"Ugh, my head hurts so much. Am I dead?"
After an unknown amount of time, Leng Xiyue slowly woke up, greeted by excruciating pain and weakness in all four limbs.
She remembered walking down the street shopping when a black hole suddenly appeared in the sky. Then a meteorite the size of a basketball came hurtling straight at her with the precision of a missile.
In the space of a thought, she had ended up here.
"You're awake? Looks like the modifications worked." A voice as clear and sweet as silver bells came from nearby, though its tone sounded rather aggrieved.
Leng Xiyue's eyes snapped open. A girl in a black dress sat slumped on the ground not far away, leaning against a wall and looking utterly listless.
The girl had golden eyes and fair skin, with long, snow-white hair spilling across the ground. A red gemstone of some unknown kind rested on her forehead.
Combined with her adorable doll-like face and seemingly small, frail frame, she made it impossible for Leng Xiyue to feel wary of her.
"Who are you?" Leng Xiyue looked around. Everything was pitch-black, so dark she could not see her hand in front of her face, yet the girl's figure alone remained perfectly clear, even from ten meters away.
The girl spread her hands and said helplessly, "Me? Just some unlucky soul who accidentally got launched along with that 'meteorite.'"
"My real name is so long you definitely wouldn't want to know it, so just call me Xiao Bai."
Leng Xiyue reached out and felt her own body. Although she could not see it, she could tell that she had become a five- or six-year-old child.
There was no doubt about it: she had been reincarnated. She just had no idea who the girl in front of her really was.
As for her previous life...
Her parents had died in an accident when she was eight, and all four of her grandparents had passed away long before that. Her parents and grandparents had all been only children, with no siblings, so naturally there had been no relatives to fight a young girl over the inheritance. Everything her parents and grandparents had left behind, along with the compensation money, had gone to her. From then on, she had lived all alone, going to school, coming home, and taking care of herself every day.
Without a family to protect her, however, she had inevitably suffered all kinds of discrimination and bullying at school. The ugliness of human nature had forced her to grow up far too young.
Eventually, she simply could not stand school life anymore. She had once loved studying, but that environment made it impossible to concentrate. After entering middle school and discovering that she was still surrounded by the same classmates from elementary school, she had simply dropped out. She bought all sorts of high-end gaming equipment and installed it in the luxury home of over four hundred square meters her parents had left her, then put her remaining five million yuan in the bank. After that, she could only scrape by on eight or nine thousand yuan in monthly interest.
People do not share one another's joys and sorrows. I just find them noisy.
After that, she had become a die-hard shut-in and embraced a life of giving up completely, staying home to play games and watch anime. With no friends, she had no real-world social life, and she had no desire to make new friends online, much less fall in love. Once the initial pleasure wore off, an inescapable loneliness had engulfed her completely.
Even so, she had never considered changing anything. She had drifted through life in a haze until she was sixteen, long since bored of every kind of game, spending each day slumped on the sofa reading to pass the time or staring into space and contemplating life.
But no matter how much she thought it over, she could never find anything to look forward to. She felt like a canary in a gilded cage. Death would be a release at most, with nothing worth regretting.
Now that she had actually been reborn in another world, she was determined to enjoy it properly.
"All right, Xiao Bai. I guess we're partners from now on?"
Xiao Bai seemed to be some sort of spirit. Perhaps she was the cheat heaven had bestowed upon her.
Whatever she represented and wherever she came from, even if she were just an ordinary person who could keep her company and relieve her boredom, Leng Xiyue would already be happy.
"Partners?" Xiao Bai froze at the word, then smiled. "Of course. From now on, we'll be the best of friends."
Xiao Bai was very cheerful, but, like Leng Xiyue, she seemed not to have spoken to anyone in a long time. When two lonely souls met, it was only natural that they should feel like old friends at first sight. In this unfamiliar world, nothing could be more comforting than having a friend bound to you through life and death.
If Xiao Bai's soul had been inside the meteorite that killed her, then weren't they literally friends bound through life and death?
Leng Xiyue had no intention of asking about her origins just yet. First, she needed to understand their situation and get settled. There was plenty of time ahead, after all, and Xiao Bai would surely explain her reincarnation eventually.
"All right, Xiyue, we don't have time to chat right now. Our first priority is for me to help you gather some psionic energy so you can protect yourself."
"Psionic energy? What's that?" Leng Xiyue asked curiously.
"Psionic energy is a special power the creator god bestowed upon our race. Only we Protoss can master it completely."
"As for humans, even in our era, human psionics were one in a million. Naturally, this human child you've been reborn as doesn't have that talent."
Before Leng Xiyue could feel disappointed, Xiao Bai changed tack. "But you happened to meet me, didn't you? You and I have already become one, so all you need to do is collect the special energies unique to this world, touch them, and absorb them. Then I can help convert them into psionic cultivation, replacing the energy you would normally cultivate in this world."
"In other words, you don't have to worry about your talent. Just gather resources~"
"Really? That's wonderful!" Leng Xiyue could not help growing excited.
For a modern person like Leng Xiyue, tedious cultivation was undoubtedly comparable to torture. Living alone and doing whatever she wanted was nothing like having to sit still and meditate. Although learning that she had been reincarnated had already prepared her to grit her teeth, find a cave, and cultivate in seclusion for ten years before going out to explore, discovering that she now had a "cultivation aid" still left her buzzing with excitement.
As for resources, she just had to find a way to rake in money, then buy, buy, buy.
But on second thought, Leng Xiyue calmed down again. "Still... what kind of world are we in? What if there's no special energy that meets your conversion requirements?"
Compared with using modern knowledge to live comfortably as a wealthy landowner in an ancient world, becoming a cultivator who could soar into the heavens and delve beneath the earth was far more appealing. Since psionic energy was the power used by Xiao Bai's race, it had to be something truly extraordinary.
Her old self had wanted only a quiet corner to call her own. Her current self wanted to take to the skies!
But if this world lacked the special energy Xiao Bai had mentioned, there would be nothing she could do. She therefore did not dare get her hopes up too much.
"Actually, before you woke up, the system had already finished integrating with this new body. The body you've been reborn into is extremely frail. It seems a wild beast scared it to death."
"Under those emergency circumstances, the system's programming allowed me to temporarily take control of this body. That let me kill the beast before it could maul your corpse, saving your life, and fight my way to this reasonably safe cave."
"A system?" Leng Xiyue asked in surprise. "We actually have a system too? I thought it would just be the two of us from now on."
"Of course we do. Otherwise, what do you think killed you?" Xiao Bai chuckled, then pointed a finger. A golden orb of light abruptly appeared in front of Leng Xiyue.
"This orb you see, along with me, actually exists within your mental space. We can't affect the outside world, and other people can't see us. I can only move within about ten meters of you, though my senses and such are independent. Once your mental power grows stronger, my range of movement can expand along with it."
"Mental space? Why can't I sense it?" Leng Xiyue concentrated on trying to sense it, but found nothing.
"Because you're just an ordinary person right now. You can only see it when I bring up its image."
As she spoke, she pointed at the orb. "As for this thing, it's our system. I'm not really sure what functions it has either. I think it's called the Core of the Starry Sky, or something else... anyway, it's been dormant this whole time, so we still need to obtain psionic energy first. Whatever this world's power system is, as long as we have enough psionic energy, we should definitely be able to activate it."
Leng Xiyue understood. Without Xiao Bai, she might have had to spend some time exploring on her own before she could activate the system. If this body had poor talent, even ten or twenty years would not have been out of the question. With Xiao Bai here, however, the inactive system had lost all its mystery at once. She just had to convert psionic energy step by step.
Xiao Bai did not dwell on the issue. She simply put the orb away, then pointed at a faint purple glow in the distance. "That's the energy I mentioned. Although I don't know what this world's power system is, absorbing those rings of different colors should help you obtain enough psionic energy to protect yourself, and heal your injuries along the way."
Looking in the direction she indicated, Leng Xiyue finally noticed the many rings glowing white and yellow inside the cave, faintly illuminating its dim interior. Beneath those rings lay numerous beast carcasses.
"Are those... Soul Rings?!"
Before you continue