Chapter Summaries

Li Qi, Vincent, and Lin Hui trapped the Water Monster, but Vincent was killed after the creature exploited his grief. Lisa and Knight Errant killed the monster, then Lisa shot Knight Errant and revealed that she was a Level Six agent taking control of the town.

• Li Qi lured the Water Monster into Lin Hui and Vincent’s trap, and the two men shot it as it struggled free.
• The Water Monster charged at them, but Vincent froze when it appeared to him as his deceased wife and was torn apart.
• Lin Hui fled with Li Qi until Lisa shot the Water Monster through the wounds Vincent had made, giving Knight Errant the chance to kill it with point-blank shots to its brain.
• Lisa shot Knight Errant after the Water Monster died, then showed Lin Hui her Abnormal Affairs Bureau identification and announced that she was taking control of the town.
• Lisa asked Lin Hui and Li Qi to help her.

Lisa revealed that the town was an oddity and asked Li Qi to help her take Kate away, while Lin Hui was tasked with keeping the townspeople under control. In the mansion, Li Qi used the Substitute Earrings to take Kate’s appearance as Lisa led the real Kate away, and he approached Kate’s mother.

• Lisa told Li Qi that only children could enter the path to the oddity’s core and asked Lin Hui to restrain the townspeople.
• In the dream, Lisa locked up Sun Xiaoqing and Knight Errant, then told Li Qi that Kate was the oddity’s core and asked him to replace her.
• Lisa explained the Substitute Earrings’ ability and thirty-minute limit, and Li Qi agreed to use them.
• Li Qi exchanged appearances with Kate, after which Lisa led Kate away and Li Qi approached Kate’s mother.

Lisa took Kate beyond the town’s boundary, but Kate melted away, revealing that Lisa’s plan had failed. In the basement, Li Qi reunited with Kate, merged with Another Self, and saw the real Ms. Jane embracing a rotting child’s corpse—the source of the dream town.

• Lisa carried Kate out of the town, but Kate melted into a puddle of white liquid and vanished.
• Lisa explained that she had hoped to steal the town’s anomalous-item core and use it as a refuge from the apocalypse.
• Lisa led Li Qi to the basement, believing the anomalous item’s core was inside, and Li Qi entered alone.
• Kate appeared and invited Li Qi to follow her; when he took her hand, he was transported to the other town and merged with Another Self.
• Li Qi saw the real Ms. Jane asleep in a basement, embracing a rotting child’s corpse, and recognized her as the source of the dream town.

Li Qi destroyed Mrs. Jane’s Dream World, freeing the trapped people and returning them to reality. He remained inside the supernatural item, where he offered Jane a chance to surrender it and live in the Dream World with Kate.

• Kate explained that Mrs. Jane’s grief over her death had caused the Dream World to expand and draw in victims whose dreams sustained it.
• Mrs. Jane mistook Li Qi for Kate and begged him to stay, but Li Qi used his Mental Power to shatter the Dream World and defeat her control.
• The two towns and their divided residents merged before the Dream World collapsed, returning everyone to where they had vanished.
• Sun Xiaoqing woke beside her car with Li Qi’s puppet body, received a call from Li Qi confirming he was safe, and drove away when Knight Errant appeared at her window.
• Li Qi confronted Jane inside the supernatural item and offered to let her live with Kate in the Dream World if she surrendered control.

Li Qi took control of Dream Town and used it to bring his deceased older sister Li Qiao back as a young girl. Meanwhile, the AAB confronted Lisa about the S-Class Strange Item and revealed that the child she encountered in Dream Town could not have been Meng An.

• Jane released Kate and merged her spirit into the Little Bear Pendant, allowing Li Qi to take control of Dream Town.
• Li Qi learned Dream Town's abilities and costs, and decided it would serve as a shelter alongside his existing Safe House.
• Li Qi manifested Li Qiao as a young girl, and she awoke believing she might be in the underworld before he explained who he was.
• The AAB interrogated Lisa about the S-Class Strange Item, and she insisted that a child had taken it when the town collapsed.
• The AAB showed Lisa a portrait and file for nine-year-old Meng An, then said he was in Hua Country and had never left, so the child in the town was either a hallucination or someone else.

The AAB investigated the Psychic Doll and launched a hunt for Sun Xiaoqing, while Sun Xiaoqing asked Li Qi for help escaping Knight Errant and Crawler. Li Qi told her to return to Dream Town, where she could hide from her pursuers, leaving her stranded there until the apocalypse.

• The AAB identified Sun Xiaoqing as a suspected holder of the Psychic Doll, classified it as a B-Class Strange Item, and ordered a hunt for her and other Ancient Relics Society members.
• Knight Errant and Crawler pursued Sun Xiaoqing, who called Li Qi for help after running for two days.
• Li Qi explained that Dream Town had severed his connection to the doll and told Sun Xiaoqing to return to the town as her destination.
• Sun Xiaoqing agreed to hide in Dream Town, and Li Qi assured her that Knight Errant would not be allowed to enter.
• Li Qi decided Sun Xiaoqing would have to remain in the American Federation until the apocalypse and focused on collecting Strange Items and advancing his cultivation.

As the Day of Darkness grew longer and the city fell under military control, Liu Cheng told Li Qi that a string of unexplained deaths had prompted Bureau 057 to take over the investigation. Li Qi suspected the deaths might involve a strange object rather than contamination, and asked Liu Cheng to explain what had happened.

• Li Qi arranged for Sun Xiaoqing to settle in Dream Town and assigned its residents to develop the town, with Li Qiao leading the work.
• The Day of Darkness returned for six hours, intensifying public panic and military deployment as Li Qi wondered whether the next occurrence would last even longer.
• Liu Cheng arrived at Li Qi's safe house and said they might have to move because unexplained incidents in the city had been identified as possible contamination.
• Liu Cheng recounted that fifteen people living alone had died of extreme fright, and Bureau 057 had taken over the cases.
• Zhao Chenghu told Liu Cheng he was unsure whether the incidents were contamination and urged him to handle stability-maintenance work.

Liu Cheng told Li Qi that Bureau 057 had taken over a suspected contamination case targeting people living alone, but Li Qi refused to leave and revealed he was using a puppet body. Zhao Chenghu arrived with money and property entrusted to Li Qi by someone Zhang Fengyun had once helped, while admitting he had suspected Li Qi and come to investigate him.

• Liu Cheng urged Li Qi to leave the city because the suspected contamination appeared to target people living alone, but Li Qi said his true body was safe and refused to go.
• Li Qi advised Liu Cheng to build ties with Bureau 057, but Liu Cheng explained that the house bought with Wang He's money could complicate his background check.
• Zhao Chenghu arrived at the Safe House and said he had come because of Meng An.
• Li Qi confronted Zhao Chenghu about his visit, and Zhao Chenghu admitted he had suspected Li Qi and had intended to investigate whether he possessed an anomalous item.
• Zhao Chenghu gave Li Qi an envelope containing living expenses through university and a deed to a residence in the capital, entrusted by someone Zhang Fengyun had helped.

Li Qi negotiated with Zhao Chenghu, refusing to join Bureau 057 as a child and insisting that Liu Cheng join instead so he could remain his guardian. Meanwhile, another member of the Undead Race, Ye Yue Heng, awoke in a corpse in Suhe City Central Hospital and realized her reincarnation had gone wrong.

• Li Qi told Zhao Chenghu that his mental oddity increased his Mental Age, and Zhao Chenghu accepted the explanation.
• Li Qi rejected Zhao Chenghu's demand that he surrender his oddity or join Bureau 057, citing his age and his existing guardian, Liu Cheng.
• Li Qi proposed that Liu Cheng join Bureau 057, and Zhao Chenghu agreed to let him work with the team on the contamination case the next day.
• After Zhao Chenghu left, Li Qi told Liu Cheng that the bureau could monitor him through Liu Cheng, and showed that his body was a puppet by rotating his wrist a full circle.
• Ye Yue Heng woke in a corpse in the underground morgue at Suhe City Central Hospital and realized her reincarnation had gone wrong.

Ye Yue was summoned from a hospital morgue by a girl wielding a magical tome, and the tome forced Ye Yue to obey her. After investigators discovered the supernatural disappearance, Zhao Chenghu ordered a search for the person using the apparent magical artifact.

• Ye Yue escaped the morgue, but a glowing Magic Array teleported her to a dim room decorated like a witch's lair.
• A girl dressed as a witch claimed Ye Yue as her servant, and Ye Yue sensed that the purple Magic Tome had formed a connection with her.
• The girl commanded Ye Yue to sit, and the Magic Tome's power slammed Ye Yue face-first onto the floor.
• Zhao Chenghu reviewed surveillance showing the corpse rise from the morgue drawer and vanish in a flash of magical symbols.
• The analysis department identified the symbols as magical, and Zhao Chenghu compared the apparent artifact to the costly Twelve Golden Immortals Painting.
• Zhao Chenghu ordered his team to investigate and find the person using magic.

Li Qi became the target of a contamination that posed as an online friend and tried to make him invite it home. After escaping to his original body, he discovered the friend had reached him through an offline Game Console as well.

• Li Qi learned that the Twelve Golden Immortals Painting created magicians rather than real immortals and reflected on how little he understood about oddities.
• An online friend called I Am Your Friend asked Li Qi to meet, and Li Qi stopped himself from agreeing, deleted their chat, and blocked the account.
• I Am Your Friend continued messaging Li Qi and threatened to find him, alerting him that he was caught in a contamination.
• Meng Xiaolin told Zhao Chenghu and Liu Cheng that the contamination, temporarily named Nonexistent Friend, befriended victims online and killed them after trying to visit their homes.
• Li Qi left his puppet body and returned to his original body, but the Game Console displayed a message from I Am Your Friend asking him to open the door, so he crushed it.

Li Qi confronted a strange being that called itself his best friend after evacuating the town and protecting Li Qiao. He destroyed the creature’s manifested form, gained a slight increase in spiritual power from its remains, and began considering how to protect Dream Town from further contamination.

• Li Qi crushed his Game Console, ordered Sun Xiaoqing to leave town, and arranged for Li Qiao to shelter with Kate and Jane.
• Li Qi opened the mansion doors and blasted the self-proclaimed friend with a Magic Cannon, then attacked it with his fused powers.
• The friend revealed its monstrous form, but Li Qi overwhelmed it and shattered its body.
• Li Qi caught the red energy escaping from the creature and severed its connecting line with a colossal Mental Power sword.
• The red remnants entered Li Qi and slightly strengthened his Mental Power, leading him to anticipate absorbing more of the contamination.
• Li Qi repaired most of Dream Town’s battle damage and wondered whether Bureau 057 knew about the incident.

Li Qi learned from Liu Cheng how Bureau 057 handled Contact and Cognitive Contamination, then went out to search for the source of the Nonexistent Friend. As he walked toward the city center, the tenth Day of Darkness suddenly began.

• Liu Cheng explained that Contact Contamination spread from a physical source, while Cognitive Contamination spread through knowledge and could be countered by deleting memories.
• Li Qi learned Bureau 057 used an anomalous item to erase memories and considered finding other anomalous items to protect his Safe House.
• Li Qi told Liu Cheng to keep gathering information from Zhao Chenghu, then left the Safe House to search for survivors and the Nonexistent Friend's source.
• On his way through the city, Li Qi used Suggestion to send away passersby who mistook him for a lost child.
• The sky abruptly turned pitch-black, and Li Qi recognized the onset of the tenth Day of Darkness.

Yi Cheng took Ye Yue to meet a supposed friend, but instead ran into Li Qi, a newly born member of the Undead Race. After the two recognized their shared connection to Mu Xi, Li Qi and Ye Yue stepped away to talk privately.

• Yi Cheng insisted that the darkness outside was the work of her rival, Darkest Demon Lord Dakdis, while Ye Yue urged her to go home.
• Yi Cheng discovered that her friend's avatar had gone gray and ran over to greet a boy as Lord of Ten Thousand Machines Ayrinlis.
• Ye Yue recognized the boy as a newly born member of her Undead family, and he persuaded Yi Cheng to buy him an expensive box of ice cream.
• Li Qi joined Yi Cheng and Ye Yue at a bubble tea shop, then used an excuse to get Ye Yue alone at a nearby snack shop.
• Ye Yue asked Li Qi whether Mu Xi had transformed him, and Li Qi realized she was Mu Xi's second elder sister from the Heng Family.

Li Qi learned that Yi Cheng’s Magic Tome could grant him magic use, and he accepted her offer to borrow it in exchange for making her a substitute body. After casting a spell, he discovered the Tome’s price and recoiled from it.

• Li Qi met Ye Yue, who explained that Yi Cheng’s Magic Tome had brought her into the corpse and that she could not take it from Yi Cheng.
• Li Qi suggested that Yi Cheng could grant him some authority over the Magic Tome, then gave Yi Cheng a handmade mechanism toy.
• Yi Cheng agreed to lend Li Qi the Tome if he made her a substitute body, and she brought him to her home.
• Yi Cheng granted Li Qi temporary permission to use the Tome, and Li Qi found that it contained the same magic he had learned in the Magic World.
• Li Qi cast an Electric Shock Spell that destroyed a water bottle, then realized the Tome demanded a price and threw it back to Yi Cheng.

Li Qi learned that the Ten Thousand Spells Magic Tome amplified magic at the cost of making its user increasingly chūnibyō, and he advised Ye Yue to stay with Yi Cheng for now. When he discovered Yi Cheng’s missing online friend was called I Am Your Friend, Li Qi offered to investigate, while Crawler found a clue to Nonexistent Friend and entered the virtual world.

• Li Qi realized the Magic Tome’s power grew with its user’s chūnibyō, but its lasting influence made him unwilling to take it from Yi Cheng.
• Li Qi advised Ye Yue to remain with Yi Cheng temporarily, then asked for Yi Cheng’s phone to help find her missing online friend.
• Ye Yue said the missing friend’s ID was I Am Your Friend, and Yi Cheng corrected her by calling the friend Friend of All Things.
• In Queens, Crawler searched for the Contamination Nonexistent Friend with her Hacker USB Drive while Knight Errant stayed by her side.
• Crawler found a clue, noticed the Contamination’s sub-entities were disappearing, and entered the virtual world to investigate.

The Crawler discovered a white entity in the data world devouring the Nonexistent Friend and mistook it for a dangerous new contamination. Li Qi revealed that he had consumed the Friend to grow stronger, and the power transformed his puppet into a new Strange Item called Artificial Human.

• The Crawler found the Nonexistent Friend hiding in the data world and spotted white specks eating its tentacles.
• The Friend and the white entity fought, and the white Pac-Man swallowed the Friend while the Crawler stabilized the surrounding network.
• The white entity noticed the Crawler, who escaped the data world and warned Knight Errant that a contamination capable of devouring others had appeared.
• Li Qi watched the Crawler leave and revealed that he had followed the Friend's thread into the Spiritual World and devoured it.
• The Friend's power strengthened Li Qi's Mental Power and transformed his puppet into the Strange Item Artificial Human.

Li Qi learned that his doll body had become a growth-type strange item with abilities governed by Equivalent Exchange, then offered Ye Yue and Yi Cheng refuge in Dream Town. At the Ancient Ruins Society, Zhao Hong’s group discussed the contamination that had eliminated the Nonexistent Friend before the higher-ups summoned him to a meeting.

• Li Qi learned that his doll body had gained a universal tool, a weapon-transforming arm, self-healing skin, enhanced durability, and an Equivalent Exchange price he could control.
• Li Qi returned to Yi Cheng’s home and invited Ye Yue and Yi Cheng to stay in Dream Town, but Ye Yue declined because Yi Cheng did not want to go.
• Ye Yue told Li Qi that she cared about Yi Cheng because she reminded her of the daughter she had lost in her Past Life, and Li Qi gave her a photograph of Dream Town.
• Li Qi left to digest the supplement he had gained from the Nonexistent Friend contamination and prepare to break through to the Fifth Layer of Heavenly Craft Soul Transfer.
• Zhao Hong’s group discussed Reptile’s report that contamination had eaten the Nonexistent Friend, while the secretary confirmed that Huaxia had reported the contamination eradicated.
• Zhao Hong received an order from the higher-ups and left the meeting to attend a gathering.

At an Ancient Ruins Society meeting, Zhao Hong was ordered to find a newly born extraordinary object in Hua Nation that could destroy contamination. In Dream Town, Li Qi recorded powers from his Past Life as he planned to create an extraordinary object that could let him use them.

• White Bear announced plans for the coming apocalypse, martial law on New World Island, and restrictions on internet access because contamination was spreading online.
• White Bear told Zhao Hong that the contamination-devouring phenomenon was caused by an extraordinary object in the city where Mystic Phoenix had encountered trouble, and assigned him to find it.
• Zhao Hong accepted the mission, recognizing that he was the only suitable person to carry it out.
• Li Qiao asked Li Qi what he was writing, and he told her to call him Meng An or Little An rather than use his Past Life's name.
• Li Qi explained that he was recording magic, martial skills, and spells in hopes of turning the notebook into an extraordinary object that would let him use those powers.

Li Qi broke through to the Fifth Layer of Heavenly Craft Soul Transfer as the twelfth Day of Darkness plunged the world into eternal night and severe cold. As unrest and corruption spread, Zhao Chenghu invited him to join Bureau 057’s Youth Training Squad, but Li Qi refused, and an unknown visitor rang the villa’s doorbell.

• Li Qi advanced to the Fifth Layer of Heavenly Craft Soul Transfer on the day the final Day of Darkness arrived.
• The sun vanished on New Year’s Day, and heavy snow and plunging temperatures strained order in Suhe City.
• Liu Cheng told Li Qi that fires, small-scale corruption, and heating failures were causing trouble across the city.
• Liu Cheng explained that Zhao Chenghu wanted Li Qi to join Bureau 057’s Youth Training Squad, which would focus on training rather than fighting corruption.
• Li Qi declined the invitation, and an unfamiliar person rang the Safe House’s doorbell after dinner.