In the courtyard.
"Check in."
Luke lounged lazily in his chair and casually did his daily check-in.
The monthly check-ins from the past two months had not given him any especially notable rewards. Looking back, it was basically just a doubled burst of the usual daily rewards.
Because of that, check-ins had not stirred much excitement in him for quite a while.
[Congratulations, Host, you have obtained one Special Check-In Card]
[Congratulations, Host, you have obtained one Training Card (Three Days)]
Two system notifications rang out in succession, immediately drawing Luke's attention.
The Special Check-In Card could turn the next check-in into a special one. He had gotten one before back in Edessa.
That made him a little curious about tomorrow.
As for the Training Card, he had received one during last month's monthly check-in, so he already had a basic understanding of it.
The Training Card allowed Luke's mind to enter a training ground, where he could spar against a simulation of himself.
The simulation possessed one hundred percent of Luke's strength and perfectly copied every skill he had, including Sixth Sense and everything else.
At the same time, it came in three difficulty levels: beginner, intermediate, and advanced.
Each level still had one hundred percent of his strength, but the actual intensity was completely different.
For example, Luke had once entered the advanced difficulty full of confidence, only to get beaten out by his own simulation in less than two moves.
That instantly made him understand one thing:
Only you truly know how difficult you are to deal with.
After stubbornly trying a few more times out of sheer refusal to accept it, Luke had obediently gone back to training from beginner mode.
Time passed in the training ground at the same speed as the outside world, and each session's results were fed back into Luke himself afterward.
In other words, it was basically a form of meditation.
Luke did not need to do anything at all. He could just lie in his chair and let his mind enter the training ground.
It was incredibly convenient.
Since he had nothing to do at the moment anyway, Luke silently thought, Use the Training Card.
Then he shifted in the chair, found a comfortable position, and rolled over.
A moment later, his mind wavered, and when he opened his eyes again, he had already arrived beneath another sky.
An endless blue sky stretched above him, and in the middle of the surrounding mountains stood a martial training ground.
The Training Card also had a surprisingly thoughtful feature: Luke could freely change the background.
If he wanted, he could even choose to fight out at sea.
"Change it to a modern city."
Luke spoke casually.
With a whoosh, the scenery around him changed at once. The mountains vanished first, then rows of skyscrapers rose into view, followed by roads, intersections, and traffic lights.
Every familiar scene filled him with a sense of homesickness.
Only this hometown of his felt eerily isolated—there was not a single person on the streets, and the silence was so complete that even a pin drop could be heard.
At that moment, a system prompt appeared.
[Please select difficulty: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced]
Luke glanced at it. "Intermediate."
[Selection successful]
As the system finished speaking, a vague human figure appeared.
Looking carefully, its height was exactly the same as Luke's, and the long blade in its hand was identical as well.
The aura radiating from its body was no different from his own either.
The only distinction was that the simulation itself looked blurry.
The next second, the simulation did not bother with so much as a greeting. Sword intent surged from its body as it charged straight at him with blade in hand.
The footwork it used was none other than the Godspeed Footwork.
Luke was already used to that. He released his own sword intent as well, raised his blade, and rushed forward, clashing with the simulation in an instant.
Inside the sea of consciousness, the battle was especially fierce. Luke and his intermediate-difficulty self fought evenly, though he even seemed slightly suppressed at times.
Outside the sea of consciousness, however, everything remained calm and peaceful, with only the cool autumn breeze drifting softly through the air.
Lux, in a pretty good mood, hummed a little tune as she slowly rode her bicycle into the courtyard. At a glance, she spotted Luke lying sideways on the rocking chair with his eyes closed.
"Sleeping out here this early in the morning? You might as well sleep yourself to death."
After getting off her bike, she shot Luke a glance and headed straight for the main house.
Not long after, Fiora, Sona, Kahina, Vayne, Quinn, and Frey arrived one after another as well.
When they saw Luke lying in the chair, none of them paid him any mind. Each simply went off to do her own thing.
Half an hour later, Luke opened his eyes and felt the waves of feedback returning from the training ground.
The sensation was rather strange, almost as if he had just taken a nap.
After checking the sky, he got up and started preparing breakfast.
Once breakfast was over, Luke lay back down in the front courtyard, just about to enter the training ground again for another round—
when a carriage suddenly rolled up and slowly stopped at the front gate.
A moment later, Navis stepped down from it.
"Good morning, Your Highness~!"
"Good morning."
Luke sat up with a smile and greeted her back.
"Good morning, Navis!"
Lux, standing nearby, greeted her warmly as well.
"Miss Crownguard, it's been a while."
Navis gave a soft smile, then looked at Luke. "The thing Your Highness asked me to make is finished."
"Oh?"
Luke got to his feet and watched as Navis's petite frame hauled a heavy wooden box out from the carriage.
He stepped forward and took the box from her, while Lux moved closer curiously.
"What's this?"
"It's something His Highness asked me to make before," Navis explained. Then she added, "Now that it's delivered, I'll be going, Your Highness."
Luke nodded. "Take it slow on the way back."
"Mhm."
Navis responded and climbed back into the carriage, then hurried off almost as soon as she had come.
Lux watched the carriage leave, puzzled. "Why was she in such a rush?"
From arrival to departure, Navis had not even spent two minutes there. She had come purely to deliver something.
The reason the girl was in such a hurry was simple: she did not want to delay the learning progress at the Research Institute.
During this period, the researchers working on gunpowder and electricity had all been studying with incredible dedication, one more hardworking than the next. Quite a few of them walked around with dark circles under their eyes every day.
Because of that, Luke had sent over plenty of Smoky Earl Grey Tea to help them keep their minds in good shape.
Although Luke had already told them there was no need to rush and they could take things slowly, none of them listened.
After all, for people starving for knowledge, the four fundamental interactions of physics and all the other ideas they had been introduced to were like an enormous treasure trove.
Navis might have been young, but among the first group of talents to come into contact with physics, she was absolutely one of the best.
"Did Navis already come by? I was just about to say hi to her..."
Kahina came jogging over from the backyard, only to catch sight of the carriage disappearing into the distance.
Seeing that Navis had already left, her eyes shifted to the box in Luke's hands, and she asked the same question.
"What's that?"
"Something fun."
Luke smiled mysteriously and walked inside with the box as he said, "You two go call everyone over."
That instantly piqued Lux and Kahina's curiosity.
Not long afterward, in the living room, Fiora, Sona, Vayne, Quinn, Frey, and even Yurna—who had originally only intended to watch—had all gathered there.
Their eyes were all fixed on the large wooden box sitting on the table.
Luke opened it, revealing something folded up inside that looked like a board.
He took it out and spread it across the table, and it immediately covered the entire surface of the huge tabletop.
The girls looked down and saw that the large board was filled with all kinds of labels, words, and numbers.
It was divided into space after space. Some spaces were marked Item Space, others said Move Back Five Spaces or Move Forward Two Spaces, and still others were labeled Penalty or Reward...
At a glance, there was so much on it that it was almost dizzying.
But it also looked very fun.
At that point, Luke said, "This board is called a Monopoly board. It's a game that lets multiple people have fun together."
Fiora looked at the giant Monopoly board that covered the entire table and nodded. "I can tell that much. So how do you play?"
Even she looked genuinely interested now.
"Each player starts with fifteen thousand gold. You roll the die to determine your movement. A lot of things in the game require money, and in the end, the last player to go bankrupt wins. The game lasts two hours. If there are still players who haven't gone bankrupt after two hours, they count as winners too."
Luke explained the basic rules while continuing to take things out of the box: a nine-sided die, paper currency to represent money, little figurines to represent each player, plus various items and cards used together with the game.
The rules for Monopoly were not particularly hard to grasp. After hearing his explanation, the girls quickly understood and all became quite interested.
Lux asked, "So this is what you've been going out to work on every day lately?"
Luke nodded. "Something like that."
In truth, making the Monopoly board had not taken very long at all. With Navis's intelligence, she had understood his idea very quickly and begun producing it soon after.
He had only happened to think of Monopoly two days earlier.
After all, there were more people in the courtyard now, so it made sense to expand their list of group games.
He had also thought of many other fun multiplayer games he could introduce one by one in the future.
"One last thing about the rules," Luke said. "The rule is that there are no rules. As long as it falls within the range of the die, arson, murder, robbery—anything goes. After the game ends, the player with the highest total assets can punish the player with the lowest assets, or the first one to go bankrupt, by making them do one thing."
The moment they heard that, fighting spirit ignited in every girl present.
The rule that first place could punish last place instantly made the game even more entertaining.
Very quickly, the nine-person Monopoly game began.
To make it more fun, Luke had added a lot of random events.
As the game progressed, someone would occasionally get arrested and thrown into jail, or get robbed by bandits on the road, or be extorted out of money by an old man who had "fallen over."
Each time they watched the amount of money in their little treasury shrink, groans of misery would ring out from time to time.
At the same time, in order to gain more assets—or simply avoid ending up at the bottom—everyone started desperately hoarding items and scheming against each other in a frenzy of wits and tricks.
A game like this was bound to produce one luck queen.
And by the law of opposites, if a luck queen was present, then there also had to be one walking disaster.
The luck queen, of course, was Lux.
The girl's luck lately had been outrageously good. She won at cards every day, and now that she had arrived at Monopoly, it was like she had returned to her natural domain.
Whatever number she wanted, that was the number she rolled.
It was terrifying.
As for the title of walking disaster, it landed squarely on Kahina's head.
If Lux had everything going her way, then this poor girl had nothing going her way at all.
When Lux helped the fallen old man, she was rewarded with three hundred gold.
When Kahina went to help him, she was immediately extorted for five hundred.
When Lux ran into bandits on the road, a patrol happened to pass by and saved her from trouble.
When Kahina ran into bandits, not only was all her money stolen, she was also sold off to a shady worksite for forced labor and needed two turns to escape.
The moment she got out, she stepped right into one of Luke's preset item traps and lost another two turns unable to move.
By the time she could move again, half her assets were already gone.
She had barely taken two steps before a random event landed her in jail...
It was the perfect example of how, once your luck turned bad, even drinking cold water could break your teeth.
Meanwhile, Lux, the luck queen, could just sit there doing nothing and still have windfalls drop right into her lap.
So throughout that game, one side kept bursting into wild laughter while the other kept crying out in despair, making for a sharp contrast.
Unsurprisingly, Kahina was the first to go bankrupt.
As they watched her collapse onto the sofa on the verge of tears, everyone sent her sympathetic looks, while secretly breathing sighs of relief themselves.
At least now the identity of the punished player had already been decided.
As for Luke, his luck that round had been average.
He was the fourth from last to go bankrupt, and while passing by a gold shop Lux had opened, he got fleeced for a large sum.
By the final stretch, the board had essentially become Miss Crownguard's domain. The remaining players all went bankrupt one after another.
"Let me see which unlucky soul gets punished."
Lux sat there with an arrogant, triumphant air, one leg crossed over the other on the sofa, before turning her gaze to Kahina.
"Lux..."
Kahina shrank back a little and blinked at her, trying to awaken the bond of friendship between the two good girlfriends.
Lux smiled at her. "Relax. I'll go easy on you."
Hearing that, Kahina let out a breath of relief, thinking their sisterly bond still meant something—
right up until she heard Lux muttering to herself.
"Would twenty forehead flicks be a bit too many?"
At those words, Kahina's entire face froze. She stared at Lux in utter disbelief.
Twenty forehead flicks?
If you want me dead, just say so!
Aren't we supposed to be friends?!
"Never mind, never mind. I'll pick a different punishment."
Seeing the look in Kahina's eyes, Lux ultimately took their friendship into account and began thinking again.
The moment Luke saw that, he immediately moved to Lux's side with the expression of a shameless little court flatterer and suggested, "Lady Lux, just look at that soft, fair little face of hers. If we were to add a little something to it, wouldn't that be beautiful?"
Lux's eyes lit up at once. "That's a great idea!"
Luke immediately added, "This humble servant is willing to carry it out for milady."
"Mhm. Permission granted."
Lux waved her hand with all the swagger of a crime boss.
"By your command."
Luke immediately accepted the order, acting like a perfect lackey.
The girls all rolled their eyes at the sight, watching his back with open contempt.
A moment later, Luke returned with a pen and stood before Kahina wearing the exact expression of someone who had been the one to win the game.
Kahina, meanwhile, looked up at him pitifully, her eyes practically begging him to go easy.
But if Luke went easy, then would he even still be Luke?
This sort of thing was exactly what he loved doing.
So without the slightest mercy, he started drawing all over Kahina's soft, delicate face, sketching first on one side and then the other.
Before long, his masterpiece was complete to his full satisfaction.
When he pulled the pen away, Kahina's ordinarily smooth, fair face looked as ridiculous as it possibly could.
And seeing the expressions everyone else was giving her, Kahina covered her face and no longer dared lift her head.
At the same time, a burning desire for revenge rose in her heart.
She was absolutely going to make Luke and Lux, those two shameless partners in crime, pay for this!
Unfortunately, ideals were full and reality was painfully thin.
Over the course of the morning, they played a total of three rounds of Monopoly.
And in the remaining two rounds, Lux's status as the reigning queen of the game remained utterly unshakable.
Faced with the luck queen, everyone felt a deep helplessness from the bottom of their hearts.
The final outcome was that Kahina, Sona, and Vayne all went bankrupt.
Since Lux took first place every time, the punishment they received was the same.
The only difference was that the masterpieces Luke left on each of their faces were not identical. Those three beautiful faces, after being "improved" by Luke's hand, had become truly unbearable to look at.
And on top of that, the punishment required them to keep those drawings on for the entire day.
That brought back some unpleasant memories for Fiora.
Looking at the Monopoly board and then at Lux, she made up her mind that until this little blonde's streak of luck passed, she could not play games like this with her anymore.
As for Lux, she looked at Luke with a face full of regret.
That jerk had been lucky. In one round he ended up second from last, so she had not managed to catch him.
Otherwise, she definitely would have shown him what an attack from the luck queen looked like.
Luke suddenly felt a chill run down his back, then sensed the hostile stare of the little blonde on him.
That was when he realized just how unwise it had been to introduce a pure luck-based game like Monopoly right now.
At lunch, Miss Crownguard—who had clearly spent the entire morning having a wonderful time—seemed a bit droopy by noon.
Seeing that she had only eaten three large bowls of rice before barely touching her chopsticks again, Luke could not help asking with some concern, "Why are you eating so little today? Got something on your mind?"
"?"
The girls all mentally threw out question marks.
Three bowls was little?
Then again, when they thought about it, Miss Crownguard usually started at five bowls minimum, so in comparison, three did indeed seem a little low.
"Ah..."
Lux snapped back to herself, shook her head at Luke, and said, "No."
As she spoke, she served herself another bowl of rice and picked at it absentmindedly, clearly thinking about something.
With the way she looked, it was obvious she had something on her mind. It was practically written on her face.
Still, judging from her expression, it was clearly not anything troubling.
So Luke did not press further.
Meanwhile, Lux was thinking a little absentmindedly to herself.
Come to think of it, her birthday was coming up soon.
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