She slept through the night, and when she woke up in the morning, a torrential downpour was raging in the forest.
The zombie worker in the rain looked utterly wretched, drenched like a drowned rat. Mu Shan let it shelter under the eaves.
The heavy rain did not cool the air one bit; instead, it made everything even more sweltering. The forest was like a steamy steamer basket.
Mu Shan tidied up a woven rattan basket, small scissors, and a small shovel, planning to go foraging for food once the rain stopped. At that time, the forest would likely sprout many edible mushrooms.
While weeding and fertilizing the crops in the sunroom, she drifted off, lost in thought.
She had not reunited with He Yuncong yesterday.
…To be honest, the reasons were quite complicated.
The tavern in the NPC Village was crowded with too many people and loose tongues; it really was not a suitable place for a family reunion.
Some players could not distinguish friend from foe and eyed everyone covetously. She did not want to reveal too much privacy in front of them.
Added to that, his strange appearance and reactions—Mu Shan herself was not mentally prepared and needed time to process it slowly.
She just hoped that when she told him to wait, he would listen and not do anything rash…
The only consolation was knowing He Yuncong was alive now, powerful, and feared by others.
By comparison, she, this weakling, faced even harsher survival trials.
“I’ll go find him in the village after surviving the second giant insect monster attack tomorrow,” Mu Shan thought.
The protective gear she had commissioned from the system yesterday was complete.
【Insect Shell Arm Guard x2 (Defense Type)
Quality: Ordinary
Usage: Worn on the forearm
Description: Hardness rivals rebar. To harm your body, they must first crush through it.
Note: Sourced from an ordinary worker insect】
Mu Shan slipped the brown arm guards onto her arms to test them. The size was perfect, and the surface had a glossy, lacquered finish. Ignoring the raw materials, they were pretty decent protective gear.
From using cardboard wrapped around her arms to fend off zombies on the first day of the instance to finally having proper “equipment” today, Mu Shan felt she had taken a big step as a player.
From the information the system had intentionally or otherwise leaked, she extracted a key detail.
“Worker insect.”
Terms like worker insects generally appeared in bee colonies—queen bees and worker bees. Could she infer that the insect race in the Humid Heat Forest instance had a similar hive system, with ordinary insect monsters and a “queen” somewhere…?
But right now, she had neither the time nor the ability to consider the boss of Side Quest 2, especially since she could not even handle a worker insect.
Today’s Card Album yielded three cards, filling the slots for the Zombie Siege instance.
[Item Card: Baseball Bat Wrapped with Barbed Wire]
[Environment Card: Clear Spring]
[Item Card: Bird Nest]
For the Humid Heat Forest instance, she already had two bird nests. Mu Shan chose to materialize all of them.
Two branch-woven bird nests, one large and one small, appeared before her. One contained three blue-skinned bird eggs, the other four speckled ones.
Premium protein for the week obtained!
Though the Humid Heat Forest did not drop useful weapons, it provided plenty of fresh food!
Mu Shan had not eaten eggs in ages. Just thinking of fried eggs, egg drop soup, poached eggs, or bird egg salad made her mouth water uncontrollably.
Tears of emotion streamed from the corners of her mouth.
For breakfast, she eagerly boiled one bird egg. The egg white was springy, the yolk creamy. Paired with scavenged pickled vegetables and porridge, it was top-notch.
She could not bear to throw away the eggshell and crushed it to fertilize the Peashooter’s pot.
Mu Shan stored the remaining six bird eggs in the safe house’s freezer. She placed the empty bird nests on a sturdy tree branch outside the sunroom.
She hoped generous bird couples would come lay eggs again!
After waiting about thirty minutes, the downpour eased. Rain mist shrouded the forest, drastically reducing visibility.
The sunroom roof was covered in fallen branches and leaves. Mu Shan had to take time to clear it.
She donned a waterproof jacket, but walking through the woods still soaked her hair and clothes. One misstep, and she splashed into a puddle.
But after enduring the torrential floods of the previous instance, this light drizzle was nothing to Mu Shan.
Wearing a wide-brimmed hiking hat, she turned into a diligent little bee, busily gathering fresh mushrooms sprouting under tree roots with both hands.
Mushrooms usually grew amid rotting branches, dead wood, or grass. They required patient digging with tools.
But distinguishing edible from poisonous was far harder than finding them.
There were simply too many wild mushroom varieties. She only recognized a few edibles: oyster mushrooms, straw mushrooms, chicken of the woods, termite mushrooms, wild shiitake, and such.
Many deadly toxic ones looked plain too—grayish-white colors like the infamous death caps, destroying angels, fool’s funnels, yellow stalkers…
Mu Shan could not always tell them apart. If unsure, no matter how plump or fresh they looked, she would not pick them.
On top of that, plenty of purple bone-eroding fungus had sprouted.
Mu Shan carried a lighter and burned each one she saw, showing no mercy.
Wild fruits dripping with water hung from the treetops. She snipped them with branches intact using her scissors to preserve them longer.
Every now and then, she picked larger bananas or bitter bamboo shoots.
At this slow pace, she gradually filled half her backpack with ingredients.
Since entering the second instance, her three meals a day featured many fresh ingredients, greatly supplementing her micronutrients.
Though the physical labor was still grueling, Mu Shan felt she had lost hair but gained strength.
And the menu changes brought a sense of “happiness.”
It was a profound word.
Mu Shan figured that a cunning system like this must have considered something similar when deploying players.
—After the collapse of one world, adding a bit of “happiness” to the next instance would make players motivate themselves and cling to survival.
The tropical rainforest was vast, full of unknown dangers.
Mu Shan dared not stray too far from the safe house. After a certain distance, she carved an “M”-shaped mark on a distinctive tree with her small knife.
That way, next time she would know if she had gone too far.
Around noon, Mu Shan stopped.
She wiped the sweat from her face and head with a towel, gulped down half a bottle of pre-mixed saltwater, and turned toward the river.
Time was of the essence now; she had no time to fish.
But with such a resource-rich river nearby, she did not want to waste the opportunity.
Mu Shan planned to set fish traps along the riverbank near the safe house, checking them once or twice a day.
She thanked the once-popular short-video apps for always pushing random content; she had watched a few wild fish-trapping videos.
She never imagined she would actually use that knowledge one day.
The fish trap was not bamboo-woven but made from a discarded mineral water bucket. She drilled small holes in the bottom and cut a larger opening at the top.
She fringed the edges into tassel-like strips with scissors, then pressed them inward at an angle so fish could enter but not easily exit. She had to be careful not to cut herself on the sharp plastic.
She placed a large stream stone at the bottom for weight to sink it quickly.
For better lure, she added a lump of leftover rice inside and wrapped water weeds around the opening.
Thus, a crude plastic fish trap was ready.
Mu Shan tied a rope to the bucket and chose a river spot rich in snails and clams, tossing in her homemade trap.
“Plop.”
“Gurgle-gurgle-“
Bubbles large and small rose on the surface as she watched it sink.
Mu Shan secured the rope under a shore rock.
She clapped her hands, clasped them toward the river, and prayed.
—May the damn Main God System bless me with a bountiful catch!
The sun climbed higher, evaporating the morning rain. The forest turned scorching, the humid heat suffocating.
Mu Shan’s clothes were soaked through with sweat. To avoid heatstroke, she soaked her towel in cold water and laid it across her forehead and neck to cool down.
Though she had gathered enough ingredients, the workhorse player could not rest yet.
Tomorrow was another giant insect monster attack day. Against such overwhelmingly stronger foes, she had to devise some traps.
The most common were pit traps, like the horse pits from ancient battlefields.
The riverbank was all coarse sand, gravel, and hardened by rushing water—digging a pit was tough.
Mu Shan shoveled twice with her entrenching tool, and river water quickly filled the shallow hole.
To fit a giant insect monster’s fridge-sized body, she could dig from dawn to dusk and still not finish.
Since big pits were impossible, she would dig smaller ones.
Giant insects could be “aggroed.” Once lured into the complex underbrush, there would be more options.
Sweat poured off her as she dug, cursing inwardly: This is digging the system’s grave.
During the Vietnam War, Vietnamese used terrain for small pitfalls in the jungle, hindering the Americans plenty.
Though humans and giant insects were different species, she figured it had reference value.
After about two hours, she dug thirty-centimeter-wide deep pits at intervals along the path from riverbank to forest.
She buried sharpened wooden stakes in them—using the hardest wood.
She camouflaged the pits with leaves overhead.
A human would never step into such a trap.
But wooden stakes only worked against limbless, unarmored, non-flying insects. Against giant cockroaches, it was like tickling—their shells could dull machetes.
So, she slathered the pits with highly flammable pine resin.
The tropical rainforest had plenty of springy trees. Mu Shan chopped many, bending them into bowstring shapes and rigging them at angles with tripwires.
She tested it: If an insect triggered the wire, a dozen branches would snap back, unleashing her prepared wooden stake and oil attack like a meteor shower.
Pine resin ignited easily, natural and abundant.
A single spark would start a conflagration—a “giant insect barbecue.”
Mu Shan even prepared firewood to add fuel and spread the blaze.
Of course, the battlefield had to be far enough from her safe house, with safety zones marked to avoid collateral damage or forest fires.
She piled wet mud and sand at safe distances—impossible to ignite.
Such a massive project was impossible for one tool-less person alone.
Thankfully, the Virtual Backpack was like a mobile supply cheat. She just picked up and dropped items, skipping the hauling.
The day passed in foraging and trap-making.
“Ca—” A brightly feathered parrot flew overhead, but Mu Shan did not look up.
She was focused on bending over her work when, in an instant, “Plop—”
A half-severed green snake dropped beside her feet.
She jolted upright and glanced back—the other half still dangled from a branch, very close…
“You sure have guts. This forest is full of nasty venomous critters,” a clear, pleasant female voice rang out.
Mu Shan turned to see Xia Xueqin emerging from bushes five or six meters away.
She held a throwing knife-like weapon.
Mu Shan was surprised to see her. “Thanks for saving me.”
She had thought her a reclusive delinquent girl back at the tavern.
“No problem, just doing a good deed!”
Xia Xueqin hopped over in a few steps and peered curiously at the large hole in the ground. “Little Plum. We met yesterday—I’m position four, Weather Forecaster. What are you doing?”
“Traps. I want to trap them as much as possible,” Mu Shan answered. “Actually, I’ve been wanting to ask for a while. Was your last instance [Zombie Siege]?”
Xia Xueqin looked shocked. “You too?!”
“Yes. Do you know the Old Driver? He said you were friends. Thanks to your weather forecast, we stocked up on waterproof building materials and survived the flood.”
Xia Xueqin waved her hand speechlessly. “No big deal. But my weather forecasts aren’t that reliable. After all, real-world weather reports are all about gut feelings too. The rainforest weather changes on a dime; it’s impossible to predict.”
“That old guy Feng Wei spreads my secondhand info everywhere. I’ll charge him someday.”
She pointed at the traps on the ground. “A friend of a friend is a friend! But little childhood sweetheart, your traps look pretty low-damage.”
“I’m a support. My attack power isn’t strong, so this is the best I can do.”
Xia Xueqin let out a ‘hmph’. “All supports, I get it. The 3000-gold punishment sounds like a lot, but don’t worry. As long as No. 1 is here, we’ll have no problem completing Side Quest 1.”
“You just got here, so you don’t know. The veteran players in this instance have a unspoken rule passed down by word of mouth: Players in positions 8-12 use AoE skills and traps to whittle down the bugs’ overall health as much as possible. The first seven positions take them out one by one and keep the bugs from reaching the village.”
Mu Shan nodded. So there were twelve people in total.
“Sounds like standard tower defense gameplay.”
Xia Xueqin said, “But that’s assuming everyone’s around the same level. Once a crushing high-level player shows up in the instance, you get the tower defense paradox…”
【That is, the backline players slack off and lie flat, dealing no damage to the monsters. All the monster power piles up on the frontliners, who are expected to handle it by default.】
“No. 1 is ridiculously strong. No matter how many bugs are left, they’re no match. That idiot David who picked a fight with you yesterday was the first to benefit, but he still jumped out to show off. What good are his tickle-level attacks?”
Mu Shan felt like she’d been hit too and fell silent.
Xia Xueqin rubbed her chin. “Little childhood sweetheart, to be honest, you’re not what I imagined.”
Mu Shan paused. “You… imagined me?”
The pink-haired girl leaned in and whispered, “Come clean. What’s the shady deal between you and No. 1?”
Mu Shan nearly choked on her own spit.
She put on a serious face. “We’re childhood neighbors who grew up together. Totally aboveboard.”
Xia Xueqin’s face screamed ‘I don’t buy it’.
“If it was just some ordinary relationship, why would No. 1 react like that? You’re a newbie, right? You don’t even know he goes insane looking for his childhood sweetheart in every instance. It’s so wild, so R-rated. Everyone knows, and I feel awkward even saying it!”
Mu Shan already felt sweat pouring down her back.
‘Please don’t gleefully elaborate on this stuff with that excited look on your face.’