No dreams.
Fang Qi slowly opened his eyes.
Beneath him was a soft yoga mat.
The warmth in his arms remained, soft as ever.
He looked down.
In his arms was a silver-haired girl with a bandage wrapped around her small head.
Her single amber eye was gazing up at him, glistening with moisture.
Seeing he was awake, she blinked gently.
"Master, you're awake."
Her voice was soft and drowsy.
...Adorable.
Fang Qi rubbed his eyes and sat up, his mind still a little hazy.
Liguang had her back to him, unhurriedly slipping into that pale blue loungewear, her slender shoulder blades faintly visible through her silver hair.
His blurry vision slowly sharpened.
Huh?
He blinked hard.
That felt great...
He clenched his fist, then turned his neck.
Yeah...
Refreshed, like a brand new man!
The exhaustion from before sleep had been completely washed away!
...Comfortable.
But...
He frowned slightly.
Why did he feel this good?
How long had he been asleep?
He looked around.
The underground lab had no daylight — the overhead lights always burned with that circle of pale, sterile white.
No windows. No sunrise or sunset.
The last time he'd slept this soundly was probably back on his own bed...
Back when Liguang had decorated the room like a wedding suite.
At that moment, the silver-haired girl was biting down on a black hair tie, gathering her silver hair behind her head with both hands.
"Liguang..."
Fang Qi looked at her and couldn't help but ask.
"How long did I sleep?"
She blinked, taking the hair tie from her mouth.
"Master didn't sleep that long."
She said, while deftly twisting her hair into a loose bun, glancing back at him.
"Just four and a half hours."
...Four and a half hours?
Fang Qi was taken aback.
That short?
It felt like he'd slept a full day and night...
"Mm, four and a half hours."
Liguang secured the bun.
A few stray silver strands fell from her temples, which she lightly tucked behind her ears.
Her cheeks still carried a hint of satisfied flush as she smiled at Fang Qi.
"But four of those hours were deep sleep!"
This...
Fang Qi blinked.
His wife had this ability?
"...How did you do it?"
He asked instinctively.
"Massage."
Liguang tilted her head, reaching her hand toward the back of Fang Qi's neck.
"After Master fell asleep, Liguang kept massaging you to relax your muscles."
"Here, and here..."
Her slender fingers pressed gently on the back of his neck.
"The pressure on the acupoints has to be just right — too light and it does nothing, too heavy and it wakes Master up."
Then she curved her lips.
"Liguang got it just right!"
This...
Fang Qi widened his eyes at her.
His wife really had this skill?
"...Then, why didn't you use it before?"
He couldn't help but ask.
Liguang gave a light pout.
"I never used it before!"
Her delicate fingers tapped lightly against his skin as she murmured.
"This is an emergency, so Master needed to recover his strength as fast as possible. And besides..."
She looked at Fang Qi with innocent eyes.
"Master was so exhausted last night..."
"Ahem!"
Fang Qi coughed loudly, cutting off the rest of her sentence!
Don't say it!
The silver-haired girl's eyes curved into crescents, letting out a giggle, and she dropped the topic.
She clasped her hands behind her back, leaning forward slightly, the gauze over her right eye swaying a little.
"But usually, Liguang never uses it."
"...Why not?"
"Because when Master sleeps normally, Liguang can just watch Master's sleeping face the whole time!"
Her tone was matter-of-fact, her amber eye sparkling.
"Under normal circumstances, Liguang can watch for seven or eight hours!"
"If I made Master wake up too early, then the time I get to watch Master would be shorter..."
Fang Qi: "..."
...So that was the reason!
Fine.
Fair enough...
He shook his head helplessly and stood up, stretching his limbs.
His joints popped with a few crisp cracks.
"Whoosh...!"
He let out a breath.
His head was definitely clearer now.
The fatigue from winding through the maze yesterday had been scrubbed clean by four hours of deep sleep!
But...
He suddenly reached out, grabbed Liguang's hand, and gently pulled her toward him.
Then he lifted the silver hair at the back of her neck.
"Master...!" Liguang squirmed slightly in his arms.
Fang Qi looked at the delicate artificial skin there.
The small display window was glowing faintly.
[Remaining Battery: 20%]
...Oh?
Fang Qi's eyes widened slightly.
Before he fell asleep, Liguang's battery had been at 21%, right?
Mm...
Well, that kind of thing really didn't drain much battery after all?
Liguang hadn't actually been pulling his leg!
But...
He couldn't let his guard down either!
Time to move!
"Let's go, Liguang!"
Fang Qi ruffled her bun.
"We're heading out!"
"Master should eat first — eat a good meal before we set off."
"...Fine, fine. Let's eat."
...
...
With rest complete, the two stood back at the entrance to the research room.
Liguang was still carrying that woven bag, the few cans and biscuits inside clinking softly against each other.
"If there's anything we find, we stuff it all in here!"
Liguang swung the bag, her amber eye winking at him.
"Liguang can carry it."
Wife's right!
Fang Qi reached out and pushed the door open.
The hallway outside looked no different from yesterday.
The pixelated walls were still creeping slowly, colorful blocks gathering and dispersing across the metal surface.
The floor was still that pixel swamp — stepping on it felt like treading on a slowly breathing blob of jelly.
The silver-haired girl held his hand as she walked beside him, swinging the woven bag with her other hand!
She started humming again!
Fang Qi glanced at her from the corner of his eye.
Right eye covered in white gauze, left amber eye sparkling.
She seemed to be in much better spirits.
Fang Qi blinked.
Was she... soothed by last night's events?
Hah, I'm still pretty impressive...!
Ahem.
Anyway, Liguang's mood was definitely much improved.
Even her steps felt lighter than yesterday.
He looked away, his gaze settling once more on the pixelated corridor ahead, steadying his breath.
...Time to move!
He narrowed his eyes at the mosaic hallway ahead!
With yesterday's experience, he decided not to be as cautious as before.
The pixelated floor was solid to step on — as long as you kept moving, you wouldn't sink.
The walls would contract, but they wouldn't actually crush down.
In short, the danger existed, but it wasn't severe!
So he decided...
He would use these patterns as a foundation to actively test the maze's rules!
"Master, look, there's another door ahead!"
Liguang suddenly tugged his hand and ran a few steps forward.
Sure enough, another door had appeared on the left side of the hallway!
A complete doorframe, no pixelation, no warping — identical to the ones from yesterday.
Fang Qi immediately walked over and reached out to push the door!
But the moment his fingertips touched the door panel...
"BUZZ —!"
The entire door dissolved into a wall of pixelated tiles!
Colorful pixels churned across the surface a few times!
"Ah, it's a wall again..."
Liguang muttered behind him.
Fang Qi frowned.
But he didn't give up right away!
He narrowed his eyes, staring at the wall.
The door that had suddenly appeared turned into a wall when pushed…
But it hadn't been eroded. It hadn't become one of those blurry, writhing things.
It was just a solid, real wall!
So the door that had appeared here just now…
There had to be a reason for it!
He took a deep breath, bracing both hands against the wall's surface…
And pushed forward with all his might again!
Suddenly, the wall flickered!
The mosaic pattern on its surface rippled violently!
And beneath his hands—there was nothing but air.
“What the—!”
Fang Qi lurched forward!
The wall was gone!
In front of him stretched a seething swamp of writhing mosaic tiles!
“Master, watch out!”
His arm was yanked back by a powerful force!
Liguang had one hand clamped tightly around his wrist, the other still gripping that woven bag, her whole body leaning backward…
She hauled him back with all her strength, and the two of them staggered a couple of steps.
“Master! You—!”
Liguang stared at him, her amber eyes brimming with a mix of alarm and lingering fear, about to say something more…
Fang Qi's gaze sharpened!
In front of him, the flickering wall suddenly shifted back into a door.
…It had changed back?
The two of them stared at the door, then exchanged a look.
“…Master, let me do it.”
Liguang immediately reached out to push the door. Fang Qi caught her wrist and pulled her to his side.
“Didn't we agree before?”
He turned his head to look at her.
“I'm the one who protects Liguang.”
The silver-haired girl pressed her lips together, the white gauze over her right eye crinkling slightly.
She stared at Fang Qi for two full seconds, then finally stepped back half a pace—but her hand remained tightly gripping his arm.
Fang Qi took a deep breath, held it, and reached out to push the door again.
Cold metal under his palm. It didn't turn into a wall.
The door opened.
Before them…
A dust-covered room?
Bookshelves lined the walls.
Writhing pixels crept up from the floor; the lower halves of the metal frames were already swallowed by mosaic.
But on the upper shelves…
Those yellowed folders and archive boxes were still there!
Fang Qi's eyes lit up!
A records room!
Wasn't this the very room where he'd read his cheap mom's notebook before?
He immediately pulled Liguang inside and casually left the door ajar.
The two of them moved around the small room.
The floor here was just like outside—unable to stop.
Liguang's amber eyes swept across the shelves, and a hint of delight crept onto her face.
“Master, maybe we can find useful materials here!”
Even though she couldn't scan and analyze right now, she could still read the labels on those archive boxes one by one.
She let go of Fang Qi's hand and began walking and searching through the room.
Her movements were clumsy, forced to keep a steady pace while pulling one archive box after another from the shelves, holding each up close to her eye to read the label, then putting it back and grabbing the next.
Fang Qi wasn't idle either.
He circled between the shelves on the other side, his fingers gliding over the spines of yellowed folders.
Maybe, just maybe, he could find…!
“Master, look at this!”
Liguang's excited voice rang out.
Fang Qi turned and saw her holding a leather-bound notebook.
His eyelid twitched. His pupils contracted.
Ah, that was…
That notebook!
His mom's notebook!
In the first loop, he'd only read half of it before being interrupted by sudden events, and he'd never gotten to open the second half again.
He never thought he'd find it here!
Could he keep reading?!
What exactly was his relationship with Gu Xi…!
He snatched it up immediately and flipped eagerly to the first page.
Then froze.
Those once-elegant, neat, slender characters… were now all blurred into clumps of indistinct mosaic.
A few characters here and there were still recognizable, but strung together, they made no sense at all.
Pixelated blocks of color writhed slowly across the page.
…Tsk.
Fang Qi refused to give up, flipping a few more pages.
But every page was the same.
The delicate handwriting had been utterly devoured by this collapsing rule.
Then, a yellowed scrap of paper slipped out from between the pages!
Ah, that was—!
The silver-haired girl bent over in an instant, her fingertips catching the paper just before it hit the floor.
She straightened up and glanced at it—
“Ah.”
A small gasp escaped her.
Then warmth welled up in her single amber eye—a look of aching tenderness.
Fang Qi leaned in to look.
It was that drawing.
The “Silver-Haired Big Sister first draft” that Xiao Qi had drawn when he was seven.
—“Like amber gemstones” “like crimson flames.”
The lines on the drawing had blurred too.
But luckily, the doodle was rough to begin with.
The lopsided round head, stick-thin arms and legs, that silver blob like a ball of yarn…
Even blurred, the general outline remained!
The mismatched eyes were still recognizable—the amber and the crimson color patches standing out vividly against the yellowed paper.
“Good. That's a relief,” Fang Qi said softly.
Liguang didn't answer.
She pressed her lips together, carefully placed the drawing on the lab table, and smoothed out the creases with her fingertip.
Then she folded it meticulously and tucked it gently into the inner layer of her dress.
“Safely kept!”
She patted her chest and beamed at Fang Qi.
“First treasure found!”
Fang Qi squeezed her little hand, then…
Handed his mother's notebook to Liguang, telling her to keep it in the woven bag too.
Even though they couldn't read it now, who knew if the mosaic might fade once they got out?
It had to be carried along.
Then they continued circling through the records room, searching.
One shelf after another was checked.
The documents in those archive boxes, the old notices tacked to the walls, the scattered sticky notes on the desk…
Nearly every paper archive they could still pick up had its text blurred into mosaic.
Others had fully pixelated—the moment a fingertip touched them…
They dissolved into a cloud of writhing, colorful specks.
Nothing found.
“Looks like there's nothing left here.”
Fang Qi stood in the records room that was about to be swallowed by pixels, making one last sweep of the place.
“Time for us to go too.”
Liguang reached out and took his hand voluntarily, lifting her face to him.
“Getting to recover Master's childhood drawing here again—that's more than enough.”
Fang Qi pinched her nose.
She didn't dodge; instead, she nuzzled her cheek against his palm.
They took one final look at the records room, pushed open the ajar door, and stepped out.
Behind them came an extremely faint “whoosh.”
…Hmm?
Fang Qi immediately turned back, and saw—
That door, frame and all, was being swallowed by the mosaic!
Within seconds, it was completely gone, turned into the same flickering wall as everything around it.
Fang Qi's pupils shrank.
…Well, that was…
Really quite strange.
ose... to cooperate with the protagonist! Shen Yuan: I have a system! Protagonist: What? System: Holy crap, you're just spilling it out like that? Shen Yuan: Let's team up, we'll split the system rewards! Protagonist: Fifty-fifty split? Shen Yuan: No way! Protagonist: What!? I'm the one getting beaten up, and I don't get half? Shen Yuan: Forty-sixty split, I get forty, you get sixty! Protagonist: Deal! Big brother, come on, hit me! As long as it doesn't kill me, beat me like you mean it! Shen Yuan: Don't worry... I will definitely protect all of you! No one but me can lay a finger on you! Guard our Heaven's Chosen Ones! I'm the only one allowed to bully them!
. As long as he maintains the villain image and follows the plot to the grand finale, he can obtain generous rewards and return to the real world. So Gu Chen'an entered the role and began to act as a scumbag villain, but who would have expected that the female leads could hear his inner thoughts. Miss Su from the Su family was shocked: "I originally thought Gu Chen'an was a scumbag, but I didn't expect he turned out to be a gentleman! What? You said I have to call off the engagement? I definitely won't, I'll piss you off!" Bai Yuan Tian was dumbfounded: "Young Master Gu is usually unreasonable and a complete brat, but he actually calls me little sweetie in his heart? What, Young Master Gu even said he likes me?" As the female leads' images collapsed more and more, the plot also collapsed with it. Gu Chen'an looked at all this chaos. "Ladies, don't aggro me, if you keep this up the male lead really will stab me, I still need to survive to the grand finale!"
ut it can buy an entire year of absolutely perfect training results! Su Yu stared at his empty wallet and decisively opened up various online loan platforms. “Borrow a thousand bucks! Recharge my vitality!” Boom! His vitality broke a hundred points, shattering the limits of the human body! “Borrow ten thousand bucks! Recharge my combat skills!” Boom! A basic punching technique so common it was everywhere instantly maxed out, revealing the ultimate assassination technique of Five Elements Unity—Inner Force! When a rich kid hired assassins for a midnight ambush, aiming to break both of his legs, they instead ran headfirst into a monster—a human-shaped tyrannosaur, brimming with dragon-like vitality. With just two fingers, Su Yu snapped a steel staff reinforced with alloy. Staring at the killer’s stash of stolen cash—a staggering quarter-million dollars—he showed a corporate-sincere smile: “Thanks for the pre-exam gift pack, Mr. Zhao! I’m gonna go re-invest this!” Three days later, at the National Martial Arts College Entrance Exam, while everyone else struggled just to reach the passing line, Su Yu threw a single punch—and more than a thousand vitality points literally detonated the entire arena!
ing gift was a patch of barren land, and disciples were all picked up along the way. He spent fifty years diligently building three "ramshackle little sects," thinking he could finally live a carefree life relying on his disciples. But right at the fifty-year mark, he was suddenly swept away by a spatial rift and exiled to the Chaos Desolation, the Disorderly Ruins. There was no spiritual energy there, only slaughter. Relying on the cultivation feedback from his disciples, Gu Changyuan hacked his way through a sea of blood for eleven hundred years. When the system finally fished him back out, he discovered the ramshackle little sects he'd built back then had developed a rather... unusual style. Hold on... I vanished for a thousand years, so how did my ramshackle little sects become holy lands?!
