The liquid in the test tube had no taste, only a faint, mint-like coolness.
As it entered his body, He Ao felt a strange energy awaken within his flesh, permeating his soul and gradually restoring what he had lost.
He Ao did not down the liquid in one gulp. Instead, he drank it sip by sip, waiting for his soul to slowly recover.
After drinking roughly a quarter of it, he felt his soul return to its peak condition. The exhaustion and weakness from before were swept away, but when he continued drinking, there was only a faint cool sensation. He no longer felt his soul gradually growing stronger.
That was why it was called a Recovery Potion rather than an Enhancement Potion. It could only restore He Ao to his original state.
He Ao looked at the roughly three-quarters of the potion remaining in the test tube. One quarter had restored the cost of twenty seconds of burning his life away. The rest meant he could burn another sixty seconds without concern, equivalent to having another trump card in hand.
Yeah, burning his life away was definitely addictive.
He sealed the test tube with its cork again and held it in his hand. Then He Ao opened his personal status panel.
He Ao Permission Level: Normal Player Physical Fitness: 16 (ordinary people in the Copy World are 10, while ordinary people in the Main World are 5) Skills: Talent Sequence 272: Hyperthymesia (Soul-Bound) (Rank E), Basic Firearms Proficiency Mechanical Modification: None Martial Arts: Qi Induction (Rank F)
Hyperthymesia had advanced to Rank E, and he had gained a new skill. He Ao already knew about those changes.
He shifted his gaze to the Physical Fitness entry. His Physical Fitness had risen from 15 to 16. This one-point increase seemed to have come from the physical enhancement brought by Basic Firearms Proficiency.
With Physical Fitness at 16, he was already more than three times stronger than an ordinary person in the Main World. But in the Copy World, according to the supernatural ranks in Ander's memories, Rank F was two to three times the physical capability of an ordinary person, meaning Physical Fitness between 20 and 30.
Without using his abilities, He Ao's own Physical Fitness was still almost enough to reach that supernatural rank.
But Hyperthymesia had a time limit, and burning his life away was not a long-term solution.
Improving his Physical Fitness was what mattered most.
At present, the only available cultivation method was the energy absorption method recorded in that little book, but it could only obtain energy at dawn.
He Ao could not read the writing in the little book either. He did not know whether there were other cultivation methods. Perhaps the next time he went to a Copy World, he could find information related to that script.
At that moment, the countdown to his next mission had already appeared in his field of vision. It was still twenty-four hours, meaning one day later.
This time, he had spent around six or seven hours in the Copy World, but only a little over ten minutes had passed in the Main World.
He Ao closed the status panel, stretched, and slowly walked over to the camera he had set up before the mission began.
He skillfully removed the camera's memory card and entered the study. He first locked the silver test tube in a small drawer, then turned on the old desktop computer.
As the fan started humming like an old ox pulling a cart, He Ao crouched down, unplugged the network cable, inserted the memory card into a card reader, and connected it to the computer.
Two minutes later, the computer displayed the desktop, but the mouse did not respond at all. The computer had frozen during startup. After waiting nearly five minutes, the old computer finally finished booting, and the mouse began responding.
He Ao had bought this computer for a few hundred yuan at a secondhand market. He did not know how old it had been before he bought it, but it had been with him for five years.
Once the computer finished reading the card, He Ao opened the latest surveillance video stored on it.
At the beginning of the video, He Ao set down the camera, walked away, and sat on a stool.
After several dozen seconds, He Ao's figure flickered. The entire camera feed began showing obvious interference. Every object in the room distorted, turning into clumps of warped color. Nothing could be seen clearly.
A few seconds later, the image returned to normal, but He Ao was no longer in the room.
He Ao then quickly dragged the progress bar forward. Around sixteen minutes later, the entire image became violently distorted again. The distortion lasted roughly five or six seconds, and once the image recovered, He Ao reappeared in the room.
He Ao closed the video and fell into thought.
When he went to a Copy World, it was clearly his soul that transmigrated. This could be seen from the fact that the soul-bound Hyperthymesia could be used, while the body-related Qi Induction could not. Moreover, every character he played had a different body.
He had installed the camera to confirm what state his body in the Main World would be in after he transmigrated.
Now, it seemed that during transmigration, his body in the Main World would disappear along with him. Ordinary electronic devices could not capture the process of its disappearance. He did not know whether this was a protective mechanism of the system.
This counted as good news. He had been worried that when he went to a Copy World, his soul would leave while his body remained behind, only for someone to mistake him for dead and bury him, or for an enemy to stab him to death while he was defenseless. Now he no longer had to worry about that.
Of course, since he disappeared after transmigrating, he would need to start missions in places where no one was around from now on. Otherwise, if someone suddenly vanished in the middle of the street, he would probably make the front-page headlines the next day.
Perhaps that was one reason the system displayed a countdown to his next mission: to give him time to prepare in advance.
After thinking it through, He Ao formatted the memory card once. Then he copied several large videos from the "Study Materials" folder on the computer's hard drive to fill the card, formatted it again, and repeated the process two or three times before removing the card.
After the first format, data on a memory card or mechanical hard drive could still be recovered. So he needed to fill all the empty space with large files, overwriting the original records before formatting it again. That way, even if someone recovered the data, they would only find some study materials.
By the time he finished everything, it was already past eight. He Ao rose from his chair and stretched.
He needed to prepare for tonight's stall. Just then, his phone started ringing again.
He Ao frowned and took out his phone. He barely had any friends. Usually, the only people who called him were lenders, salespeople, and scammers.
He looked at the screen. He had not saved the number, but it looked somewhat familiar.
He answered the call, and a familiar female voice came from the other end.
"He Ao, are you free tonight? I heard there's a snack place near the school that's especially delicious, but it opens rather late. How about I treat you?"
Liu Nan...
He Ao froze for a moment.
Why was this girl so persistent?
Did she not know that an abnormal human was looking for her all over the place?
When he went to the police station yesterday, he had already told Team Leader Liu that the Youth was planning to find someone to kidnap Liu Nan. Had they not told her?
Did they have some other arrangement?
But none of that was He Ao's concern. He was just a student who sold cold noodles.
He picked up the phone and directly rejected Liu Nan's invitation.
"I have something to do tonight. Sorry."
He still had to run his stall and make money.
After thinking about it, he still reminded her, "You should be careful lately. Don't wander around. Watch out for kidnappers."
--
"Ah?"
Liu Nan froze for a moment, then heard the busy signal from the other end of the call.
She lowered her phone in confusion and looked at the girl beside her. "He hung up..."
Yesterday, he had not come when she offered to treat him to something expensive. Today, he still had not come when she offered to treat him to something cheap.
"He cares about you! He must be worried you'll be in danger! He likes you!"
The girl analyzed firmly.
That was not convincing at all.
It was Liu Nan's first time asking a boy to dinner and being rejected twice in a row. Playing hard to get did not work like this.
But owing someone a favor had been weighing on her, and it made her uncomfortable.
"Come on, Nan Nan. Let's go try that snack place ourselves," Liu Nan sighed, looking at the girl. "Where is that snack shop?"
"It's over by the Industrial Area. It isn't really a shop, more like a street stall, but they say it tastes amazing and only comes out at night. Wait a second," the girl said as she took out her phone. "I'll turn on navigation."
Before you continue