Where am I? Yang Xuan opened his eyes with difficulty. Right, he should still be inside the underground cavern from Chronicle. He had considered this too. The plot had only just begun, so the protagonist shouldn't have come over yet, right? He checked his phone. From entering until waking up, roughly twenty hours had passed, or 1,200 minutes. In reality, not even twelve minutes had passed. Hahaha, not bad, not bad—what a bargain.
System, return.
With a flash before his eyes, he was already back in his dormitory. Looking at the familiar furniture and furnishings, an indescribable feeling welled up in his heart.
There was panic, surprise, and even more happiness. Not every shut-in was idle and aimless. Many of them had simply become lost after failing to find a goal in life. Yang Xuan was the same.
Now he had finally found his goal.
It was only a little past midnight. He would try out his telekinesis. He casually pulled out a lighter and stared at it, muttering, "Get up. Float up."
Damn it, there was no reaction.
Yang Xuan calmed his agitated emotions and stared at the lighter. Just as he was about to give up, the lighter wobbled and floated into the air. It seemed his effort hadn't been wasted. Although many abilities from movies were more powerful than this super-bugged ability, telekinesis was one of the best abilities Yang Xuan could find at this stage. Most importantly, obtaining it had been incredibly easy.
Although Yang Xuan felt extremely energetic, his body was genuinely exhausted. The tense, thrilling, and painful process had rapidly drained some of his physical strength.
At eight in the morning, Yang Xuan woke up. Not bad, not bad. He felt incredibly refreshed, and even the world seemed clearer to him. With a thought, the lighter trembled slightly and floated up, as if it were instinctive. He could even open the dormitory door. His coworkers on the day shift had gradually arrived, so Yang Xuan hid back in the dormitory and practiced for several more hours. He could sense that his telekinetic power was currently around thirty kilograms. Yang Xuan did not want to resign yet. After all, even with telekinesis, he couldn't exactly rob a bank, right? Besides, the atmosphere at the company was excellent. There were few employees, and they were all comedians, so there was no scheming or infighting. Even the supervisor gave them the feeling of an older sister.
He would set himself a small goal: increase his telekinetic power to over one hundred kilograms, develop two minor skills, and then go to the next world.
The first skill would be defensive. No matter what kind of world it was, staying alive came first. Yang Xuan had always felt that he was afraid of two things: dying, and pain. So developing a defensive skill was his top priority. Having watched many movies and read many novels, Yang Xuan had already thought of a way to train without making too much commotion. He lay on the bed, tossed the lighter upward, and let it fall naturally. Then he would use telekinesis to condense it into a shield.
Of course, it looked simple, but it was somewhat difficult in practice. At the beginning, he could not react in time when the lighter fell, and as his practice increased, he could knock the lighter away. Yang Xuan always felt that his training method was not quite right, so he tried another approach. He spread his telekinetic power across the space directly in front of him and waited for the lighter to fall naturally. Unexpectedly, the lighter passed straight through the telekinetic field. After experimenting bit by bit, Yang Xuan finally understood what he had to do: compress his telekinetic power as much as possible, flatten it, and shape it into a shield. When his telekinetic power became the size of an A4 sheet of paper, its defensive strength reached its current maximum.
Late that night, Yang Xuan sneaked downstairs, lifted a brick to the height of a five-story building, and let it drop vertically onto the telekinetic shield. Nothing happened at all. The preliminary experiment was a success. Next came the development of offensive telekinesis. His initial idea was to condense telekinetic power into needles and fire thousands of them at once. But when he finished condensing them, Yang Xuan's face turned green. There were quite a few needles, several hundred, but he could control only a dozen or so as easily as his own fingers. It seemed this training had a long way to go.
"Knock, knock, knock! Brother Xuan, are you there?" Blackie's voice came from outside the door. Blackie's real name was Zhang Molin. Because he was extremely dark and had naturally curly hair, everyone at the company called him Blackie.
"I'm here! What's up?" Yang Xuan asked curiously.
"Xiao Su and I are going out for a late-night snack. Brother Xuan, are you coming?" Blackie replied.
"I'm coming, of course I'm coming. I'm almost completely out of provisions!" Yang Xuan wailed.
Xiao Su and Blackie lived in the dormitory next door. Everyone usually did their own thing, but they got along quite well. They had already been working together before the company moved here.
There was a street stall at the corner, not far from the company. They told the owner to prepare roughly a hundred yuan worth of food, then ordered three bottles of beer.
Drinking beer and chatting about gossip on a hot summer night, while eating barbecue and drinking ice-cold beer, was truly one of life's great pleasures.
Everyone was actually quite envious of Blackie. Besides working at the company, Blackie also knew accounting and had part-time jobs at three small factories. He only needed to spend a few days at the end of each month handling the work, and by the end of the year, he could earn over twenty thousand yuan extra.
After they had eaten for a while, Xiao Su said, "Blackie, are you planning to open a shop of your own?"
"We'll see. I haven't decided yet," Blackie replied after thinking about it.
Blackie seemed to be three or four years older than them, so he had begun considering his future options. It was precisely because the company environment was so good that he had been reluctant to leave.
When everyone asked Yang Xuan, he stuffed the last grilled eggplant into his mouth, wiped his lips, and said indifferently, "I don't know what I'll do after leaving either. I'll just take things one step at a time."
They had not come out only for a late-night snack. They also had to buy more of their nearly depleted happy water for shut-ins, as well as cigarettes.
Two cases of cola and two cartons of cigarettes. Hahaha, they had returned with a full haul!
After returning to the dormitory, Yang Xuan shook his slightly dizzy head and began choosing his next target.
Yang Xuan was someone who really liked working out, but he was also very lazy. Watching his belly grow larger bit by bit, he still felt that he should choose a martial-arts world and properly train this body that was quickly becoming as useless as a salted fish.
No matter how powerful an ability was, it ultimately could not be separated from mental strength and the physical body. Now that he had mental strength, he also needed to strengthen his body. He had to make both his mind and body powerful.
Sometimes, the reason one was killed might not be that one could not defeat the enemy, but that one was not well-rounded enough and was countered by the other person.