“Your exceptional memory is also considered one of these special abilities. Fuyao Academy recognized you as someone born with innate power. That’s why they made an exception to admit you.”
But to become truly powerful, resources, abilities, and luck were all necessary. Even if Li Chuan had a one-in-ten-thousand special ability, without family support, it would still be very hard to rise in the Multiverse.
Each year, the three major academies selected countless elites from the human world to send to the Multiverse Realm, but most ended up as mere support components of the main city’s protective shield, never returning home.
Li Chuan asked again, “What is ‘Tian Ren’?”
“It’s what I aspire to be. The elite of the elite. Tomorrow, when you study Star Dust Technique, the instructor should explain in detail. I’m tired. I’m going to rest. You should too. Countless people have studied Nie Yuanqing’s book and found no answers. Don’t waste your energy. Find another way to solve the energy potion problem,” Mu Ge advised.
“I’ve already had enough sleep. I definitely won’t fall asleep tonight. Go rest. I’ll give it another try,” Li Chuan replied.
Seeing that he could not persuade Li Chuan, Mu Ge turned and left.
Li Chuan, on the other hand, went to different shelves in the library, pulled out all 158 books, and placed them on a table. He planned to stay up all night and read them all.
From the book, it was clear Nie Yuanqing was a very honest person. He was not hiding anything. He simply could not remember.
He wrote that he later reread every book he could recall, but still could not find the one.
Li Chuan believed that the reason Nie Yuanqing could not remember was because it had never been a single book. In a moment of crisis, Nie Yuanqing had merged several books from his memory and created a breathing technique of his own that could absorb the Extreme Heat Wind.
Nie Yuanqing did not have any talent as a writer. His writing showed that clearly. He could not describe his experience with technical terms, only with vague and mystical emotional expressions that were hard to grasp.
To understand Nie Yuanqing’s breathing method, one had to read all the books he had read and combine that with the feeling described in his long-titled book to piece together the technique formed by merging multiple sources.
Even reading all 158 books might not be enough. One would still need to input Nie Yuanqing’s three thousand words of feelings into the library’s search system and read all the books that matched in content before there could be hope of reconstructing the method.
Ordinary people simply could not do this.
Fortunately for Li Chuan, even if he failed to deduce the breathing method, reading all the books would still earn him knowledge points to exchange for energy potions to stave off hunger for now.
With his plan set, Li Chuan rolled up his sleeves and began to read.
He started with the 57 books on breathing through pores. Many of these were not from the human world but were part of the Multiverse library’s collection of books from various realms, intended to help students understand the physiology of other species.
One of the books was about the Mechanical Bee Race. Li Chuan had seen the queen bee’s neural fluid when buying brain expansion items before, but had not understood what kind of species they were. After reading How Mechanical Life Breathes, he finally understood what the Mechanical Bee Race really was.
They had originated in a primitive world with no intelligent beings. A higher civilization discovered the world’s entrance in the vast Multiverse and sent people in to build factories and conduct animal experiments.
The Mechanical Bee Race was a result of merging insects with machinery.
The hive mind shared information. Each mechanical bee absorbed different knowledge, and all of it was transmitted via mysterious pheromones into the queen’s brain. The queen gained intelligence.
Each mechanical bee acted like one brain cell of the queen. As their numbers grew, so did her intelligence.
Before the outsiders even realized it, the queen had mastered all the knowledge they brought.
When the outsiders decided the bee population was too large, the queen led a sudden counterattack. The invaders were instantly wiped out, and the queen established her own civilization in a world that once had no intelligent life.
Since then, the Mechanical Bee Race had grown by selling neural fluid, obtaining knowledge from various civilizations. They became a formidable power in the Multiverse and achieved impressive rankings in the quadrennial Ten Thousand Realms Tournament.
Three years ago, during the last tournament, they placed fifteenth. No one knew how strong they would become by the next.
It was in this book that Li Chuan first learned about the Ten Thousand Realms Tournament.
He did not delve deeper into that topic and instead remained focused on studying the breathing techniques.
The book explained that the Mechanical Bees had been modified. Seventy percent of their bodies were made of synthetic memory alloys. Only the skin, brain, heart, and a few parts remained biological.
They breathed through their skin, using wing vibrations to draw in air, and then opened honeycomb-like pores in their skin to breathe.
It could be said they were a species that created wind and used wind to breathe.
Li Chuan read ten such books in one go.
He read very fast, but the information was so novel that he read more carefully than usual. It took him a full two hours to finish the ten books, which was slow for him.
After reading, he no longer felt bloated, but he was so hungry he almost wanted to eat the books.
Fortunately, after reading those ten books, the Ten Thousand Realms Ring notified him that his acquired knowledge points had increased by seven.
Li Chuan immediately exchanged the seven points for seven hundred Multiverse coins and bought six bottles of energy potion. He quickly drank one and finally felt full.
With those six bottles, Li Chuan would not have to worry about food for a while.
But this also meant he had to reread the books he had just finished.
He glanced at the time and sighed deeply.
The night was still young. Time to read.
