I Am Your Natural Enemy

Over three days, the power of the Pauper’s Radiance Halo kept ramping up, and the overall earnings of this group of Ghost Wealth Gods started nosediving.

They just complained a bit out loud, but in reality, this didn’t set off any alarm bells for them.

Even under normal circumstances, it’s not like they earn money every single day, and when they get together and brag, the standard line is, ”I’m having a rough time, it’s just these few scraps, can’t trade them for anything.”

Now it’s the same, you ask and they say, ”I’m having a rough time, didn’t make a dime.”

At least among the Ghost Wealth Gods here, the vast majority would never tell others how much they actually made.

When everyone brags and swaps tips, it’s only because they’re all far apart, basically not competing with each other.

On top of that, a lot of their experience only fits the local situation and doesn’t work elsewhere, so when they’re shooting the breeze they don’t have many scruples.

People like Zhou Xiaorong, who specialize in just one field, are the rare exceptions.

So now that the overall numbers start dropping, nobody’s really on guard; ups and downs are perfectly normal.

Ren Yubao squatted here without moving, gradually releasing his power, while on the other side, preparations at the Scorching Sun Department were proceeding in an orderly fashion.

A large number of little shrines that fell into the loophole category and didn’t need to be reported were all photographed during the day and archived one after another.

On Wen Yan’s side, with Zhou Xiaorong assisting him, he had already started the positioning work.

Zhou Xiaorong numbered all one hundred and eighteen small shrines in the plaza.

He described each shrine according to its number: how it looked, the materials used, its approximate size, overall or partial colors, and then described the shrine’s distinctive features, using these as auxiliary recognition nodes.

Wen Yan then fed these descriptions into the Black Box, and the Black Box searched through the various photos taken over the past few days across the commanderies where the Scorching Sun Department was deployed, looking for pictures that matched the criteria.

After the Black Box finished filtering, it handed the small batch of candidates over to Zhou Xiaorong for confirmation.

Once Zhou Xiaorong confirmed them, Wen Yan would have Men Xinsheng confirm them again, adding another layer of safety.

The whole process had to be run at least twice.

Within three days, out of the one hundred and eighteen shrines, one hundred and ten had already been pinned down to specific locations.

And these locations were all re-confirmed at night using special imaging devices; only when Ghost Wealth Gods showed up there at night would they be finally confirmed.

The last few locations hadn’t been confirmed yet, mainly because those few shrines were in areas that weren’t densely populated, and those particular shrines had long since been abandoned and left without worshippers.

Tracking them down now was indeed tricky, especially one shrine which, according to Zhou Xiaorong’s description, was identified as having a northwestern style, which made the search even harder.

Because out there it’s just too vast and sparsely populated; in some places, a sub-commandery-level administrative unit can be larger in area than an entire commandery in the South, with nearly four thousand mu of land per person on average.

In such a huge place with so few people, trying to locate an unworshipped little shrine—if you don’t have support in manpower and equipment from Scorching Sun Department personnel in the outer commanderies, and rely purely on manual searching—finding it within a year would already be insanely efficient.

On the fifth day, drone after drone flew over the desert, streaming data back in real time for the AI to process first.

Relying on the drones doing a carpet-style sweep, they finally found that shrine buried in a ruin half-swallowed by yellow sand.

No one had any idea how the Ghost Wealth God of that shrine managed to make money in a place like this.

In this region, you have uninhabited zones stretching a hundred kilometers at a time; forget about people, even seeing one or two Ghosts would be rare.

In the end, all one hundred and eighteen shrines had their locations fully confirmed.

After Wen Yan confirmed them on his side, he submitted the information, and the final verification procedure was handed over to the Scorching Sun Department.

Wen Yan held his phone and mulled it over.

”That great hall—do you still remember what it looked like?”

”Huh?” Zhou Xiaorong was stunned.

”Since every single shrine there corresponds to a Ghost Wealth God, is it possible that the great hall also corresponds to someone—or something?”

”Uh... I do remember it, I even remember what it looked like inside, it’s just...”

”Tell me everything you remember. Height, style, color, materials—give me all the data you can.”

Wen Yan didn’t keep reading what came after; he directly had the Black Box take over all subsequent related content and dump it entirely into the Black Box, without letting anyone else see it.

He was worried that the detailed information about that great hall was the most sensitive data of all.

After setting it up, Wen Yan added another command for the Black Box.

”Once you receive the relevant description, start matching immediately.”

Then, after thinking for a moment, he added another line.

”Matching range is not limited to the Divine Land. Outside the Divine Land, prioritize the Nanyang region.”

If such a great hall really existed somewhere, it was unlikely to be in a completely uninhabited area.

Nowadays everyone carries a camera; on the open internet, someone would have taken a photo.

As long as it’s been around long enough, there will definitely be pictures.

After setting all that up, Wen Yan put his phone away.

Zhou Xiaorong’s description was very detailed: roughly how tall, how wide, what the internal layout was—he provided a set of approximate but workable numbers.

And that alone was enough to let the Black Box filter out more than half the candidates.

The Black Box began mobilizing computing power to complete the matching.

Inside the Scorching Sun Department, someone reported upwards again that computing power was insufficient, making the work really hard to do; some tasks done purely by manpower were just too inefficient.

The General Director opened his device and checked the computing power distribution. At the moment, among all single tasks, the Black Box was taking up the biggest slice; no one knew what the Black Box was working on, but it had pulled in a massive amount of compute.