Xiao Dou clucked at Jing Shu's feet, agreeing completely with her words.
Back when she first boarded the No. 808 cargo ship, she saw that Tank's thick hair had been twisted strand by strand into a chicken nest. Xiao Dou had found the perfect spot to rest, lounging comfortably on top of him with two black chicks tucked under her wings.
It was hard to imagine. The first time Jing Shu met Tank, the man had an aura so intimidating that few dared to approach. Yet now, even a chicken was nesting on his head.
Xiao Dou was huge, and Tank was just as muscular. The whole thing looked like he was wearing a brown-feathered hat. No—more like a living, forty-kilogram hen, fat and round like a lotus parasol, blocking half of his vision.
Jing Shu was speechless.
"Get down already…" she muttered. When she and Yang Yang had gone to the underwater world with Hao Yunlai, she'd only asked Tank to watch the chicken for a bit. How the hell did it turn into this?
Tank gave a sheepish grin. "I was just moving supplies and didn't want to lose your chicken, so I put her on my shoulder. Didn't expect she'd build a nest on my head and refuse to come down. But hey, she laid quite a few eggs for me. Guess that's her way of paying rent."
A chicken that barters eggs for comfort!
Tank carefully pulled eight eggs from his pocket and handed them to her. Each one was worth fifty contribution points, a price that made the entire team treat them like treasure. A chicken that laid one egg a day wasn't anything special, but one that could produce twenty or thirty a day—and provide half the team's protein—was priceless. Though, truth be told, Jing Shu herself ate most of them.
And Xiao Dou's eggs were insanely good. After one taste, people were willing to spend that sky-high fifty contribution points just to eat them again.
"Keep them," Jing Shu said. "Since they're from Xiao Dou, they're yours."
She knew Tank was the kindest of the group. When others exchanged contribution points for eggs, they'd always ask her to fry them on the spot, make egg custard, or stir-fry them with vegetables. Only Tank saved his up carefully, saying he wanted to bring them home for his little sister. Cough, cough—since egg dishes didn't require extra processing fees, Jing Shu didn't mind being generous.
Jing Shu gave Xiao Dou a look. The hen tilted her head, understood the hint, and immediately went to work. She straightened Tank's hair with her beak, added some "styling fluid" from her mouth, and then fluttered down gracefully with her chicks, following Jing Shu's feet like an obedient little lackey.
Tank groaned inwardly. Thanks a damn lot for the new hairstyle.
Xiao Dou: You're welcome, you're welcome.
Their teammates all looked at the hen with envy. The first time they'd met Jing Shu on the helicopter, everyone laughed at her for bringing a chicken along. But after months together, they'd lost count of how many times her eggs had literally saved their lives. Sure, those eggs cost a fortune, but they were worth every point.
Even the top-ranked war dogs that once threatened to eat chickens now acted like Xiao Dou's underlings. In underground black market fights, the hen had proven her worth again and again, winning ten consecutive matches and earning Jing Shu hundreds of thousands of black market coins—not to mention helping the whole team profit and restock their supplies.
Her contributions were obvious to everyone, which was why the group spoiled her rotten. Xiao Dou had grown so smug she probably thought she was royalty.
Anyway, back to the main topic.
Ling Ling stopped cleaning her gun and spoke softly, "We probably can't come back to America anymore."
"What? Why?" Jing Shu was surprised. If there were still rich people overseas who needed rare goods, they could come back once a year for a raid or two. As long as they had "sponsorship," America was basically a fat sheep waiting to be sheared. Sure, things got bloodier toward the end, but fat sheep always oozed oil before they died, like salted duck eggs.
Honestly, Jing Shu envied those rich bastards with private planes. Fuel was ridiculously expensive, but in the apocalypse, one successful raid could make you filthy rich. Fuel costs were nothing when you came back loaded with resources.
"If the Rubik's Cube Space reaches tier 13," she mused, "I could probably store a small plane in there. When that happens, I can go abroad alone and gather more supplies. The longer this goes on, the scarcer things will get."
She started calculating again. Getting a plane or a gunship wasn't impossible. Even if she had to steal one, she could. The problem was where to park it and how to maintain it. It was too much hassle. Still, if she had enough space, she could just stuff one into the Cube Space, pull it out when needed, and stash it again afterward.
The real issue was that her space was still too small. It was hard to believe that when she first got it, it was only 4×4×4—just sixty-four cubic meters—and she somehow managed to raise chickens, farm crops, and stockpile apocalypse supplies all in there.
"The Cube Space's only tier 8. Still a long way to go," she sighed. Lately she hadn't trained much. For one thing, her teammates were around, and it wasn't exactly normal to whip out a giant Rubik's Cube from her pants in front of everyone. For another, she was just too busy. So leveling it up to tier 9 would take time.
Once she got home, she planned to focus on training and push the Cube Space as far as possible before the fifth-year migration started.
Ling Ling lowered her voice. "Because we're on America's blacklist. Not only have our faces been exposed, but our fingerprints, facial scans, and iris data from Austin are all included in the government's wanted list. We're internationally wanted. Anyone who provides information gets fifty thousand pounds (about twenty-two metric tons) of food, and if they actually capture us and hand us over, they'll get three hundred thousand pounds (around one hundred thirty-six metric tons)!"
She pulled out her phone and opened the official site, translating it for everyone. Since most of the group couldn't read English, they had no idea how much trouble they were in.
Tank's eyes went wide. "We've been exposed? No way! All we did was take a few million pounds of supplies! We only grabbed a third of the rare minerals anyway. That damn Dr. B took the biggest share!"
Snake Spirit frowned. "There's no way just that would land us on a government blacklist."
Ling Ling gave a bitter smile. "You probably don't know. The entire Austin fortress—hundreds of thousands of people—has been hit with a terminal illness. The blood they've coughed up could circle the planet three times. At the same time, a lot of high-ranking officials and farm owners have died.
Every day, bodies pile up like mountains. People have started looting the corpses, which caused tons of bloody fights. Even those on the outskirts have gotten sick from mild radiation. The whole city's gone to hell. Now Austin's basically a ghost town, and it's a political disaster for America."