Advancing from LV9 to LV10 changed more than just the numbers on the status panel.
The instant he left the System Space, Lu Zhou, sitting at his desk, felt as though the back of his head had taken a heavy blow. The impact nearly knocked him unconscious.
The strain brought by developing his brain did not stop there.
As waves of stimulation washed over his cerebral cortex, a blazing heat surged from the back of his neck and crawled all the way to the space between his brows, making his mind extraordinarily clear.
The ordeal lasted a full five minutes. By the time that soul-deep pain finally subsided, the clothes clinging to his back were soaked through with sweat.
At the same time, when Lu Zhou slowly opened his tightly shut eyes, the world he saw had already become different from before.
The tree outside the window was no longer a tree, but a growing Mandelbrot Set. The clouds in the sky were no longer clouds, but ever-changing Calabi-Yau manifolds. Even the vast, boundless sky was no longer empty, but something closer to the very origin.
Perhaps their shapes had not changed at all, but in his eyes, they had been endowed with a quality that could be seen directly.
It reached into the depths of the universe.
It shook the hearts of mortals.
"...Is this the world through a god's eyes?"
Lu Zhou considered himself a firm atheist, and even now, he still believed that.
He simply was not sure whether anyone else in this world had ever seen such a sight, just as he had.
His retina seemed to have become a filter, sifting out all the chaotic information and leaving behind only its purest parts.
This world was so beautiful.
So beautiful that Lu Zhou sat motionless