Wang Sheng snapped to, his first instinct to clear the excess memories flooding in.
Not all, though. He needed the skills and common knowledge buried in those remnant souls' fragments.
Soon, his storage dropped from 200+ GB to 100+ GB.
The rest? System essentials and built-in functions.
He targeted old downloads for deletion—games, mostly—to free space for memories. Gunfights, PvP battles, gone. But Genshin Impact? He froze.
It hit him. Inazuma. That's why it felt familiar. The déjà vu of his surroundings clicked.
He was in the Ley Lines.
And Ritou? That rundown island off Narukami Island, crawling with Nobushi and Kairagi.
What a mess.
His mood twisted—nostalgia, frustration, disbelief.
He hesitated, fingers twitching, but didn't delete Genshin Impact. Instead, he dragged it, along with those memories, into a hidden folder.
Memories shape you. Teyvat's alive, not some game's static script. Relying on it would skew his survival odds.
Better to forget, for now. He hoped he'd never need to open that folder.
With that, he purged more: study materials, manga, GIFs. Painful, but survival trumped sentiment. He hit permanent delete.
Next, useless apps. Short-video platforms, social media, chat tools—Q Sauce, Mini Micro. He salvaged useful videos from Bilibili, then uninstalled it. Shopping apps, music players, browsers—all gone.
Even the smart assistant. Useless now. Hilarious—he was the smart assistant.
After the purge, storage sat at 60+ GB.
"Not looking good. This firewall's useless, huh?"
Remnant souls kept breaching his LV1 Firewall like it was paper.
Feeling the growing clutter of stray thoughts, Wang Sheng sifted through, picking out useful memories.
Storage crept up, bit by bit.
At first, he didn't notice, but then it dawned: not just soul fragments ate space. His daily thoughts and actions generated data, too.
Worse, his Delete ability, while handy, wasn't clean. Each deletion left a stubborn 1KB file fragment, baked into the hardware. Tiny, but unignorable.
He could only stew. Hardware issues? No fix for that, not now.
Deep in the lightless underground…
The straw mat and corpse had long rotted. Even the sturdiest bones crumbled under elemental erosion. But the phone—a technological relic—glowed brightly.
Not intact, though. It had reached its limit.
The otherworldly material succumbed to Teyvat's rules, deconstructed, replaced by elemental matter.
A spark of spirit coalesced. The phone transformed into an elemental creation—a rebirth of the old, nurtured by the Ley Lines, born of Electro and Geo.
The creation plunged deeper into the Ley Lines, incubating.
Maybe a god heard his prayers. Maybe he figured it out himself. Or maybe his fusion with the phone deepened.
He sensed its makeup—chip, casing, battery—every detail in his mind. Alongside it, his body's composition: brain structure, bone components.
His perception broke free.
He felt the energy (Electro) and matter (Geo) drifting in the Ley Lines.
He knew how to use matter to build new storage.
He'd lost his form and anchor, now drifting with the Ley Lines' flow, not fixed like before.
Pros: fewer remnant souls breached the firewall. Cons: those that did were stronger, carrying richer knowledge—and leaving bigger fragments after deletion.
The firewall wasn't useless, though. It blocked several times more stray thoughts than it let through.
He had a fix: craft memory chips and fuse them into himself.
His state was bizarre. The chips self-organized, slotting into place. He crafted more, decoding their principles deeper.
During this, he absorbed a scholar's remnant soul, devoted to the so-called Greater Lord Rukkhadevata. It unlocked swathes of Teyvat's knowledge.
He learned he was an elemental creation, his "matter" and "energy" being Geo and Electro.
It puzzled him. Electro? Shouldn't that be sound? Electricity was the energy. Why not call it Electro? Baffling.
Otherworldly Knowledge LV5 (42.2↑/100)
Using this knowledge, he designed a chip with massive storage—1000TB by phone metrics. He duplicated it a hundred times with elemental power, optimizing processing chips too. His thoughts sped up, razor-sharp.
No storage worries now. 1TB alone could last ages in this state.
System: Elemental Creation System (Unnamed, you've forsaken the old name for a new beginning)
System Level: LV5
RAM: 10TB
Storage: 100000TB
Elemental Reserves: 493/500
Health: 0/600
Stamina: 0/60
Status: Overflowing Spirit/Incubating (Overflowing Spirit/Healthy & Energetic, Sub-Healthy/Lethargic, Minor Injury/Illness, Severe Injury/Gravely Ill, Near Death, Terminal/Life-or-Death, Dead)
Theoretical Knowledge: Otherworldly Knowledge LV5 (42.2/100), Inazuma Common Knowledge LV3 (10.0/100), Inazuma Herbalism LV3 (8.3/100), Inazuma Linguistics LV3 (0.2/100), Culinary Theory LV6 (99.9/100), Mathematics LV5 (21.6/100), Fitness Theory LV5 (99.9/100), Wellness Theory LV4 (99.9/100), Elemental Theory LV3 (1.2/100), others omitted
Practical Experience: None
Abilities: Omitted
Evaluation: None (Editable)
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Want to read ahead? Early chapters on: patreon.com/ShadowKage