Chapter 107 – Completed Yu-Gi-Oh!
It was the first time he'd ever seen a rating that had virtually no impact on the world. Even during his very first transmigration, at least George Bernard Shaw had written a novel about it. For this one, Zhou Ning could only sum up the "ordinary office worker" template with three words: vegetative state.
Next came the reward collection. After brushing aside his melancholy, Zhou Ning tapped the "Claim Reward" button under the Rewind section. A prompt instantly popped up on the panel:
[You have chosen to claim your reward.]
[You have obtained a Rare Item: Fragment of the Pillar Man's Body.]
[You have obtained a Life Skill: Cooking (Advanced).]
[You have obtained a Skill: Italian Proficiency (Expert Level).]
He had invested 20 Traversal Coins and lost 18 of them. He finally managed to bring something back, and it wasn't even an epic-tier item. Zhou Ning only felt more dejected.
Review of Acquired Items:
[Rare Item: Fragment of the Pillar Man's Body] – A shard of the Pillar Man Kars's palm, still retaining faint cellular vitality. It craves life energy and fears sunlight.
[Cooking (Advanced)] – The art of the chef, allowing you to skillfully and efficiently prepare meals using ingredients.
[Due to your mastery of a new professional language, your Linguist level has increased! Current level: 5. You've obtained a new life skill: Rough Translation (Beginner).]
Leveling up as a Linguist granted him another point of Spirit and a free attribute point, along with a new life skill. It was small comfort, but comfort nonetheless:
[Rough Translation (Beginner)] – A basic skill of Linguists, allowing you to interpret unfamiliar scripts based on textual form, structure, and sequence. Accuracy is not high.
Not bad at all—a very practical skill. In the game, the Linguist sub-class couldn't be leveled up with experience points; it could only be improved by learning new languages. As a result, players with this skill were exceedingly rare.
There was still one last reward left to examine—the fragment of the Pillar Man's body.
That was what Zhou Ning had been most interested in from this transmigration. He had a Stone Mask and one-third of the Aja Red Stone. If he could figure this thing out, maybe he could extract the Pillar Man bloodline.
The item icon in his inventory looked like a small, gray shard. Zhou Ning carefully took it out.
It felt faintly warm to the touch. Under the whale oil lamp, it appeared to be nothing more than a regular rock fragment with a few sinister-looking patterns etched on the surface.
Suddenly, the shard twitched without warning. It turned flesh-colored, leapt up, and lunged toward Zhou Ning's body.
Startled, Zhou Ning reacted instantly—his right hand shot out and caught the shard between his fingers. A searing ripple pulsed through him, and a plume of black smoke rose. The shard struggled briefly, then quickly fell dormant once more.
"Feisty little thing."
Zhou Ning let out a breath, grabbed a file from the shelf, scraped off a bit of powder from the shard, stored it in a small container, and then tossed the shard back into his inventory.
The next morning, Zhou Ning woke up naturally, feeling well-rested. He made himself a breakfast of pan-fried toast and a glass of milk, leisurely flipping through a newspaper as he ate. There were already small kitchen appliances in the lab, and with his newly acquired advanced cooking skill, there was no need to skimp on himself.
After a satisfying breakfast, Zhou Ning decided to return to the school dormitory. There were no classes that morning. Before he even entered, he heard loud voices from inside:
"It's my turn! Draw!"
"...I summon Mechanical Snail in attack mode!"
"Battle phase! Mechanical Snail attacks your Lightning Conger!"
"Damn! That's some serious attack power!"
Zhou Ning: …
Amateurs brawling, clearly.
What the hell? Could it be?
He pushed the door open and was taken aback. The dorm was packed with people. John and the chubby Fred were locked in a heated Yu-Gi-Oh! duel, faces flushed with intensity.
Walking closer for a better look, Zhou Ning found that John's homemade Yu-Gi-Oh! set was impressively faithful to the original. Although the card artwork leaned more toward realism, the craftsmanship was superb. A card mat was spread out on the table, marked with five monster zones and five spell/trap zones. The background featured the cute Dark Magician Girl—truly a work of art.
Under Zhou Ning's gaze, the two noobs kept going at it for over twenty turns. The duel was tense throughout—back-and-forth betrayals, fierce combat—and in the end, John barely won with a mere 200 life points remaining, like a candle in the wind.
Zhou Ning tugged at the corner of his mouth. People in this world really were easy to please—a duel between normies could still be this thrilling.
John licked his lips, still not over the excitement. Then he noticed Zhou Ning and quickly stood up. "Wayne, this is the final product. What do you think?"
"Pretty impressive. Better than I expected," Zhou Ning replied honestly. The faithfulness was at least 80%, and judging by the crowd's level of engagement, they probably wouldn't have trouble selling it. "How are you planning to price it?"
"Card mat, starter deck, and rulebook all bundled together for 5 Vecktas. The first expansion pack sells for 1 Roshen per pack, or 60 packs for just 50 Roshens. Following your design, each pack contains 5 cards. What do you think?"
Zhou Ning did the math. At that price, it was roughly 20 yuan per pack—pretty reasonable. Whether it would sell well was hard to say, though, so he turned to Fred and asked, "What do you think of the price?"
"Not bad," Fred replied casually. "I'll definitely buy it once the final version is out."
"I want one too! We're classmates—can't we get a discount?"
"Yeah, give us a discount!" the surrounding students chimed in.
"Of course! Anyone with a Vick University student ID gets 10% off all card purchases," John grinned from ear to ear, replying eagerly.
Zhou Ning didn't care much about the discount. He was already thinking that if the cards didn't sell, he could just commission someone to draw a Yu-Gi-Oh! manga for promotional purposes. But now, it seemed that wouldn't be necessary.
He chatted with John for a while and watched a few more noob duels. Since only the basic cards were available, it was just a bunch of low-tier brawling. Yet Zhou Ning enjoyed it thoroughly and even joined in for a match himself.
To his surprise, Molly turned out to be quite interested in Yu-Gi-Oh! too. She kept giving him "advice" during the match—though it was all completely off the mark, perfectly capturing the spirit of being both bad and enthusiastic.
It wasn't until 4 p.m. that Zhou Ning snapped back to reality and realized—damn, he had something to do today!
After returning the two books he had borrowed yesterday, and finding the dorm temporarily overrun by card-playing fanatics, Zhou Ning checked out two books on the folklore of the Four Heroes period and settled into the library to read.
This batch was far more interesting than the last. It described Abbott City, the predecessor of Darkland, focusing particularly on its customs—especially the adult entertainment industry. According to the book, under one particular governor's administration, Abbott's adult industry had developed a wide range of special "playstyles," involving ropes, whips, and a dazzling array of options—even some cosplay-like services.
Zhou Ning was stunned. People back then were this wild? He wondered if they even used candles too.
After finishing both books, his reading progress hit 7895/10000.
Yes, this was the only serious thing the slacker Zhou Ning had done—over 45 years of transmigration, he had read nearly 3,000 books, forming a sharp contrast with the reading-disabled Mad Clown. With one or two more transmigrations, he might actually complete the task.
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