Chapter 152: Market Sweep
There was no guarantee that the owners had even been inside when the apocalypse began.
Aside from one delicatessen, none of the shops even had employees present, so there simply had not been many people there in the first place.
The zombies in the market provided Joo Joowon with a total of nine points of experience.
The aquatic zombies, meanwhile, compensated for their low value through sheer numbers and gradually contributed another eight points of experience altogether.
The amount of experience provided by the aquatic creatures was not fixed.
Some gave 0.1 experience, some gave 0.3, and others only provided values like 0.03.
Joo Joowon had no idea whether the system simply rounded everything up at the end, but the experience he actually received always appeared as a whole number without any decimal points attached to it.
Because his Mental Power’s talent had already been permanently fixed, Joo Joowon could no longer use Mind’s Eye to inspect the drops inside.
Fortunately, Enhanced Cognition had not become completely useless under these circumstances.
He could still see the pillars of light hidden within the flames.
By using spider silk, Joo Joowon pulled the cards contained within those pillars of light out toward him.
Only after they reached his hands did he realize that these dropped cards were incomplete.
They were actually Fragments.
...
[ Card Fragment ]
[ Grade ]: ?
[ Description ]: Dropped by Level 0 minor monsters that are insufficient to generate complete cards on their own. Gather ten fragments to randomly combine them into a Doomsday Card.
...
Joo Joowon counted the fragments he currently possessed.
Twelve.
That was already enough to synthesize one card.
Without hesitation, he immediately selected the synthesis option.
The card fragments floated into the air and began assembling themselves together as though guided by some invisible force, fitting together like pieces of a puzzle.
Eventually, they formed a brand new card.
Joo Joowon picked it up and examined it.
...
[ Sea Pearl Pill ]
[ Grade ]: Normal
[ Description ]: Grants the user the ability to breathe underwater for fifteen minutes. Movement speed underwater becomes identical to movement speed on land.
...
Joo Joowon then glanced back at the description of the card fragments.
You call this random?
There was no way he believed that this result was truly random.
The monsters he had killed all lived underwater and the synthesized card just happened to produce an ability related to water?
There was not even the slightest hint of randomness in that.
After thinking about it carefully, however, Joo Joowon felt as though he had grasped a clue.
Perhaps this so-called randomness only existed within a limited range.
After all, card fragments themselves did not indicate what type of monster had dropped them.
If someone possessed fragments dropped from several different kinds of monsters, there was no way that person would bother sorting them into separate categories.
They would simply pull out ten fragments at random and perform the synthesis.
Under those circumstances, what kind of card would ultimately be created really would become a matter of luck and complete uncertainty.
After storing the Sea Pearl Pill inside the Spatial Waist Pendant, Joo Joowon prepared to leave.
This place no longer had any value for him.
After looking around the surroundings for a moment, Joo Joowon used spider silk to pull both gates of the market completely open.
Although the supplies inside were nowhere near as plentiful as those in a supermarket and consisted mostly of salt, sugar, garlic, ginger, seasonings, and at best some eggs, noodles, and flour, they were still enough to fill some people’s stomachs.
Leaving them here to go to waste would be a shame.
For ordinary people, climbing over the main gate would be difficult enough on its own, and the old metal gate would inevitably make a lot of noise in the process.
By opening the gates, the risks involved for anyone entering to search for supplies would be significantly reduced.
At the very least, they would be less likely to attract the attention of zombies.
Joo Joowon had no intention of doing anything more than that.
There was no way he was going to go door to door handing out charity.
He was not that kind-hearted.
Only people with enough courage to venture outside and search for supplies would have any chance of surviving in this cruel world.
One of the shops inside the market sold eggs and also stocked preserved eggs and salted eggs.
Joo Joowon remembered that preserved eggs could remain edible for anywhere between three and six months.
Unlike ordinary eggs, they would not splatter all over the place and go to waste if they were accidentally broken.
They could barely be considered valuable supplies.
Unfortunately, Joo Joowon disliked eggs of every kind.
Preserved eggs in particular were something he had tried multiple times throughout his life and had never once enjoyed.
Because of that, he did not take a single one and simply left them all behind.
After leaving the market, Joo Joowon thought for a moment before leading Byeol and Hwi toward the hospital.
There was no way he would dare approach a major hospital.
Places like that never lacked people regardless of the hour, which meant the chances of Boss monsters appearing there were extremely high.
Fortunately, there were no major hospitals nearby.
Aside from a few roadside clinics, the only things in the area were pharmacies.
The largest hospital nearby was still relatively small and incapable of performing major surgeries.
Joo Joowon had no intention of entering that hospital either.
He had never studied medicine, so even if he risked going inside, he would not know what supplies were worth taking.
Instead, he only entered the small clinics, collecting large amounts of common medicines before moving on to pharmacies and taking various vitamin supplements as well as medicine used to treat external injuries.
The fifty pound carrying limit of the Spatial Waist Pendant was actually quite generous.
After all, it only cared about the weight and placed no restrictions whatsoever on size.