Turn off the light for me, thank you

What kind of power was this?

According to Huang Si's understanding, this power could create objects out of thin air, perhaps similar to the 3D printers popular these days.

He could either conjure an object in his mind and manifest it, or control the manufacturing process at a molecular level.

If his mental conception lacked detail, the resulting object would inevitably lack detail as well, or perhaps even turn out bizarre.

It would be quite embarrassing for a creator to have his finger sliced by his own creation.

However, it seemed that if he used molecular-level reference and replication, he could manufacture objects with precision. It could be said that one must have a sufficient understanding of a thing to fully create a practical object.

Having set his mind at ease, Huang Si decided to try making a pancake.

He didn't know how to make oil yet, but fortunately, there were two large jugs of oil in the kitchen, which was enough.

He mixed flour with water, kneaded the dough, rolled it out with a glass bottle, stuffed some sugar inside, and flattened it again.

Huang Si lit the gas stove. Though he called it gas, it was actually liquefied petroleum gas; the canister was still sitting in the cabinet under the stove.

Huang Si could only be thankful that he had been such a homebody that he missed the neighborhood's collective installation of piped gas, leaving him with only the LPG canister, which looked like it would last another month or two. If he had installed piped gas, he would be without a way to cook today.

Before long, Huang Si had finished making the pancake.

He scooped the pancake onto a plate. Although the shape was ugly and quite a bit of the sugar filling had leaked out, Huang Si felt a sense of accomplishment.

Even if he couldn't create food directly, he had created the water, sugar, and starch, hadn't he? The sugar pancake he made himself had a unique flavor.

Although he had already eaten dinner, a few hours had passed, and Huang Si felt it wouldn't hurt to eat a little more, so he ate the pancake while it was still hot.

The pancake was still a bit scalding; Huang Si blew on it as he ate. The sweet pancake was indeed sweet, but it wasn't very fragrant, and the texture was mediocre—there was still a gap between it and a regular pancake.

After eating his fill, Huang Si lay on the bed in the bedroom, feeling a bit sleepy.

He could feel that the power born within his body had become very weak, likely because he had consumed too much today.

Every time he created an object, replicated something, or registered a pattern in the Creation Book, his power would be depleted a little. After several rounds of consumption, there was very little left.

Moreover, the near-total exhaustion of his power made Huang Si feel extremely fatigued. This fatigue wasn't physical, but mental; he felt particularly dizzy.

Huang Si went out to look at the wall clock in the living room; it was 9:30.

This clock was actually quite decent. Even though it was a cheap item he'd bought for 19.9 yuan with free shipping, he hadn't expected that when the world outside disappeared into darkness, this clock would still be faithfully serving him. It was a good clock.

It was time to sleep, Huang Si thought, but that Creation Book was too bright.

He returned to the bedroom and pulled the door shut behind him, but no, some light was still leaking in through the gap at the bottom of the door. Furthermore, this light felt somewhat eerie; it seemed to penetrate even the door panel, making the bedroom bright as well.

Huang Si went to the living room, annoyed. How was he supposed to sleep with it this bright?

Couldn't this book just not be bright?

Huang Si glanced at the book, and it immediately stopped glowing.

????

Only then did Huang Si feel that he seemed to be able to slightly control this book. This memory, or rather, this knowledge, had just surfaced in his mind.

He tried to control the book to turn its pages.

Sure enough, the book cover moved without any wind and flipped open.

Then, under Huang Si's intent, it closed again.

Next came turning the light on, off, and on again.

After fiddling with the Creation Book for a good while, Huang Si finally turned off its light and returned to the bedroom, satisfied, pulled up the quilt, and went to sleep.

Before waking up the next day, Huang Si was still muttering in a daze:

"No power, the whole city has no power. No power at work, no power all day, I don't want to go to work..."

After a while, Huang Si sobered up; he really didn't have to go to work.

However, his workplace probably didn't have a power outage. They didn't need to clock in, and since he worked in network maintenance, as long as the network didn't have any issues, there was usually nothing for him to do.

Unless the computers broke or the internet went down today, his boss wouldn't notice he wasn't at work.

The lax management of public institutions was evident.

But Huang Si had no time to lament this; he thought of a new problem.

What kind of situation was he in right now?

Option 1: The entire world had vanished, and he was the only one left alive.

Option 2: He had translocated along with his house and was now in the void. In the original world, he was gone, so his boss would be furious and his workplace would dock his pay. Most importantly, his mom and dad would be worried sick because they couldn't find him.

Huang Si didn't want to choose either option.

He lay on the bed worrying for a while before he stopped thinking about it. He couldn't dwell on his parents; he could only pray they would find out about this later.

For now, he might as well figure out how to survive here and then find a way back.

Having figured this out, Huang Si climbed out of bed, got dressed, and went to the kitchen to fry three pancakes for himself.

He had drunk sugar water and eaten a sweet pancake yesterday, and eating something sweet today felt a bit unappetizing.

Huang Si thought for a moment, mixed the flour with salt, and fried them. Soon, three piping hot savory pancakes were ready.

He looked at the leftover vegetables... Forget it. It was already the third day; what if he got food poisoning?

Although there was a medicine cabinet at home, if the medicine couldn't cure the illness, he might end up dying in here.

Huang Si threw the leftovers back into the refrigerator. Even though the fridge no longer cooled, it could still serve as a cabinet.

After finishing three pancakes and drinking a few cups of the purified water he had just created, Huang Si stroked his Creation Book and sprawled out in the living room.

"My strength seems to have recovered a little. Is it a natural recovery?" Huang Si felt the power within his body.

He could clearly perceive that the strength in his body was still growing slightly, but there was an upper limit to this growth—or rather, this limit was the "volume" of the power within him.

After a night of rest, although his strength hadn't returned to its maximum, it seemed to have refilled by about one-third.

One-third? Huang Si frowned. That was quite low. He hadn't created that many things yesterday, had he? At this rate of consumption and replenishment, wouldn't he end up spending more than he earned?

For the sake of survival, Huang Si first created enough flour to last the whole day, just to avoid running out of food unexpectedly.

Then, he filled his thermos and several cups with water.

"Others are doing wilderness survival, but here I am doing home survival," Huang Si mocked himself.

Yet, in the past, who would have thought that a home could also trap a person to death?

After finishing his food and water reserves, Huang Si checked the power in his body. Hmm, it had dropped from one-third to about one-fourth.

In other words, if calculated based on his maximum power capacity, his daily base consumption was about one-twelfth?

Huang Si felt that was acceptable. Recovering one-third overnight with a fixed daily expenditure of one-twelfth meant he still had plenty of leeway.

After finishing his work, Huang Si suddenly felt a bit stifled.

He thought for a moment and finally realized a problem: this room was not ventilated.

He needed to breathe, and he had used the stove to cook yesterday and today. In other words, after more than 12 hours of consumption, could it be that the oxygen was running low?

However, Huang Si looked at the window. Logically, an ordinary house shouldn't have such poor airtightness.

With so much air trapped in the room, why wouldn't it leak outside?

There was nothing outside, after all. When he poured water in the bathroom earlier, it had all flowed out.

This wasn't scientific.

But the fact that he could create objects out of thin air was even less scientific. This Creation Book wasn't a scientific object, even if it had been quite chemical so far.

Forget it, he should create some oxygen for himself first, or he would suffocate.

Huang Si stared at the space within the room and soon saw oxygen molecules—pale yellow, in pairs. Besides those, there were more slightly smaller, light gray nitrogen molecules, also in pairs.

Additionally, there was carbon dioxide, consisting of a black atom plus two yellow ones.

With a thought, the composition of oxygen was registered in the book, and then a large amount of oxygen was created in batches.

This stuff was even easier to create than water.

Having solved the breathing problem, the idle Huang Si continued his manufacturing experiments.

After tossing and turning all morning, and rubbing his slightly dizzy head, he finally managed to test out some data.

First, entering the microscopic state to observe the structure of matter did not consume power. This ability should be an innate talent granted to him by the book, allowing him to observe any level from the microscopic to the macroscopic world without any cost.

Second, copying single or multiple molecules required consuming "a strand" of power, and the amount of this power depended entirely on how thin the power filaments Huang Si split off were. If they weren't thin enough, it would consume a full portion at once.

Therefore, for the sake of conservation, Huang Si needed to subdivide his power filaments as much as possible.

Third, creating objects on a macroscopic scale was related to the size and complexity of the object. For the same amount of water and flour, the latter consumed more than three times as much.

Actually, the complexity of starch fibers was certainly more than three times that of water molecules, but the increase in power consumption wasn't that rapid.

Fourth, if he recorded the structural pattern in the Creation Book first and then manufactured it, he could not only mass-produce it on a macroscopic scale, but the consumption would also drop significantly.

Huang Si assumed his maximum power was 100. A night's recovery was about 30 points, and creating a day's worth of flour and water required about 8 points.

Huang Si then created a piece of bread out of thin air. This piece was much more realistic than the first one he had made; at least it felt soft to the touch, though the color was still monotonous, and it lacked aroma or a porous structure.

The consumption for this piece of bread was quite high, about 10 points.

Huang Si mused that if he had an oven at home, he could create the flour, knead the dough, add leavening agents, and bake real bread. The cost per slice would probably be at most 2 points.

Deducting the ratio saved by the Creation Book, the gap in cost was staggering.

So, could he record the microscopic composition of a pancake in the book and then create the pancake directly?

Would that be more convenient, and would the consumption be lower?

Thinking of it, he did it. Huang Si first kneaded a very, very small piece of dough with flour, then entered the microscopic state to observe its composition.

What unfolded before Huang Si's eyes was an extremely chaotic scene: long starch molecular chains were entangled with pale green water molecules, with a density much higher than the pure water and pure flour he had seen before.

However, since he had the experience of creating both, re-mastering the molecular entanglement structure of the dough wouldn't be too difficult for Huang Si.

After trying to create some, Huang Si finally had a flash of inspiration. He connected his consciousness to the Creation Book and sketched the complex structure of the dough directly into it.

He immediately returned to the macroscopic world and flipped through the book. All the previous molecular structures had occupied only a tiny, tiny part of the page, and the pattern generated by this dough didn't take up much space either. It didn't record the entire dough, but rather intercepted a repeating microscopic structure, displaying a pattern of molecular entanglement in the book.

Then, with the assistance of the Creation Book, Huang Si could directly mass-produce raw dough.