Banter in a fleeting dream

The quiet underground training ground was brightly lit.

Wang Shui held his longsword casually. Without moving his upper body, he pushed off with his feet and charged forward. His figure blurred, and as he raised the blade, a layer of silvery moonlight enveloped him like a shield of light.

Two slashes, one upward and one downward, unleashed two bursts of moonlight. The light was not dazzling, only restrained and crisp, brimming with killing intent.

"That's the complete [Moon Goddess Slash]. Speaking of which, you clearly have no moonlight energy in your body, nor any trace of the special class [Moon's Penumbra], but as long as you actively use it, your unattributed energy actually turns into moonlight."

Naturally, that highly practiced charging slash had been performed by Silvia while piloting Wang Shui's body.

"All right, coach, I want to learn that!"

"Doesn't anyone with hands know how to do that?"

Silvia stopped insisting on pushing Wang Shui to the intermediate tier and began explaining the special abilities of the [Moon's Penumbra] class to him in detail.

Having lost her body and her status as an awakener, Silvia had retained many skills. But with the disappearance of her class, her entire [Moon's Penumbra] system had vanished too, leaving only memories.

Wang Shui naturally welcomed everything she offered. He had time now, construct robots handled the physical labor, and all he needed to do was steer development.

The process of learning and improving was the hardest thing to describe in detail. Wang Shui could summarize and organize the knowledge he had mastered, but even he struggled to define how much knowledge he gained in a day. It could not be expressed as simply as the visible improvement of adding attribute points.

Photographic Memory, the sensitive memory of his mind and body, his concentration while studying-the more knowledge Wang Shui mastered, the stronger these abilities became.

Time skipped forward once more.

The second year was just as uneventful. Silvia had never imagined she could rest for entire years at a time. Even before she became an awakener, before her first death and resurrection by the system, she had never rested like this.

Etiquette, socializing, scholarship, combat, even dancing and singing-endless lessons had filled her childhood.

The best days of her life had been spent hunting and taking wilderness trips with her club at a public university. Insisting on attending a public school had been the wisest, most self-directed decision of her life.

The past became as meaningless as a dream. It had merely shaped the personality named Silvia.

Now, this Silvia was borrowing a man's body to live an ordinary daily life. Even her anger at being betrayed by her old friends in the hunting group seemed to have faded considerably.

Time was a healing medicine.

"Hey, hey, hey, Sil, come in if you read me. You've spaced out again!"

That bastard's voice came through the thought network named after her. After two years together, Silvia felt she knew this fellow well enough.

Free-spirited and easygoing, arrogant, lazy, averse to trouble, prone to getting hung up on things, disinclined to fight, clever, good at learning and showing off newly acquired knowledge, patient but unwilling to touch something again once it was done, skilled at reading people and steering conversations, nasty in temperament, and fond of teasing people with a perfectly bland expression.

Yet, surprisingly, he was very easy to get along with and a good choice for a friend.

He never meddled or took up your time. When you were irritable, he stayed out of your way; when you were bored, he could always think of something fun. His thoughts leaped from one thing to another, and when you did something stupid, he always joined in with great interest, then mocked your boredom afterward.

That was also why Silvia, steady-tempered but combative, could tolerate two years of uneventful living. Though she had no body of her own, life was not boring.

"Stop making noise. Keep it down, I'm infiltrating. This biomimetic spider construct you made is too small. It's taken forever just to crawl three or four meters."

"A big spider wouldn't be infiltration. It'd be a horror movie. Once we've planted the eavesdropping alchemy array in this company, there'll be two small companies left. Once we've dealt with them all, our tentacles can reach into Central City."

"Ew, disgusting. Your tentacles, not ours."

"What? Remembering last week's tentacle monster construct again? A body made of gel. Quite an experience, wasn't it?"

"Get lost! I'm putting ten holes clean through you tonight!"

Every day was filled with amusing exchanges like these. Wang Shui had recaptured some of the happiness of his university days, and even his working days. He had been like this with his colleagues and some online friends too, chatting about world affairs and amusing dirty jokes while slacking off all day.

Amid the banter, a little black spider the size of a mung bean had crawled into an office. It took a long time to reach the ceiling, where the spinneret on its abdomen smeared corrosive liquid across the surface, quickly drawing a round transmutation circle.

"That'll do."

From several hundred kilometers away, Wang Shui activated remote transmutation. Some concrete separated from inside the ceiling and formed an alchemy array.

Equivalent Alchemy used [Transmutation Circles], while the alchemy of Wang Shui's main world used [Alchemy Arrays], a type of magic formation not restricted to a circular shape, but with far more complex fundamentals.

Moreover, an alchemy array's shape alone was not enough. Energy also had to be injected evenly into the array for it to take effect.

So the biomimetic spider poured all the energy it carried into the array, leaving itself attached to the ceiling by its jointed legs alone.

"All done. Self-destruct."

Silvia sent the message. After briefly sensing it, Wang Shui crooked a finger, and the biomimetic spider immediately decomposed into dust. Layering a large amount of array technology onto such a tiny body was something Wang Shui had only recently developed.

With that matter settled for the moment, Wang Shui let Silvia go off duty and continued browsing the reports at hand.

"All right, Dashan, how are collections from the agent companies?"

"The ten integrated warehousing companies under the [Silvia Food and Energy Group] have a real-time collection rate of 81.12%. This month's basic agricultural product figures: 820,000 tonnes of staple grain released, 120,000 tonnes of vegetables, and 11,000 tonnes of cotton. Processed products: 240,000 tonnes of white sugar, 70,000 tonnes of cooking oil, and 1,130,000 tonnes of compressed plant fuel."

Wang Shui sat in his comfortable office, tapping his fingers on the desk.

The entire building belonged to his group-or rather, this whole business park belonged to him. Everyone working here was a professional in finance and management whom he had hired. They knew more about running a company than Wang Shui did.

But Wang Shui had not included them in unified, group-wide decision-making. The true decision-making level, the group's head office, consisted of only Wang Shui and Silvia, two people who slacked off all day.

[Core Computing Center · Crater] was responsible for organizing and analyzing the business big data. Wang Shui planned to retain Crater's intelligence after leaving this world and have him pursue further studies in finance and management.