Chapter 223: "A Bountiful Harvest"

Just like that, under the banner of “Better Miss Than Let Go,” Jing Shu ended up rescuing a few people, though some had gotten trapped underwater for other reasons.

In the meantime, she completed a bounty worth 800 virtual coins, helping a client retrieve a set of equipment from a shopping mall. Due to the terrain, the salvage boat’s machinery couldn’t reach the spot, and the equipment was too heavy to move manually underwater. Even with oxygen tanks, it would take seven or eight people to handle it. In the dark, winding waters, it wasn’t easy to manage.

This is where the shark submarine truly shined, with its 280 horsepower making the job almost effortless. Jing Shu, ever cautious, always made sure there were no creatures or surveillance before she tucked the equipment into her special spatial storage. Only when she neared the surface did she retrieve it.

Her “Rubik’s Cube” spatial storage was a powerful tool, saving her a lot of diesel fuel.

As time passed, the temperature plummeted from 37°C to just a few degrees above freezing. The dim daylight was about to give way to total darkness, signaling the end of the day. Jing Shu hadn’t encountered a single leech nest—not even one she could take home for cultivation.

“Did I mess up again? Should I just start a one-person, grid-like search?” Jing Shu started doubting her approach, prepared to head back empty-handed once more.

“Wrap it up, we’re done for the day!”

“No one else goes back down! Line up, report your headcounts, and each group marks their search area and findings on the map. We’ll have a debrief after everything’s organized!” Liu Xing wiped the sweat off his brow—another day with no major incidents.

Just as Jing Shu was about to leave, a voice caught her attention:

“Where’s the A10 team? All three members are missing! Anyone know how long they’ve been gone?”

“No idea, haven’t seen them in a while.”

Jing Shu’s eyes lit up. She hurriedly asked, “Which direction?”

“Six o’clock, near what used to be a large underground supermarket.”

In a flash, Jing Shu sped off in her shark submarine.

Large underground supermarkets were usually stripped bare, and today, Jing Shu hadn’t even marked this location on her planned salvage list.

Which meant one thing: something was fishy.

“There’s definitely something going on.”

Navigating swiftly through the supermarket in her shark submarine, Jing Shu zoomed through the now-empty space. Even the shelves were gone. Occasionally, she bumped into something, but she bulldozed her way through—this submarine was only for short-term use, anyway, and it was cheap, so she didn’t care about a few scratches.

Her powerful lights scanned the underwater scene, but there was still no sign of anyone. She passed through the snack section, the household section, the vegetable section, and the grocery section. Just as she reached the fresh food section, she spotted a large, dense, writhing mass of something.

It was a heap of rotting, bloated meat—possibly from humans or other creatures—crawling with corpse worms.

This area had likely been a fishmonger’s stall before the apocalypse. The smell of fish had probably attracted flies and maggots, which in turn attracted other unknown creatures. After the area flooded, it became a breeding ground for all sorts of bugs.

Speaking of unknown creatures, Jing Shu remembered a species that had appeared later—an invasive species attracted to the scent of blood and meat. These creatures thrived on rotting flesh, their bodies covered with decaying, dead tissue, and swarmed with corpse worms. Once bloated, the flesh turned white, as it did now.

Their defining traits were that they lived in large colonies, spread viruses, and ate the corpse worms on each other’s bodies. When they encountered humans, they would excitedly attack. Jing Shu had encountered many such attacks during her migration in her past life.

This species had first been spread by Australia’s "zombie deer," and it later invaded other animals, evolving into something closer to wolves. Jing Shu even suspected these creatures had evolved from wolves themselves.

“They shouldn’t appear this early,” Jing Shu muttered, shaking her head. These creatures were still a few years away from emerging, migrating southward from colder regions with everyone else.

Besides these, there were also countless redworms, drawn to the area by the energy from the rotting meat. These redworms were indiscriminate—they ate both vegetables and meat.

A large cluster of redworms had gathered here, which in turn attracted an enormous swarm of leeches.

“This is a big one! I’ve never seen such a huge swarm of leeches. No wonder the three members of the A10 team didn’t make it. If just one of them had surfaced to call for help, they wouldn’t have all died here,” Jing Shu thought. What a massive haul!

Jing Shu spotted a familiar sight: the three missing team members were entangled together, covered in leeches. One of them was holding a blood mushroom!

Sure enough, they had discovered blood mushrooms here. But the sheer number of leeches, thousands upon thousands of them, was overwhelming. Even if you didn’t approach them, they wouldn’t stay still.

Once a single leech spotted its target, a swarm would follow, viciously pursuing it. Jing Shu didn’t dare expose herself in the water—there was a reason she never left the submarine.

In the midst of the leech swarm were clusters of blood mushrooms, vibrant and plump, at least ten in total! Jing Shu’s heart soared with excitement. Without disturbing anything, she carefully transferred everything to her spatial storage, hoping to see if the blood mushrooms could reproduce. She even moved the surrounding water into her space.

The three men were already dead beyond saving. Jing Shu collected their bodies, the leeches, the blood mushrooms, and a swarm of redworms, transferring everything into her space, occupying six cubic meters.

She then separated the corpses from the leeches and attached them to the back of her shark submarine, speeding off. Oh, by the way, while live people couldn’t enter the spatial storage, dead ones could.

Eager to get home and examine her haul, Jing Shu made a quick U-turn, dropping the three bodies back on the boat. Liu Xing was moved to tears, nearly kneeling before her. When he realized the three were dead, he shed even more emotional tears, “Quick, prepare proper burials for them!”

Jing Shu was equally thrilled.

Once home, Jing Shu locked herself in her villa and eagerly began studying the biological chain inside her space. The leeches surrounded the blood mushrooms in the center, while the redworms were trapped outside the leech swarm.

At last, Jing Shu figured out how the leeches survived—they had evolved to feed on redworms directly.