After reaching Level 1, Duan Lili’s current stats are:
【Combat: 10】
【Strength: 10】
【Agility: 5+2 (Coarse Cloth Shoes)】
【Defense: 3+1 (Coarse Cloth Shirt)+1 (Coarse Cloth Pants)】
【Resistance: 3】
Combat and Strength each increased by 5. Agility increased by 2, Defense increased by 3, and Resistance increased by 1.
Taking another look at her Health Bar, it still has no numerical value. Duan Lili is starting to understand now—because… she can respawn. As long as she can respawn, she won’t truly die, so the Health Bar’s purpose is only to remind her of her physical state, such as when she’s tired or hungry.
The experience bar is empty again. All the experience she had just now was used for leveling up, and there was no overflow after the upgrade. She isn’t sure whether the experience in her initial state was too little for Level 1, or if the overflow is directly cleared when leveling up. If it’s the latter, she’ll need to be careful not to waste experience points in the future.
Her body feels excellent now, which means leveling up can eliminate all negative status effects. She’ll have to pay attention when leveling up in the future—it might help her save on food and medicine.
After studying the changes in her stats, Duan Lili turned her attention to the warehouse Interface on the right. She immediately noticed that the half-eaten steamed bun she had just stored was separated from the other steamed buns, occupying a slot of its own.
That makes sense. Usually, the same items can only stack in the same slot. Since this steamed bun has been bitten, it’s no longer identical to the others, so it takes up its own slot.
What’s even more exciting is that the warehouse has also leveled up! It went from ten slots to fifteen slots.
This makes Duan Lili even happier than the stat upgrades. Because Duan Lili is a hoarder.
Perhaps due to her parents’ divorce and living in a boarding school since elementary school, Duan Lili has always felt deeply insecure. In this state of insecurity, she developed a strong tendency to hoard things.
In the real world, this manifested as hoarding instant noodles, dry snacks, and powdered milk—foods with relatively long shelf lives—in her dorm room, and refusing to throw away things that were no longer useful. In games, it meant hoarding everything she could obtain, filling every game backpack to the brim.
In fantasy games, she would learn crafting skills to make larger backpacks first and save up gold to buy permanent warehouses.
In sandbox games, she would line the walls of her house with storage boxes, organizing materials by category.
Whenever she saw these backpacks, warehouses, and storage boxes filled to capacity, Duan Lili would feel immense joy from the game.
Human nature is that of a hamster, after all.
Duan Lili organized her warehouse, storing everything from the sofa inside. Currently, her entire inventory consists of:
Small Wooden Hammer x1, torch x1, raw wood x10, medicine x1 bottle, steamed buns x7, half-eaten steamed bun x1, bottled water x1, half-eaten bag of potato chips x1, snake meat x5, snake skin x2, snake gallbladder x1, Snake Sinew x1, snake eggs x5.
This takes up 13 warehouse slots, with 2 empty slots remaining.
Even though she doesn’t yet know the uses of the Snake Sinew and snake gallbladder, having items in her warehouse fills Duan Lili with satisfaction.
She took out the half-eaten steamed bun again.
This steamed bun was obtained three hours ago. She ate the first one when the Small Wooden Knife broke, and it was piping hot, as if just out of the steamer. Even after all this time, it still feels warm to the touch.
After leveling up, Duan Lili no longer felt hunger, but the aroma was so enticing that she couldn't resist taking another bite. Warm, fluffy, and soft, she chewed it in her mouth—pure bliss!
She had been too exhausted earlier, her mind unable to function properly. Now that she had recovered, her thoughts were flowing smoothly again. The warmth and state of the steamed bun made Duan Lili realize that time stood still in the warehouse.
A portable storage space where time is frozen—the ultimate dream for a hoarder!
Items wouldn't spoil and would remain in the exact state they were stored in. If she put a bowl of hot soup in today, it would still be steaming when she took it out ten years later.
Excellent, excellent!
Food was precious. Since she wasn't hungry, Duan Lili satisfied her craving with just one bite and then stored the partially eaten steamed bun back into the warehouse.
She took out the Small Wooden Hammer.
Just as she had anticipated, as soon as the Small Wooden Hammer was in her hand, a new Interface immediately opened.
The new Interface included four tabs: 【Crafting】, 【Construction】, 【Tailoring】, and 【…】.
Entering the 【Crafting】 page, she saw that icons for items like the Small Wooden Knife and Small Wooden Axe were already listed in the 【Item List】.
The top priority was to replenish weapons and tools.
Duan Lili clicked on the icon for 【Small Wooden Knife】 in the Item List, and the System prompted, "Insufficient materials."
The only material among the basic supplies provided by the System was 【raw wood】.
Raw wood, as the name suggests, referred to felled trees—untreated, natural logs.
Based on Duan Lili's experience playing games, in various Infrastructure Construction-related games, raw wood was a basic material. It usually wasn't used directly to craft tools but could be further processed into advanced materials.
Duan Lili canceled the crafting of the 【Small Wooden Knife】 and tried dragging just one piece of raw wood into the material slot of the Crafting Interface. Instantly, an arrow split into three branches appeared, pointing to the primary materials that raw wood could be further processed into: Wood Block, Wood Plank, and wooden rod.
Duan Lili consumed 3 pieces of raw wood, trying each type, and obtained 4 Wood Blocks, 8 Wood Planks, and 16 wooden rods.
Each crafting process took 10 minutes. With insufficient warehouse slots, she took out the potato chips and tossed them onto the sofa, while the Wood Blocks, Wood Planks, and wooden rods were directly stored into the warehouse from the Crafting Interface.
She selected the 【Small Wooden Knife】 from the 【Item List】 again, and the System automatically chose the required materials: 【wooden rod x2, Wood Plank x1】. Indeed, crafting tools required primary materials.
Duan Lili had just gone through an intense battle. Although her physical condition had fully recovered after leveling up, she still felt mentally exhausted. Crafting the primary materials and the Small Wooden Knife took 40 minutes, so she lay on the sofa and watched.
Her body relaxed, but her mind remained active.
"Why me?"
"Why did I transmigrate?"
However, even though she asked these questions, the System showed no reaction at all. Just as it had announced earlier, it had gone into hibernation, leaving only its automated functions running.
Duan Lili sighed.
She found an answer for herself: perhaps, in her original world, she was simply someone who wasn't needed?
Her parents divorced when she was in elementary school, and from then on, she started living in a boarding school.
While other students at the boarding school went home during winter and summer vacations, she had no home to return to and stayed in the dormitory. This situation continued until high school.
After the college entrance exams, her father and mother each gave her a sum of money.
"Don't spend it recklessly, and it should be enough for your tuition and living expenses throughout your four years of college, plus some initial startup funds for after you graduate," Mom said over the phone.
What Mom meant was that neither of them had ever missed paying Duan Lili's living expenses, and with this final sum, they had fulfilled all their responsibilities and obligations toward her.
She hoped Duan Lili would try not to disturb them in the future, and they didn’t need her to support them in their old age.
"Your dad feels the same way. He said I could tell you on my own, so he won’t call you separately," she added.
Both she and he had long since started new families and had new children, and they didn’t want Duan Lili disrupting their current lives.
With the money in hand, Duan Lili immediately rented an apartment for herself.
Some of her classmates also lived off-campus, sharing apartments with others. But Duan Lili didn’t want to share with anyone. She had been boarding since childhood and had never had a space truly her own. She just wanted to live alone.
It was during her freshman summer break when she crossed over. She was lying on the sofa in her rented apartment, eating chips and scrolling through her social media feed, where her parents were each posting photos of trips with her younger siblings.
She closed the app, lay back on the sofa, and started playing a game.
The landlord’s sofa was too old and dirty, so she had bought a new fabric sofa for herself.
Little did she expect that when she crossed over, the sofa came along too. At least the money wasn’t wasted.
Lost in these random thoughts, the Small Wooden Knife was successfully crafted.
Duan Lili took out the Small Wooden Knife and held it in her hand, finding it identical to the one the System had given her—Combat +10.
She tried to put the Small Wooden Knife back into the warehouse but couldn’t. It turned out that when she took out the Small Wooden Knife, she had placed the Small Wooden Hammer inside. Earlier, because she had crafted Wood Blocks, wooden planks, and a wooden rod, three more slots were occupied, and the warehouse was now full.
Duan Lili took out the bottled water and tossed it onto the sofa. With a river nearby, there was no need for it to take up warehouse space. While a warehouse full of supplies was comforting, running out of storage space was a headache.
She glanced at the Interface and was surprised to find that she could still open the Crafting Interface even without the Small Wooden Hammer in hand. She clicked on the Small Wooden Knife icon in the Item List under the Crafting Interface and noticed the difference—without the Small Wooden Hammer’s boost, crafting a Small Wooden Knife on her own would take 30 minutes.
Small Wooden Knife boosts combat power, Small Wooden Hammer reduces crafting time. Got it.
Holding the Small Wooden Hammer, Duan Lili crafted a Small Wooden Axe, which took 10 minutes and consumed [wooden rod x1, Wood Block x1].
After five uses in crafting, the Small Wooden Hammer’s Durability dropped by 5, leaving it with 95 more uses. Quite economical and durable.
Duan Lili took out the Small Wooden Axe and stored the Small Wooden Hammer. Before it got dark, she jumped off the sofa and ran toward the back.
After using the sun to determine direction, she realized the sofa faced north with its back to the south, and the river flowed from east to west.
Duan Lili ran south, behind the sofa. The area behind the sofa was open, dotted with wild grass and flowers but no trees. The terrain gradually sloped upward. Trees began to appear about a hundred meters away, gradually thickening into a dense forest.
Having leveled up, Duan Lili was full of energy. She jogged over and, among the nearest trees, chose one of moderate thickness that she could wrap her arms around. Swinging the Small Wooden Axe, she began chopping at the tree.
The System provided raw wood in the basic equipment, indicating that raw wood is the most fundamental material. She decided to give it a try.
After swinging the Small Wooden Axe ten times, a "crack-crack" sound echoed, and a tree trunk as thick as a person's embrace slowly tilted before vanishing upon hitting the ground—raw wood appeared in her backpack. Unlike loot, which the System would prompt her to pick up, gathered materials seemed to go directly into the warehouse.
Very convenient.
Duan Lili glanced at the warehouse, which now displayed [Raw Wood 10]. Swinging the Small Wooden Axe ten times had yielded three pieces of raw wood.
Duan Lili selected another tree, slightly thicker than the last, and after ten swings, obtained four pieces of raw wood. So, the amount of raw wood gathered was related to the size of the tree itself.
Duan Lili checked the sky. Taking advantage of the remaining daylight before sunset, she swung the Small Wooden Axe wildly at the trees. By the time the axe's durability ran out, crumbling into a pile of wood shavings with a "crack," Duan Lili had gathered 33 pieces of raw wood, bringing the total in the warehouse to 40.
The sky had grown darker.
The trees nearby were still sparse, but further in, they quickly thickened into dense woods. The forest appeared much darker inside.
Duan Lili didn’t venture deeper. Having battled a giant serpent earlier, she had no energy left to explore the environment today—that could wait until tomorrow.
She turned to head back but stopped after a few steps.
Oh no, she needed to use the bathroom…