Shouts, panting, the clash of cold weapons, the piercing shrieks of blades scraping against one another, and the stern reprimands of the knight instructor filled the concrete training ground. They pulled Logo back to reality just as his memories had awakened, while his brain was still in a bewildered shutdown.
"I was reborn?"
Logo surveyed his unfamiliar surroundings in disbelief, utterly unaware that a burly figure had quietly stepped up behind him.
Beifu raised his foot and kicked hard at him. It was his usual approach to youngsters who let their minds wander during knight training.
These brats were only apprentices, and they had virtually no chance of dodging a sneak attack from a Tier Five grand knight.
But this time, Beifu had miscalculated.
Although Logo had only just awakened and had yet to fully adapt to his current body, the danger response he had developed as a fifteenth-tier epic martial artist in his previous life remained intact.
When he sensed the abnormal shift in the air behind him, Logo instinctively turned sideways and raised his leg. His movements were smooth, natural, and lightning-fast, firmly blocking the kick.
Beifu raised an eyebrow, then looked surprised. After blocking the kick, Logo actually counterattacked immediately, throwing a straight punch at him.
The punch had just the right amount of force and came from the perfect angle. More impressively, the transition from the low block to the punch was seamless.
Even Beifu, who was known for his strict standards, could not help but admire it.
Beifu raised a hand and blocked the punch. He wanted to test Logo further, but Logo had already realized what was happening and hurriedly stopped.
By then, the commotion had drawn the attention of many students.
Some students who had been looking forward to a laugh were so surprised to see Logo block Instructor Beifu's kick that they instinctively stopped what they were doing.
"What are you staring at? Get back to training! Don't let me catch you slacking off!" Beifu turned and bellowed, his voice louder than a loudspeaker.
Everyone jolted and hurriedly resumed training in earnest.
Logo, meanwhile, studied the burly man standing right in front of him. A stream of data poured into his mind, followed by a screen wrapped in blue light that appeared before his eyes.
[Beifu Kel uosi] Health: 100% Race: Gendaya Bloodline: low-level extraordinary (cursed) Tier: Tier Five (mid-level extraordinary) Class: knight Constitution: 45 Spirit: 13 Energy: 47 Mystery: 9 Charisma: 19 Luck: 5 Bloodlines/talents: [Blood Qi Battle Robe] Active - [Thunder Eye Light] Active - ... Knowledge/skills: [Astral Common: Lv8] - [Knight Combat Techniques: Lv17] - [Chain Cleave] Active - [Battle Qi Berserk] Active - ... (32 in total) Combat power level (unit: Dale): 372-385 Status: good
"A... combat support scanner?"
Logo thought instinctively.
What he was seeing was familiar to him. Any mercenary or scavenger scraping by in the astral realm would buy the best scanner they could afford.
For people who spent their lives fighting and killing, these things were as indispensable as phones and computers had once been to homebodies on Blue Star.
As an epic martial artist in his previous life, Logo had used all kinds of scanners. He was familiar with what he saw and naturally associated it with a scanner's information page.
But he soon noticed a difference. Wasn't this neural link system a little too seamless?
It was as if it had actually grown out of his brain!
Logo fell into thought, utterly forgetting about Instructor Beifu standing in front of him.
"Could this kid have been shaken up by Xisi?" Beifu sighed as he looked at the blank-eyed Logo.
It was understandable. His position as first in line to inherit the Campbell Family was about to vanish. If Beifu were in his shoes, he might have reacted even more strongly.
The Campbell Family was one of the Red Maple Clan's seven great families. Its patriarch held a hereditary viscountcy and an exalted status, with money and people at his disposal. What a pity...
Beifu gave Logo a pitying look and patted him on the shoulder. He decided to give the ill-fated boy half a day off to settle his feelings.
When Logo left the training ground, a well-dressed Three-Eyed Race man of about forty or fifty, sporting a short beard, came up to greet him with a broad smile.
This was Logo's personal butler, Lunbate. The gray eye in the center of his forehead showed that he was not a pureblooded Gendaya; he was a Blood Descendant.
"Young master, I heard all about what happened today. There's no need to be discouraged. Even if you can't become the patriarch, your status in the family will still be second only to Young Master Xisi's, given who you are. As long as you work hard at cultivation and become a legendary one day, you could even establish a new clan of your own..."
Butler Lunbate gently comforted Logo as he opened the car door for him.
Logo nodded slightly but said nothing. All his attention was on the panel now; he had no mind to think about family inheritance.
Seeing that he was silent, Lunbate immediately shut his mouth, not daring to say anything more. He got into the driver's seat and drove away very smoothly.
"I see. It was because of that?"
Half an hour later, Logo finally sorted through the jumbled information in his mind and understood where the panel before him had come from.
Logo's home in his previous life was called Blue Star, a technological civilization that had only just entered the interstellar age and gained a preliminary grasp of nuclear fusion technology.
At the time, Blue Star's more than two hundred countries had grown tired of endless infighting and jointly established the United Government. Full of ambition, they had set out toward the sea of stars, and everything had been moving in a good direction.
Then, without warning, disaster struck!
The moon split open and transformed into a massive blood-red eye hanging across the sky, casting a mocking, playful gaze upon humanity's pale-faced elites.
Logo would never forget that day. He had still been in college, dreaming of a beautiful future with his girlfriend.
But when the blood-red light descended from the sky, every beautiful prospect for the future vanished like a dream, scattered on the wind.
In an instant, all of Blue Star's military facilities and the military might humanity had once been proud of-including the nuclear arsenal said to be capable of destroying Earth a hundred times over-were reduced to dust, like earth and stone eroded by a river of time over countless ages.
Like ants, ten billion humans were dragged by the tractor beams that followed into a gigantic transport ship that had suddenly appeared in the sky.
The glorious civilization Blue Star's humanity had built over thousands of years.
It took only one minute to collapse!
The mastermind behind it all was the [Thousand-Eyed Civilization].
The Thousand-Eyed Civilization was an intermediate astral-level civilization inclined toward energy and mysticism.
The Thousand-Eyed Race possessed high-level extraordinary bloodlines. They looked like masses of flesh covered in countless tentacles, each tipped with an eye capable of emitting energy beams and psychic waves with a variety of functions.
The civilization's spatial technology was highly advanced, and it was particularly skilled in technologies such as exploring other planes and traveling across space.
The Thousand-Eyed Race was cruel by nature. Although it belonged to the order-aligned [Civilization Council], it was very fond of invading other planes.
But strictly speaking, Blue Star had not been invaded. It had been "farmed"!
The greatest value of intelligent beings lay in their capacity for innovation, a point long established as a consensus in the astral realm.
In the astral realm, many advanced civilizations liked to secretly nurture and guide weaker civilizations, then harvest them once they had developed to a certain point.
With luck, they could obtain quite a few pieces of black technology.
Blue Star was one of the many weak civilizations the Thousand-Eyed Civilization had secretly guided and supported.
However, after Blue Star's technology reached a certain level without producing any black technology that satisfied the Thousand-Eyed Race, its impatient higher-ups ordered an early harvest.
After keeping a very small number of highly skilled technical personnel, they either sent the remaining humans of Blue Star to the lab tables or sold them into slavery.
Logo was sold to a young member of the Thousand-Eyed Race and became his pet, suffering countless abuses.
Fortunately, he awakened an extraordinary talent and took advantage of an accident to escape the young Thousand-Eyed being's clutches.
Relying on his talent, Logo endured many hardships and became a legendary professional.
Once he had gained a measure of strength, he could no longer suppress the vengeful fury filling his heart. He began taking revenge on the Thousand-Eyed Civilization!
Relying on his extraordinary luck attribute, Logo not only killed the young Thousand-Eyed being who had tormented him for years, but also caused the Thousand-Eyed Civilization a fair amount of trouble.
Living on the edge of death and danger year after year and constantly fighting, Logo grew much stronger at a remarkable pace. His class level rose rapidly, and he gained some renown in several nearby star systems.
But against an intermediate astral-level civilization at the height of its power, even a peak epic martial artist was no more than an ant trying to shake a tree.
In the end, the Thousand-Eyed Civilization put an exceptionally generous bounty on Logo's head. Pursued by eight demigods, he stumbled into the ruins of a civilization and obtained a strange eyeball covered in dense cracks.
"The Eye of Aslant!"
Logo was filled with mixed emotions as he touched the third eye on his forehead.
He had thought he was certain to die after detonating the spatial bomb, yet he had somehow survived once again.
And with his soul reincarnated, he not only possessed greater extraordinary potential, but had also fused with this [Miracle Creation].
The Eye of Aslant, originally named the [Eye of Insight], was a Miracle Creation and the treasured heirloom of the Aslant Civilization, a former advanced astral-level civilization.
One of the major reasons the Aslant Civilization and the Floating Light Civilization had gone to war was that the Floating Light Civilization coveted the Eye of Insight.
During the final battle between the two civilizations, the Eye of Insight was shattered in full view of everyone, leaving them all dumbstruck.
Who would have thought that among the supposedly indestructible Miracle Creations, there would be a glass cannon like you? Logo thought with a peculiar expression.
Miracle Creations were wondrous objects born from the operating laws of the astral realm through a convergence of chance circumstances.
[White Feather of Time], [Chaos Stele], [Elemental Furnace], [Death Note]...
Their names resounded throughout the astral realm; everyone knew of them!
They were miracles of the astral realm, wonders, impossibilities, possessing all manner of powers that defied understanding.
Miracle Creations usually possessed some kind of extremely special structure and the property of eternal indestructibility, making them almost impossible to destroy.
The Floating Light Civilization had thought so too, which was why it had attacked without restraint.
But they ran into the Eye of Insight, which refused to play by the rules. After one annihilation beam, the people of the Floating Light Civilization were dumbfounded as they stared at the Eye of Insight, shattered to pieces!
They had drawn water with a bamboo basket-only to come away empty-handed!
"But what the Floating Light Civilization didn't know was that the Eye of Insight could repair itself. Even the Aslant Civilization didn't know that, and I ended up benefiting from it!"
Logo was thrilled. The Eye of Insight was not only a Miracle Creation, but also the key to opening the Aslant Civilization's [Higher-Dimensional Information Space]!
A civilization at the advanced astral level could already alter the rules of planes, tamper with the laws of causality, and even build an entirely new plane universe from nothing.
Because civilizations at this level had territories that were simply too vast, they generally built their own communications networks and information base stations in the [Fantasy Dimension] to exchange information in real time. Their civilization's data was also stored in a higher-dimensional information space, making it readily accessible.
And because of the Fantasy Dimension's [Infinite Spacetime] rule, countless dimensional spaces overlapped one another. Finding the location of a hostile civilization's information space there was simply impossible.
"The Aslant Civilization was destroyed, but its database was preserved intact... Hehe, it's all mine!!"
Logo could not help grinning foolishly. Lunbate saw him through the rearview mirror and muttered to himself, "Looks like I'll need to find a psychologist for the young master. This can't go on."