On the matter of the apocalypse, Lin Muyan kept her mouth shut, for one thing, she felt there was no need to bring it up, even if she did, Lin Xiao might not believe her.
For another, she still wasn’t certain whether to go on living with her birth family, facing the end of the world together.
Call her selfish, call her cold, she didn’t care.
After everything with the Shens, she’d felt firsthand what it meant to have one’s heart turned to ice.
Twenty years of family ties, they cast them off the moment they chose to, cast them off clean and complete, treating her like a bloodsucking leech that would cling to them and not let go, shooing her away like swatting a fly.
Perhaps they had their own considerations, from their standpoint, Lin Muyan had no standing to pass judgment.
But it had, at the very least, made her see one bloody truth clearly: no matter the relationship, none of it could be guaranteed absolutely solid. When the feeling was good, people would all but tear out their hearts for you, but feelings could change in a blink, vanish in a blink. Terrifying, really.
Only relying on herself was the surest thing of all.
So Lin Muyan said only this to Lin Xiao:
“A friend asked me to buy these for him. He’ll send a vehicle to haul them away soon.”
Lin Xiao obviously didn’t believe this line, but he didn’t press further.
His sister was already an adult, with a broader outlook than his, perhaps she had some plan in mind, and naturally he couldn’t go interfering on his own.
After handing the warehouse key to Lin Muyan, Lin Xiao made to leave.
As he went, he thought for a moment and said:
“Sis, I’ve got to go look at a place in Half-Mountain Villa shortly. Someone commissioned our company to handle a property transfer, but the owner still hasn’t been found, so I need to go deal with it.”
Lin Muyan was startled. There was a Half-Mountain Villa property that needed transferring, and the owner was this unmotivated about it? How rich would you have to be, did they look down on Half-Mountain Villa?
“You don’t have to report to me. I’m not your boss.” Lin Muyan answered him half-jokingly.
Tall as he was, Lin Xiao grew bashful, scratching his head with a laugh.
“It’s just, I was thinking, in case I run into you over there again, I wanted to give you a heads-up that I’m not going there for the Shens.”
Yesterday he’d suffered humiliation at the Shen house: Jiaojiao had plainly been home yet wouldn’t come out to get him off the hook. Even just a word that it was a misunderstanding, and he wouldn’t have been taken for a thug, nearly hauled off to the police station.
He was less and less able to read Shen Jiaojiao’s temper, and he wouldn’t be going to the Shens to see her again.
Perhaps she simply didn’t want to see them anymore. To her, the Lin family wasn’t a place worth any attachment, she was the Shen family’s young miss now, of noble status, and from here on they’d be a world apart, one in the heavens, one in the dirt, never to cross paths again.
After Lin Xiao left, Lin Muyan drove the little pickup into the warehouse and quickly shut the door.
The Golden Shovel’s refresh time had come. She found a corner first and gave it a dig, and out popped two balls of black light.
“Black Space?”
By her space-naming method, Lin Muyan guessed this should be called Black Space.
As she drew the black balls of light into her body, they formed an independent space of twenty square meters, pitch-black inside, its purpose entirely unclear.
Her eyes weren’t idle either, she kept an eye on the bullet comments, expecting to learn the new space’s function soon. But to her surprise, the bullet comments didn’t know either.
【What space is this? Jiaojiao never dug up this kind, did she?】
【Definitely never seen it. The wretched girl’s luck seems a bit better than Jiaojiao’s, apart from that key, everything she’s dug up so far has actually been good stuff.】
【Now I’m intrigued. I think this’ll be something even more broken than the White and Green Spaces.】
This time the bullet comments seemed considerably friendlier toward Lin Muyan, with fewer people cursing her.
Still, Lin Muyan didn’t find the answer she wanted in the bullet comments, and could only experiment herself.
She turned a thought toward the rice beside her, and found the rice couldn’t be taken into the Black Space.
Then she tried living things, neither herself nor a few stray little ants she found on the ground could enter the Black Space either.
After several failed attempts in a row, and with the sky already growing late, Lin Muyan had no choice but to set it aside for the time being.
She took a portion of the rice and grain and oil into the White Space. Though the White Space was now a forty-square-meter room with a ceiling five meters high, she didn’t dare stack the goods too high, it would be inconvenient to fetch them.
Over the next few days she’d plan things out and see how to store and stack the goods more sensibly.
After that, she scattered a small bag of corn seeds into the Green Space. The bullet comments had said the Green Space didn’t need tending, so she left it alone, wanting to see whether, as a hands-off proprietor, the space really could farm itself.
With all that done, Lin Muyan had meant to drive back, but then she remembered what Lin Xiao had said, swung the wheel around, and headed straight for Half-Mountain Villa.
She really was a bit curious, what kind of person could be transferred a Half-Mountain Villa property and still drag their feet about showing up?
After all, Half-Mountain Villa was S City’s true rich quarter. Latecomers couldn’t buy a place there no matter how much money they had.
The Shen family had squeezed into high society three generations back, which was how they’d become part of the first wave of residents when Half-Mountain Villa was built.
The Half-Mountain Villa of today, where would there ever be a listing for sale? Even if one came up, it’d be absorbed internally and never reach the open market.
Lin Muyan wanted to go see who had taste so lofty they didn’t even care about Half-Mountain Villa.
Of course, there was a bit of private motive too: she didn’t want Lin Xiao to get caught and beaten by the Shens again.
Though she hadn’t built up much of a bond with the Lin family, blood was thicker than water, and she didn’t dislike Lin Xiao. Going along to keep an eye out would put her more at ease.
Driving up to the entrance of Half-Mountain Villa, she was, sure enough, stopped.
The guards on duty tonight saw it was Lin Muyan, and in a loud pickup truck no less, and each of them wore a peculiar expression.
“Miss Shen, what are you doing driving a pickup this late at night?”
Beside him, another guard spoke up, his eyes drifting lightly over Lin Muyan, his tone carrying a hint of flippancy too.
“‘Miss Shen’? She’s not the Shen family’s young miss anymore, why bother being so polite with her?”
By now the whole of Half-Mountain Villa had heard about the Shen family’s little affair, even the weeders knew.
Lin Muyan had gotten to play a wealthy young miss for twenty years free of charge, for an ordinary person that was already a windfall. The Shens had sent her back to her birth family, so why did she keep wanting to run back here?
“Lin Muyan, you ought to know the rules of Half-Mountain Villa. Someone of your status isn’t qualified to go in, not unless an owner is willing to come out and bring you in. Or why don’t you give Mrs. Shen a call and have her let you in?”
The guard who’d just been needling her grew swaggering and smug. Before, he’d had to bow and scrape before Lin Muyan, all deference. Now that she was no longer a wealthy young miss, and her birth family was said to be especially poor, even worse off than guards like them, why kowtow to her moods?
Some people resent the rich, and the moment they see you fall from your pedestal, they’ll kick you while you’re down, even take an inexplicable smugness in it, deciding the wealthy are nothing special after all, that, stripped of their status, they might be worse off than ordinary folk.
This guard thought exactly that way. He was still young, and being a guard left him feeling he couldn’t hold his head up, by what right did others get to rank a notch above him?
He figured it was all because he’d been born to the wrong womb, not into a rich and prominent house.
Well, now there was someone even more pitiable than him, fallen from true heiress to fake. Where once she’d traveled in luxury cars, now she’d sunk to driving a little truck herself.
His heart found in this enormous solace and satisfaction.