Chapter 159: Cheating

As for why Lin Zhongqing wasn't chosen for comparison, the man was a tycoon who used cheats—Lang Sheng had already lost at the starting line. The only way for him to overtake on a curve was for the opponent to crash.

Take that Tiger Mountain that had just appeared, for instance; she would only need to accumulate thirty billion points of spiritual energy to overturn it.

If she scraped the earth to the bone, she could definitely pull it off.

However, the problem was that while overturning Tiger Mountain was easy, what would happen if another Dragon Mountain appeared?

After scraping it once, the productivity left on Earth would no longer be enough for her to extract a second time.

Yet Earth was a spiritual isolated island, incapable of external inputs, relying entirely on self-accumulation.

As long as this self-accumulation grew strong enough, theoretically speaking, Lin Zhongqing would be sufficient to deal with all evil spirits.

At this thought, he suddenly remembered Lin Zhongshi, who had been thrown into some kind of Asura arena to take part in a management competition.

If he could win the competition and bring advanced management experience back to Earth, it would be a timely help to Lin Zhongqing in building up her strength.

With one following the other in such a seamless coordination, this surely could not be a coincidence.

Could someone else be secretly assisting Lin Zhongqing?

No, pie does not fall from the sky.

This ought to be a test; the mastermind behind the scenes wanted to see what kind of capital she truly possessed.

For a barren land like Earth to suddenly produce an entity capable of thrashing colonists would undoubtedly arouse the curiosity of any colonist.

Even though the defeated party was merely an insignificant exile—comparable to a bankrupt minor European aristocrat of modern times—his background and origins were still there.

At a point like this, two attitudes typically emerged. One was to directly crush the target to death, much like the will manifested by Tiger Mountain; the other was to treat the target as a valuable oddity, just like the Indigenous peoples who, despite being backward and uncivilized, held gold in their hands that served as currency everywhere...

As for how much value the strange objects in Lin Zhongqing's hands truly held, and whether they were worth seizing, it all depended on Lin Zhongshi's performance...

Tracing the root cause of everything that had happened recently, it probably boiled down to this.

When Fan Bei figured this out, a lingering fear gripped his heart.

The better Lin Zhongshi survived in that management arena, the greater the danger he and his sister would face.

The newcomer who had just made a move was deeply hidden, but fortunately, he was not hiding shallowly either.

A sage of the previous life once said: conceal yourself, and clear out your enemies.

In this perilous world of the end times, being too conspicuous was like hanging a bright lantern in the night—it made you the prime target.

He flipped through the pages of *Father of the System*, checking on Lin Zhongshi's movements.

Playing chess against this new heavyweight meant that he couldn't afford to lack chess pieces or intelligence.

***

Copper Fortress.

Lin Zhongqing was immersed in her conscious world, where Dongfang Yitong was streaming the live broadcast for her.

"The mastermind behind the scenes is probably trying to test you, but his target is me," he analyzed, virtually copying Fan Bei's reasoning verbatim.

"I think so too. Otherwise, how could he have happened to choose Stone, and at the same time suppressed that powerful Tiger Mountain?" Lin Zhongqing, however, was full of fighting spirit. "Since he wants to play this game, it actually buys us time to maneuver. If we had to fight head-on right away, our only option would be to run."

"Exactly. He doesn't want us to flee or take our own lives outright, because that would be meaningless to him. They have plenty of patience to dig out your secret," Dongfang Yitong continued.

The two of them exchanged thoughts clearly and logically, speculating on the hidden puppet master's intentions.

Ceasing their chatter, they turned their attention to the live broadcast.

This was because after the system achievement "Blood is Thicker Than Water" had been shared with Lin Zhongshi, the system rules had partially bound to his soul, allowing them to perceive events happening around him.

Naturally, the perspective was limited to Lin Zhongshi's own viewpoint; it was impossible to see or perceive what he could not.

Lin Zhongshi now appeared inside a thatched hut, which served as his dwelling.

Inside the room were a dozen primitive people covered only in thatch. With bewildered eyes, they prostrated themselves on the ground, performing deep kowtows before him.

In the oracle, Lin Zhongshi was revered as the guide of their civilization—ageless and immortal, indestructible, possessing profound wisdom and a magnificent will.

Yet none of them knew that this very guide had almost died just a short while ago.

Right now, Lin Zhongshi was full of confidence. Following the techniques transmitted by Dongfang Yitong, he was teaching these people how to make fertilizer, practice intensive farming, and increase crop yields.

Food was the foundation of all development; he understood this better than anyone. The rise of the industrial age was equally built upon this premise.

The Age of Discovery had opened up more land, supplying Europe with more food and other necessities, allowing them to break free from the dynastic cycle of chaos and order and establishing the foundation for industrial development.

Latecomers had no such luck; initially, they could only desperately squeeze their citizens to drive primitive accumulation.

Making fertilizer sounded simple, but without experience, it was terribly troublesome—collection, fermentation, fertilization... What seemed like a task easily completed by an ordinary old farmer would take an ordinary person with zero knowledge years of fumbling to master the specific techniques if they had to start from scratch with just a conceptual understanding.

And in this world, time was the most precious commodity of all.

Lin Zhongshi had failed last time precisely because of time. He understood quite a few things, but they were merely the theoretical output of his family's upbringing, leaving him no time for deep practical application.

Just like farming—the only land he had ever cultivated was that tiny garden at home, and even that was only done on rare occasions.

So much so that over the past two years, he had stumbled down all sorts of wrong paths, resulting in the lowest score.

He had suffered the harshest punishment: soul execution.

Now, having survived the torture, he had entered for a second time and been assigned to a new tribe, while his original tribe would naturally be annexed and taken over by others.

Things were different this time. Dongfang Yitong had directly transmitted the Shenzhou farming tutorial to him, complete with both videos and text—absolute perfection as a blueprint for starting from scratch.

When it came to intensive farming under inferior conditions, Shenzhou ranked near the top; many ancestors had carved out barren lands relying on nothing more than a single hoe.

Consulting the tutorial, Lin Zhongshi lectured the primitive people step by step.

These primitive people were not stupid; they recognized the formidable power of these precious techniques. Their minds were free from snobbish notions that deemed all pursuits inferior to scholarly study. Growing more food meant being able to raise more children, which in turn meant their tribe could grow stronger.

And the one who could bring all this to them was their god, their guide.

The feeling of cheating was fantastic; cheating once was thrilling, and cheating continuously was endlessly thrilling.

*Sigh, I never expected myself to degenerate as well...*

Lin Zhongshi sighed inwardly, but the thought of rejecting such assistance was out of the question.

He wasn't that pedantic.

"First of all, you must maintain good personal hygiene... The gods only favor clean lives."

After rattling off a long speech, the minor chieftains of the primitive people dispersed.

They were the ones who had to do the heavy lifting—organizing people to dig pits, collecting human and animal waste to make farmyard manure, and teaching others how to farm intensively and utilize crude agricultural tools for maximum efficiency.

The divine messenger had proclaimed that compared to their previous slash-and-burn agriculture, yields could be increased more than threefold, turning one mu into the equivalent of three.

Previously, sowing a catty of seeds in the fields yielded only six catties; now, it could yield over twenty catties. A mu of land that originally produced only eighty to one hundred catties could now harvest over three hundred catties.

Although there was still plenty of wasteland outside, in an era where travel depended entirely on one's feet, they were inevitably restricted from developing areas too far from their settlement, capping the number of fields they could maintain.

At most, they could manage the land within a radius of two to three miles around their dwellings; going any further meant the food consumed on the journey would outweigh what they brought back.