For short-distance travel on the surface, it posed no issues.

After racing over a dozen kilometers outward, Jiang Yunxia arrived at what had once been a riverbed.

The moment she entered this area, the desolate, lonely tones of the wasteland were replaced by an endless expanse of engineering equipment.

Everywhere she looked, vehicles were cutting and harvesting ice.

Occasionally, she could hear the continuous roar of explosives—directional charges being used to shatter the frozen ground.

Then, like harvesting wheat, the broken ice was systematically collected and loaded onto transport trucks.

Ever since the underground water sources had dried up, no longer able to meet the Jianghe City Shelter’s developmental needs, the primary method of obtaining water had shifted to harvesting ice from the surface.

After years of rapid advancement, the entire process had become highly refined.

There were detailed plans for where to cut and transport, where to blast and collect—all designed to maximize labor efficiency.

At regular intervals across the harvesting field, Ice Lake-class Transport Ships hovered silently, serving as central hubs.

As Jiang Yunxia observed, one such Ice Lake-class Transport Ship, now loaded with nearly ten thousand tons of ice, began sealing its open cargo hatches one by one.

Like a massive beast, it slowly set off toward the direction of the Farmhouse Shelter.

With a top speed of ten kilometers per hour, the Ice Lake-class Transport Ship moved steadily onward.

Judging by the data, it seemed almost cripplingly slow.

In reality, it matched the average speed a regularly exercising adult could maintain during long-distance running.

Relative to its ten-thousand-ton payload capacity,

this was more than sufficient.

Having briefly surveyed the surroundings,

Jiang Yunxia piloted the industrial mecha to the designated mission site—

a flat, thick expanse of ice.

Activating the oscillation cutting blade mounted on the mecha, she began her work.

A cutting route, dynamically generated based on the current terrain, appeared on the screen.

This was the optimal path calculated by the artificial intelligence.

Jiang Yunxia glanced at it, committing it to memory,

then swung the cutting blade with fluid precision, following the route flawlessly.

Soon, large blocks of neatly cut ice began piling onto a nearby transport vehicle.

Alone,

Jiang Yunxia demonstrated a labor efficiency exceeding that of ten ordinary workers combined.

Seven minutes into her task,

amidst biting winds and low-hanging clouds,

a blizzard descended with startling speed.

Within moments, the high-definition camera on Jiang Yunxia’s industrial mecha

could no longer capture anything beyond a meter or two.

At times, even the ice beneath her feet became indistinguishable.

It was as if the entire world

had abruptly shifted from bustling activity to utter isolation,

leaving her as the sole presence.

Jiang Yunxia paused briefly, pressing her lips together,

then refocused on meticulously separating ice, snow, and soil from the ground.

Though visibility was compromised,

the radar-scanned data modeled by the mecha’s systems

ensured her overall efficiency barely dipped.

Unconsciously,

the AI’s performance rating of her work steadily stabilized at S-tier and above.

May 20th

Farmhouse Compound, Underground Level 1 Control Center

Su Wu stepped away from the Shelter’s demanding affairs and poured himself a glass of chilled juice.

Taking a sip,

he studied the holographic projection before him—

the structural blueprint of the Farmhouse Shelter, suspended midair.

Apart from being slightly taller than a few days prior, it appeared largely unchanged.

Yet internally,

it had undergone a transformative overhaul.

First, thanks to the nonstop operations of two Morning Light-class transport ships,

the Shelter’s total population had reached 205 million.

On Level 6—currently the only above-ground tier housing residents—

the population exceeded 50 million,

nearly double the surviving populace of Australia.

Even with such staggering growth,

the recent completion of Level 9

left Su Wu with three and a half entire tiers of vacant living space,

capable of accommodating an additional 270 million people at once.

A level of luxury bordering on the absurd.

However, this extreme surplus of living space

was the result of Su Wu funneling nearly all engineering resources and externally scavenged materials into its construction.

The supporting resources—such as domestic water supply, nearby factories producing mechanical parts for local operations, and newly established plantations that haven't yet yielded crops—were all struggling to keep up with the pace.

Of course, these issues weren’t too significant.

With the current fleet of Ice Lake-class Transport Ships now numbering 27,000, a single trip could transport 270 million tons of supplies. This was enough to completely empty out all shelters—excluding megacities—in one or even two provinces within an extremely short timeframe. The gaps in these ordinary resources would soon be filled, and there would even be surpluses.

Given the overwhelming scale of this transport fleet, the 615 Merchant Trains that had once been the backbone of logistics had been reduced to near irrelevance. Su Wu decisively removed them from the transport roster altogether, repurposing them into a dedicated escort force tasked solely with carrying armed personnel and emergency relief supplies. These units now patrolled the expanded routes of the Ice Lake-class Transport Ships, clearing obstacles and providing security along the way.

"Currently, about 10,000 Ice Lake-class Transport Ships are assigned to the route between Jianghe City and Xiao Jiang Province," Su Wu noted. "Another 10,000 are handling the transfer of supplies from Ancheng behind Yuhe City and its surrounding Subsidiary Shelters. Six thousand are relocating resources from the vicinity of Steel City. Many of these deployed ships are already fully loaded and on their return journey."

"On average, over 6,000 ships arrive daily at the Farmhouse Compound, delivering more than 60 million tons of supplies. And this intake rate isn’t even the Farmhouse Compound’s limit—it’s the maximum capacity of the transport routes. Any more, and there wouldn’t be enough road space for the ships to operate in parallel."

"With that in mind," Su Wu continued, "we can open three additional northbound transport routes. We can also expand deeper along both sides of the Kuan Jiang River Basin."

Following the successful takeover of Ancheng, a megacity, Su Wu had since dispatched intelligence operatives to every megacity across the Eastern Continent to gather information. From these, he selected 32 as the first batch of targets for infiltration and armed takeover.

To support this operation, nearly all of the Shelter’s 500 Sixth-Generation Fighter Jets had been mobilized, with most of their transport capacity dedicated to these efforts. Even the Morning Light-Class Transport Ships had been deployed twice, ferrying sizable contingents of security forces to assist in the operations.

Progress on these selected targets had been highly favorable. In the fastest-moving cities, the insurgent factions backed by Su Wu had already seized the highest authority and could now facilitate the transfer of populations and resources. This was the foundation of Su Wu’s confidence in adding three new northern transport routes and launching large-scale resource extraction across all provinces along the Kuan Jiang River Basin.

Thirty-two megacities meant 32 provincial hubs. Once fully absorbed, Su Wu’s total population would easily surpass the one-billion mark—effectively bringing half of the Eastern Continent under his rule.

And more importantly—

Once the achievement of ruling a population of one billion is reached,

Su Wu can complete the next phase of the main quest.

He will receive an unknown, era-defining reward.

"Though I don’t know what the reward will be,"

"still,"

"just the sheer scale of a billion people alone"

"would be enough to elevate the Farmhouse Compound to the status of a world power."

"By then, even if we openly clash with the capital of the Eastern Continent,"

"or face off against the Federation’s main combat forces,"

"it shouldn’t be much of a problem."

Facing this imminent turning point of destiny,

Su Wu couldn’t help but feel his heart surge with excitement.