Once the NPCs had departed, Lin Luyao was in no rush to tidy up the clutter scattered all over the ground. Instead, she opened her system panel first.
She checked the team channel.
Only to find that upon leaving the dungeon, the party mode had been automatically dissolved.
Her movements paused for a fraction of a second. Rather than hastily searching for Gu Xinghe and Chen Caidie in the friends channel, she got up and began helping the Slime pack up the supplies scattered on the ground, stuffing them all into the eighty storage slots of the tricycle's cargo bed.
During this dungeon run, Lin Luyao had practically taken care of every single aspect of food, clothing, and daily necessities.
Not to mention the quilts and extra clothes to cope with the bitter night cold.
Cleaning supplies such as dish soap, body wash, and toothpaste were also stocked fully in one go.
As for the shelves of tissues and sanitary pads, she had cleaned them out entirely.
Lin Luyao placed similar types of items in order into twenty transparent storage boxes she had found at the grocery store, each estimated to hold over a hundred liters of capacity, and then loaded them into the cargo bed's storage space to save slots.
Each box filled with supplies occupied a single storage slot.
Meanwhile, everyday items that appeared in larger quantities were stacked separately up to ninety-nine per slot.
After somehow managing to cram everything into the cargo bed, Lin Luyao, accompanied by the equally enthusiastic Slime, continued on their journey.
They needed to reach the next player rest area before dark.
Thinking of Zhaocaimi's luck bonus and the more than forty treasure chests waiting to be opened in her backpack, Lin Luyao's eyes lit up.
Her exhausted body suddenly seemed infused with a surge of invisible strength.
With a burst of speed, the tricycle quickly vanished into the horizon.
Meanwhile, just behind that same highway, four people were abruptly dumped out of the dungeon together.
Mao Ruigang stared at the familiar dilapidated van, the tear tracks on his face not yet dry before he was overwhelmed by a fresh surge of tears.
"Sob, sob, sob, sob! I knew it! I knew we'd definitely make it through this last stretch! Brother Xu, Brother Xu, are you okay?!"
Zhou Xu clutched his forehead, his face pale.
On his character panel, the debuff [Zombie Virus Infection (Stage 2)] seemed to flicker within his field of vision.
Then, his attention involuntarily drifted to the two people in the front seats.
"Did we actually clear it?"
Chen Caidie was still somewhat dazed.
"Sob, sob, sob, sob, Caidie, Sister Gu, are you two okay? You have no idea how we survived that last stretch..."
Mao Ruigang was both overjoyed and frantic, tearfully recounting in a disjointed manner what had happened to the two of them during the second half of the dungeon.
"...Brother Xu wanted to go out later, saying something had gone wrong. I wouldn't let him take the risk, so I grabbed his leg and refused to let him go. I didn't expect him to hit me. I got angry and wanted to fight back, but then zombies actually crawled up from outside the tower!"
"Wuwuwu, when that thing lunged in, Brother Xu tripped over me and ended up getting bitten by the zombie. Is Brother Xu going to die?!"
Mao Ruigang was on the verge of a breakdown.
Gu Xinghe recovered slightly from the dizziness of leaving the dungeon. Seeing Mao Ruigang's overly hysterical state, she brushed everything else aside and spoke directly to Chen Caidie beside her.
"Play a tune first."
Mao Ruigang's state right now looked somewhat unhinged.
It almost gave her flashbacks to Li Qun at the restaurant.
Thinking of the virus-related knowledge they had learned from the Zombie King, Gu Xinghe immediately realized the crucial importance of sanity points.
Chen Caidie did not dare delay, instantly untying the flute hanging from her waist.
A distant, soothing flute melody soon echoed throughout the van.
Not only did Mao Ruigang, whose emotions had pushed him to the brink of losing his sanity, gradually stop trembling uncontrollably.
Even Zhou Xu, who had been wearing an expression of pain, saw the furrow between his brows slowly smooth out.
"Did any of you get any rewards from the dungeon?"
Gu Xinghe asked as she casually opened the treasure chests she had obtained from this dungeon, tossing the resulting hemostatic bandages and soothing potions into the back seat.
"Get your HP and sanity back to full first."
If he entered stage three, there would be no saving him.
After a bout of chaos, half an hour later they were finally able to calmly chat about their experiences in the dungeon.
Chen Caidie took charge of the narration.
From her words, Lin Luyao—whom they had encountered in the dungeon—was portrayed as an omnipotent high-tier player.
"You guys didn't see it, but every single one of those NPCs jumped at her command. If we hadn't teamed up with her, I'd seriously doubt whether she was even a player at all."
Gu Xinghe didn't correct Chen Caidie's peculiar phrasing. Instead, while messaging Lin Luyao in the friends channel, she spoke to the two somewhat dazed and incredulous people.
"If possible, I hope to seize this chance. Even if we can't form a long-term partnership with Ms. Lin, we should at least maintain a long-term friendly relationship. With her around, I believe our path ahead will become much easier."
Once his HP and sanity were fully restored, Zhou Xu's paranoid temperament noticeably subsided, and his sluggish brain was finally able to function again.
Compared to Chen Caidie's description of a dashing top-tier player and Gu Xinghe's proposal, he recalled an incident they had stumbled upon earlier.
"Do you remember that bottle cap we found at the scene after the NPCs killed each other?"
As soon as those words were spoken, silence fell inside the van.
At the time, Gu Xinghe and Zhou Xu had found a food container bottle cap near the short NPC's corpse, and upon returning, they had shared their suspicions with the other two.
Yet the owner of that bottle cap they had envisioned back then should have been a tyrannical, cold, and somewhat bloodthirsty high-combat player.
And that high-combat player seemed to match Lin Luyao to perfection.
As for the preceding description of "tyrannical and cold," perhaps it was simply because they hadn't had the chance to witness it from Lin Luyao yet.
After all, since they could be pulled into the same dungeon, their distances apart shouldn't have been very far.
The probability that Lin Luyao was indeed the owner of that bottle cap increased accordingly.
"No way?"
Chen Caidie spoke weakly.
"Sister Luyao even cooked meals for the NPCs."
Originally, Lin Luyao had even packed a few extra boxes of food for them, but when the dungeon closed, none of them had paid attention to the time and completely failed to bring the items along.
Thinking of those fragrant boxed meals once more, Chen Caidie swallowed hard in despair before drooping crestfallen.
Compared to the compressed biscuits and dry bread slices they had on hand, those meals were simply divine delicacies.
She hadn't even gotten a chance to taste one!
Li Qun's appearance back then had been far too sudden, and they had put all their energy into being on guard against that fellow, completely missing out on the gourmet food just like that.
Chen Caidie regretted it so much she could practically beat her chest and stamp her feet.
Meanwhile, Mao Ruigang sat pale-faced, looking as though he had more to say.
He had been completely scared out of his wits in this dungeon.
This large-scale dungeon zombie horde was entirely out of a different league compared to the first zombie dungeon they had entered voluntarily.
If not for Zhou Xu's combat strength, he would have been finished long ago.
Hearing Chen Caidie describe the so-called top player as someone who might be a ruthless killer and could dine right next to NPC corpses, his initial joy at the thought of clinging to a powerful ally instantly dissolved into panic.
"Let's forget it..."
Mao Ruigang picked at his fingernails. Due to excessive anxiety, his sanity points dropped another two points uncontrollably.
"Why on earth would a top-tier player want to be friends with small fries like us? What if we accidentally anger them? Wouldn't that just be..." making a loss on the deal.
Due to these conflicting thoughts, the atmosphere inside the van unconsciously grew somewhat heavy.
Chen Caidie looked back and forth between them. Remembering how much suffering Mao Ruigang and Zhou Xu had endured in this dungeon, she was unwilling to argue with them at the moment, so she smoothed things over.
"Alright, let nature take its course. There's no point discussing this now anyway. I think we'd better open all our treasure chests first and compare our rewards."
"Let me tell you, with the big boss around this time, both the senior sister and I made a fortune!"
While the four-person team was busy opening treasure chests, Lin Luyao—who had hurried all the way to the player-exclusive rest area—also devoutly patted Zhaocaimi on the head before opening those thirty-odd bronze chests first.