From Feng Xue's perspective, girls reading harem novels aimed at men was nothing unusual—not even men reading yuri novels aimed at women was all that uncommon. But Chen Xiyao's era seemed a little more old-fashioned.
You could tell from the book's binding style and its contents.
How should he put it? As someone who'd once worked in the industry, he could easily determine when a book had been written from its prose style, descriptions of certain things, and common expressions and memes.
He'd only flipped through a few pages when he came across a wealth of terms like "jade pillar" and "white rabbit." He could practically conclude outright that this was an early webnovel.
Of course, he couldn't be sure that webnovels had developed the same way in Chen Xiyao's world as they had in his own, so he didn't jump to conclusions. But judging by how shy Chen Xiyao looked, the Yan Nation over there didn't seem like the sort of place that would turn a blind eye to webnovels crossing the line.
So, setting aside the possibility that the girl simply had unusual tastes, Feng Xue felt he was already close to the truth.
Of course, none of that mattered. Feng Xue had only teased her to make a deeper impression on the girl.
Clearly, it had worked rather well. One sentence was all it took for the girl to immediately lose her composure, spouting incomprehensible things like "Why shouldn't girls be able to put themselves in the hero's shoes?" and "Lust is part of human nature."
Feng Xue had no intention of arguing with her. He took out Disassembly Madonna and, under the girl's horrified gaze as she asked, "What are you doing?", carefully dismantled the thick, perfect-bound book.
In Infinite City, every sheet of paper was an extremely precious resource and couldn't be wasted lightly.
To make the most of the paper, he first took out a page and carefully cut it into pieces, making a palm-sized pocketbook. Then he wrapped another page around a wooden stick to make a simple scroll. Finally, he cut a sheet into a long strip, folded it over, and glued wooden boards to either side, making something like a memorial tablet.
Chen Xiyao had no idea what Feng Xue was doing, but as long as he didn't bring up her taste in novels, she didn't care about anything else.
With one working and the other watching, it didn't take long for three experimental books to appear in front of Feng Xue.
"Next, it's time to see how the results turned out!"
Feng Xue took a deep breath and frowned at the objects, forcibly restraining his desire to absorb the [Shi] within them.
Once their original forms had been destroyed, these things, which had looked no different from False Things, finally revealed their True Thing nature. In Feng Xue's eyes, they were like a lavish feast laid before someone on the verge of starving to death. Even if eating it might make him burst, grow sick of it, or choke to death... he still couldn't suppress the urge to pounce on it.
These things should have the same properties as Bran Brick. If he absorbed the [Shi] within them, they would completely evaporate, just like people who'd lost all their [Shi]. After all, no matter what it was, everything in Infinite City was ultimately just information. Drain the information that sustained its existence, and True Things and False Things alike would disappear.
But in truth, Feng Xue didn't need to check whether [Shi] could be absorbed to tell True Things from False Things. His Golden Finger interface would directly mark True Things as impossible to Smelt.
"First, the usual fodder step." Feng Xue took a deep breath and looked toward the "scroll." A book in that form inevitably brought the eastern nations to mind.
After thinking it over, Feng Xue selected a few worthless elements from his interface. Since this was just fodder, he didn't feed them in one at a time to limit his losses like before. Instead, he threw in several all at once: [Mist], [Blindness], [Concealment], and others.
An element like [Blindness] was easy to find on corpses. [Concealment] was something Feng Xue had obtained recently while hunting Omens. The weaker Omens didn't have these as their obvious elements, yet after they died, he could always Smelt things like [Concealment] and [Silence] from their corpses. However, Feng Xue couldn't be sure whether this was caused by the Omens' way of life, or whether their corpses, like those of [Nothingness], acquired other elements because of the way they died.
As for [Mist], that was an element Feng Xue had been deliberately collecting. After all, he had Disassembly Madonna in hand. With a nighttime setting and a way to produce mist—even a smoke bomb—he could raise Disassembly Madonna's Combat Power by a whole tier. If his opponent happened to be a living female, it would become a decisive move.
After feeding in these elements, it went without saying what Feng Xue wanted.
He wanted to see if he could Reforge a manual for the Mist Concealment Technique.
What? The Mist Concealment Technique was a skill?
Come on, there were tons of Naruto games, from GBA all the way up to PS4, not to mention mobile and fan-made games. What was wrong with making a skill book?
Besides, the ability to create mist wasn't rare in games, and it was almost always connected to blocking vision and hiding oneself. Even if Reforging didn't give him the best possible result—the Mist Concealment Technique—Feng Xue would be fine with some kind of fog-making skill. Besides, this was only a fodder attempt. He wouldn't be surprised if he got nothing at all.
With that in mind, Feng Xue tossed in a thousand [Shi] to test the waters. Omen corpses contained a great deal of [Shi], so the [Shi] stored in Feng Xue's Golden Finger was practically overflowing. Of course, all of it was heavily contaminated, so it could only be used as fuel for Smelting or Reforging.
While Feng Xue was selecting his elements, Chen Xiyao was seeing something entirely different. She watched as he made three ugly-looking objects and fiddled with them for a bit. Then the thing that could barely be called a scroll began to glow.
As the light swelled and shrank, the hideous scroll in Chen Xiyao's eyes began to change too. It turned into...
A CD!
Wait, a CD?
Chen Xiyao stared in stupefaction at this completely unreasonable sight and rubbed her eyes hard.
Then she became absolutely certain: the thing made from a wooden stick and pages, which could barely pass for a scroll, had really turned into an utterly ordinary CD!
Chen Xiyao wasn't the only one dumbfounded. Feng Xue was completely baffled too. No matter how he looked at it, he couldn't understand why Reforging a scroll had produced a CD!
And he didn't have a computer with a disc drive! Forget a computer, he didn't even have a CD player!
Feng Xue sighed. The result was certainly unexpected, but at least this thing was a Phantom Object. After his brief confusion, he finally turned his Golden Finger's appraisal interface toward the CD...
The reason True Things could go unnoticed in Infinite City was their connections. Simply put, the [Shi] of True Things in Infinite City dissipated because they had been cut off from the Real World, making their [Shi] unstable. But objects carried by Outsiders had a stable connection to them through those Outsiders, so the Outsiders' presence stabilized the [Shi] within the objects.
Once an Outsider forgot about an object, or the object was damaged and ceased to be the same object, it was no longer recognized by the Outsider, and its connection through [Shi] would be severed. Only then would it become unstable and absorbable.
Before you continue