Tang Muzhou's Alt Account┃He Should Take the Daiyu Card to the Auction House!

Thinking of this, Xie Mingzhe could not help asking Pang Yu, "Brother Yu, have you ever heard of Water Margin?"

Pang Yu froze. "Water tiger? A tiger that can swim underwater?"

"..." Xie Mingzhe did not know whether to laugh or cry. To make sure, he continued, "Do you know people like Cao Cao, Liu Bei, and Sun Quan?"

Pang Yu looked utterly baffled. "Who are those people you mentioned?"

Xie Mingzhe said, "What about Sun Wukong and Jia Baoyu? Have you heard of them?"

Pang Yu laughed. "Nope. Are they your classmates? Their names are pretty interesting."

"..." Xie Mingzhe's heart began pounding violently.

I'm such an idiot!

When he had finished drawing Daiyu Burying Flowers and taken it to the Black Market to sell, he should have noticed—no one recognized Lin Meimei. They only said the card art was beautiful and its style was pretty. Even the card-buying vendors had focused on studying the card's attributes, completely ignoring the exquisite scene of Daiyu burying flowers.

At the time, he had thought there were simply too many cards in Star Card World, and that his own cards were too ordinary to be popular. But now it seemed that it was not because his cards were not good enough. It was because no one recognized the characters he had drawn; they had merely assumed she was a girl who cried.

Nie Yuandao and Shan Lan clearly did not recognize Wu Song either. That was why they had found his design so impressive and come looking for him in person.

It seemed that this world's cultural background was completely different from that of China on the Twenty-First-Century Earth where he had lived. Perhaps humanity had gone through something that had destroyed those once-brilliant civilizations.

No wonder the game galaxy's navigation map contained a whole host of planets, such as Venus, Wood Planet, and Mars—yet Earth alone was missing.

He had been puzzled at the time. If the Star Card game incorporated the Solar System setting, then shouldn't humanity be living on Earth? Why had they gone to Gemini instead?

It was Star Calendar 3001. Who knew how many centuries had passed since 2018, before his rebirth?

Had those splendid cultures and five thousand years of Chinese history truly vanished from this world?

Xie Mingzhe took a deep breath and steadied his racing heart.

He realized that he had made an enormous mistake—he had underestimated his own potential as a card maker. He had thought he was just an untalented little player whose cards were nothing special, so he had sold Daiyu and Wu Song cheaply on the Black Market. That had been incredibly stupid.

But now he knew that he possessed an incomparably precious treasure—a vast and rich treasury of knowledge that others could not even imagine, as boundless as the starry cosmos!

Wu Song's copyright had sold for 300,000, and Water Margin had one hundred and eight heroes.

Daiyu had not been sold yet. Since her skills had broader applications, her price certainly would not be lower than Wu Song's. And there were also the Twelve Beauties of Jinling from Dream of the Red Chamber!

Not to mention all the characters from his beloved Three Kingdoms, each of whom could be turned into a card with a little imagination!

Xie Mingzhe clenched his fists, brimming with motivation.

He loved reading novels, but unfortunately, he could not write them. He had no way to recreate those stories through fiction.

But he could draw those wonderful stories into his cards!

Author's Note: -

The groundwork ends here, and the cheat ability has fully awakened.

Pipi Zhe has realized his cheat ability, so he will no longer make such low-level mistakes. :)

Nie and Shan's role was to make the protagonist fully awaken through the copyright purchase incident. Tang Muzhou will have an even bigger role next.

Tang Muzhou's Alt Account┃He Should Take the Daiyu Card to the Auction House!

Fenghua Club.

After returning to his dormitory, Tang Muzhou took out his helmet and logged into Star Card World.

Two characters appeared before him. The first had the ID "Tang." His appearance closely resembled Tang Muzhou's own, though he wore a silver mask. This was the character he had created when he first entered the game six years ago. It was also this character that had made him famous in the Black Market and turned him into an original card player in the Professional League.

The second character used the system's default adult male appearance, an ordinary face so common in the game that it was practically everywhere. Its ID was "7456789," a random string of gibberish that clearly marked it as an alt account. He had used this alt account to post the fragment collection quest in the game. Whenever he developed a new card, he would hand it to this alt account and take it into the arena for real combat tests, examining the card's data.

Tang Muzhou selected his alt account and entered the game, teleporting to the Black Market on Commercial Star.

Red Candle had been setting up a stall to look for someone. When he turned around, he suddenly spotted an ordinary player ID in the crowd. That string of gibberish numbers looked especially familiar. Red Candle immediately walked over and opened a private voice chat. "Tang God, you really came into the game?"

"Mm. Any clues about that card's creator?"

"I sent dozens of people to comb through the Black Market, but we still can't find the Daiyu Card. None of the other original cards have the 'Yueban' mark on their backs either. That person seems to have vanished out of nowhere..."

"I'll look for him myself." Tang Muzhou turned and walked away.

Having risen to prominence from the Black Market himself, he was extremely familiar with the place.

The Black Market's card-buying stalls fell into two categories. One consisted of merchants who bought and resold original cards. These vendors were relatively professional and could distinguish good cards from junk. The other consisted of players casually setting up stalls for themselves. They only cared whether a card looked pretty, buying cheap cards to add to their collections.

Some players who casually raised cards never entered the arena and did not care to study card data. They only enjoyed collecting all kinds of beautiful cards and filling the display cases in their studies to the brim. It gave them a great sense of accomplishment.

If a skill as powerful as Daiyu Burying Flowers had been bought by a professional vendor, it would definitely have appeared at an auction or been traded to a large guild for a huge sum. Since it had remained impossible to find, perhaps it had ended up in the hands of a casual player who liked collecting character cards. These stall owners bought cards without upgrading or cultivating them, simply placing them in display cases and summoning them to admire whenever they were bored.

Tang Muzhou noticed that managers from major guilds like Judgment and Frostfall City were also wandering around the Black Market, picking through the various stalls.

Just as Red Candle had said, the Black Market in the game had already descended into chaos.

Back then, he had not understood the market either. He had sold several outstanding vine combat cards cheaply in the Black Market, disrupting the entire market and drawing searches from every guild. Years later, the same scene had appeared again—the creator of those cards really was a lot like him.