After what Aiwen said, Mo Fei felt a little sleepy too.
This body was no longer young, so after that brief spell of fear and anxiety, he was feeling rather tired.
Still, there were a few things he wanted to find out.
He returned to his room, sat down on his battered wooden bed, and began trying to call out to his cheat.
"Belief Sublimation System?!"
"System?!"
But no matter how he called, that reassuring sound of machinery running never appeared in his mind, as though it had all been an illusion.
As he wavered between hope and fear, he began to despair.
Fortunately, fate had not played a trick on him after all. After he cleared his thoughts once more and began meditating to try to calm himself, a clearly visible screen of light appeared before his eyes.
The screen had a distinctly technological feel, completely unlike the backdrop of this century. That familiar sense of technology gave Mo Fei the illusion that he had returned to the twenty-first century.
[Host: Mo Fei] [Age: 42 (24)?] [Skills: Computer proficiency (basic), cooking (beginner), Herbology (beginner), farming (beginner), medicine (uninitiated), mending (uninitiated), masonry (uninitiated), business (uninitiated)...]
A great many skills from his previous life and this one were listed.
The problem was that they looked far too meager.
His basic computer proficiency was easy enough to understand. He had studied computer science at university and had worked for an internet company ever since graduating, so it was only natural that he had built up some expertise in the field.
The problem was that, although the current era could not be called primitive, its technological revolution had not yet reached the information age.
Whether his remaining lifespan would even last until computers became widespread was still an unknown.
A skill he could not use seemed like a complete joke right now.
As for cooking, that was even simpler. In his previous life, his cooking skills had mostly amounted to boiling instant noodles and cracking an egg into them.
The cooking skills shown here came more from this body's years of experience.
To look after himself and these orphans, he had been forced to learn to cook. However simple European food might be, making it edible was no small matter.
The two men's cooking skills combined had produced this result.
Herbology and farming were there for similar reasons. This private orphanage did not have much money for medical treatment or food, so they had cleared a vegetable patch and an herb garden in the backyard, growing some simple crops and common medicinal herbs.
However, in this era, many medicinal herbs were associated with witchcraft, so these things were theoretically taboo, which also meant those herbs were very scarce.
The other uninitiated skills were even more numerous to an astonishing degree, but many had somehow accumulated over time in the struggle to survive.
Just looking at this skill list, Mo Fei felt that without this body's memories, he would never have been able to survive in this era. These skills alone told him how difficult life here was.
Fortunately, heaven had still given him some help. These basic skills would be his foundation for facing the world in the future.
After looking through his skills, Mo Fei turned his attention to the most important thing: skill points.
Anyone who had played a game should know that skills were important, but how to allocate skill points was even more important.
Counting how many skill points he had was the key to his life from here on.
To his disappointment, however, this Belief Sublimation System had no so-called newbie gift pack, or even any instructions. All that appeared, alone at the very bottom, was-
[Current Belief Points: 1.3]
Without system instructions, he had no idea where these Belief Points came from, but such a small amount meant he needed to choose more carefully.
He had wanted to give it a try, but with so few Belief Points, if he ended up sublimating a skill that was not much use, his start would truly be a disaster.
After getting a rough understanding of his cheat, he put the matter aside for the time being.
Sleepiness kept surging through his mind and finally defeated him. After a yawn, he drifted off to sleep.
The long night gradually faded, and the rain and wind died away.
Gray morning light pierced the heavy clouds and spilled in patches through the gaps in the battered wooden window into the cramped room, dispelling the cold darkness of the night before.
The next day, Mo Fei rose very early. Although he had not yet fully integrated the experiences of the past, his body had already climbed mechanically out of bed.
Past memories, the original owner's habits, and all the orphanage's affairs, large and small, had become fixed entries in his memory without any sense of reality. Still, at least this meant he did not feel the unfamiliar distance of a newcomer.
Unlike his wakeful morning, the children living in the shared dormitory were not so lucky.
Jimmy was the first to wake, and only because the swaddled bundle that had suddenly appeared beside him made his sleeping position terribly uncomfortable.
When he opened his eyes, he saw a baby staring intently at him with large, pitch-black eyes, neither crying nor fussing, just staring straight at him. More unnervingly, even in that simple stare, the cold-blooded killing intent in those eyes seemed less like a newborn infant and more like a cold-blooded snake watching its prey.
The terrifying sight that greeted him upon waking made him scream outright.
"Aah!!!"
Aiwen was also quick to react. He rushed over, banging into several bed legs along the way. Ignoring the pain in his toes, he scooped Tom straight up and carefully soothed Jimmy.
After all, a normal baby would have cried and fussed to some extent after all that, and once it started, it would never end.
Aiwen had looked after children before, but too much crying could easily make them ill, and the orphanage had no money left to spare for medical treatment.
Of course, what puzzled and unsettled him was that Jimmy's scream had not made Tom cry. He simply looked ahead with those pitch-black eyes. This abnormal behavior left Aiwen full of doubts. If he could not feel the child's pulse, he would have thought the baby had died during the night.
Children sent here had to pass through several stages. The first was this very moment: they arrived somewhere unfamiliar, cried incessantly, and then died when they failed to catch their breath.
In the vacant ground beside the orphanage lay some children who had died for precisely that reason.
Jimmy's scream also made the other children in the orphanage rub their eyes and gradually wake up.
The second-oldest child, the girl who acted as their boss, called out in displeasure, "Jimmy, what are you shrieking about now? It's first thing in the morning..."
But when she saw the child in Aiwen's arms, she could say no more.
"Another newcomer? The director and his bleeding heart, honestly..."
Unfortunately, she had not gotten a clear look at Tom's eyes, so all she could do was comfort the agitated Jimmy and get him to settle down.
After that, her movements became much gentler too. Although she still called out for the other children to get up, she moved much more quietly, then also told some of the children to help heat water.
Newborn children were the most delicate and the most trouble. Keeping the other children from disturbing Aiwen was an unspoken understanding among them.
When Mo Fei appeared before Tom again, he saw him resting in Aiwen's arms, neither crying nor fussing, drinking warm water in tiny sips.