Return from a Low-Magic World

The shabby Rental Room had no windows because of the landlord's unauthorized renovations, making it feel a little stuffy. Still, it was kept quite tidy overall. Yet after fitting in a single bed and a desk, the room, less than ten square meters in size, had almost no space left.

Some personal clothes on the bed showed that this was a woman's room. The sound of showering came from the bathroom, and through the frosted glass door, white mist and a lovely silhouette could be seen within.

Then suddenly, the air in the center of the room twisted. Bzzzt~

A black dot rapidly spun in reverse, and as though a black hole were rewinding its own devouring, a bedraggled figure in robes burst out of it and landed directly on the single bed, making the bedframe creak under the burden.

The sudden crash even stopped the shower in the bathroom, yet no additional sound followed. The air seemed to grow heavy for a moment.

Wang Yi, who had landed on the bed, sniffed the scent at the tip of his nose and removed a lace-trimmed garment from his head, feeling somewhat dizzy.

After putting down what he held, he opened his eyes in confusion and looked around. Seeing the furnishings that were both familiar and unfamiliar, he felt dazed for a moment.

This was...

He was back?

"Three years. A shoddy cheat device really does screw people over..."

Wang Yi sighed inwardly.

Wang Yi had transmigrated to this parallel world resembling the late twentieth century twenty-one years ago, reincarnating here as a fetus.

After living again, Wang Yi recovered the memories of his previous life following the shock of his parents' accidental deaths in this life. From the moment his memories returned, he began planning out his life and moved forward without the slightest hesitation.

His parents had died when he was young, and he had been raised by his uncle's family. Wang Yi had not made a fuss over compensation money or inheritance.

The restrictions of being a minor were right there. Though he knew that some of the assets that should have been his had been misappropriated, as long as he was not abused, Wang Yi had always kept a low profile.

A minor without parents was better off not making reckless moves.

At the very least, they had not shorted him on food, lodging, or schooling. He simply pretended not to notice the occasional petty things his uncle's family did.

At the same time, due to the limitations of his identity, Wang Yi had never considered making quick money while he was underage. With the outstanding talent for learning granted by having lived two lives, he knew that only knowledge truly belonged to him.

Even if he possessed some foresight in this similar parallel world, he knew that without core technology in his own hands, ideas were utterly meaningless.

Just like Facebook founder Zuckerberg. At first, someone had approached him with an idea and wanted to cooperate. He relied on his own technical skills to kick them aside, took the idea, and used it himself, while the people with the idea could do nothing about it.

Not wanting to become like that, Wang Yi spent most of his time before adulthood improving himself.

He skipped grades all the way through and completed his undergraduate studies at the age of eighteen.

There were even people who finished doctorates at eighteen, but Wang Yi was not pursuing academic credentials. He merely kept acquiring all kinds of knowledge for his own goals, auditing classes everywhere and doing grunt work in various research groups.

Once he had learned what he wanted, he left immediately, never dragging things out.

As time passed and the world gradually reached something like the early twenty-first century, instant messaging platforms, search engines, and online shopping platforms had already fought their way into three major giants. Wang Yi's goal was clear.

He would use the timing to establish a short-video platform, which he believed was the direction in which he had the greatest chance of succeeding.

It was not that he did not know chips and semiconductors could become choke points. Rather, even if he knew the direction, with only the minor boost of enhanced learning ability, he was not confident he could shift the greater tide alone. Time was simply too tight...

So he chose a direction he felt confident about.

Yet even after choosing this direction that he considered manageable, Wang Yi had come to understand through years of study that it involved many core technologies that needed to be mastered. It was far from as simple as it appeared on the surface.

Even if he gathered together all the knowledge he had learned across different fields, he would still need a powerful team to cooperate with him. He would also definitely have to find a way to tie himself to capital and share the pie, yielding enough benefits.

He would use the core technologies in his hands to ensure he would not be kicked out in turn.

But just as Wang Yi had completed his initial accumulation and used his extraordinary memory to sell a few songs from his previous life for his first pot of gold, rubbing his hands together in preparation to begin striving—

The cheat device that had been eighteen years late activated.

It was a Light Orb that had transmigrated along with his soul. Because it had fused with his soul, he instinctively understood its functions.

It had three simple functions. First, it provided half a cubic meter of Personal Space; second, it provided ten minutes of Overclocking energy each day, with a maximum storage of one hundred days; third, it allowed planar travel.

The Overclocking state was the Light Orb's greatest ability and greatest boost. If Wang Yi before transmigration had been a GTX 1060 and matching hardware, then the enhancement from two lifetimes after transmigration made him a full RTX 4090 setup, while Overclocking could directly turn him into a quantum supercomputer.

If Wang Yi before and after transmigration still counted as the same species, then after Overclocking, he was no longer human at all. Even measured in seconds, the ability was incredibly powerful.

It could even allow him to consciously control his body's autonomous passive functions, such as hormone secretion, cell division, and even DNA transcription!

As someone who had continued painstakingly studying knowledge even after transmigrating, Wang Yi was cautious enough. After the cheat device activated, he did not immediately choose to travel. Instead, he used the Overclocking state to painstakingly accumulate for another half year.

By spending half his daily energy on five minutes of Overclocking to summarize and adjust things, he trained his body to its limits in half a year. Firearms, combat, cold weapons, wilderness survival, and more were all maxed out as well.

He had even used a tourist visa to visit Beautiful Country and conveniently lifted the essential weapon for mastering Ashina Style Swordplay. Only after stuffing his Personal Space full and arming himself to the teeth did he choose to travel.

But the result was that this cheat device was practically a scam. The burden during travel had been too great, and it broke down directly!

The travel button got stuck!

It forced him to struggle in another world for a full three years.

Fortunately, that other world had merely been a low-magic world, while Wang Yi had been thoroughly prepared and his Overclocking ability could still be used.

Relying on Ashina Style Swordplay to protect himself at the start, combined with the extraordinary learning ability of Overclocking, he finally gained a foothold in that other world, killed the Necromancer who had captured him in retaliation, and inherited his knowledge.

Combined with his own knowledge of the modern world and the Overclocking ability, he finally holed up in that Necromancer Tower and achieved Legendary status—uh, Legendary status in a low-magic world.

When he tried using a magic array to repair his cheat device after becoming Legendary, he finally managed to send himself back.

"Free mana really is exceedingly scarce."

Wang Yi briefly sensed his surroundings. That extreme sluggishness of mana felt practically identical to a Magic-Sealing Orb.

According to his research over there, mana should have been a kind of dark energy that normally had no electromagnetic reaction, and only those whose spiritual power exceeded a threshold could sense it.

After all, it had only been a low-magic world. Even though Wang Yi had broken through to Legendary by the end, when using magic, he usually had to use spiritual power to control the portion of mana his body had absorbed and form resonance with it, leveraging natural mana to complete the conversion.

The Mage Tower's Mana Pool and some magical equipment he carried could also provide mana for instant casting.

Fortunately, his half-cubic-meter Personal Space could store mana as well. He had always used it as a portable Mana Pool, and it was full even now.

Otherwise, with how sluggish the mana was here, even one Fireball would probably take a whole day to recover from.

Only, his cheat device's travel function had been locked again. Shoddy goods really did screw people over...

Just then, the creak of the bathroom door opening interrupted Wang Yi's wistful review of the past.

A pale, delicate hand quietly stretched out from the bathroom and reached for the phone on the table outside...

During the public release period, there will be two updates every day, tentatively around five in the afternoon. Since today is the first day, here's the first update~

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