“Are you leaving?” Huo Liang asked. He looked at the pangolin with tears welling up in his large sparkling eyes.
Five days had gone by in the game and although the pangolin had not managed to help Huo Liang become stronger, it had given him the resolve to become stronger—the trio of hooligan-like students had not dared to go to school ever since they were bitten by the pangolin.
And on the third day, the pangolin suddenly opened its mouth to speak, giving Huo Liang a shock.
“You have not even memorized the formula to calculate the volume of a cone?”
“The phrase ‘the mountain island stands tall’ is preceded by ‘Even as water surges’!”
“The cost of the shirt is 9 pounds and 15 pence! The answer is C!”
Hiding in Huo Liang’s bag, the pangolin could only be heard by Huo Liang himself. It was coincidentally the month exam before the end of the term that few days. With the pangolin, Huo Liang was able to cheat and breeze through paper after paper at an incredible speed.
But after the examination ended, the pangolin said, “You’re doomed!”
“If you do badly in the end-of-term examination but was able to do so well in this month’s examination, your teacher is definitely going to accuse you of cheating! When that happens you won’t be able to defend yourself! Even breathing is a sin for those who do badly!”
Huo Liang was slightly taken aback and asked, “What should I do now?”
“I will guide you these two days, if you don’t learn well, haha, prepare for your doom!” the pangolin said.
In the following two days, Huo Liang studied under the guidance of the pangolin. He did not have a tutor before and did not dare to ask questions in school either, nor did he have many friends whom he could consult with, resulting in him accumulating many misconceptions and knowledge gaps. After they were clarified by the pangolin, he felt enlightened, as if he had awakened from a dream.
After school that day, Huo Liang ran home and attempted three sets of mock examination papers in two hours, under the supervision of the pangolin. They were the three main subjects.
“You are actually quite bright,” the pangolin said.
“That’s right, that’s the way, just as I thought.”
“You completed the papers quite quickly. Alright, only these two questions are wrong, be careful the next time. But on the whole, your result is quite good.”
Huo Liang looked at the pangolin reviewing his papers on the table and giving its comments. He was extremely delighted as he received back his papers and made corrections. Then, he heard the pangolin saying, “I am leaving.”
Huo Liang was shocked and said, “But, but I have not become stronger…”
“Don’t be a fool, did I ever agree to your request? I only stayed these few days to repay you for the lamp holder,” the pangolin replied.
Looking at Huo Liang about to burst out in tears on the screen, Ren Suo thought about it and entered in the dialogue box: “Sigh, I am actually just a thief who stole a precious treasure from the Deities’ Palace. I finally managed to return to reality but was turned into a pangolin. If I stay here any longer, the Palace guards would soon catch on and you would be implicated.”
The best excuse for a child like Huo Liang was none other than saying that “It’s for your best benefit that I am leaving because I don’t want to implicate you”. As to why Ren Suo said the Deities’ Palace… it was just because he remembered that he once made up a story about such an extraordinary force.
“I am not afraid!” Huo Liang said without hesitation.
“What about your mother? Do you want to drag your mother into this as well?” Ren Suo replied through the dialogue box.
Huo Liang remained silent.
“Study well. I am not a human after all and do not have any abilities that I can impart to you. But as long as you continue to work hard, perhaps… there would not be any significant use.”
“Don’t let your imagination run wild, there is no such easy way out in life.”
As Ren Suo typed the above line, he subconsciously looked at the cabinet with the Mini Worlds Gaming Console inside.
“I am leaving now. If I manage to survive, I will visit you again.”
Without letting Huo Liang stop him from its great mission of devouring Reiki, the pangolin left the housing estate without hesitation.
After all, all of the Reiki items in the estate had been devoured of all their Reiki.
Over the last five days, Ren Suo had found a total of 91 objects with scarce Reiki content and 13 objects with moderately little Reiki content in the housing estate. In addition to the floor tile he had gotten from the female toilet previously, the pangolin had evolved 16 times!
Not all lamp holders had decent amounts of Reiki in them, and whether it would become a Reiki object was dependent on luck—the luck of the antique.
But over ten peculiar cases of theft and loss of property were reported in the district, and posters urging people to “protect against fire, theft, and vagrants” had emerged on the ground level of the buildings. The people in the district must have thought that some homeless person had appeared who was going around stealing weird objects.
However, Ren Suo did not proceed to the second old district as the side goal either. He had only stayed for one more day because of Huo Liang—the homework of a second-year junior high school student only required one extra day of guidance.
Furthermore, as the pangolin grew stronger, more Reiki was needed to evolve. After it finished absorbing the Reiki in that district, Ren Suo realized that objects with moderately little Reiki were also no longer very beneficial to the pangolin.
He needed to find and devour the Reiki of objects with higher Reiki content.
The pangolin leaped off the edge of the fourth level of the building, and a meaty pair of wings emerged from its body—
It was “Bat Wings”, a rare evolution whose ability card was red with blue words.
The pangolin landed gracefully on the floor and its body was already changing based on the environment. It was not exactly similar to the environment but looked more like a smudge on the ground. No matter where it was, it would not draw the attention of people and would not be stepped on either. Moreover, when it moved, the appearance of the smudge would change rapidly according to the changing environment. Ren Suo had not let the pangolin be invisible, but rather less “eye-catching”.
It was “Blend-in Smudge+”, a rare evolution whose ability card was red with blue words and was a result of the ability of the floor tile from the female toilet.
The pangolin arrived at a public bus stop and waited for 3 minutes before going onto city bus number 8. Ren Suo fast-forwarded the game by 1 hour and 30 minutes, and the pangolin arrived at Anshun West High-Speed Railway Station.
After looking at the lighted circuit boards in the main hall, Ren Suo realized that there was indeed no direct high-speed rail connection to Lianjiang. He had already checked beforehand in real life and had expected it to be the same in the game.
Should I let the pangolin take a special trip to Lianjiang?
Ren Suo looked at the 336 combat points of the pangolin. After comparing it to the 46832 combat points of the strongest player in the world, Ren Suo dismissed that idea.
He did not have much time to waste.
Furthermore, if the pangolin traveled the Lianjiang, it was highly likely that it would see a Ren Suo who was playing games on the game console anyway.
Would he believe it then? Or would he not believe it?
Unless the events in the game took place tens of years later, there was no point in making the pangolin travel to Lianjiang. Ren Suo himself could predict what would happen to him ten days later or tens of days later—the future of ordinary people like him was predictable as such.
It was fortunate that Ren Suo noticed a train that was about to depart Anshun West station and controlled the pangolin to dash immediately towards the gates.
The security checks at the gates were meant for humans and not pangolins, and the pangolin managed to hide and pass through the checks into the waiting area as a smudge on the ground without much difficulty. The only problem was that the ticket gate was too narrow and there was only space for one person to walk through.
As such, the pangolin said to the ticket inspector, “Hey, guess who I am?”
It was “Telepathy”, an evolution whose card was red with yellow words. It allowed the pangolin to communicate its thoughts directly to another life form without “speaking”—in the game, the effect was effectively a one-way dialogue box.
It was one of the two ability cards of the pangolin that were yellow-worded, and Ren Suo had not selected it because he wanted to guide Huo Liang in his work, but because it was an effective and useful ability in many situations, including communicating, disrupting, and scaring.
Any person who heard the “voice” would be extremely suspicious as the “voice” produced by the ability had no particular direction and no one would imagine that a pangolin that they could not see was essentially speaking to them. For example, an extremely bold hooligan was scared to his wits after the pangolin cornered him into an alley and even wet his pants after hearing the “voice”.
When the ticket inspector heard the “voice”, he was stunned momentarily and looked around. At the same time, the pangolin used “Afterimage” and slipped through the gate in a whoosh. After waiting for a while, it got inside the high-speed train!
Ren Suo fast-forwarded the game by 10 hours and 30 minutes. As the sky began to light up the next day, the pangolin finally arrived at the place where Ren Suo thought had the most Reiki objects—
Tianjing City, the capital of Xuan Nation!
In fact, Ren Suo had never been to Tianjiang City. The places of interest in Tianjing City were extremely crowded during the holidays and his friends who had been there before all advised him–
“Don’t go there.”
That time, however, he had controlled the pangolin to Tianjing City on the legendary high-speed train, without needing to squeeze with the crowd or spend too much time himself. But the most important thing to do was still to level up as fast as possible. After just one night, the strongest player in the world had gained another 1000 combat points!
Ren Suo more or less understood the mechanics of the combat score. The claws of the pangolin were now able to dig through concrete and crush metal cans, and it would only suffer from moderate injuries when it was hit by a car traveling at 60 km/h (of course, this was also due to its 15 layers of defense armor) while needing only 1 hour to fully recover from its injuries. However, its combat power was still merely 336 points.
As such, Ren Suo suspected that the combat power of adult humans was likely 100, and 100 combat points would be the benchmark. Although the pangolin was still a pangolin, its bite strength, movement ability, defense, and recovery ability was far stronger than humans, and could well be the king of the pangolins.
But that was not of any use either, for the goal of the game was not to win against the BOSS but to find ways to become the strongest in the world.
The present difficulty was that the various attributes of the pangolin was almost at its maximum. For example, its recovery ability was already at a maximum of 150 points.
150 recovery points could be equivalent to 1.5 times the recovery ability of humans, but to the pangolin, it was 10 times its usual recovery ability. An average pangolin was, after all, only 2 kg, and Ren Suo’s pangolin character was merely 4.5 kg, which was just a tenth of an average adult female human.
After one of the pangolin’s attributes reached its maximum, a hint appeared in the attributes column:
[Maximum value: ‘Super-evolution’ would definitely be evoked during the next evolution.]
Ren Suo was extremely eager to find out what changes the super-evolution would bring for the pangolin.
But he still had to find Reiki objects and absorb the Reiki in them.
Ren Suo pressed R3 and entered the Reiki vision mode. In an instant, the entire screen turned yellow.
After a few seconds, the screen returned to normal, and it was then that Ren Suo suddenly realized that light beams of Reiki which pierced through the clouds were everywhere in Tianjing City.
The pangolin moved to a taller building. Ren Suo used his mobile phone to find out the location of that building the pangolin was on, muttering, “The KFC stall beside Tianjing West Station… Found it.”
“Directly east, 7 kilometers away… Yes, that should be the Palace Museum.”
“Directly north, 10 kilometers away… That should be the Summer Palace.”
At that time, the sky was already bright. Suddenly, a golden-colored beam of light emerged from somewhere further than the Palace Museum. It exploded into crimson-red streaks and virtually shrouded the entire land. The entire screen was now crimson-red in color.
Ren Suo was taken aback and thought for a moment that the game had turned into a horror game.
After a few minutes, the crimson-red color slowly converged together and disappeared. The light beam that was even farther east than the Palace Museum appeared to have become thicker by a few centimeters.
“That terrifying Reiki light beam should not be the Palace Museum, no?” Ren Suo said as he looked at the time in the game, 04:51.
Without any doubt, the explosion of Reiki moments ago must have been due to some event.
If it was not that it was so coincidental that the pangolin had encountered a sudden event, it must be that there would be such events occurring daily in Tianjing city.
In that direction, at that time, the most likely event would be…
“The flag-raising ceremony?”
Ren Suo blinked and muttered to himself, “In that case, the Reiki streaks that virtually covered Tianjing City in its entirety, could it really be…”
“Are you leaving?” Huo Liang asked. He looked at the pangolin with tears welling up in his large sparkling eyes.
Five days had gone by in the game and although the pangolin had not managed to help Huo Liang become stronger, it had given him the resolve to become stronger—the trio of hooligan-like students had not dared to go to school ever since they were bitten by the pangolin.
And on the third day, the pangolin suddenly opened its mouth to speak, giving Huo Liang a shock.
“You have not even memorized the formula to calculate the volume of a cone?”
“The phrase ‘the mountain island stands tall’ is preceded by ‘Even as water surges’!”
“The cost of the shirt is 9 pounds and 15 pence! The answer is C!”
Hiding in Huo Liang’s bag, the pangolin could only be heard by Huo Liang himself. It was coincidentally the month exam before the end of the term that few days. With the pangolin, Huo Liang was able to cheat and breeze through paper after paper at an incredible speed.
But after the examination ended, the pangolin said, “You’re doomed!”
“If you do badly in the end-of-term examination but was able to do so well in this month’s examination, your teacher is definitely going to accuse you of cheating! When that happens you won’t be able to defend yourself! Even breathing is a sin for those who do badly!”
Huo Liang was slightly taken aback and asked, “What should I do now?”
“I will guide you these two days, if you don’t learn well, haha, prepare for your doom!” the pangolin said.
In the following two days, Huo Liang studied under the guidance of the pangolin. He did not have a tutor before and did not dare to ask questions in school either, nor did he have many friends whom he could consult with, resulting in him accumulating many misconceptions and knowledge gaps. After they were clarified by the pangolin, he felt enlightened, as if he had awakened from a dream.
After school that day, Huo Liang ran home and attempted three sets of mock examination papers in two hours, under the supervision of the pangolin. They were the three main subjects.
“You are actually quite bright,” the pangolin said.
“That’s right, that’s the way, just as I thought.”
“You completed the papers quite quickly. Alright, only these two questions are wrong, be careful the next time. But on the whole, your result is quite good.”
Huo Liang looked at the pangolin reviewing his papers on the table and giving its comments. He was extremely delighted as he received back his papers and made corrections. Then, he heard the pangolin saying, “I am leaving.”
Huo Liang was shocked and said, “But, but I have not become stronger…”
“Don’t be a fool, did I ever agree to your request? I only stayed these few days to repay you for the lamp holder,” the pangolin replied.
Looking at Huo Liang about to burst out in tears on the screen, Ren Suo thought about it and entered in the dialogue box: “Sigh, I am actually just a thief who stole a precious treasure from the Deities’ Palace. I finally managed to return to reality but was turned into a pangolin. If I stay here any longer, the Palace guards would soon catch on and you would be implicated.”
The best excuse for a child like Huo Liang was none other than saying that “It’s for your best benefit that I am leaving because I don’t want to implicate you”. As to why Ren Suo said the Deities’ Palace… it was just because he remembered that he once made up a story about such an extraordinary force.
“I am not afraid!” Huo Liang said without hesitation.
“What about your mother? Do you want to drag your mother into this as well?” Ren Suo replied through the dialogue box.
Huo Liang remained silent.
“Study well. I am not a human after all and do not have any abilities that I can impart to you. But as long as you continue to work hard, perhaps… there would not be any significant use.”
“Don’t let your imagination run wild, there is no such easy way out in life.”
As Ren Suo typed the above line, he subconsciously looked at the cabinet with the Mini Worlds Gaming Console inside.
“I am leaving now. If I manage to survive, I will visit you again.”
Without letting Huo Liang stop him from its great mission of devouring Reiki, the pangolin left the housing estate without hesitation.
After all, all of the Reiki items in the estate had been devoured of all their Reiki.
Over the last five days, Ren Suo had found a total of 91 objects with scarce Reiki content and 13 objects with moderately little Reiki content in the housing estate. In addition to the floor tile he had gotten from the female toilet previously, the pangolin had evolved 16 times!
Not all lamp holders had decent amounts of Reiki in them, and whether it would become a Reiki object was dependent on luck—the luck of the antique.
But over ten peculiar cases of theft and loss of property were reported in the district, and posters urging people to “protect against fire, theft, and vagrants” had emerged on the ground level of the buildings. The people in the district must have thought that some homeless person had appeared who was going around stealing weird objects.
However, Ren Suo did not proceed to the second old district as the side goal either. He had only stayed for one more day because of Huo Liang—the homework of a second-year junior high school student only required one extra day of guidance.
Furthermore, as the pangolin grew stronger, more Reiki was needed to evolve. After it finished absorbing the Reiki in that district, Ren Suo realized that objects with moderately little Reiki were also no longer very beneficial to the pangolin.
He needed to find and devour the Reiki of objects with higher Reiki content.
The pangolin leaped off the edge of the fourth level of the building, and a meaty pair of wings emerged from its body—
It was “Bat Wings”, a rare evolution whose ability card was red with blue words.
The pangolin landed gracefully on the floor and its body was already changing based on the environment. It was not exactly similar to the environment but looked more like a smudge on the ground. No matter where it was, it would not draw the attention of people and would not be stepped on either. Moreover, when it moved, the appearance of the smudge would change rapidly according to the changing environment. Ren Suo had not let the pangolin be invisible, but rather less “eye-catching”.
It was “Blend-in Smudge+”, a rare evolution whose ability card was red with blue words and was a result of the ability of the floor tile from the female toilet.
The pangolin arrived at a public bus stop and waited for 3 minutes before going onto city bus number 8. Ren Suo fast-forwarded the game by 1 hour and 30 minutes, and the pangolin arrived at Anshun West High-Speed Railway Station.
After looking at the lighted circuit boards in the main hall, Ren Suo realized that there was indeed no direct high-speed rail connection to Lianjiang. He had already checked beforehand in real life and had expected it to be the same in the game.
Should I let the pangolin take a special trip to Lianjiang?
Ren Suo looked at the 336 combat points of the pangolin. After comparing it to the 46832 combat points of the strongest player in the world, Ren Suo dismissed that idea.
He did not have much time to waste.
Furthermore, if the pangolin traveled the Lianjiang, it was highly likely that it would see a Ren Suo who was playing games on the game console anyway.
Would he believe it then? Or would he not believe it?
Unless the events in the game took place tens of years later, there was no point in making the pangolin travel to Lianjiang. Ren Suo himself could predict what would happen to him ten days later or tens of days later—the future of ordinary people like him was predictable as such.
It was fortunate that Ren Suo noticed a train that was about to depart Anshun West station and controlled the pangolin to dash immediately towards the gates.
The security checks at the gates were meant for humans and not pangolins, and the pangolin managed to hide and pass through the checks into the waiting area as a smudge on the ground without much difficulty. The only problem was that the ticket gate was too narrow and there was only space for one person to walk through.
As such, the pangolin said to the ticket inspector, “Hey, guess who I am?”
It was “Telepathy”, an evolution whose card was red with yellow words. It allowed the pangolin to communicate its thoughts directly to another life form without “speaking”—in the game, the effect was effectively a one-way dialogue box.
It was one of the two ability cards of the pangolin that were yellow-worded, and Ren Suo had not selected it because he wanted to guide Huo Liang in his work, but because it was an effective and useful ability in many situations, including communicating, disrupting, and scaring.
Any person who heard the “voice” would be extremely suspicious as the “voice” produced by the ability had no particular direction and no one would imagine that a pangolin that they could not see was essentially speaking to them. For example, an extremely bold hooligan was scared to his wits after the pangolin cornered him into an alley and even wet his pants after hearing the “voice”.
When the ticket inspector heard the “voice”, he was stunned momentarily and looked around. At the same time, the pangolin used “Afterimage” and slipped through the gate in a whoosh. After waiting for a while, it got inside the high-speed train!
Ren Suo fast-forwarded the game by 10 hours and 30 minutes. As the sky began to light up the next day, the pangolin finally arrived at the place where Ren Suo thought had the most Reiki objects—
Tianjing City, the capital of Xuan Nation!
In fact, Ren Suo had never been to Tianjiang City. The places of interest in Tianjing City were extremely crowded during the holidays and his friends who had been there before all advised him–
“Don’t go there.”
That time, however, he had controlled the pangolin to Tianjing City on the legendary high-speed train, without needing to squeeze with the crowd or spend too much time himself. But the most important thing to do was still to level up as fast as possible. After just one night, the strongest player in the world had gained another 1000 combat points!
Ren Suo more or less understood the mechanics of the combat score. The claws of the pangolin were now able to dig through concrete and crush metal cans, and it would only suffer from moderate injuries when it was hit by a car traveling at 60 km/h (of course, this was also due to its 15 layers of defense armor) while needing only 1 hour to fully recover from its injuries. However, its combat power was still merely 336 points.
As such, Ren Suo suspected that the combat power of adult humans was likely 100, and 100 combat points would be the benchmark. Although the pangolin was still a pangolin, its bite strength, movement ability, defense, and recovery ability was far stronger than humans, and could well be the king of the pangolins.
But that was not of any use either, for the goal of the game was not to win against the BOSS but to find ways to become the strongest in the world.
The present difficulty was that the various attributes of the pangolin was almost at its maximum. For example, its recovery ability was already at a maximum of 150 points.
150 recovery points could be equivalent to 1.5 times the recovery ability of humans, but to the pangolin, it was 10 times its usual recovery ability. An average pangolin was, after all, only 2 kg, and Ren Suo’s pangolin character was merely 4.5 kg, which was just a tenth of an average adult female human.
After one of the pangolin’s attributes reached its maximum, a hint appeared in the attributes column:
[Maximum value: ‘Super-evolution’ would definitely be evoked during the next evolution.]
Ren Suo was extremely eager to find out what changes the super-evolution would bring for the pangolin.
But he still had to find Reiki objects and absorb the Reiki in them.
Ren Suo pressed R3 and entered the Reiki vision mode. In an instant, the entire screen turned yellow.
After a few seconds, the screen returned to normal, and it was then that Ren Suo suddenly realized that light beams of Reiki which pierced through the clouds were everywhere in Tianjing City.
The pangolin moved to a taller building. Ren Suo used his mobile phone to find out the location of that building the pangolin was on, muttering, “The KFC stall beside Tianjing West Station… Found it.”
“Directly east, 7 kilometers away… Yes, that should be the Palace Museum.”
“Directly north, 10 kilometers away… That should be the Summer Palace.”
At that time, the sky was already bright. Suddenly, a golden-colored beam of light emerged from somewhere further than the Palace Museum. It exploded into crimson-red streaks and virtually shrouded the entire land. The entire screen was now crimson-red in color.
Ren Suo was taken aback and thought for a moment that the game had turned into a horror game.
After a few minutes, the crimson-red color slowly converged together and disappeared. The light beam that was even farther east than the Palace Museum appeared to have become thicker by a few centimeters.
“That terrifying Reiki light beam should not be the Palace Museum, no?” Ren Suo said as he looked at the time in the game, 04:51.
Without any doubt, the explosion of Reiki moments ago must have been due to some event.
If it was not that it was so coincidental that the pangolin had encountered a sudden event, it must be that there would be such events occurring daily in Tianjing city.
In that direction, at that time, the most likely event would be…
“The flag-raising ceremony?”
Ren Suo blinked and muttered to himself, “In that case, the Reiki streaks that virtually covered Tianjing City in its entirety, could it really be…”
