A few days later, in the early morning, as soon as Li Cheng pushed open the bedroom door, he heard a chaotic noise in the living room.
He saw three little girls with gray skin and delicate features,
one holding a game controller, sitting in front of a TV connected to a PS5 and playing a game;
another was chomping away at a coffee table, with a spread of snack debris including preserved fruits, pork jerky, biscuits, chocolate, beef jerky, spicy strips, marinated peanuts, beer, and crawfish.
One was lying on the sofa, giggling while scrolling through short videos and Weibo on a tablet and phone, also rudely playing TikTok aloud.
They all noticed Li Cheng and sweetly called out, "Good morning, brother."
"Brother, my foot." Li Cheng twitched the corner of his eye, still in his robe, "Change back."
The three girls joined hands and gradually merged into one, reverting to the appearance of Gray Rain.
"Ah, it’s such a nice day today, the sun is so bright, I feel like taking a nap. Cheng, you go ahead with your business."
Gray Rain, with a slightly bulging belly (filled with snacks), mumbled and walked towards her own room. She had only taken a few steps when Li Cheng stopped her with a hand on her shoulder, asking indifferently, "What about the homework you were assigned yesterday?"
As a Liquid Metal Robot, Gray Rain didn’t need sleep to recover her energy; when she felt drained, she just had to touch an electrified plug in the house, give herself a charge and get her pulse back.
She could also use the "One Qi to Three Purities" Skill to split into three lower-level identities, maximizing the use of the nighttime for entertainment, eating and drinking merrily.
"I’ve finished it a long time ago!"
Gray Rain pulled out a workbook from under the coffee table and put it in Li Cheng’s hand with confidence, "Look, all done. Cheng, we’ve been through life and death together, we should have a little more trust, a little more space, and a little more gentleness."
"You’re even singing now, huh?"
Li Cheng rolled his eyes, glanced at the workbook, and said with some suspicion, "You didn’t use any app that helps with homework, did you? Scanning for the correct answer first, then copying it down by hand."
"How could that be? Am I that kind of person?" Gray Rain protested with righteousness.
"Then how do you explain this?"
Li Cheng pointed to the workbook. For the math question cos90°, Gray Rain wrote CSgo,
for the English question very good, she wrote very 9006,
for the general knowledge question that Earth rotates once every twenty-four hours, she wrote that Earth rotates once a week every twenty-four hours.
Sure, there was an effort, but only a tiny one.
"The cheater is found, @Big Gray Rain. Caught red-handed, incontrovertible evidence, take it back and do it over."
Li Cheng crumpled the workbook into a roll, tapping Gray Rain’s forehead neither too lightly nor too heavily, and she walked off dejectedly toward the study. Follow current ɴᴏᴠᴇʟs on novel⚑fire.net
Gray Rain’s "One Qi to Three Purities" skill was fine, but the downside was that the IQ level of each split identity was one-third of her own.
Originally not particularly bright, after splitting, things got even worse, and even copying standard answers could go awry.
Li Cheng entered the study to supervise Gray Rain redoing her homework and casually took out the [Suicide Notebook] from the Backpack, tearing off a page and quickly tracing a sketch with a pencil.
Scratch, scratch, scratch—
The pencil tip rubbed against the paper, outlining a sketch of Li Cheng being hit and flung through the air by an overloaded large truck.
"Hmm." He put down the pencil with satisfaction and entered the license plate number of the overloaded truck into the computer, searching for the vehicle’s trajectory. He found that the truck had been frequently traveling back and forth between the warehouse in the outskirts of Yin City and the docks.
Buried in her homework, Gray Rain asked curiously, "What’s this?"
"Testing the function of the [Suicide Notebook]."
After several days of testing, Li Cheng had fully explored the potential uses of the [Suicide Notebook], a fine quality gimmick prop inspired by Death Note — for divination of good and bad luck.
For the player community, Earth’s Transcendents are just as dangerous as the hostile Bosses in script tasks. Mutual deception and undercover assaults among players are common.
Had it not been for the Global Supernatural Alliance and various national agencies’ oversight, players would have killed each other in the streets long ago, snatching Equipment and props, pushing global social order back to a Darwinian killing field, playing a game of survival of the fittest.
Not to mention the incessant wars and the disregard for human life in places like Africa and South America,
even in regions with relatively good public security like Europe, America, Japan, and Korea, there are occasionally some inexplicable bizarre deaths — the results of player killings.
Under such circumstances, the Transcendent community generally suffers from survival anxiety, leading to extraordinarily high prices for Medical props and defensive Skills on the black market.
The [Suicide Notebook] could, to some extent, be considered a defensive prop.
Transcendents’ physical capabilities far exceed those of ordinary people; it’s hard for them to die from common causes like diseases, traffic accidents, or accidental shootings. The most likely cause of death is being killed in a script task or assassinated by other Transcendents.
The effect of the [Suicide Notebook] is to let the user sketch out potential death scenarios they might face in the near future.
Moreover, the effect is cumulative; the more scenes drawn at once, the broader the coverage of the predictions!
Players can use it to predict whether they might be attacked by other Transcendents or to foresee their own deaths in script tasks.
"This paper shows that the most likely upcoming death scenario for me is being hit by this overloaded truck that frequently travels to the outskirts of Yin City. It means that I will be safe as long as I avoid going to the outskirts, and also that it is highly unlikely I will be a target of a direct assassination by other Transcendents."
Li Cheng explained casually, "The [Suicide Notebook] contains a hundred sheets inside; you can tear them out and transfer them to someone else or take them into script tasks. Most importantly, each time a drawing is completed, the paper automatically restores itself. That means I can not only use it myself but also rent out the sheets inside, or sell them to other players."
This is a life-saving prop! It won’t be lacking a market.
Gray Rain nodded, apparently not fully grasping it but immediately catching the keyword, "Sell to other players? Cheng, are you going to the shady street?"
"Yeah, I’ll go after I wash up." Li Cheng nodded. He currently had 3259 Game Coins and, considering the need for a lot of materials for [Assembly Puppet], it was time for a shopping spree.
Gray Rain’s eyes lit up, and she immediately jumped up, "Take me with you!"
"Um..." Li Cheng hesitated.
"I promise I won’t cause trouble! I’ll go east if you point east; I’ll chop whoever you want me to chop."
Gray Rain shook Li Cheng’s arm vigorously, almost breaking his arm with the power of a hydraulic press. It looked like she wanted to jump up and cling to his neck in a cute way...
To prevent himself from becoming a Headless Knight, Li Cheng had no choice but to agree.