After swapping the water storage barrel, Lin Chu placed the barrel in the bathroom and turned on the faucet to fill it with water. She instructed Xiao Er to wait until the barrel was full before turning off the water.

She then entered the house and lay down on her small bed.

The bed was now very soft.

The mattress from the system’s gift package was even more comfortable than the rubber palm mattresses from her original world.

It wasn’t too soft, just the right balance. It provided a unique feeling of comfort that allowed her body to sink in while supporting her waist.

After a good night’s sleep, her fatigue was completely gone, unlike before when the bed was too hard and she’d wake up feeling more tired.

Lin Chu couldn’t describe how it felt, but she was sure of one thing.

The system came from a more advanced civilization than her original world.

So, the items produced by the system were all superior to those from her world.

She lay on the comfortable bed, her thoughts drifting, and quickly fell asleep.

The next morning, she woke up early as usual to do physical training.

It had been many days since she took the body-modifying pills, and through her deliberate practice, she had already learned to better control her strength.

After finishing her training, Lin Chu quickly washed off the sweat and put on her diving suit to prepare to head out.

Before leaving, she checked the peephole and saw that the water level had dropped below the viewable range.

Through the peephole, she could see faint ripples on the surface of the water.

Fish swam past.

Lin Chu waited for a while, noticing no anomalies before opening the door and stepping out.

This time, the water level had dropped another 50 cm, now reaching just below her neck.

She could stand and walk out without the need for an oxygen mask and still breathe normally.

In the distance, on a small hillside, wisps of smoke were rising.

A man was carrying a rake and heading out to work.

From afar, it looked like a peaceful secluded place.

But not long after, the sound of a child crying could be heard.

Anyone who has taken care of children knows that when they cry, it’s both sharp and jarring.

Even from a distance, Lin Chu could hear it.

Too far away, she couldn’t discern the cause, but she quietly wondered how the survivors who went to the small hillside were doing.

Had they successfully settled in the shelter, or had they joined the survivors’ base and crowded into tents?

When the survivors’ base moved a portion of their people here in 6 days, she would likely run into them.

Suddenly appearing in this residential area would raise many questions. She needed to quickly rationalize her presence here.

However, before the water level drops below the 6th floor, her priority was to search all 6 remaining 6th-floor apartments with balconies.

Besides that, she also needed to check the 1st to 5th floors of each building.

Before the survivors moved in, it would be impossible to search all 1st to 5th floors, so she would have to selectively search some buildings.

Lin Chu followed her plan and searched the remaining 6th-floor apartments.

She found several bags of fertilizer, a bird net, and many flower pots.

Since she had to use water buckets to repurpose flower pots yesterday, today she simply packed up the flower pots to take with her.

Later, she found a child’s deep bathtub in one of the lower floors.

Lin Chu thought about the black fish trapped in the water bucket.

The bucket was a bit too small for it, but this child’s bathtub was deeper and larger, more suitable for the fish.

She took it and placed it in her storage space.

By the end of the day, she had gathered a lot of food and tools.

Looking at her nearly full storage space, she began to enjoy the treasure-hunting process.

Her storage was getting full, but Lin Chu didn’t regret exchanging Ma Yan’s storage for Yu Hongfei’s.

Without the body-modifying pills she received in exchange, she couldn’t have handled such high-intensity underwater tasks.

When you gain something, you lose something—it all depends on what’s more important.

For Lin Chu, her body was her most important asset.

That day, she earned 68 points for catching fish.

But today, she had caught an odd-numbered fish again, so she was still holding a black fish trapped in the fishing net.

She planned to temporarily bring it back to the shelter to keep it company with the other small black fish.

When she caught another odd-numbered fish, she would submit it to the system.

She also dug up more algae in the yard on the 1st floor to use as fish food.

Just as Lin Chu was about to swim upstream to return to the shelter from the surface of the water, she suddenly heard noises from above.

It was the familiar sound of water splashing.

But this time, the sound was slightly different from yesterday’s.

Lin Chu paused, pressed her body against the wall, and silently listened to the noises above.

The man’s voice was muffled and sounded slightly displeased.

“Bai Jie, didn’t you say you asked the survivors? Someone here used to hang bird nets on their balconies, but now we can’t find any.”

“The whole building was flooded before the floodwaters receded. It’s no surprise the outdoor things were washed away.”

The woman’s voice was calm and composed, seeming to be the dominant figure between the two.

“Even if there’s nothing outside, surely there’s some stockpiled inside. If everything’s been washed away, doesn’t that mean we came here for nothing? You know, I gave you a day’s worth of supplies to help you out. I can’t return empty-handed.”

The man’s mumbling, transmitted through the water’s current, became faint in Lin Chu’s ears, but she could still make out the gist.

“There were other taskers sent here, not just you and me. It’s normal if someone arrived before us and took what we wanted.”

The woman’s words made Lin Chu’s eyes flicker.

Sure enough, they were two taskers.

“So you mean someone got here first? Then why wait? When we head back to the base, I’ll go and take it from them!”

After the man’s excited outburst, he seemed to think it through.

“But it shouldn’t be… Those taskers in the base haven’t come here yet.”

“Who says it has to be base taskers?”

“Bai Jie, are you saying… there are other taskers around here? But when we were dropped off that day, we saw all the taskers in the water trying to grab stuff, and they all got…”

The man swallowed as he trailed off.

Lin Chu felt a chill run down her spine.

What did he mean by that?

Was there a dangerous fish in the water?

She hadn’t encountered one all this time.

Now that she thought about it, after she escaped from the wood board grabbers on the first day, she had swum straight to this residential area.

She had entered a 6th-floor apartment with an open window.

She had looked back once, but all she saw was a group of people swimming toward the small hillside.

She hadn’t seen the group that had tried to grab her wood board.

According to these two, those people hadn’t gone to the hillside but had instead…

Lin Chu, deep in thought, suddenly felt as though someone was watching her.

She slowly turned around…

And in the next second, every hair on her body stood on end.