Chapter 552 – Mobile Residence

Chapter 552 – Mobile Residence

During the fruit-ripening season, the only thing of value on a sentinel coconut tree was its sap. But sentinel coconut trees were far too vigilant — if you wanted to collect sap during this period, you had no choice but to trick all their fruits into dropping first.

Each tree had at least a dozen large black fruits, meaning you’d be chased and pelted over ten times.

That alone would have been manageable, but there were also plenty of sailor vines growing beneath the trees.

Sailor vines were extremely tough and flexible. When fresh, they would secretly coil around the ankles of passersby. When dried, they made excellent material for braiding rope — rope woven from them would never rot.

Mo Lan silently raised the handle of her broom a little higher, gaining some altitude.

She had no desire to be pelted by a sentinel coconut tree that mistook her for an intruder.

The scenery here was quite nice, but if she wanted to place her mobile residence card here, she’d have to clear out all these sentinel coconut trees and sailor vines first — and that was no small amount of work.

The beach beyond the sentinel coconut trees had a pleasant environment and plenty of space, but it carried the risk of being flooded at high tide.

Mo Lan continued flying forward.

She wanted to find a place with an open view where she could see the ocean and the beach, yet wouldn’t require constant relocation due to high tide.

Ideally, it wouldn’t be too far from Moon Harbor either.

After about a minute of flying, the sentinel coconut trees thinned out, and the coastal land was occupied by a type of pink shrub.

Looking at its naturally curved, comb-tooth-shaped branches, Mo Lan recognized what it was — merfolk comb.

Combing your hair with it would temporarily turn your hair the color of seaweed. Merfolk were supposedly very fond of using it to groom their hair.

Though it grew by the seaside, it only took root in places the seawater couldn’t reach.

If merfolk wanted to pick its branches, they had no choice but to ask land-dwelling creatures for help — such as humans.

Among the pink merfolk combs, small blue shell-shaped flowers also grew. Those were tidebell flowers.

Mo Lan suspected that the tidebell conch soup at the Merfolk Tavern contained tidebell flowers, which was why you could hear the sound of ocean waves when you leaned in close.

The pink leafless shrubs interspersed with tiny blue shell-shaped flowers made it look like a cluster of pink coral on the ocean floor.

This was absolutely a sight unique to Tidewhisper Forest.

Mo Lan was immediately taken with this place.

Wherever merfolk comb grew, the seawater would never reach. Placing the mobile residence among the merfolk comb bushes meant no worrying about high tide.

From here to Moon Harbor, it was only a two-to-three-minute flight — not far at all.

The only drawback was that beyond the merfolk comb thickets, there wasn’t much of a proper beach.

The ground was covered entirely in dark green moss that extended all the way into the sea, and it looked quite beautiful in its own way.

“What kind of moss can grow all the way into seawater and still be this lush?” Mo Lan found it somewhat strange and lowered her flying altitude.

After getting close enough to see the moss clearly, realization dawned on her. “So it’s moonlight moss!”

That made sense.

While other mosses preferred damp, dark freshwater environments, moonlight moss alone favored seawater and sunlight.

It commonly appeared in shallow ocean areas and on beaches frequently submerged by seawater.

Still, it was quite rare to see it growing so luxuriantly that it formed an entire carpet of moss.

If it was moonlight moss, Mo Lan figured the lack of a sandy beach wasn’t a problem at all.

On moonlit nights, moonlight moss would emit a faint, starlike glow. Harvesting it at such times, drying it, and grinding it into powder could produce fluorescent pigment. This fluorescent pigment was especially striking at night, but just like moonlight moss under the moon, it carried the risk of attracting oceanic magical beasts.

This minor flaw was no issue in Mo Lan’s eyes.

She’d made her decision — she was staying right here.

Not wanting to destroy the sprawling merfolk comb thickets, she cleared out an open area on the inner side of the shrubs instead.

On the inner side of the thickets lay a grove of treasure bamboo.

This type of bamboo had naturally formed mysterious symbols on its nodes. Once deciphered, they could pinpoint the location of pirate treasure.

Unfortunately, every stalk of treasure bamboo was home to bamboo-boring bugs, and 99% of those symbols had been gnawed out by the bugs.

Within the bamboo grove grew some sneezewort and drunken sea-buckthorn.

Drunken sea-buckthorn was manageable enough — as long as you didn’t eat the orange-yellow berries on it, you wouldn’t experience the hallucination of flying over a beach.

But sneezewort was another matter entirely. The fine fuzz on its leaves was incredibly tiny and drifted on the wind. Anyone who inhaled it would sneeze uncontrollably until they jumped into the sea — virtually impossible to guard against.

Mo Lan shrouded herself in wind-element magic before daring to land in the bamboo grove. She cleared all the sneezewort from the area near the shrubs first, then began clearing the treasure bamboo and drunken sea-buckthorn.

Once she had cleared a suitably sized open area, she materialized the mobile residence card she had prepared long ago.

Between the bamboo grove and the pink shrub thickets, a two-story wooden cabin with a courtyard appeared.

The cabin’s exterior was modeled after the one she had lived in as a child back in Emerald Creek Plains.

However, the interior layout was quite different. The little cabin in Emerald Creek Plains had been shared with Mama Shanna, but this one was for Mo Lan alone. Everything inside was designed around her personal needs and habits, and there was only one bedroom.

The courtyard outside the cabin, the flower pots on the cabin’s balcony, and those inside the cabin — every spot with soil in this mobile residence functioned as a planting bed.

The plants grown inside would continue growing normally when the mobile residence card was materialized, and would pause their growth when the card reverted to its card state.

The courtyard wall was a ring of vine-covered flower hedging only one meter tall. It served a purely decorative purpose; what truly protected the courtyard was the magic circles covering the entire residence.

Defensive magic formation, invisibility magic circle, constant-temperature magic circle, humidity-regulating magic circle, dust-removal magic circle… This mobile residence card possessed every type of magic circle that could be used to protect a dwelling, and all of them were Advanced grade.

With their protection, unless a Beyond Peak level powerhouse launched a sudden attack, the mobile residence could hold out for a while.

For her first meal after moving into the mobile residence, Mo Lan used local ingredients — oil pressed from the seeds of drunken sea-buckthorn berries picked from the treasure bamboo grove, combined with bamboo-boring bugs caught while felling treasure bamboo — to make a dish of deep-fried bamboo-boring bugs in drunken sea-buckthorn oil.

It was a dish that looked completely unappetizing, even a bit disgusting, yet it was a classic specialty of Valen’s coastal regions.

Its reputation was well-deserved: with your eyes closed, it was heavenly; with your eyes open, it was impossible to swallow.

Even Mo Lan was not immune — she ate the entire meal with her eyes shut.

After lunch, Mo Lan pinned on her water-repelling gem brooch, mounted her broomstick, and set off to find the “treasure” from last night’s treasure map.

In truth, after hearing about the past treasures found through the Sunken Ship Treasure Platter’s maps, Mo Lan didn’t hold much hope for this one.

It was simply that she had just arrived at Moon Harbor and found everything novel enough to want to try.

Besides, she had never visited Valen’s ocean floor before, so she might as well use the treasure hunt as an excuse to explore.

All the treasure maps pointed to locations in the near-shore area.

Mo Lan hadn’t been flying long before she reached the position shown on the treasure map.

She stowed her broomstick and dropped into the sea, diving toward the ocean floor while searching for the legendary treasure.