7: Chapter 7 Floating Treasure Chest

A few minutes later, he pieced together the truth from the vast sea of comments.

"Holy crap, can you guys believe it? I just ran into a floating bronze treasure chest on the flight path! I opened it and got a tube of blue [Primary Gene Enhancement Serum]! After injecting it, I feel like I could punch a cow to death with one hit!"

"To the guy above, I found one too! But I opened a silver treasure chest, and it had two tubes of serum inside! The system notified me that my personal combat power reached a critical value, and I was directly promoted to Tier 2! Now I can lift hundreds of pounds with one hand!"

"I envy the big shots flying at the front... All the ownerless treasure chests on the flight path have been picked clean by you guys along the way, and we flying behind can't even see a single hair!"

Seeing this, Zhou An was completely speechless, his mouth twitching slightly.

"So they were random floating treasure chests on the flight path..."

He finally understood where the problem lay. Sky Survival was a one-way flight marathon; five million people were in the same area, and those with faster speeds flew at the front, acting like a giant comb that scraped the flight path clean of naturally spawning ordinary supply crates, bronze treasure chests, and silver treasure chests.

And what about him? With a top speed of 50 km/h, he was permanently stuck in the "tail-ender" position, lagging behind 99% of the players.

Throughout his journey, he had either voluntarily dove into resource rains that others avoided, or gone to tiny, deserted floating islands to fight boss monsters. As for those easy-to-get, freebie treasure chests floating in the sky...

He hadn't encountered a single one! They had all been picked completely clean by the millions of people ahead!

Zhou An looked at his massive, sturdy Tier 2 vehicle, then back at his own Tier 1 body, which was still at the level of an ordinary person; for a moment, he didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

"This won't do. No matter how strong the vehicle is, if someone forcefully boards, my puny body won't be able to take a punch from a Tier 2 enhancer. I must find a way to get the gene serum!"

"Since the people in front have scraped all the good stuff in the sky clean, I'll just change my strategy."

Zhou An closed the forum.

The system had previously warned that flight altitude must be maintained between 10,000 and 20,000 meters.

He was currently in the safe middle range of around 15,000 meters.

Those survivors who were frantically accelerating or even attacking each other to compete for treasure chests were inevitably causing a large number of crashes.

And at this altitude, gravity seemed to be affected by some mysterious rule, causing objects to fall much more slowly than on Earth.

"In other words, those vehicles that were destroyed or ran out of fuel wouldn't immediately shatter into pieces, but would instead drift like falling leaves, sinking slowly through the clouds for a long time."

The millions of people in front were like locusts passing through; not only did they sweep away the treasure chests, but they must have also left the sky full of "corpses"!

Others were in a hurry to move forward and had no time to stop and dismantle the wreckage.

But he was different; he had the Little Giant for infinite endurance, and he was fully capable of being a leisurely scavenger in this area!

"Lower altitude, start sweeping for mines!"

Zhou An pushed the joystick, and the four ducted fans at the bottom of the Cloud Top Fortress slowly decelerated, its massive fuselage beginning to descend steadily toward the clouds below.

14,000 meters... 13,000 meters... 12,000 meters...

As the altitude decreased, the surrounding clouds became increasingly dense and chilly, and visibility began to drop.

Suddenly, a dim gray dot flashed on the radar.

Zhou An immediately shone the searchlight in that direction. A few hundred meters away, diagonally below, a broken biplane was emitting black smoke, circling and falling slowly like a bird with broken wings.

The wings were riddled with bullet holes, and a pool of blood was vaguely visible in the cockpit, clearly the result of a fierce air battle.

Zhou An didn't hesitate to maneuver the Cloud Top Fortress closer, its massive shadow instantly engulfing the wreckage.

He opened the bottom hatch, leaned out, and aimed the system's dismantling reticle at the biplane.

[System Prompt: Ownerless Tier 1 vehicle wreckage detected. Dismantle?]

"Dismantle!"

A deep blue light swept over, and the biplane silently disintegrated in mid-air.

[Dismantling successful! Obtained: Tier 1 Steel x 45 units, Aviation Fuel x 3 units, Damaged Canvas x 2 units.]

"It really works!" Zhou An licked his lips. This was much easier than going to dangerous floating islands to kill monsters.

With the successful experience of the first time, Zhou An completely switched to low-altitude corpse-collecting mode.

He maintained the altitude of the Cloud Top Fortress at around 11,000 meters.

Wrecks of hot air balloons, skeletons of airplanes... In just one day, Zhou An intercepted and dismantled over six hundred pieces of scrapped vehicle wreckage.

After finishing this haul, Zhou An pulled up his altitude again, returning to the relatively clear airspace at 15,000 meters, and began to take inventory of his warehouse.

The results of the morning were extremely bountiful:

[Tier 1 Steel: 1240 units]

[Tier 1 Wood: 850 units]

[Aviation Fuel: 1050 units]

[Rubber, Scrap Iron (some)]

Looking at the full warehouse of supplies, Zhou An was overjoyed.

"Over a thousand units of metal and fuel; if this were in one of those large guilds, it would probably be a significant strategic reserve."

More importantly, he had [Compound Interest]!

"Right now, if I deposit a thousand, it only generates 10 units of interest per day. But as long as I keep collecting these 'corpses', once the base reaches ten thousand, that's 100 units of freebies every day! If it reaches one hundred thousand, that's 1000 units every day!"

Zhou An seemed to see a bright future where he was lying on a mountain of resources counting money.

"Having tasted the sweetness, I should go a bit deeper to see if I can find more intact wreckage."

Getting a bit cocky, Zhou An decided to challenge the system's warning threshold. He pushed the joystick again, letting the Cloud Top Fortress slowly approach the 10,000-meter warning line.

10,500 meters... 10,200 meters...

As the altitude approached 10,000 meters, the surrounding light almost completely disappeared, and the clouds turned into a depressing leaden gray. The air was filled with an indescribable, fishy stench, as if something huge was watching him from the shadows.

"Drip—"

A drop of viscous black liquid suddenly fell onto the windshield, followed by a second drop, then a third.

Zhou An frowned, and before he could turn on the windshield wipers, a shrill system alarm suddenly rang in his mind:

[Warning! You have entered the shallow pollution zone of the Abyss (Altitude: 9980 meters)!]

[Indescribable biological interference detected, SAN value is decreasing! Current rate: -1 point/minute!]

[Warning! When SAN value falls below 50, severe auditory and visual hallucinations will occur; below 20, the vehicle will lose control and plunge into the Abyss!]

Zhou An's expression changed drastically. He immediately checked his personal panel; his original 95 SAN value had already dropped to 93!

Almost at the same time, out of the corner of his eye, he seemed to see a massive tentacle, over a hundred meters long, roll in the depths of the leaden-gray sea of clouds outside the window, then vanish into the darkness.

An inexplicable chill shot from his tailbone straight to the top of his head. Zhou An could even hear his own violent heartbeat, and a kind of sticky whispering faintly reached his ears.

"Damn! There really is something terrifying down there!"

Zhou An's scalp tingled, and without hesitation, he yanked the pull-up lever all the way.

The four ducted fans of the Cloud Top Fortress roared, blasting out violent air currents, and the massive fuselage climbed frantically at top speed, forcibly breaking free from that leaden-gray layer of clouds.