Chapter 14

Chapter 14: Pet Food Price Hike

Ling Mo scrolled through her phone. The top trending topic was impossible to miss: Was the game’s appearance a good thing or a bad thing?

The discussion was fueled by hospital reports. A lot of people were being admitted after falling into comas from high fevers.

Some cases were heatstroke—people refusing to use air conditioning in this heat—but most were game players.

Their temperatures were terrifying, commonly reaching 40°C, and medicine didn’t seem to help at all.

Ling Mo remembered what the System had said during her awakening.

Three days.

She suspected that was the limit. And if she had to guess, the shorter the awakening, the stronger the talent.

In the comments, experts offered the brilliant advice that if medicine didn’t work, people should endure it and stay in cooler environments as much as possible.

Ling Mo read two lines and lost interest. They might as well have said, “Try not to die.”

She switched to a forum packed with survival enthusiasts. People were venting nonstop: grain prices were rising too fast, their money couldn’t buy anything, and some couldn’t buy grain at all.

Ling Mo posted a suggestion: stock up on cat food and dog food.

So what if it was pet food? At a time like this, nobody had the luxury of being picky. In the old days, people had eaten tree bark and grass.

Dog food and cat food had meat in them. That was more nutrition than bark could ever dream of. And other pet feeds were high-quality protein.

Pets ate better than people these days. Everyone knew it.

Her comment detonated like a bomb.

Pet owners might have already thought of it, but plenty of people who’d never kept animals hadn’t even considered it.

Ling Mo had no idea that because of her single post, pet food factories would be buried under orders that night.

Even if she did know, she probably wouldn’t have cared. As long as her own shipments arrived, that was all that mattered.

The next morning, her 6 a.m. alarm rang on time.

Ling Mo dragged herself out of bed, washed up, changed, and ate breakfast.

The pool had filled overnight. She stored it in the pocket space, assembled another pool, and started filling again.

That took an hour.

At 7 a.m. sharp, she opened the interstellar learning machine and began studying.

interstellar felt like a different form of Chinese—difficult, but not incomprehensible. She struggled, but she wasn’t lost.

By late morning, she felt as if a brand-new door had opened in her mind.

Then the doorbell rang, pulling her out of her focus.

Her pet food order had arrived.

Three full trucks—one for cat food, one for dog food, one for pet snacks.

And that wasn’t even everything. Another portion had been delivered to an external warehouse.

The villa came with a garage, but since Ling Mo didn’t own a car, she used it as storage.

As the workers hauled boxes inside, she overheard them talking.

Pet food prices had skyrocketed in just one day—especially cat and dog food—rising the way grain had.

One worker shook his head. “Young lady, you ordered at the perfect time. If you’d waited even a day, this much pet food would’ve cost you several times more—and you might not even be able to get it.”

Ling Mo handed out sealed bottles of water. “I didn’t have a choice. I can’t compete with those uncles and aunties, so I had to take another route.”

After they left, she closed the garage door and stored everything in the pocket space, leaving only a small amount outside.

She wasn’t planning to eat pet food. It was just camouflage.

After lunch, she took a one-hour nap, then headed to her home gym.

She’d never worked out before and barely knew how to use the machines. Training blindly could strain something and set her back.

So she followed tutorial videos step by step, slow and careful.

By the afternoon, she was exhausted and drenched in sweat—but there was also a strange satisfaction in it.

As dusk approached and the temperature finally dipped, she showered, changed into clean clothes, put on a sun hat, and made sure she was properly protected before going out.

Before leaving, she removed the cat food and dog food from the time-stopped warehouse space. After this, it would be too close to expiration. This was likely the last time she’d be able to use it.

On the way back, she noticed two fully armed soldiers posted outside every supermarket. Some smaller markets were closed entirely today.

Her mental power made her senses sharper. She could tell those weapons weren’t props—and they were loaded.

She stopped and walked into a large supermarket. It was still crowded, but everything was orderly. Nothing like yesterday’s frenzy.

She checked the grain prices again.

300 yuan per jin of rice.

And each person could only buy one jin per day.

So the authorities had finally stepped in.

Had some players already awakened?

Ling Mo did the math. From the end of the first game until now, today was exactly the third day.

The world never lacked talented people.

Reality matched her guess. A few players had awakened—but not many, and all of them were trained soldiers with iron willpower.

With the purchase limits in place, Ling Mo couldn’t buy much. The money sitting in her account felt useless—if she couldn’t spend it, it might as well be scrap paper.

And online shopping was gone now. Even if you placed an order, no one shipped.

Back home, she tossed what she’d bought into the pocket space, turned on the TV, and trained her mental power while watching the news.

“Training,” in her case, meant using mental power to do chores—assembling pools, cleaning, shifting furniture around.

Her mental power was still weak. She could only move smaller pieces of furniture, and not for long.

But the biggest surprise was this: she could now store objects into the pocket space from a distance. Before, she’d needed to touch them with both hands.

It had to be related to the way her talent had mutated.

Her perception range had expanded too—from an initial three-meter radius to five.