Chapter 15

Chapter 15: Awakening

Ling Mo’s current goal was to expand her mental power until it could cover the entire villa.

That way, if anyone broke in, she would know immediately and have time to prepare.

As for why her talent had mutated, Ling Mo suspected it had something to do with her pocket space.

Otherwise, why would her mental power be mixed with pocket space attributes instead of something else?

As expected, today’s news finally featured talent users.

On TV, two tall young men stood straight as pines. One made a ball of flame appear out of thin air; the other summoned a coil of purple lightning. Even Ling Mo, a player herself, couldn’t help thinking, This is insanely cool.

Fire and lightning. No one needed to question their combat power.

Their appearance was like a tranquilizer for the public. People who had been panicking finally started to calm down.

At the same time, anyone with family members who were players couldn’t help getting excited, wondering what their own family would awaken.

Next, the news host announced two updates, one good and one bad.

The good news was that the temperature had stabilized and wouldn’t keep rising for now. The bad news was that the average daytime temperature had already climbed past fifty degrees.

Experts urged everyone not to go out during the day.

And with the heat wave dragging on, fires had broken out in many places. Residents were being told to cut down dead trees nearby to reduce the risk of fires spreading.

Ling Mo glanced outside. This neighborhood’s greenery had once been its biggest selling point. Now it was a hazard.

She’d originally planned to handle it herself, but after thinking it over, she reported it to the property staff instead.

They responded quickly and politely, promising the problem would be dealt with before tomorrow. They even thanked her for the reminder.

As the temperature rose, another serious issue became more and more obvious: mosquitoes.

Ling Mo slapped two that tried to land on her, quick and precise. Her mental power let her sense them approaching with uncanny accuracy, but it couldn’t drive them away.

To make sure she could sleep, she lit a mosquito coil.

That night, she lay in bed, absently petting her cat with one hand while holding a bottle of interstellar milk with the other. One day of studying wasn’t nearly enough for her to read interstellar writing.

But she had found an incredibly practical feature on the learning machine: translation.

In other words, she could scan interstellar text she couldn’t read and have it converted into something she understood.

She scanned the milk bottle.

“Produced by liang chen ranch, the first-choice milk for all interstellar citizens…” Ling Mo skipped the long string of marketing nonsense and went straight for the date.

Then she ran into a new problem: interstellar dates didn’t match Blue Star dates.

Even if she knew the date on the bottle, she still couldn’t tell whether it had expired.

Right as her frustration peaked, the learning machine blinked, and a flat mechanical voice spoke: “Milk produced by liang chen ranch has approximately half a month of remaining shelf life. Please consume promptly to avoid waste.”

So it wasn’t expired.

Ling Mo opened the bottle and took a sip. One mouthful was enough for her to fall in love with the taste.

“No wonder it’s their first choice,” she murmured. “If this were on Blue Star, it’d be mine too.”

After that, she scanned all the other interstellar products she had. Anything she could use, she kept. Anything she couldn’t, she tossed into her shop to sell.

Even damaged interstellar products contained technology far beyond Blue Star.

After sorting through everything, she picked out ten machines that were the most thoroughly wrecked.

According to the learning machine, they were still agricultural machines, but they were so destroyed that repairing them would cost more than buying two brand-new ones.

When she listed them for the first time, the System priced them at two silver coins each and labeled them: “trash with some use.”

Ling Mo didn’t hesitate. She jacked the price up from two silver coins to twenty gold coins.

Alien tech. One-of-a-kind on Blue Star. It was absolutely worth that much.

Whether they sold or not didn’t worry her. If she had to, she could lower the price later—or just keep them. This was a test.

Once the items were up, she stopped thinking about it. She needed to stay in peak condition to handle the next game, whenever it started.

Players were already awakening. From here on out, there would only be more.

She had to get stronger—fast.

The game might not be dangerous right now, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t become dangerous later. And when there was no immediate threat, the people around you were often the biggest threat of all.

In her previous life, Ling Mo had grown up as an orphan. She had seen enough of human darkness to never be naive again.

Thinking about what she needed to do tomorrow, she drifted off to sleep.

Elsewhere, plenty of people couldn’t.

Some were drowning in despair because they hadn’t awakened at all. If they’d never had hope, maybe they could have endured it—but hope dangled in front of you and then ripped away could break a person.

Many people were collapsing under that weight right now, not just from fear of the future, but from their families’ disappointment, resentment, and blame.

Meanwhile, those who had successfully awakened started gathering in the game’s chat channel.

At first there were only one or two. Then more and more trickled in.

Very few awakened in the first three days, but globally, that still meant hundreds.

For a while, the chat was a chaotic flood of voices—everyone saying whatever they wanted.

And as their talents awakened, their desires seemed to swell, unchecked. Before long, two camps became obvious.

One camp believed the game was humanity’s hope and that everyone should work together to survive the disaster. The other believed in survival of the fittest—why should they care whether strangers lived or died?

All over the world, people grew restless because of these awakened players. Some unhinged scientists even tried to capture and dissect players to uncover the game’s secrets.

As the only shop in existence, Ling Mo’s store naturally drew attention.

Ordinary people clicked in, saw damaged machines priced at twenty gold coins, cursed the seller as a profiteer, and left.

But those who knew what they were looking at spotted the word interstellar and immediately realized the machines were likely interstellar products.

Interstellar.

Even broken, that kind of technology had enormous research value.

Buy.

Not just twenty gold coins. Even two hundred gold coins would be worth it.