Chapter 18

Chapter 18: happy farm

Ling Mo knew today had only been the appetizer. The real feast was still coming.

She took the quest card. As usual, it praised her as an excellent employee, then assigned her next task: sorting ducklings.

If the pattern held, the final day would probably be geese.

When she left the work area, she saw other players stumbling out, faces drawn with exhaustion. Robots guided them toward a distant area.

A robot approached her and rattled off a stream of interstellar speech.

Ling Mo caught only the gist: work was over; it was dinner time.

“I’m not eating,” Ling Mo said quickly, in clumsy interstellar, gesturing as she spoke. “I can keep working. I can help you collect trash.”

The farm was enormous. If she wandered around on her own, she could waste hours—or worse, step into somewhere she wasn’t allowed and fail the game outright. It was smarter to use the robots.

The robot looked her up and down. A question mark appeared on the screen built into its head.

It had probably never met an employee who finished work and immediately asked for overtime.

And Ling Mo looked skinny, small, and barely able to communicate. The robot’s logic clearly filled in the blanks with a tragic story.

“Follow me.”

It led her away from the crowd, in the opposite direction.

After about ten minutes, in a remote corner of the farm, Ling Mo saw a familiar building.

The robot spoke again. This time, she only caught fragments—something broken, repair workers on the way, and a reward.

She decided it didn’t matter. She wasn’t here to understand every word. She was here to collect trash.

The moment she stepped inside, she froze.

A mountain of feathers towered in front of her.

Each feather was enormous. Just from the size alone, Ling Mo could imagine how big the birds had been.

Her excitement dipped. So interstellar people liked eating chickens, ducks, and geese that much? They left nothing but feathers?

Fine. Feathers were still useful. She could take them back and make feather dusters.

She walked closer and grabbed one.

Then her eyes widened.

Under the feather was skin. Meat.

She yanked the feather and stumbled back a step—

And a whole chicken slid into view.

Not entirely whole. The breast and both thighs had been removed cleanly, but everything else was intact.

Ling Mo stared, genuinely impressed by the precision. Whoever did this had surgical hands.

She began collecting the piles—chicken, duck, and goose remains—packing them into her pocket space.

Then she went deeper, and a second mountain appeared, this one made of vegetables.

This place wasn’t only a farm—it was a farm stay. Vegetables made sense.

But why were they being thrown away?

At first Ling Mo assumed they’d spoiled. When she got close, she realized they were perfectly fresh.

She picked up a red, tomato-like vegetable bigger than her face. It smelled sweet.

She took a bite.

Juice burst across her tongue. The sweetness was almost ridiculous.

So good.

Why would anyone throw this away?

She stopped questioning it and started collecting.

But after using her mental power at such high intensity, she quickly felt it thinning out, stretched to the brink—classic overuse.

She pulled out a bottle of D-grade mental soothing solution from her pocket space and drank it. The relief was immediate.

Draining her mental power and restoring it was also a form of training.

Like stretching an elastic balloon: only by pushing the limit could it expand, so next time it could hold more.

Still, when her mental power ran dry again, it took time to recover. Without it, her efficiency dropped sharply.

She didn’t find any hidden “bonus” cuts like thighs this time.

So much for dreaming.

Even so, she gathered plenty of feathers, and she also discovered piles of eggshells from hatched eggs.

Those were useful too—good fertilizer, and eggshells even had medicinal value in some recipes.

She took everything.

At this point, as long as she separated the fresh from the not-so-fresh, she was happy to haul it all back.

When she finally emptied the entire trash facility and stepped outside, she realized there were still a few hours before the next day’s work began.

Her mental power had recovered enough that she felt she could keep going.

The robot guarding the entrance went inside to check. When it came back out, it looked genuinely stunned.

“You are the most capable waste handler I have ever seen,” it said, voice flat but tone unmistakably impressed. “You have helped the farm greatly. I will report to the farm owner and ensure you receive generous compensation.”

Ling Mo didn’t catch every word, but she didn’t need to. The robot’s attitude said enough.

So she immediately offered to continue working.

The robot stared at her, expressionless, and yet somehow the judgment was obvious: Who works like this unless their family is desperate?

If Ling Mo had known what it was thinking, she would have nodded along.

Desperate? Absolutely.

Blue Star was a furnace right now. Crops were dying from heat. If the game hadn’t descended, the world would already be chaos.

And the most terrifying part was not knowing how long it would last. Even if this heat wave ended, what would come next? More disasters?

Ling Mo’s only wish had always been to stay alive. But if Blue Star collapsed into violence and panic, she would be dragged down with it—unless she hid in her pocket space forever.

And that wasn’t a real option. Humans were social creatures. She couldn’t live sealed away for a lifetime, and her instincts told her she wouldn’t be allowed to stay in her pocket space indefinitely anyway.

She had no desire to play savior, and she definitely didn’t want attention.

But selling food and water from her pocket space—enough to keep ordinary people from starving—was something she could do.

Because when people fall into absolute despair with nothing left to lose, there’s no limit to what they’ll do.