Chapter Ten: Viewing the Rewards
Page 1 of 3
The data during a book’s launch period is very important. If you’re enjoying the story, remember to add it to your collection—and preferably cast a recommendation vote too. Hehe.
※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※
There really is a system?
Along with his shock, Hua Twelve felt an overwhelming surge of excitement and anticipation.
Modern life meant working from nine to five, busy yet uneventful. Most people followed more or less the same path: laboring tirelessly to buy a car and a house, then shouldering the burdens of a family after getting married and having children.
After finally enduring until their children grew up, they began worrying about retirement and medical expenses.
In short, most people spent their entire lives toiling away, unable to choose the life they truly wanted.
All the while, they watched themselves grow older day by day, their black hair turning gray, until at last they were powerless to hold on to the world and could only die as ordinarily as the countless masses before them.
But… among those chuunibyou youths who had grown up reading comics, then moved on to web novels, and who often indulged in wild fantasies whenever they were not studying or working, who would be content to live out an ordinary life like that?
Who had never dreamed of encountering some incredible opportunity, breaking free from the cage, and declaring, “My fate is mine to command, not Heaven’s”?
Yet most of the time, such things were merely beautiful dreams.
Now, however, the chance to realize those dreams had appeared right before Hua Twelve’s eyes.
It was a system!
Hua Twelve took several deep breaths to calm himself, though his voice still carried a trace of excitement as he asked, “System, what can you do? Who created you, and what is your purpose?”
Unlike certain systems in novels, which appeared before their hosts as virtual screens, this one generated a stream of information directly in his mind to answer his questions.
“There are seven pearls in the universe, each imbued with divine power…”
At that point, Hua Twelve asked with a dark expression, “System, I have to interrupt you. Are you sure you’re not trying to fool me with the Dragon Pearls?”
The system fell silent for a long while. Then another message appeared in his mind:
“Once, a demon god was trapped inside a magic lamp…”
Hua Twelve raised a hand in a gesture for it to stop and said helplessly, “You mean Aladdin’s magic lamp, don’t you?”
The system went silent again. After a while, it finally sent another message:
“The Great Dao has fifty paths, while Heaven’s workings derive forty-nine. This system is the one that escaped…”
Page 1 of 3
Page 2 of 3
Hua Twelve: “…”
He suddenly felt that the system he had obtained might not be very reliable.
In the end, the system admitted that all records concerning its origins had been lost. Everything it had said moments earlier consisted of information it had temporarily gathered from this world.
What could be confirmed was that its creator could no longer be traced and had either perished or departed from this universe.
Otherwise, the system would not have lost contact with its creator, much less selected a new host.
The system’s function was actually quite simple: to help certain lucky individuals from parallel spaces fulfill the wishes they could never let go of.
Modern physics had already proven that the basic components of all material entities—particles—could be described partly in terms of particles and partly in terms of waves. This was the famous wave-particle duality.
In other words, the origin of the universe could actually be viewed as a wave. The universe had been born from fluctuations.
The emergence of intelligent life gave rise to individual consciousness, and consciousness produced waves of awareness. These waves exerted a subtle influence on the universe. Although the effect of any single intelligent being’s consciousness wave upon the entire universe was negligible, the influence nevertheless truly existed.
When the consciousness of a group resonated, however, it produced a greater effect. Some of these effects acted upon the universe, while others, due to special circumstances, broke away from the real universe and formed numerous corresponding parallel spaces.
For example, a bestselling novel or a blockbuster film would both leave traces within the collective consciousness.
Once the collective consciousness reached resonance, the powerful wave of awareness it produced could form a parallel world based on the novel. The same was true of films and television works.
But because these worlds were all based on existing source material, the fates of their characters had already been determined.
Take the supporting characters in such worlds. Without the halo of a protagonist surrounding them, some were destined to meet tragic endings. No matter how hard they struggled, they could not escape the fate that had already been written for them.
To a certain extent, this was unfair to individual lives and represented a phenomenon that violated the laws of the universe.
If such phenomena became too numerous, the resentment and karma within the parallel spaces would form harmful fluctuations, which would in turn affect the source universe.
The direct consequence of this backlash from the waves of consciousness would be catastrophic disasters for the civilization that had given birth to the parallel world.
In the case of human civilization on Earth, for instance, earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes would all become more frequent as a result.
The system’s purpose was to give those characters in the source worlds whose fates had already been decided a sliver of opportunity, a thread of hope—a chance to turn the tables and change their destinies.
Because these figures were products of collective waves of consciousness, changes in their fates would also disrupt those fixed collective patterns of awareness. In this way, resentment and karma could be sorted out, the influence upon the source universe reduced, and disasters averted.
As the system’s host, Hua Twelve’s role was to complete the tasks issued by the system, helping those lucky individuals change their destinies, resolve their regrets, and calm their resentment.
As a reward, after each task was completed, the system would conduct a lottery to draw one ability or item belonging to the person who had been helped, then perfectly replicate it within the host’s own body.
Page 2 of 3
Page 3 of 3
The matter of replacing the Big Fella had indeed been real—though the Big Shark in question had come from a parallel world formed by the waves of consciousness generated by countless basketball fans.
Of course, that had merely been a trial task for binding the system.
Hua Twelve’s body had sustained severe internal injuries in the car accident earlier—the very ruptured organs that the hospital had diagnosed.
However, because Hua Twelve had completed the system’s task, the system had promptly repaired his body. Thus, after he was wheeled into the operating room, his vital signs returned to normal, prompting the doctors to examine him again. In the end, they discovered that his body was completely unharmed.
Faced with the discrepancy between the two diagnoses, the doctors could only attribute it to a temporary malfunction in the hospital’s equipment.
Hua Twelve only half-understood the information transmitted by the system. Karma, resentment, parallel spaces, and the like were concepts he had encountered in novels, but if he were asked to explain them properly, he understood their existence without understanding their underlying principles.
Still, he had no intention of investigating too deeply. As long as he grasped the general idea, that was enough.
Even if the system was using him, it hardly mattered. After all, without the system’s sudden appearance and the repair of his body, there was no telling whether he would have survived.
Besides, the system was not making him work for nothing. It offered rewards, didn’t it?
At the thought of those rewards, Hua Twelve’s heart grew heated again. He hurriedly said within his mind, “System, I want to view my rewards!”
This time, just as in the novels and films, a translucent virtual screen appeared before his eyes. Two lines of information flickered across it.
The first read: “The host has drawn Shaquille O’Neal’s regular-season single-game salary from the 2000–2001 season: 240,000 US dollars.” Beneath it flashed the words: “Available for withdrawal at any time.”
The second read: “The host has drawn the strength of Shaquille O’Neal at his peak.” It, too, was marked: “Available for withdrawal at any time.”
Looking at the two rewards, Hua Twelve felt his blood surge.
The first needed no explanation. Even at an exchange rate of 6.3, that would still be… He spent a long time counting on his fingers. That came to more than 1.5 million yuan!
Damn this money…
I love it!
The second reward excited Hua Twelve even more. The strength of Shaquille O’Neal at his peak—what did that actually mean? If it were added to his own body, he would essentially become Superman.
If his career ever failed, he could simply go work at a construction site carrying bricks, and he would still earn more than everyone else.
All right, that was a joke. If he obtained O’Neal’s strength and still went off to carry bricks, that would be failure at its absolute finest—failure plus!
Page 3 of 3