Today, Lin Mei got off work much later than usual. By the time she dragged her exhausted body home, the wall clock was already pointing at eight o’clock. She let out a soft sigh.
“Forget it, I’m too tired. I’ll be lazy for once today and skip delivering food.”
After quickly freshening herself up, she went to the kitchen to cook instant noodles. Steam curled upward from the pot, carrying a rich aroma that made her swallow unconsciously.
Such fragrant noodles deserved an egg… maybe even a sausage.
The moment the thought appeared, she acted on it, cracking two eggs into the noodles. Unfortunately, she had already finished the sausages. Well, one extra egg it was then. Now that she had finally paid off all her debts and even saved up a little money, she figured she should treat herself slightly better.
As she cooked, Lin Mei couldn’t help reflecting on how difficult the road had been for her. It had made her extremely frugal.
After eating and drinking her fill, Lin Mei collapsed onto the small sofa chair in her room, feeling as though every bit of strength had been drained from her body. She set the chopsticks across the noodle bowl and lazily leaned back against the chair, her gaze unfocused. Whenever she was full, she became lazy. Looking at the still-steaming bowl and chopsticks on the table, she truly couldn’t be bothered to clean up.
A sudden thought crossed her mind:
If only the dishes could clean themselves up automatically.
The instant the thought flashed through her head, the bowl and chopsticks in front of her actually disappeared.
Lin Mei’s eyes widened instantly, her face filled with horror. She jerked upright in the chair and looked around wildly.
“Where did the bowl and chopsticks go? What the hell? Am I seeing ghosts? Or am I hallucinating? Don’t scare me! Gods and spirits, come out right now!”
The moment she finished speaking, the bowl and chopsticks suddenly reappeared in exactly the same spot, completely intact.
Lin Mei rubbed her eyes, thinking she must have seen wrong. She even reached out and touched the bowl. It was still warm. There was no mistake—it was the same bowl.
She cautiously tried again, silently willing the dishes to disappear. Sure enough, they vanished once more.
After repeating this several times, Lin Mei finally accepted that she wasn’t imagining things, nor was it some supernatural haunting. She really could make objects disappear and reappear.
She experimented with making the sofa disappear and reappear, then even played around with the blankets and pillows on her bed. Eventually, she was forced to accept reality.
She seemed to have gained some kind of supernatural ability.
Even someone as slow to react as her could tell something was wrong. She had wished before for things to put themselves away automatically when she felt lazy, but nothing like this had ever happened.
This phenomenon felt strangely similar to something one of her college roommates used to talk about in the dormitory—storage spaces from novels.
Back then, Lin Mei had overheard her roommate talking endlessly about how wonderful it would be to have a magical “space” like in fiction. Valuable items could be stored inside and taken out anytime. Convenient and amazing.
“Space.”
Such a strange word. The reason Lin Mei suddenly remembered it was because that roommate had been absolutely obsessed with novels. Aside from sleeping, she spent every waking moment glued to her phone reading stories—even while eating, drinking, using the bathroom, attending class, or walking. Whenever she chatted with anyone, she only talked about novel plots and settings.
Among all the “cheat abilities” in fiction, “space” had been the one she wanted most. She constantly fantasized about transmigrating to ancient times and making a name for herself.
When in doubt, search online.
Lin Mei immediately grabbed her phone and searched for novels about “space abilities.” She quickly skimmed through dozens of story summaries and soon developed a terrible feeling.
In these stories, people with spaces either faced an approaching apocalypse filled with natural disasters and zombies, or they transmigrated to ancient times to farm or flee famine.
Lin Mei didn’t want the apocalypse. Just imagining endless disasters made her scalp tingle with fear. As for zombies, she didn’t even dare imagine whether she’d turn into one immediately at the beginning.
She also had zero interest in transmigrating to ancient times. That feudal era, bound by rigid social rules, sounded suffocating. She still remembered what history books described—women with low status, trapped by the expectations of obedience and virtue.
She had struggled for more than twenty years and was finally close to living a better life. She didn’t want anything to change.
Lin Mei picked a novel that looked relatively decent and started reading. Right at the beginning, the heroine’s space was introduced: thousands of acres of farmland, a spiritual spring that could purify the body and enhance beauty, crops that matured ten times faster…
Lin Mei was stunned.
This is ridiculously overpowered!
Am I supposed to become this overpowered too?
Immediately, she copied what the novels described and concentrated hard, trying to sense the existence of her own space. After several attempts, she actually succeeded.
The space was real.
But… there was absolutely nothing inside. Empty and barren. And tiny.
Wasn’t it supposed to contain thousands of acres of farmland? Where was the spiritual spring water?
Her space was literally just a square area about one zhang across—small and box-shaped. Its floor area was about the same size as the tiny room she rented, roughly eleven square meters, only slightly taller than the room itself. After mentally calculating the volume, she estimated it was only about thirty-six cubic meters in total.
Then she remembered that in novels, some spaces could preserve freshness, some could hold living creatures, and some even allowed people to enter.
Lin Mei eagerly began testing things out.
First, she tried to see if she herself could enter the space. She focused intensely, attempting to pull herself inside. After ten minutes of effort, she gave up. No matter how hard she concentrated, she simply couldn’t get in.
As for testing living creatures, she currently had none around, so she decided to wait until tomorrow.
Next came freshness preservation, which was easy to test. She grabbed a bag of frozen dumplings from the fridge and stored them inside the space. Tomorrow morning she would check whether they had thawed.
That night, Lin Mei barely slept at all.
At first, she busied herself experimenting with the space. Later, she became completely absorbed in reading novels. But the further she read, the more anxious she became. Her mind filled with thoughts of what she should do next.
By the end of the night, she had skimmed through several novels of the same type—and completely lost the ability to sleep.