Free Web NovelAfter taking a nice, hot bath, then lying down on a comfortable, soft big bed...
Wen Yuzhi reached out at random and pulled the moon pillow beside him straight into his arms. It was almost as tall as he was. The fluffy texture was extremely soft, and it even carried a puffed-up, pleasant scent.
When he lifted his eyes, countless star-shaped pendant lamps hung down from the ceiling, which had been painted a pale goose-yellow. Every single one of them was round and cartoonish.
All around the room, there were piles of plush dolls—big and small—stacked together. It was almost visible to the naked eye: there wasn’t a single sharp object anywhere in the room. Every edge and corner had been wrapped up.
Very obviously, this was a children’s room through and through.
A room like this... Wen Yuzhi had one too, before he turned seven.
Wen Che and Madam Jilanya had been parents who never begrudged love or effort. On Wen Yuzhi’s path of growing up, as long as other kids had it, he would have it too.
And naturally, his room had been decorated by Wen Che and Madam Jilanya personally. From something as big as a bed to something as small as a plush doll, everything had been carefully chosen by them during their travels.
Without exaggeration, back then Wen Yuzhi had been the most envied child in the area.
But everything changed after his second uncle moved in with his family.
That second uncle, who proclaimed himself the one taking over control of the Wen family, also treated the old estate—this symbol of the family head’s status—as his personal property. Along with that, his youngest son had long since started treating Wen Yuzhi’s room as something that belonged to him too.
The reason was simple.
Wen Yuzhi’s room was the biggest and the prettiest room in the entire old estate. How many kids had dreamed of having a room that nice?
That little cousin ran up to Wen Yuzhi with his face full of smug pride. Wen Yuzhi didn’t indulge him at all—he beat him up on the spot, beating him until he lost teeth all over the floor.
Before the other could run off wailing to his parents, Wen Yuzhi ran off first and complained.
Wen Yuzhi’s second uncle lost face hard in front of the clan. After he went back, he immediately beat that useless youngest son again, then personally dragged him over to apologize to Wen Yuzhi, swearing again and again that they would never touch Wen Yuzhi’s room.
Wen Yuzhi smiled politely on the surface, saying they were all family.
Then he turned around and packed up everything in his room, along with everything his parents had left behind, and sent it all to another house.
That house had been one of Madam Jilanya’s birthday gifts to him. She’d bought it through her private account. The Wen family had no right to lay a finger on it.
Even after Wen Yuzhi’s second uncle found out, he didn’t dare come question Wen Yuzhi. Instead, he turned around and sent over a lot of pocket money, and during holidays he would fuss over him and act warm, putting on the full performance of a “good uncle.”
But for various reasons, Wen Yuzhi still ended up staying in the Wen family’s old estate. freewebnovel.cσ๓
Only, the style of his room was no longer that flashy. It became ordinary—nothing worth talking about.
And Wen Yuzhi gradually went from being the one every child envied... to becoming an unremarkable, marginal figure in the Wen family.
He had gotten used to living like that early on.
And yet now, lying once again in a room this brightly colored, warm, and childishly cozy, Wen Yuzhi felt a little unaccustomed instead.
He kneaded the oversized pillow in his arms in a messy, unstructured way, silently sighing that he’d slept on the ground out in the wild for too many days. Then all of a sudden, jumping from primitive society back into a technologically advanced civilized world, he couldn’t quite get used to sleeping like this.
Since he couldn’t fall asleep, Wen Yuzhi took out the light-brain Alvin had given him.
The new light-brain he’d bought before was confirmed to be truly dead. It looked fine on the outside, but it couldn’t connect to the signal here at all.
Of course, it might also be because the technology levels of the two worlds were different.
The one he’d called the latest model—here, it was basically an antique. It simply couldn’t match the network on this side.
Wen Yuzhi could only take out the chip he’d inserted earlier and swap it into this new light-brain.
What surprised him was that the chip actually matched this light-brain.
And that single contact inside was still there.
The message he’d sent before was still hanging there. The other side still hadn’t replied. frёeweɓηovel.coɱ
Wen Yuzhi wasn’t surprised. He’d known for a long time that the other was very busy.
As for what, exactly, the other was busy with, the other had once answered: school.
Competition on remote planets really was intense. Heavy coursework was normal.
So Wen Yuzhi had long since gotten used to the other replying only once every ten days or half a month.
He thought about it, then tried sending another message.
【Plans changed. I might not be able to go to the planet my parents left me for now. I’m sorry I can’t show you what it looks like.】
After he finished typing.
Wen Yuzhi tapped send.
And then he didn’t expect...
It actually sent!
He blinked, looking utterly incredulous.
Could the networks of these two worlds be connected?
No—no, that wasn’t right.
Wen Yuzhi immediately calmed down.
If the networks of the two worlds were connected, it would’ve been impossible for him to not find any information about the Wen family, or Liang Song and Su Yu.
So... was it the chip?
That chip was something he’d found while sorting through his mother’s belongings. It had been placed alone inside a small box.
That was also Madam Jilanya’s habit. She would put important things into little boxes, and the password on them would be something only the three of them knew.
When Wen Yuzhi found that chip back then, he hadn’t thought much of it.
He’d checked it. There was nothing inside—only one contact that was also using that chip.
An unknown IP address...
Knowing nothing about recent events...
And the other side occasionally dropping words he’d never heard before...
All at once, something flashed through Wen Yuzhi’s mind, and a bold guess formed.
He had always thought his online friend lived on some remote, backward, primitive planet—so the other acted like an old fossil who didn’t understand anything.
But what if... the other was in another world?
Then all those unreasonable parts from before suddenly became explainable!
Only, that guess was too bold, and too absurd.
Wen Yuzhi decided to wait until the other replied, then ask carefully.
..........
Far, far away from the fleet, in the First Star Sector.
Inside the capital’s military academy, the smell of gunpowder hung in the air above a virtual training room. A sun with realism close to ninety-nine percent hung overhead, roasting the scorched earth below, which had been blasted into crater after crater by ammunition.
A high-tech alloy device automatically opened, revealing injectors frozen inside at low temperature.
A hand reached in, and a blue injector was pushed into the upper-arm vein.
As the medicine slowly flowed in, the vicious wounds covering the arm began to heal little by little.
"Hiss! That’s a nasty injury. You were this close to losing the whole arm."
The one giving the injection hadn’t said anything yet when the blond sitting beside him bared his teeth and talked like it was happening to him.
After putting the used injector back into the alloy device, Xi Heyan lifted his head, revealing a pair of exceptionally deep black eyes. Like a bottomless dark pool, they carried a cold, distant detachment.
Just like those eyes, Xi Heyan had a face that could only be called superior.
Black hair, cool pale skin, sword-straight brows and starry eyes—high nose, thin lips. Even wearing a plain military uniform with no rank markings at all, he still wore it with an expensive, luxurious air. Like right now he shouldn’t be standing on a smoke-choked battlefield, but on a runway under everyone’s gaze.
"That’s it, that’s the feeling. If you took a picture of you like this—battle-damaged and wounded—and posted it on the forum, who knows how many upperclassmen and underclassmen would feel sorry for you."
The blond chattered on.
What they were doing right now was a battlefield simulation training match—an evaluation held once every half year.
They called it training, but it was basically half a real battle. They used real weapons and real ammunition, all to recreate the most realistic battlefield.
And the enemy they had to face this time was the Padar people, who had been in the spotlight lately.
Those creatures looked like moles. Thick-skinned and tough, and good at digging. This kind of hilly terrain only amplified the Padar people’s advantage.
They’d been stuck in the virtual room for more than a week and still hadn’t taken down those hateful bastards.
The most recent battle lasted three days. They’d finally managed to seize a stronghold, and only then did they have time to sit here and rest for a bit.
But the moment they rested, the blond’s noisy personality couldn’t sit still.
Xi Heyan didn’t respond. Instead, taking advantage of this rare downtime, he pulled out the light-brain he’d been carefully keeping.
The blond glanced at it.
It was that outdated light-brain again—the kind that was so old it was basically about to lose its teeth.
Honestly, if you tossed it into a recycling station, nobody would bother collecting it. The model was too old.
Especially the chip on it—something from who-knew-how-many years ago. Even his grandmother wouldn’t use a fossil like that.
Who would’ve thought that the top student in their mech combat [N O V E L I G H T] major lived worse than an old lady?
Thinking about how many times Xi Heyan had used “my light-brain model is too old, I can’t add friends” as an excuse to reject upperclassmen and underclassmen who came offering themselves, the blond felt a wave of grief and indignation.
He had never seen someone as pure and desireless as Xi Heyan—someone who, from head to toe, screamed those three words: cold abstinence.
But recently, in the last year, that seemed to have changed.
The most obvious difference was that Xi Heyan had started chatting with someone on the light-brain more and more often.
"Chatting with your kid again?"
"Mm."
The blond wasn’t surprised at all by that reply.
Because Xi Heyan only had that one contact on his light-brain.
At first, the blond hadn’t believed it. Later, he found out that person was just like Xi Heyan—still using that chip model that had already been phased out.
The blond: "........"
What kind of fate was this?!
He admitted that the chip developed by Master Lena had been outstanding. When it first came out, it had caused quite a stir.
But so many years had passed. Master Lena was gone now.
And that once-era-defining chip had become a synonym for old and backward.
And yet, somehow, he’d run into two people still using that exact chip model.
The odds were so absurdly high that it even made the blond start reflecting—had retro culture become the trend now?
Xi Heyan paid no attention to the blond’s constantly shifting expression.
He opened the message window.
The moment he saw the text there, the coldness in his eyes finally changed.
Like ice and snow melting, Xi Heyan’s brows and eyes softened in an instant.
【Congratulations. You finally got away from them.】
