Chapter 6

"Hahaha..." Samuel looked helpless. "Ji'en, stop joking."

There were so many Alphas here. How could there be such a coincidence in the world?

Ji'en smiled, tacitly admitting it had indeed been a joke. "All right, cousin, I hope we both find the Alpha we're looking for. Goodbye."

"Goodbye." Samuel parted ways with Ji'en and headed in a different direction. Each major had been assigned a different area, and he needed to return to his own and sit down before the entrance ceremony officially began.

There were only three minutes left until the entrance ceremony. He could search for another two.

With little time to spare, Samuel quickened his pace.

At that moment, the skin showed that Qin Su had 11 minutes and 06 seconds left to live, but he had come to a halt.

[What are you doing?] They were clearly not far from the entrance, yet Qin Su had avoided the "electronic eyes" patrolling overhead and stopped in the shadows. This puzzled 777.

Does he think he's not dying fast enough?

"Waiting."

Qin Su kept his answer short.

After studying the data 777 had provided, Qin Su had easily discovered that, just as he had guessed, the electronic eyes hovering around the venue all followed fixed routes. They were evidently controlled by a single operating program.

Having deliberately studied the routes of the venue's electronic eyes, Qin Su now easily avoided their surveillance and cautiously took in the actual situation inside.

Although he already knew where his seat was from the data the system had provided, the corner of his mouth twitched slightly when his gaze fell on the middle seat in the curved first row of the freshmen's section.

The information he had received from the school bluntly stated that the seats for the freshmen's welcome ceremony were arranged according to the numerical value and length of their "identity IDs."

With "QS" in his identity ID, his was without question the lowest-numbered and shortest ID among this year's freshmen.

But just like license plate and phone numbers in the real world, although they were supposedly assigned by "random draw," ninety-nine percent of the "desirable numbers" were actually "monopolized." He did not believe that 777, which had made it clear that it had served several hosts to death and that he was merely one of its unremarkable hosts, would deliberately choose such a special "desirable" ID for him.

There had to be some misunderstanding.

[Wait for what?]

Before Qin Su had a chance to get an answer, the system's puzzled voice sounded in his mind.

"Time."

With that, Qin Su glanced at the time in the upper right corner. There were thirty seconds left until the one-minute mark he had "calculated."

It was almost time. As he pondered, Qin Su slipped his hand into his dress pants pocket.

During his first twelve hours in the comic world, he had already used the distance between his seat and the entrance, along with his own speed, to calculate from the data that he needed exactly one minute to walk from the entrance to his seat.

He intended to time it precisely and enter during the final minute before the "freshmen's welcome ceremony."

By then, the vast majority of the freshmen would be seated in their assigned places and would not become "obstacles in his path."

He would pass by the protagonists and become the focus of everyone's attention.

The upperclassmen? They were not even on the same level as the freshmen, but on the three levels above. They would not "get in his way," so naturally, he did not need to consider them for the time being.

With the Cold Blast Bomb in his pocket adding "a filter," the freshmen would have no choice but to turn and look at him.

But once the entrance ceremony officially began, sounds from the stage in the very center would interrupt everyone's attention, leaving them unsatisfied with how much they had seen of his "grand" entrance and triggering the contrary impulse to want to look all the more because they could not.

That way, in a sense, those gazes would fall on him unconsciously during the freshmen's entrance ceremony with even greater "stubborn determination."

Even freshmen seated far from him would look in his direction because everyone else was doing so, and more and more people would look at him.

It would give everyone the illusion that they were involuntarily drawn to him and that he was the center of attention.

Time?

Before 777's question had been answered, it saw Qin Su pull something the size of a peanut, encased in transparent material, from his dress pants.

[What's that now?]

"A Cold Blast Bomb. Once crushed, it can make the temperature within a ten-meter radius drop sharply from the center outward for a short time," Qin Su explained.

The "Alpha pheromones" he had personally concocted were not yet complete, but strictly speaking, this would be his first appearance before the comic's readers and the natives.

To establish a "forceful and cold-blooded" image when he first let the "audience" inside and outside the comic see his face clearly, he had to make a "grand" entrance.

Without pheromones or an imposing presence, he could only rely on the Cold Blast Bomb. Only then could he leave a deep impression on the people inside and outside the comic and make them wary.

Although it did no actual harm, he could use the sudden drop in temperature to "create a mysterious effect and blur the line between truth and fiction."

To the "audience" inside and outside the comic, this was just an ordinary freshmen's entrance ceremony. To him, it was an important occasion on which he had to manually stack every possible buff to build up his image.

An ordinary college student disguising himself as an Alpha to stay alive could lose everything with the slightest mistake. He had to be careful.

[??? You actually brought this useless stuff! Previous hosts brought either money or precious metals, and some even had the connections to bring guns and ammunition!]

A "Cold Blast Bomb" that made the air temperature plummet? It could neither be exchanged for star coins nor used as a weapon. It was simply trash.

"Were the things they brought useful?" Qin Su asked in return.

Star coins were used here, so money from home was useless. According to Jiang Lu, there were more kinds of precious metals here than in the real world, and they were more expensive. Gold and the like were not considered valuable here at all. For the sake of his persona, bringing it would have been useless anyway. He could not sell it and leave behind a "blemish" like "needing to sell cheap gold for star coins."

Weapons? He had no shortage of those at home.

But weapons that were practically "truth" in the real world would, against the technological standards of the comic world, become nothing more than obsolete scrap metal unfit to be shown in public.

From the moment he appeared in the comic world, he had deliberately never even taken out his phone.

[...Useless.]

They had even been laughed at.

Qin Su: "..."

He finally understood why so many hosts before him had died.

If they took out "low-end" items, the "audience" inside and outside the comic would find them "ridiculous" and "boring." They would certainly fail to pique the audience's interest, gradually be forgotten as a matter of course, and ultimately die.

With one minute and ten seconds left before the freshmen's entrance ceremony, Qin Su finished answering the system's question and asked the one on his own mind.

"I have a question." Qin Su's gaze rested on his seat. "Why does my identity ID have QS in it?"

[Of course it's because the citizen IDs on every planet in the Federation begin with the capitalized initials of their names. My name is '777,' and you can't use my '7,' so I simply added five '1's to make it '7' characters long. That way, no matter how you look at it, you're a host I brought out!]

Qin Su: "..."

No exception at all.

He thanked the system for its utterly inflexible thinking, which had unintentionally given him another piece of "material" for disguising himself as a big shot.

So Qin Su thought as he walked toward the entrance.

All the freshmen were already inside, and there was no one outside. But Qin Su, now visible to the hovering electronic eyes, still did not dare relax. He took every step as though he were walking a runway.

When only one minute remained before the entrance ceremony, Qin Su stood at the entrance as planned.

The instant he strode into the venue and into everyone's sight, Qin Su discreetly crushed the Cold Blast Bomb in his hand.

The moment he crushed it, the surrounding temperature plunged to freezing in an instant as Qin Su stepped into the venue.

A piercing chill swept through the ten-meter radius around Qin Su in an instant. At the center of the "ice blast," Qin Su took each step exactly as he had rigorously rehearsed beforehand, his presence unleashed in full...

In just two minutes, Samuel had searched the entire freshmen's section, practically running the whole way, yet still failed to find the Alpha he had in mind. He sighed and murmured, "It looks like that black-haired Alpha isn't a freshman in our year. He must be an upperclassman..."

Samuel was still murmuring as he jogged back to his seat when his whole body suddenly felt as though it had plunged into an ice cave. He stiffly turned his neck and instinctively looked behind him. The instant he did, his pupils widened.

It's him! That Alpha I met briefly not long ago, the one standing by the floor-to-ceiling window watching us!

Although Samuel had not been able to see the other person's face clearly before, the moment he saw him, the thought "It's him" flashed through his mind.

He had searched everywhere without success, only to turn around and find the man suddenly standing before him. Enormous delight and bone-deep cold surged through Samuel at once, leaving him frozen in place, his head still turned.

So cold!

The instant Qin Su crushed the Cold Blast Bomb, the freshmen within ten meters of him all had the same thought, both physically and mentally.

The previously noisy venue fell so silent that a pin could be heard dropping, all because of the sudden chill they could not ignore.

That made the sound of Qin Su's leather shoes striking the polished marble floor all the clearer, making it even harder for the freshmen not to notice.

The bone-deep chill drew everyone's gazes to Qin Su as if by instinct, all in perfect unison.

Amid a powerful, icy, imposing aura, a tall and slender black-haired young man with a handsome, cold face appeared in everyone's field of view, his expression indifferent and his steps unhurried.

Impeccably tailored custom Gurkha dress pants cinched his lean waist, elegant and austere. A silk shirt with a luxurious sheen showed off his fine figure, and the red lambskin soles of his shoes appeared and disappeared as he walked... From head to toe, his outfit was casual, yet to their eyes it seemed inexplicably striking, refined and elegant, drawing their gazes after him and leaving them unable to look away...

Low murmurs rose throughout the venue.

"Who is he? What a powerful aura, such an authoritative face, and such a cold demeanor!"

"No idea, but with an aura and presence that strong, he has to be an Alpha. Can't you find some better words?"

"Obviously. Can't you see the pheromone-blocking patch for Alphas over the gland on the back of his neck?"

"Come to think of it, his aura is still this strong with a pheromone-blocking patch on. He's definitely an S-rank Alpha."

"No, no, no. Is S-rank Alpha the limit of your imagination? I had a brief encounter with an S-rank Alpha. With an Alpha pheromone-blocking patch on and no strenuous exercise, an S-rank Alpha wouldn't produce such a terrifying aura."

"You mean... this freshman is an SS-rank or SSS-rank Alpha? Are you kidding? You don't even get one SSS-rank Alpha in a century!" In a world where the average life span was two hundred years, a century was not that long.

"There's always a chance! Anyway, after that overpowering blast of his icy aura, my head feels much clearer. Heaven knows I nearly suffocated from all those jumbled Alpha and Omega pheromones just now."

The unusual commotion on the freshmen's level also caught the attention of the Fourth Military Academy's upperclassmen.

"Interesting, truly interesting. I didn't expect a surprise among this year's freshmen. I wonder which family's heir he is?"

"Tsk, is an heir the limit of your imagination? Still, he looks like an Alpha of a very high rank, yet there's been no news about him at all."

"What's so strange about that? You can tell at a glance that his family deliberately protected his privacy very well."

Back at his seat, Ji'en excitedly grabbed the hand of the friend beside him. Even his lowered voice could not hide his excitement. "It's him!!! The Alpha we met on the train! We've seen him again! And he's a freshman, just like us!"

The Omega beside him had been so absorbed in watching that he had forgotten to breathe. Ji'en's excited grab brought him back to his senses, and he hurriedly patted his chest and gasped for air. "Even though he radiates authority from head to toe, if I remember correctly, we didn't even see his face before. How can you be sure?"

"The moment he stood there, I had a gut feeling it was him! My intuition can't be wrong!" Ji'en said firmly.

Sensing gazes from every direction, Qin Su suppressed the upward curve of his lips.

Good. With the Cold Blast Bomb's "assistance," the opening of his plan for a "grand" debut had been a complete success.

With that thought, Qin Su walked expressionlessly toward the four members of the protagonist group, as planned. Only... his gaze fell on Samuel, the "obstacle" standing rigidly in the path he had to take.

Something unexpected had appeared in his path.