Jiang Zhaoye slept until evening, when the light filtering through the slit in the curtains had already turned an orange hue.
He rolled over, fumbling blindly beneath his pillow until his hand caught the cold watchband, pulling it out with a yank. His brain was still groggy, but his fingers had already clicked the watch face awake, the backlight stinging his eyes so that he squinted.
The psionic attribute values were clearly displayed on the screen: [Psionic Energy: Metal 13, Water 15, Ice 22]
He stared at it blearily, his eyelids drooping halfway shut before he suddenly shuddered, his eyes snapping wide open.
Staring at that "Ice 22" in sheer disbelief for a long moment, Jiang Zhaoye's drowsiness evaporated instantly. He shot up from the bed in a kip-up, glaring intensely at that line—[Psionic Energy: Metal 13, Water 15, Ice 22]—scanning it back and forth as his breathing grew rapid, shoving the watch almost against the tip of his nose.
Holy—shit—
A whole month! He had cultivated bitterly for a full month! Thirty days without daring to take a single extra break, only barely grinding his ice attribute from 16 to 17, and the water attribute used for the conversion had even dropped by a point. That process had been so grueling it was practically like squeezing oil from bone.
Now, after just one sleep, his water attribute had gone from 12 to 15, and his ice attribute had shot up from 17 to 22—a sudden leap of eight points in total!
Ice attribute 22! Twenty-two!
The hard threshold for Huaicheng No. 2 High School's psionic class was 20, and the minimum standard for the city's unified awakening ceremony was also 20. Seeing that he was still three points short after a month of cultivation, he had been verging on despair; now, not only had he crossed the threshold overnight, but he even had two points to spare.
"Wahahahahahaha—!"
Laughing wildly, Jiang Zhaoye fell backward onto the bed, flailing his arms and kicking his legs as he rolled all over the mattress.
Making a stunning entrance when school started a month from now, awakening a one-in-ten-thousand high-tier sequence, showing off before the masses, bursting onto the scene, chilling thousands of miles with a single stroke of frost, dominating an era... The scene of vibrant vitality and all things competing for glory practically felt right before his eyes.
After chuckling foolishly for quite a while, Jiang Zhaoye finally put away the goofy expression with theatrical seriousness. Putting on the cold, callous face of a killer, he sat upright on the bed in a pensive pose, beginning to ponder just where this increase had come from... and whether it could be sustainable.
He had an inkling of the reasons; in all probability, several factors had stacked together.
Was it because of the spirit eyes awakened from fusing with two pieces of Mystic Sea Ice Marrow? Or was it because of the Great Void Ice Soul Cicadas?
Or was it the effect of the spirit-gathering array on the jade bed where Perfected Hanyu had passed away in the ice cave?
Was the texture of spiritual energy over there fundamentally the same as Blue Star's psionic essence? If it was the same, was there a difference in purity? Did the criteria for evaluating spirit root quality have anything to do with base psionic attributes?
Or was it because he cultivated the Ice Muscle Jade Bone Art? Or the Marrow Cleansing Pill?
Or perhaps each of these reasons played a part?
Once Jiang Zhaoye's clever little brain began to branch out, questions bubbled up like an endless stream of curiosities.
He rubbed his chin. Regardless of which reason it was or which one contributed the most, wouldn't practice yield the truth anyway? In any case, the child cicada had left behind coordinates in the ice cave, so he could return anytime. He could just conduct isolated tests one by one later to find out.
Without him realizing it, the sky outside the window had completely darkened. He stepped onto the floor barefoot, groped through the dark, and snapped on the light with a click. From the training mat, he picked up the things he had brought back the previous night one by one and laid them out on the desk.
A jade slip, a jade pendant inscribed with "Han," a bronze mirror, half a bottle of Marrow Cleansing Pills, and a full bottle of Fasting Pills.
There weren't many items, but every single one was precious to his heart.
Jiang Zhaoye grabbed a pack of wet wipes and cleaned each treasure smeared with "black mud," inevitably thinking of the bag of spirit stones left behind in the ice cave. Reaching overhead, he pulled down his third-year middle school psionic materials textbook from the shelf and skillfully flipped through it, quickly finding the pages printed with sample illustrations of natural spirit stones.
Mm, exactly the same indeed.
"I'll bring them back in a while to let Mom take a look. If they're the real deal, I'll be rich." Mumbling to himself, he put the treasures by his hand into the drawer and grabbed his phone. Connecting to Wi-Fi, a deluge of news notifications and message alerts popped up.
He swiped up, first checking the time on his phone.
Less than twenty hours had passed since he was teleported away by the Ice Soul Cicada.
Jiang Zhaoye subconsciously raised his arm and glanced at his watch. The time on the watch didn't match the phone at all; as long as the phone connected to the psionic net, it would automatically synchronize its time.
The watch was issued by the school, a stripped-down version of a military tactical watch whose main functions were monitoring physical condition, recording the environment, and sending distress communications.
This was also why Jiang Zhaoye had continually felt he had transmigrated while in the ice cave: with the absurd scale of Blue Star's psionic net project, as long as one was still within the Milky Way, this watch could place calls even from alien planets and secret realms.
No signal? Then in all probability, you had transmigrated. Of course, leaving the Milky Way was another possibility, but that wasn't much different from transmigrating anyway.
Then again, the watch, which hadn't been manually synchronized yet, recorded the time he had genuinely experienced—more than eleven hours longer than the time on his phone.
In the ice cave, he had consciously tracked the time, spending sixteen hours there awake.
Comparing the two sides, the flow of time was roughly 3:4.
Rubbing his chin with two fingers, Jiang Zhaoye entered this information alongside the questions he wanted to test into the watch's memo pad, deciding to test them all together when the time came. Aside from verifying the cause of his attribute increase, he also needed to calibrate the exact time difference. If time over there was truly longer than here, wouldn't he essentially be running a time-cheat for his cultivation?
That would mean having eight more hours to use every single day than everyone else~
Just as he was reveling in the thought, his phone suddenly chimed with a flurry of notifications. Opening it, he found that several group chats from his middle school days had exploded.
The pinned message was from his homeroom teacher: "Students, the Municipal Psionic Bureau has issued a notice that a unified psionic census for incoming tenth-graders will be conducted two weeks before the start of term. Each school will arrange it independently rather than waiting for the term to begin! Since incoming tenth-graders have not officially enrolled yet, organization will tentatively proceed according to your middle schools and classes. Please gather in your original third-year middle school classrooms two weeks from now, before 9:00 AM on August 16."
Below was a long train of "Acknowledged" replies, interspersed with a few high-EQ remarks like "Understood, thank you for your hard work, Teacher," and "Thank you for notifying us, Teacher," breaking the formation.
Over in Class Group 2, where there was no homeroom teacher, messages were flooding the chat. Some were flexing, some were acting cheeky, some were overjoyed, and some were fretting.
Jiang Zhaoye smoothly slipped in, flicked his fingers, and dropped a low-key flex: "That was close. My ice attribute barely passed 20 a couple of days ago..."
He was swarmed by his former classmates in an instant, their feverish enthusiasm practically melting him down.
"@FrozenThroneNotCooling Holy shit, are you hacking?"
"From 16 to 20 in one month? Old Jiang, did you sneakily drink a fairy's bathwater?"
"Twenty means you can step onto the awakening platform, bro! You're a lock for No. 2 High's psionic class."
Suppressing the uncontrollable grin pulling at the corners of his mouth, he was chatting casually and bantering with his old acquaintances in the group when the sound of the front door opening suddenly came from the living room.
Jiang Zhaoye sprang up, opened his bedroom door, and poked his head out to peek toward the entrance.
Before the pitch-black living room, soft light illuminated the entryway. Ms. Wen stood under the light looking travel-worn, her suit jacket draped over her arm and a modest suitcase standing beside her as she looked down to change her shoes.
"Mom—!" Jiang Zhaoye bounded into the living room in a couple of quick strides and slapped the light switch with a click, instantly illuminating the whole house.
Ms. Wen looked up. Catching sight of Jiang Zhaoye, she froze completely. Tossing her coat and bag onto the shoe cabinet without even bothering to shut the door, she rushed forward in her freshly donned slippers and circled around her son several times.
"What's wrong with your eyes? And you... I haven't seen you for a little over a week, and you've grown into your looks?"
Rate on N.U.
