My Dating Sim Just Got an Update - Chapter 5

Perhaps it was because she had faced a zombie head-on, used her wits to escape, and successfully navigated to a safe hotel room using the mini-map, but Ren Chenxi felt a surge of will to live that was stronger than ever before.

See? These mindless zombies weren’t all that. No matter how fast they were, they couldn’t outrun her logic. Maybe she really could struggle through ten years in this apocalypse, complete the quest, and return to the real world. Thinking of her beautiful life back home, Chenxi’s determination to survive hardened.

Once she reached the hotel and locked herself in the room she had stayed in previously, the first thing she did was call up her inventory panel.

To stay alive, the most critical resource was food. Chenxi opened her bag and began a thorough audit of her supplies. Luckily, throughout her travels, she had made it a habit to buy local specialties at every stop, tossing them into her inventory to snack on or to save for when she was back at university and tired of canteen food. Besides snacks, she had some heavy-duty items: ham, jerky sausages—she had even bought several massive jars of pickled vegetables. The shopkeeper’s pickles had been so delicious that Chenxi, fearing she’d never taste them again, had bought multiple jars in one go.

Since items in the system inventory exist in a state of stasis, she never had to worry about rot or spoilage. Time simply stopped for anything inside the bag.

After confirming she had enough food to last at least six months, Chenxi breathed a sigh of relief. But then a thought struck her, and she rushed to the bathroom. She emerged a moment later with a gloomy expression and slumped back onto the sofa to check her water supply. Food was vital, but drinking water was a matter of immediate life or death.

She had returned to the game two years into the apocalypse. She didn’t know about other places, but in this hotel, the water flowing from the taps was murky and tinged with green. Just looking at it told her it was undrinkable. Back when she was just a tourist, water was never a concern. Now, she realized with growing dread that despite all the junk in her bag, she only had two containers of water.

Specifically, she had two thermal flasks: one 3L and one 800ml.

Fortunately, while her inventory was dry, the room still had the complimentary bottled water provided by the hotel. Perhaps because the apocalypse had hit during the off-season, the hotel hadn’t been full, and for some reason, no other survivors had broken in. The two bottles of mineral water on her desk were untouched. Chenxi figured other rooms would likely have leftover water as well.

During her first week back, she spent two days methodically scavenging room by room. Her luck held out; she managed to find over sixty bottles of mineral water.

As for whether the water was expired after two years.

Ha! Facing the prospect of dying of thirst, did she really care about an expiration date? Besides, the system had labeled them as “drinkable,” so what was there to fear? As for how the system decided…

It was simple: she just had to put an item into a slot and check its info. The descriptions were incredibly detailed. For example: Expired mineral water from XX Hotel x1 Drinkable.

Other items read: A jar of Grandma Chen’s homemade pickles x6 (Very delicious) A large bag of Uncle Memet’s handmade rock-hard naan x3 Edible.

Back during her travels, Chenxi had often used this “Check Item Info” feature to avoid trouble.

Even before the update, when the game world was still at peace, Chenxi had never let her guard down just because it was a “brain-dead dating sim.” This world felt too real. She never went out to clubs late at night, and even when meeting “honest-looking” fellow travelers, she remained vigilant.

Thanks to the system, she had avoided several disasters. Checking the drinks offered by others, she had seen: 100ml fruit wine spiked with knock-out drops, 200ml Cola spiked with suspicious pills, and even 100ml fruit juice laced with extra-strength laxatives.

She had no idea what the person with the laxatives was thinking. Were they jealous of how “handsome” she looked as a guy and wanted her to have an accident in front of the girls? Regardless of the intent, Chenxi had always found a way to quietly give the drinks back to the original owners.

The inventory was incredibly convenient. It could store items in containers, but it could also store “loose” items. Chenxi would often pretend to take a sip of a drink while actually pulling 100ml into her inventory to check the info. When she took the liquid back out, it would be in a “loose” state, but the system allowed her to manifest stored items into any container or location within a three-meter radius.

Using this trick, she had once made the man who tried to spike her drink with laxatives spend a very long afternoon in front of everyone, and she’d ensured other creeps got a taste of their own medicine too.

This system inventory was easily one of her greatest assets for surviving the end of the world.

Her other primary asset was a skill she had leveled up on a whim just to impress the goddess: Accuracy.

In the original dating sim, none of the skills were combat-oriented; they were all about academics, lifestyle, or pleasing the target. When Chenxi leveled up Accuracy, she wasn’t thinking about fighting. She did it because, during a school festival, one of the classes had organized a shooting gallery. The grand prize was a giant, human-sized teddy bear.

At the time, Chenxi was competing with another suitor for the goddess’s attention. Seeing her rival popping balloons with 90% accuracy, she had panicked and scrolled through her skill list until she found “Accuracy.” Since she had plenty of points from her “affection exchanges,” she dumped every last one of them into that skill, maxing it out instantly.

With 100% accuracy, she won the bear. Unfortunately, the goddess had immediately turned around and given the bear to a little girl standing nearby. At the time, Chenxi was heartbroken, never imagining that this random skill would become her lifeline.

Of course, 100% accuracy wouldn’t be very useful if she didn’t have a weapon. The only thing in her bag was a baseball bat she’d bought for protection during her travels. Without a ranged weapon, she’d have to throw things, and with her limited strength, it was doubtful if she could even reach an enemy, let alone hurt them.

However, while organizing her bag, she noticed a single slot containing a book, tucked away near her old university textbooks. While she usually stacked similar books together, this one occupied its own slot. Curious, she checked the info.

It turned out that she had overlooked a Skill Advancement Book that had been part of her “Update Gift Pack.”

Her excitement quickly turned to uncertainty. An advancement book was used to upgrade a maxed-out skill, but most of her skills were for cooking or studying. Would “Advanced Cooking” make her a Chef Queen? Or “Advanced Academics” make her a super-scholar?

Still, she went through her list and eventually settled on “Accuracy.” In the games she played back home, accuracy was always a combat stat. It had to be useful.

The moment she applied the book to the maxed-out skill, the text turned from white to a vibrant red. The description changed:

Accuracy Advanced Level 1: Within 10 meters, 100% hit rate on target.

Chenxi beamed. Did this mean that as long as a zombie was within ten meters, even if she didn’t have the strength to throw something that far, the object would still find its mark? To test it, she grabbed a small fruit knife from the room. As luck would have it, a zombie was currently stumbling past the hotel below. From her third-floor window, it was exactly within the ten-meter range.

Thwack!

The fruit knife she dropped from above slammed perfectly into the very center of the zombie’s head.

“ROAARRR!!!” The zombie let out a furious howl and looked around wildly. It failed to spot Chenxi, who was peeking out from behind the curtain, and eventually wandered off with the knife still sticking out of its skull.

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