Chapter 29: Even with Kidney Deficiency, Still Crazy about Picking Up Trash!
The cave was huge, one could see the steel-reinforced concrete structure from outside the cave, the walls were blackened, covered with a grayish-green moss, and occasionally rusted steel bars were exposed, a sense of time's passage hit them in the face.
Lu Yuan's brows furrowed slightly.
This seemed to be an air-raid shelter dug out by the Meida Civilization?!
Most of the materials had been eroded by time, things like cars and machinery, all turned into scrap metal by the Fire Lizard.
So the air-raid shelter had become a filthy den for monsters.
Lu Yuan squatted down, exhaustion notwithstanding, his scavenger's heart was leaping with excitement!
He found a discarded metal door...
Unsure of the alloy, but it looked very solid and was not even rusted.
Way too heavy, he'd leave it for now and come back for it when he had the time.
He found over a hundred bundles of foul, filthy cloth?!
The material resembled meltblown cloth used in facemasks, made of synthetic fibers, each roll two meters wide and rolled up together.
However, many of the cloths were contaminated with the excrement of the Fire Lizard...
Lu Yuan wasn't sure if these things could be cleaned.
"If I can find clean cloth, I could make clothes, trousers, the harvest would be quite rich."
"If they can't be cleaned... sigh, just forget it!"
Lu Yuan, holding his nose, shook his head at these synthetic fibers.
It's not that he was being picky, but wearing stinking clothes would seriously affect one's mental state—who in their right mind would wear clothes smelling of feces?
When you're out and about, your mood is very important!
He found... a large amount of gold, silver, and various other miscellaneous metals!
Especially eye-catching were the gold ingots!
Huge blocks of gold ingots! They looked like building bricks, carelessly piled together, dazzling Lu Yuan's eyes.
He even felt as if he had stumbled upon a treasury.
While silver had become rust-stained under the erosion of time.
Only gold still maintained its brilliant, beautiful golden hue.
"Could it be that the Fire Lizard has a fondness for shiny objects? The legendary dragon trait?" Lu Yuan moved them around; each brick might weigh about 10 kilograms.
All these things combined might weigh several dozen tons. At the price of 700 yuan per gram for gold, had he just picked up several billion all at once?
"Surely, if it was of any use, it wouldn't be utterly useless!"
He found several luminous stones and metals, each weighing several tons.
[Steel ingot bitten by the Fire Lizard, care for a taste?]
[Aluminum alloy licked by the Fire Lizard.]
It was almost certain, the Fire Lizard had acquired the traits of a dragon.
One scavenger had just blown up another scavenger's pile of Gold Coins.
If the Fire Lizard had a spirit in the sky, it would surely roar in a furious rage: Do you hunt me just to steal the rubbish I've accumulated over hundreds of years?
Why must scavengers trouble each other?!
"Damn, something might be wrong with my head."
Lu Yuan was at the peak of excitement, having gotten tens of tons of scrap metal, he was even excited to the point of wanting to lie on it.
He didn't understand his own perverse psychology—seeing a pile of useless stuff, but just desperate to take it all, to move it all!
As the saying goes, the knight who slays the dragon will eventually become one — and he was now evolving into a true dragon.
"Lu Yuan, stay calm and find something useful to take back to improve our lives," someone said.
[Fluorite, a type of mineral containing fluorine. Emits a weak glow when subjected to friction, heat, or ultraviolet radiation. A raw material in industry, usually used for the extraction of fluorine.]
"Could this stuff be used as toothpaste?"
He remembered that toothpaste seemed to contain fluorine.
[Phosphorite, a phosphorus-containing mineral that releases energy slowly when heated, producing a faint glow.]
This thing, he truly didn't know what uses it had.
[Calcium, Uranium, Mica, emits a light yellow-green fluorescence under ultraviolet light, highly radioactive. Are you sure you want to live with this thing long term? A very low chance of inducing benign mutations, probabilities of all kinds of cancer increased by over 1000%.]
Lu Yuan shivered involuntarily and instinctively kept his distance from the green stone.
Continuing to explore the deepest parts of the cave, Lu Yuan found an object resembling a large iron sphere, part of which was buried in the ground, shining silver. The sphere also had crystal-like screens on it.
It looked quite out of the ordinary, didn't it?
Its surface was covered in Fire Lizard fuel and traces of dried spittle.
The Pioneer's Eye explained like this: [It is possibly a Civilization Management Device developed by some powerful civilization, used to monitor various human resource data of its civilization, while also having some remote communication functions. Whether this civilization had good or bad intentions is still a mystery...]
[However, due to the Fire Lizard's long-term fiddling, this Civilization Management Device seems to have suffered some damage. Perhaps a small portion of its functions could still be normally used.]
[The current energy reserves are severely insufficient; it can be recharged via solar power.]
Lu Yuan jumped, his facial muscles twitched twice, and he rubbed his eyes in disbelief.
Then, a wave of ecstasy surged in his heart. What kind of luck was this… he had actually stumbled upon the remains of an advanced civilization?!
Could he use this device to make contact with human civilization?!
Even if he couldn't return in person, just making a call would be good!
That longing for home in his heart trembled instantly!
Lu Yuan pressed a button on the machine, and an indicator light beside it lit up, flashing.
A strange electronic sound came from the sphere, a "sizzling" sound, as if the speaker was broken.
"I wonder if there is any artificial intelligence…"
With a thought to try, Lu Yuan shouted at the sphere, "Human civilization, can I contact humans? Hey! Hurry up and connect to the humans!"
"The number… what was the human number again… 7812HSKKJ-1 to 7812HSKKJ-17."
"That should be the right number…" Lu Yuan pressed the buttons on the surface of the sphere and entered a string of numbers on a side screen that was still illuminated.
The side screen displayed a scrambled image.
But after a long wait, the main screen did not light up.
The machine seemed to have crashed, not responding at all.
Lu Yuan was deeply disappointed, sighing for a long time, and attempted to move it outside to bask in the sun, but he couldn't budge it — the strength gap between him and the Fire Lizard was just too large.
However, this disappointment lasted only a brief minute.
After all, in the current environment, one couldn't expect to randomly pick up a slightly advanced Communicator and be able to contact human civilization countless kilometers away.
"Forget it, forget it, no expectations, no disappointments."
"If humans don't have this kind of machine, I probably wouldn't be able to make contact anyway…"
"It's like making a phone call, if the other side doesn't have a phone, no matter how I dial the number, it's no use…"
He consoled himself, but deep down, he couldn't help feeling disappointed.
It's just that he had encountered too many moments of helplessness, so this was just one more to add to the list.
He soon cheered up again, after all, just the two abilities he had gained were enough to satisfy him.