Chapter 38

Chapter 38: Mo Ka Forest

Ling Mo continued following the budgie.

About half an hour later, she reached the destination.

The buzzing had started nearly ten minutes before—deep and heavy, the kind of sound anyone who’d ever been stung would recognize immediately.

Then she saw it.

A beehive the size of a building clung to a tree.

And the bees—each one was nearly the size of her face.

Ling Mo sucked in a sharp breath and stared at the budgie. “Are you serious?”

The budgie only blinked at her with wide, innocent eyes.

Ling Mo waved a hand and stored it into pocket space, ready to leave.

But she looked at the hive again—and couldn’t make herself walk away.

A hive that large had to hold an absurd amount of honey. Wild honey was nutritious, valuable, and hard to come by.

She remembered harvesting honey once inside pocket space before entering the game. The budgie must have seen that and decided to “help.”

Ling Mo pulled out the learning machine and searched for a method to harvest wild honey.

To her surprise, there was a real solution.

Following the instructions, she found a plant called Bee-Dazing Suneye nearby. If she lit it and placed it beneath the hive, the smoke would temporarily reduce the bees’ aggression. Then, using a ladder or other climbing tools, a person could get close enough to harvest honey.

The effect only lasted half an hour. Speed mattered.

For Ling Mo, the climbing step was unnecessary. She simply raised her hand and stored the hive.

Even then, she didn’t take everything. She left a third behind.

Then she turned and left without hesitation.

Blue Star bees were tiny, and a sting still hurt like hell. These were monsters. If one of them stung her, she’d be dead.

By noon, the remaining five parrots finally returned, but they clearly hadn’t found anything. They came back because they were hungry.

One even had a bald patch on a wing. Whether a player had attacked it or some creature in Mo Ka Forest did, Ling Mo had no way of knowing.

Ling Mo hid in the grass, pulled out a boxed meal, and ate while scanning her surroundings for something she could use as camouflage.

Without weeds covering her, she felt exposed. Unsafe.

After she finished the last bite, she wiped her mouth, took out her sickle, and started cutting grass. She tore a few vines from a nearby tree to reinforce the weave.

Soon, she’d made a neat grass skirt.

Then she made a smaller one that could sit around her neck like a collar. The leftover grass became a hat.

She was just admiring her work when the vegetable basket in her hand twitched twice.

A white slip of paper appeared inside.

The vegetable basket she was holding wasn’t her original—it was one of the stolen ones.

Ling Mo stared at the paper. Weren’t they told this game had no missions?

At the top were the words “seasonal limited ingredient.” Beneath it was a drawing of a cactus—only it was purple.

Collect the fruit growing on top of the purple cactus. Fifty points per fruit.

Ling Mo pulled out the other slips she’d collected and checked them.

Every one of them was labeled seasonal limited—ingredients that only appeared in this season.

After removing duplicates, there were four seasonal limited ingredients in total: three plants and one insect.

The insect slip had come from her own vegetable basket, so she searched it immediately.

Longevity Cicada. A species with a lifespan of over a hundred years.

The description reminded her of cicada pupa on Blue Star. Each Longevity Cicada was only worth ten points, but anyone who’d ever hunted cicada pupa knew the real challenge was spotting them. Once you found one, catching it wasn’t hard.

cicada pupa were active at night. Longevity Cicada also only crawled out of the soil at night.

Nighttime in Mo Ka Forest was dangerous. Other people might give up—but Ling Mo could manage.

She just couldn’t hide in pocket space if she wanted to hunt them.

As for the three plants, she memorized them too.

She could search for the plants during the day and hunt Longevity Cicada at night.

And she wasn’t the only one thinking that way.

Ling Mo could feel the forest growing busier. She ran into players more often than before.

No matter how much she tried to avoid them, sometimes she couldn’t.

Like now.

Two men stood in front of her—one fat, one thin—with the girl in the white dress trailing behind them.

Twice in one day. What rotten luck.

The girl looked nothing like the arrogant queen from earlier. She was sullen now, beaten down, as if she’d gone from royalty to servant overnight.

Her old companions were nowhere to be seen.

But that wasn’t the problem.

The problem was the two men.

“Friend,” the thin man said, voice calm, “we don’t mean any harm. We just want your points.”

Ling Mo stared at him. “And you think that counts as ‘no harm’?”

She crossed her arms. “Are you people done yet?”

“What do you mean?” the thin man asked.

“I mean you’re late,” Ling Mo said. “My points were stolen not long ago. Don’t believe me? Look.”

She held out the vegetable basket.

The fat man checked and grimaced. “It’s really zero.”

“Wait.” The thin man’s eyes narrowed. “If your points were robbed, why aren’t you upset?”

Ling Mo shrugged. “I’m naturally optimistic. Besides, panicking won’t change anything. I’d rather use the time I have left to collect ingredients and earn points again.”

The thin man nodded—then stiffened as someone tugged at him from behind.

He turned, met the white-dress girl’s gaze, and seemed to remember something.

He cleared his throat and put on a stern expression. “Let me check your vegetable basket again. Just in case you did something to it.”

Ling Mo had already caught the girl’s little gesture with her mental power. The moment he said that, she understood exactly what they planned to do.

Using the same trick as last time would expose her.

So she made a quick decision.

Ling Mo pulled a flashbang from pocket space and tossed it straight at them.