According to his fans, the show’s production team is good at placing important things in the least important places.
So right after Li Yang "went solo," he imdiately went to the most conspicuous buildings on the street.
The tailor shop, breakfast stall, bank, convenience store.
None of them had what he was looking for.
His first plan had already failed with Guo Yin’s elimination... no, Guo Yin ended up succeeding in the end.
Shi Yuhuai and Chen Yi also ended up last, so theoretically, he didn’t need to worry.
But n, wanting to be first is in their nature, just like female guests wanting to take out the leader and replace them.
It was easy to aim for first while securing third; now he had to aim for penultimate while going for first.
Cautiously avoiding others, he ran around a few buildings on Lotus Street, but Li Yang still couldn’t find anything.
Until he entered the bank for the second ti.
He saw a receipt stuck in the slot of the ATM.
How could there be a receipt stuck in the ATM slot? Was there soone who withdrew or deposited money before the apocalypse and didn’t have ti to take the receipt?
He was about to walk past the ATM again, but after taking a few steps away, he turned back, took the receipt, and gave it a glance.
The withdrawer was Shu Ran, the amount 2000 yuan, withdrawn three days ago at ten in the morning.
"It’s Sister Shu Ran’s withdrawal receipt," Li Yang showed the receipt to the cara, "but isn’t Sister Shu Ran a bank employee? The first thing she did after the apocalypse was to co here and withdraw 2000 yuan?"
Then go buy food?
The cara couldn’t possibly respond to him, so he put the receipt away and took another couple of looks at it.
Before he could decipher anything more, the ATM made a buzzing sound as it printed.
Li Yang was startled and instinctively ran out of the ATM booth.
After running outside, he realized nothing had erged; it was just the ATM printing another receipt with a buzz.
He cautiously went back inside and took down the new receipt.
The ATM must have been a bit old, the previous receipt hadn’t been taken, so it got stuck, preventing further printing—now that an outside receipt was gone, the inside chanism started working again.
This ti, it wasn’t a withdrawal receipt.
"A card swallowed notification receipt."
Li Yang raised his eyes, a look of delight breaking out in them.
He felt like he had triggered so chanism, so excited he beca chatty.
"It was like this, half a year ago I was out with friends, running low on cash, we found a sparsely populated ATM to withdraw money.
But at the last step when returning the card, I was busy counting money and forgot to take the card in ti, so the ATM just swallowed my card. Then staff told to bring my ID to the counter to retrieve the card."
In other words, there’s a card inside this ATM now.
What kind of card? Highly likely to be a monster archive card, if not, well, getting a bank card isn’t bad either.
The only issue now was, he didn’t have an ID card, nor any living counter staff to process this transaction for him.
But, no difficult task, only the smart Yangyang. As long as hope is ahead, the rest is a breeze.
He turned to the bank hall, where the glazed partitions of the counters had all been smashed, and the few doors inside were violently damaged, probably intentionally set by the program team to create a post-apocalyptic ruin backdrop.
To ordinary folks, the bank would’ve likely been the easiest place to loot at the start of the apocalypse.
This design now played nicely in his favor.
With two receipts in hand, he deftly vaulted over the counter into the staff-only area of the bank.
Inside there wasn’t money scattered all over as one might expect, likely because they didn’t want the national emblem trampled on. But for so semblance of realism, the showrunners replaced cash with sothing else.
Li Yang casually picked up a neatly cut rectangular strip of paper with "One Hundred Yuan" printed boldly on it.
"...This is a bit—crude, isn’t it?"
Fake money at least sowhat resembles real money; this is just a number scribbled on a piece of white paper trying to pass as fake—no, real money, which really tests his cognitive tolerance.
"Written like this, can this really serve as currency in these ruins?"
No one answered.
The lonely Xiao Li thought it over, still pocketed a handful of paper strips, bundled them up, and stuffed them into his school trousers pocket.
"Better to keep so, just in case they co in handy."
After grabbing probably over twenty, he left the pile of fake bills, hugged the wall carefully walking to the operations room, avoided the mannequin "dead" on the office chair, and found a set of keys on the table.
The keys were placed conspicuously.
But there were no other keys, so with so skepticism, Li Yang took that bunch, and found the ATM’s spot at the back, trying each key, one by one.
Possibly due to a bad luck aura, or perhaps he’d used up all his luck finding this card, because it wasn’t until the last key that he found out it was bent.
The last key had been bent by soone!
He stood there dumbfounded, holding up the key, accusingly looking at the cara and the staff behind it: "...who’s so malicious?!"
The staff covered their mouths, laughing until they crouched down, the caraman was barely holding back their laughter.
The key clattered to the ground, Li Yang plopped down, fuming as he grabbed his hair and declared, "Don’t let catch who did it! Such malice!"
The malicious individual’s deeds were obviously not limited to this.
Soon enough, he discovered that whatever the bent key was used for, he struggled and finally bent it back enough to fit into the keyhole, barely feeling joy for two seconds, gave it a slight twist, and the key broke inside the lock.
Broke! Inside! It!
He inhaled sharply, almost fainting.
So angry he jumped, so much so he covered his eyes spinning around 360 degrees, so infuriated his vision darkened.
"What kind of crap is this?! Where did this low-quality key co from?!"
The staff’s laughter was impossible to stifle; it echoed clearly into his ears.
Li Yang instantly redirected his anger: "Was it you guys? Sabotaging clues wherever I go, weren’t you?! I won’t believe if it were Brother Huai and Sister Guan Yu here, this key would also break!"
This bad luck is like a toothache—not a big deal until it strikes at a critical mont, it’s lethal. This is downright discrimination! A brutal blow for past losers!
The staff could barely utter a word from laughing, only shaking heads, the sound of laughter reached the recorder.
The more they laughed, the angrier he got, tossing the key aside and yanking the door furiously.
Probably on the fifth pull, the darn door creaked open by itself... opened.... opened....
Li Yang: "......"
The cara quietly snuck over, aid at his face, capturing his expression clearly.
From shock to disbelief, to puzzlent, and finally to numbness.
Impeccably layered.
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