Chapter 42

Chapter 42: Mo Ka Forest

After tidying the area, Ling Mo moved on.

Mornings in Mo Ka Forest were mushroom season. All kinds of mushrooms burst up overnight, and mornings were when you ran into other players most often.

Mushrooms were everywhere—more than enough for everyone—so it was also when relations between players were the most peaceful. If they met, at most they nodded and kept picking.

Sorting them was effortless. Toss a mushroom into a vegetable basket: edible ones were teleported away, inedible ones stayed behind.

Of course, peace didn’t mean safety. Some people used the crowd as cover to hunt.

They’d decided gathering ingredients was too slow. Robbing points was faster.

Ling Mo kept collecting mushrooms and waterwood stone as she went. With mental power and pocket space, she might as well have been sweeping the forest clean.

Every so often she’d stop and knock on a tree trunk. If it sounded hollow—and full—she’d pause and pry it open. Nuts, neatly packed.

Anyone passing by would’ve seen a masked girl in sportswear standing in front of a tree, occasionally letting out a low, pleased giggle like she’d found buried treasure.

Still, you couldn’t walk under trees forever without consequences.

Ling Mo kept at it from first light all the way to noon. She didn’t know how many tree hollows she’d emptied, and at some point she’d even figured out a pattern.

Because she’d forced her way to first place last night, she felt no pressure today. Working for yourself really did feel different.

When her stomach rumbled, she finally stopped to eat.

She’d had nuts for breakfast—tasty, but not filling. She still thought rice was the best thing on earth.

She scanned the area, looking for a patch of grass out of sight.

That was when she sensed something dropping from above.

Ling Mo sprang sideways.

A walnut the size of a human head smashed into the ground where she’d just been, blasting out a crater.

Too familiar.

She looked up—and this time she got a good look at the culprit. A massive squirrel perched on a branch overhead, its tail puffed out, body tense with fury, shrieking at her like it wanted to chew her to pieces.

Ling Mo couldn’t understand it, but she didn’t need to. The rage was obvious.

She scooped up the walnut, hugged it to her chest, and ran.

A squirrel’s teeth could crack hard shells with ease. Getting bitten would be bad enough on Blue Star—but here, where everything was larger and stronger, one bite would be like a steel blade slicing through tofu.

The squirrel practically vibrated with fury, eyes wide and wild. Emptying its stash was one thing. Stealing right in front of it was another.

It launched after her—

And then smoke filled the path, thick and sudden. By the time it cleared, Ling Mo was gone.

After sprinting for a long time, Ling Mo still couldn’t detect the squirrel behind her. It hadn’t followed. She finally let out a breath.

A flicker of reflected light in the distance caught her attention.

Curiosity tugged at her. She approached carefully, parting thick grass.

A lake.

She didn’t rush in. She stayed half-hidden and watched, because something about it felt wrong.

The water was clear, but there was a strange odor in the air. And when she swept it with her mental power, she found nothing—no fish, no plants, not even the faintest sign of life.

Clear water often meant poor nutrients, which meant no life. But the surrounding forest was lush, the soil obviously rich.

So if it wasn’t a lack of nutrients, there was only one explanation: the lake was new. Too new to have developed anything yet.

But it hadn’t rained recently.

Ling Mo decided not to gamble. She wasn’t short on water, and if she wanted more, she could always return to the stream. This lake smelled wrong. If the water was truly clean, why would it stink?

She turned away.

As she walked, she took a swig of nutrient tonic—and immediately regretted it.

“This tastes disgusting,” she muttered, tongue out. “What is nutrient tonic even made of?”

People claimed interstellar folks ate well. If so, why did this taste like punishment? But if they ate badly, then why did they only take the best parts of every ingredient and throw the rest away?

It was already day six, and it was nearing afternoon. That meant there was just over a day left before the game ended.

It sounded like time, but for people who’d been robbed, once you took out sleeping hours, it wasn’t nearly enough.

Some had been robbed more than once.

They were like leeks—cut down again and again, with no way to fight back. Not when your talent wasn’t combat-oriented.

Ling Mo could see the desperation everywhere. A rabbit missing a leg lay ahead of her.

That made seven.

There were pheasants too, and even wild boars—same story. A leg gone, the rest discarded like trash.

Ling Mo pulled them into pocket space as her mental power swept past. Meat was meat. Wasting it felt criminal.

She was grateful her talent was mental power. Otherwise she’d have to run up and collect everything by hand, exhausted and exposed—an easy way to reveal pocket space to the wrong person.

This way, she didn’t even have to get close. From a hundred meters away, she could claim what others had thrown away.

Before nightfall, she returned to the stream again.

By now, waterwood stone was scattered everywhere inside her pocket space. Ever since she started using it, her crops had improved visibly—enough that she could take apples ripened before and apples ripened after and see the difference at a glance.