Outside, stars hung in the night sky.
Everything was exactly as it had been when Xu Feng entered the game—though he knew the sense of dislocation was all in his head.
He had only been in the game for a minute. How could anything have changed much?
Even so, the feeling unsettled him.
So Xu Feng rewarded himself with another can of sparkling water.
He wanted the rush of carbon dioxide and sugar bursting across his tongue.
A dragon's roar rang out.
Xu Feng finally pulled himself all the way back from the game world.
He looked at his Ranger Cabin, his eyes a little weary.
There was nothing like this in the game.
He got up and set to work methodically, starting with the computer collecting information.
It was still online and working.
A flood of information had piled up, waiting for Xu Feng to sort through it.
As for everything else—
First, his body.
Xu Feng took stock of it and found that the tables had turned.
Last time, he had complained that Zhao San's body was too flimsy to be of much use, nowhere near as sturdy as his real one. Now he felt that his own body could not measure up to Zhao San's.
"No Yellow River Carp," Xu Feng said.
He sighed. How quickly things could change.
"Three days apart, and you have to see a man in a new light."
After that reflection, Xu Feng began sorting through the items he had brought back.
He had saved the game in front of the Longflow River God. By then, he had stitched so many corpses that he was numb to it. He had nearly turned the handiwork into an assembly line.
The New Needle had felt awkward to use at first, but by the end,