Chapter 24

Chapter 24: I've Got a Cheat

Today's events were more or less wrapped up. Time for a good night's sleep!

The only question was whether staying up this late would leave him with enough sleep time — hopefully it wouldn't affect tonight's training.

"Goodnight, Wangshu. Sweet dreams tonight too."

He lay in bed, murmuring to himself.

But tonight, it seemed, was destined for turbulence.

After who knew how long, Wangshu was pulled from sleep by an inescapable cacophony — relentless, droning.

The noise dragged him forcibly out of his dream. Wangshu clamped his hands over his ears. Didn't the Cangcheng Cloud Knights do anything about noise disturbances?

"Wonder if little Jingliu got woken up too."

Wangshu reluctantly cracked his eyes open, instinctively reaching to throw off the covers — but his palm grasped at nothing. He turned his head slightly. This wasn't his familiar room.

A blank expanse. Absolute, pure, boundless white — as if he'd been tossed into a forgotten sandbox world that had never been painted. No up, no down, no left, no right, no reference points.

Wangshu: ...

The entire sandbox hummed ceaselessly, yet Wangshu couldn't locate the source. Everything in sight was pure white — no organisms, no planets, not even dust.

The droning grew louder. Sound bombarded him from every direction, making his ears ache. Wangshu walked forward instinctively, even though movement felt somewhat unreal in a space like this.

Until —

【The Bright Future Chat Group reminds you: Your deep sleep threshold has been met. Would you like to activate Training Mode? This is an auxiliary function of the Group Member Card module.】

【Yes / No】

The cold, familiar system notification cut through the chaos like a blade piercing through fog.

Only then did Wangshu think to look at his hands — but the arm in his field of vision wasn't the one he knew.

"..."

As if a veil of dust had been brushed from his eyes — or as if his vision slowly focused — the world suddenly gained color. Other living things gradually appeared.

The first thing he saw was a colossal Swarm Lord — armored in chitin thick as mountain ridges, the bio-luminescent organs beneath its body warping light and air like a blazing star.

The Pestilent Swarm Lord — Zinie.

The name materialized in his mind instantly. Among the Propagation Swarm Lords, the one closest to the original Swarm Sovereign.

Wangshu's mind snapped fully online. A sudden thought struck him: "Did Senior Jingliu ever turn into a bug too?"

His field of vision continued to expand. An invisible force guided his perspective, instantly crossing to the next star sector. He caught a vague glimpse of a second Swarm Lord, but the image was blurry — like a flower in a mirror, a moon on water.

Then he tried to move. The shifting of the broken remnants startled the Pestilent Swarm Lord, who had been gnawing on a corpse. Its massive compound eyes instantly locked onto the remnants' head.

In that split second of crisis, what flashed through Wangshu's mind was that moonlit card...

He remembered Senior Jingliu's trust and instruction, and the unorthodox techniques she'd mentioned. His alien body gradually returned to normal. A faint coolness permeated the scorching space.

"A sword, three feet seven inches long..."

"Is enough to sever any bond."

If you can't control the blade in your hand, then let go — let the blade control you.

Surrender your body, your will, temporarily, to a purer form of skill and power.

Senior's icy voice still echoed in his ears. Wangshu took a deep breath.

Frost spread from his palm — like a thread of moonlight held in hand during a silent winter night, glowing faintly.

"Now it's my turn to say it."

The massive remnants gradually condensed into human form, slowly resolving into Wangshu's shape — though his eyes blazed scarlet, as if drained of their light.

"Let this moon's radiance... illuminate ten thousand rivers!"

Brilliant moonlight, cold as the Milky Way cascading from the ninth heaven, and ice-sword energy honed over a millennium — all of it slashed toward the tether between the Propagation remnants and the Swarm Lord. Where the sword-light passed, the invisible chains shattered like spider silk under a blowtorch, severing in an instant, the blade punching through the phantom before it, cleaving through chitin and flesh.

【Yes / No】

Yes!

......

"Ha... haha!"

Reappearing in the familiar training space, Wangshu looked at his own familiar hands and body and couldn't contain his laughter.

So this was what it felt like to have someone at your back?

Sure, Senior Jingliu had praised his talent as exceptional — but he'd only been here two or three days. How could he possibly handle Propagation remnants on his own?

But it didn't matter. Wangshu couldn't perfectly control the power — but he could let the power perfectly control him!

Once he'd laughed himself out and calmed down slightly, he noticed two people standing before him — Asta, drenched in sweat and looking like she'd just survived a boot camp, and... Senior Jingliu, arms folded, face expressionless.

"Ahem, sorry about that. Got a little carried away."

Wangshu quickly reined in his grin and cleared his throat, somewhat sheepishly.

That said, the smile hadn't fully left his face. Claiming he hadn't been scared of the Propagation remnants would be a lie — but he hadn't expected the danger to be so easily defused.

"No matter. I'd assumed it would take you several more days to break through, but you managed to wake from the Propagation's encroachment on the very first night."

Propagation's encroachment was silent and insidious. It dulled your mental awareness, your consciousness, even your soul — making you oblivious to your body's warnings. You could even live normally the next day.

She'd been monitoring the power drain, mentally estimating how long it would take Wangshu to snap out of it. She hadn't expected the little boy's comprehension to be this sharp.

"That's not what happened." Wangshu scratched his head, answering honestly. "The chat group reminded me it was training time! It straight-up jolted me out of the daze. Haha!"

He really couldn't hold it together. He'd originally assumed he'd need years of living in this world to slowly process and absorb everything.

Who knew that a chat group — the kind of cheat that usually only existed in crossover fanfics — would actually be this useful?

Jingliu paused, then nodded thoughtfully. "Then this group truly is an Aeon's creation."

The Propagation remnants, while fragments, still operated on the level of cosmic rules. For the chat group to cut through that so casually, it had to be at least one tier above the remnants.

Like the Astral Express when Akivili was still aboard — only, no one knew what purpose the Aeon who'd gathered them here had in mind.

Wangshu: ...

He felt this was best left unexamined. He'd transmigrated from the real world, after all. If he absolutely had to trace it to a source, maybe this was just his transmigrator's starter pack.

Wangshu shook his head vigorously, brimming with eagerness. "Is there still time for me to train today?"

Jingliu was about to reflexively shake her head when she remembered the little brat had just done the exact same motion. She forcibly stopped herself.

"No time left. Don't forget to practice your swordsmanship during the day. Your talent is exceptional — you may even surpass me someday. Don't slack off."

The chat group was extraordinary in many ways, but it couldn't arbitrarily stretch time. The training space sounded impressive, but its time flow ratio with the outside world was perfectly normal.

"I will!"

Wangshu's answer was crisp and clean.

Then, sensing something, he looked toward the groaning... Asta. The young lady was bracing herself on her knees, panting lightly, sweat-dampened bangs plastered to her forehead. The look she gave him carried something indescribable — somewhere between resentful and beseeching.

"Wangshu, you absolutely must not forget to train during the day. You absolutely must not forget!"

Asta's voice was feeble, yet her tone was desperately earnest. "You have to — have to — remember to train!"

PS: Hoolay uses "They" — that's correct. Aside from one instance where Jingliu uses "he," virtually all official text uses the gender-neutral pronoun. I'm not sure if this applies to all Emanators or if Hoolay is special; I haven't noticed this with other characters.