On the way home, Lin Mo made a detour to a water station and ordered 20 five-liter bottles of purified water. She also bought a water purifier with a sterilization function.
Just do what you can, and leave the rest to fate.
After 9 PM, the building material store's delivery workers arrived by truck. The motion-sensor light in the hallway clicked on, and the workers carried in the iron doors, shoe cabinet, and other items.
Lin Mo greeted them: "Master, please put everything in the empty area of the living room."
At that moment, the security door opposite creaked open. The aunt from across the hall stood in the doorway, arms crossed, with an uncle in a wool cap behind her.
"Oh, young lady!" The aunt's voice was loud: "Moving so many things this late, are you renovating?"
Lin Mo had lived there a long time but wasn't familiar with them: "Yes, just preparing materials."
The uncle, who had been frowning, couldn't help but speak: "Young lady, renovating at night is absolutely not allowed, you know? At our age, our hearts can't take the shock—"
Lin Mo's tone was calm but firm: "I arranged with the renovation workers for 9 AM to 5 PM, fully in compliance with S City's renovation regulations."
"These things can't be piled in the hallway! It's so narrow—what if someone trips or there's a fire and the fire exit is blocked?"
Lin Mo pointed at the workers and said unhurriedly: "Look, all materials are going into my living room."
"Well, that's good," the aunt muttered, finally throwing out: "The property management will fine you if you pile things in the hallway!"
"Property management doesn't have the authority to impose administrative fines." At most they'd post a notice requesting correction, Lin Mo thought to herself.
The aunt was momentarily at a loss for words.
Seeing the young lady was young but unusually composed, the door opposite finally clicked shut with a slight grumble.
"Young people these days have such bad tempers," came a faint complaint from behind the door: "The upstairs just finished renovation last year, and now the neighbor next door is causing trouble again..."
Distant neighborly relations were just fine; then no one would notice anything unusual. Sure enough, when more delivery workers arrived later, the door opposite didn't even open.
Lin Mo shrugged indifferently.
[Detected that building materials have met the requirement. Collect?]
The system prompt sounded.
Lin Mo answered: "Yes."
At that moment, a round icon for collecting building materials appeared out of thin air.
Somewhat puzzled, Lin Mo pressed and held the icon for three seconds—a wisp of silver particle flow appeared at her fingertip out of nowhere.
"Eh?" She moved her fingertip, and the star-dust-like specks slithered through the air like a spirit snake.
Lin Mo couldn't help but hold her breath: "So this is... the system's way of collecting building materials?"
The silver particle flow seemed to understand her mental guidance, gliding lightly through the air and precisely wrapping around the cold-rolled steel doors, aluminum alloy covers, and other items on the floor.
Where the particles covered, the outlines of the objects melted like thin ice under a blazing welding torch, rapidly fading and dissolving in an invisible circle built by the silver light, until they completely disappeared without a trace.
After a moment, the system displayed:
[Stored 180kg of building materials]
An additional "Building Materials" section appeared on the system control panel, showing the balance.
[Novice task completed]
[Novice task reward: [Expansion Hammer] has been delivered to your inventory]
Lin Mo found the Expansion Hammer in the system inventory. With a subtle spatial fluctuation, a long-handled forging hammer, its body flowing with a dark silver metallic sheen and hovering in midair, silently appeared in her hand.
A line of semi-transparent floating text then appeared:
[Expansion Hammer: Consume 30kg of building materials to perform a spatial anchor strike in a specified direction, expanding physical space by 1×1×3 m³ (height)]
[Hint: The spatial anchor must be applied to the existing carriage boundary; strike 3 consecutive times]
Author's Note: None.