Cream

The instant his fingertips touched the edge of the plastic takeout container, an irresistible wave of heavy sleepiness swept over him without warning, as though an invisible stone had slammed down on his consciousness.

His eyelids felt as heavy as a thousand pounds. Thinking he might be exhausted from working overtime for days on end, he decided to sleep for a while.

He only instinctively pushed the keyboard and the takeout meal in front of him forward before collapsing onto the cold office desk as if all his strength had left him, instantly sinking into dreamless darkness.

His heart soon stopped beating, and he became another member of the army of sudden-death victims.

Outside the office building, the big city blazed with lights and revelry; the singing and dancing went on.

And the night in the room remained as quiet as ever.

But not long after his heart stopped, the screen of the computer still loading a browser game suddenly flickered.

It turned into a patch of warped, chaotic colored static, accompanied by the crackle of electrical noise.

Then a speck of golden light burst from the center of the screen, rapidly expanding and solidifying.

It was the phantom image of a strangely shaped arrow!

The arrow was mostly dark gold, with fine, bizarre insect-like patterns adorning its tip.

As though alive, it crawled out of the computer screen and solidified into a three-dimensional form.

Like a little snake that had just awakened, the arrow turned slightly and aimed at the hand lying limp on the desk in death.

The next moment, it shot silently downward, piercing the back of his hand with perfect accuracy!

There was no blood, no wound.

The arrow seemed to merge into a phantom and travel swiftly upward along the outline of his arm.

Where it passed, faint golden light could be seen flowing beneath his skin. At last, it darted into the side of his neck and vanished completely.

The static on the screen subsided as well, and the game's frozen interface returned.

It was as though everything that had just happened had been an illusion.

When he regained consciousness, he heard his own loud but unfamiliar cries, and before his eyes were swaying, blurry faces and the dim roof beams above.

He was named "Qing Miao," and according to the family genealogy, his generation was assigned the character "He."

And so he came to have his present name—Qing He Miao.

As for the origin of the golden finger he had possessed since childhood, he had his suspicions.

The system interface before him, visible to him alone, was identical in layout, font, and even its rough yet oddly bewitching aesthetic to the monster-slaying, leveling browser game he had often played in his previous life.

By that era, browser games had long since become relics of the past, with few people paying them any attention.

There were two main reasons he had become a regular player of that game.

First, logging in was extremely simple, and even without spending money, he could slowly grind his way forward. It suited a corporate slave like him, who could only snatch spare moments to relax.

Second, the game really did have something going for it.

It was a grand mishmash, wildly blending settings from all sorts of anime.

For example, the first fifteen skills available to a game character were all drawn from a work called JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.

Aside from one basic "Stand" given to players at the start, they received a chance to randomly draw a Stand every time they gained three levels.

They could then use the corresponding powerful skills.

As for the other skills, players had to venture deep into all kinds of dungeons, complete quests, and slay monsters for a random chance of obtaining them.

Having transmigrated and inherited the game system, Qing He Miao had naturally brought this mechanism with him.

Chapter 5: Cream

Not long ago, Qing He Miao had worked hard to cultivate to level nine and earned his third chance to draw a Stand.

The Stand he drew was: [Cream].

One of that Stand's effects

was that, while its ability was active, it could swallow its user whole into the alternate dimension inside its body, leaving the user completely unharmed and able to avoid the vast majority of external attacks.

It was precisely because he had this trump card to ensure he could withdraw at any time if relations soured that he dared invite trouble and meddle in his master's affair.

Yet a game with such seemingly rich settings ultimately existed only as a browser game with crude graphics and a rudimentary UI.

Most people who played it could probably guess why.

Of all those dazzling anime settings in it, probably not a single one had been properly licensed.

Still, since he could have fun playing without spending money, Qing He Miao, a corporate slave in his previous life, naturally wouldn't have bothered worrying about it.

He could barely look after himself as it was.

Keeping to his habit of checking the system panel every day, Qing He Miao confirmed that nothing was amiss with his experience bar, proficiency, or status. With a thought, he quietly dismissed the pale golden screen of light.

He readjusted his position on the warm kang, sitting cross-legged with his eyes closed and his hands resting naturally on his knees. His breathing gradually grew long and even.

His consciousness sank inward, and he began slowly circulating the Qi in his body according to the most basic method of the spirit-medium lineage, the Bingbing Ritual. Tempering body and spirit, he began another night of cultivation.

[Through continuous daily practice, you have successfully tempered and condensed a portion of Qi. Your understanding of the Bingbing Ritual has improved by a minuscule amount. Current proficiency: Bingbing Ritual (mastered)]

System notifications sounded in his mind from time to time.

The countryside had no rigid notion of work hours like the city, and now that every household had light bulbs, nighttime gatherings and long conversations had become commonplace.

When relatives and neighbors came calling, they often stayed well into the night.

Not until the hands of the old-fashioned wall clock had crept past eleven or twelve did he finally hear farewells to the guests from the outer room, the creak of the door hinges, and a few words exchanged by his parents.

Qing He Miao slowly breathed out a long stream of turbid air, knowing that his cultivation time was over for the day.

He gradually concluded his practice, slowly gathering the warm, flowing Qi in his body back into the depths of his dantian.

In this world's terms, neither of his parents in this life was an "Outcast."

They could not sense the existence of Qi.

Naturally, they could not understand what an act of heaven-and-earth transformation their child was performing when he sat cross-legged on the kang every single day, eyes closed and mind focused.

So, with their simple and practical understanding, they could not help nagging him.

They hoped he would devote more attention to his studies.

They hoped that, through education, he could one day leave this land behind.

When his parents returned to the inner room, the family briefly greeted one another and spread out their bedding on the broad heated kang.

The rustling of fabric, mingled with a few whispers about tomorrow's farmwork or the livestock, soon faded into silence.

Only the varying depths of their breathing remained, along with the occasional calls of roosters and barking of dogs outside.

Qing He Miao was completely content, and he easily sank into a deep sleep.

"When I was born, auspicious signs accompanied me. Outside the window, mist veiled the thunder and lightning, yet a yellow bird was also seen flying past the eaves with a jade ring in its beak. Thus, I was born faintly in harmony with the Heavenly Dao, able to know five hundred years into the past and five hundred years into the future."

Early in the morning, in a classroom at a township junior high school.

During morning reading, books lay sparsely open on the desks, but a group of adolescents had gathered around a seat by the window, listening as the boy surrounded in their midst spun wild tales in a seemingly casual manner.

The back row, by the window—the king's homeland.

The boy was none other than Qing He Miao, who had specifically asked the teacher to move him there.

In this life, he had just turned fourteen, the wonderful age of a second-year junior high student.

Although he had an adult soul and, through practicing Qi, had gradually come to understand that this world was actually the world of The Outcast,

he felt deeply that sitting in a classroom and shooting the breeze as though following a prescribed routine no longer meant much to him.

But he still had to consider the feelings and expectations of his parents in this life.

With the simplest values held by their generation, if they learned their child had stopped attending school, they would probably feel as though the sky had fallen.

Thus, all these years, Qing He Miao had been forced to waste vast amounts of cultivation time at school.

The dull, repetitive routine inevitably led to some unconventional behavior to pass the time.

For instance, right now, during morning reading, when the sound of students reading aloud should have filled the room, he had drawn a group over to listen to his tall tales instead.

"Bullshit! Prove it, then!"

There were always some among the boys watching who didn't buy it. A sturdy-looking boy folded his arms and retorted with feigned disdain, attempting to puncture this "myth":

"You've said that so many times, but you still can't even predict what homework the teacher will assign each day. What kind of ability is that?"

"I've explained this before too. The so-called 'Heavenly Dao' is the supreme law formed by the workings of all things in the world, their creation and destruction, and the interweaving of cause and effect. It is a vast whole that bears all things and has coalesced through unseen forces, endlessly profound and mysterious."

Faced with the challenge, Qing He Miao remained unhurried. Instead, he assumed the air of an enlightened master and explained at a measured pace:

"And what you call 'foreknowledge' is really nothing more than my extraordinary innate aptitude, which allows my mind to frequently perceive the Heavenly Dao and passively receive some information. That is why I was 'born knowing.'

"However, the world is vast beyond measure, and its affairs are endlessly complex. The information contained in the Heavenly Dao is as boundless as a sea of mist. Even if I could remain in constant contact with it, the useful information I could capture would be no more than a single hair on nine oxen, let alone when it comes at random like this."

That was not entirely a lie.

As a transmigrator who had seen the original story of The Outcast, knowing five hundred years into the past and five hundred years into the future might have been beyond his ability.

But it was no falsehood to say he knew the dramatic changes in the Outcast world over the past eighty or ninety years, as well as the course of major events that might occur over the next five or six.

And as for the Stand [Red Hot Chili Pepper] he had obtained from the system's first "lottery" at birth,

wasn't its appearance covered in electricity and shaped like a bird?

This "profound discourse," a blend of webnovel settings from his previous life and half-true, half-false metaphysical terms, immediately left the group of junior high students around him, who only half understood it, momentarily at a loss.

They really did stare at one another.

They looked at each other, the same confusion and suspicion written on their faces.

Although instinctively they felt he was lying, and there seemed to be holes everywhere in what he had said,

given their current store of knowledge and life experience, they naturally could not find any conclusive grounds for a rebuttal on the spot, and a subtle stillness settled over the atmosphere.

Seeing this, Qing He Miao deliberately paused, then slowly swept his smiling gaze over the young faces he had fooled.

Living a second life was bound to give one a few little bad habits.

He had begun to enjoy lecturing children this age.

A bunch of simpletons untainted by knowledge.

If someone actually understood him,

that would be a pleasant surprise.

"Qing He Miao."

At last, someone recovered from their daze and tried to strike back, speaking in a slightly malicious, threatening tone:

"You just went and said all that. Aren't you afraid someone will find out, drag you away, and slice you up for research?"