Hangzhou No. 3 High School.
"One strike to cleave heaven and earth! The Wangquan Sword Intent!"
"Did you obtain the Wangquan Sword? Or did you merge a template from someone in the Wangquan family who can use that technique?!"
Zhang Yu finally couldn't hold it in any longer and cried out, his voice shaking with disbelief.
His mind kept looping back to the moment of that strike, and he couldn't do anything about the expression on his face.
No wonder Ye Xuan had told him to make a bolder guess. He hadn't awakened an ability at all. He had obtained a cross-dimensional treasure.
But who could have seen that coming?
That was a cross-dimensional treasure.
How many cross-dimensional treasures were currently known to exist across all of Xia Nation, let alone the rest of the world? Out of billions of people, the total number who had obtained one probably didn't even reach ten thousand.
And most of those were the easy-to-identify kind, like Devil Fruits.
Ye Xuan had obtained a cross-dimensional treasure, and possibly even a character template, something that, as far as anyone knew in Xia Nation, only Elder Zhong possessed. It was genuinely extraordinary.
Zhang Yu's emotional outburst carried to the people around them. The students who had still been in a daze snapped their heads toward Ye Xuan. Their eyes filled with awe, envy, and here and there, something edging toward resentment.
"A cross-dimensional treasure... so that's what it was."
"No wonder the strike was that powerful. It was the strength of a cross-dimensional treasure."
"One strike to cleave heaven and earth. Wangquan, huh."
"When I see things like this in the news, it doesn't really hit me. But when something like that appears right in front of my eyes, I suddenly feel a little frightened about what's coming."
"If someone with a cross-dimensional treasure decides to commit crimes against people in the future, can we actually stop them?"
The conversation deepened, and the expressions around them slowly shifted toward something troubled.
It wasn't that they didn't know the times had changed. If they hadn't known, they wouldn't have spent their days wearing the costumes of their favourite anime characters, reciting the lines those characters had spoken, and imitating them at every turn.
It was simply that obtaining a character template from a series they loved felt almost impossibly out of reach, so they chose instead to enjoy themselves in the ways they could.
They were students, after all. Students who had already survived the brutal high school entrance exams and were about to face university admissions, which would be even harsher. They understood clearly how small the odds were of obtaining a cross-dimensional treasure or a character template.
They had their fantasies, and they also knew where they stood.
Even when someone at school awakened an ability, the output was modest enough that the others could feel jealous and still make peace with it.
The times had changed, but for most of them, the change hadn't quite reached them personally.
But now, standing in front of a power pulled straight from fantasy and made real, they finally understood with a jolt of unease what the change of this era actually meant.
It was power that left ordinary people behind. It was the vulnerability of a fate no longer in one's own hands. It was a reality that sat uneasily with those who had nothing exceptional to their name, and a shift unprecedented in all of human history.
They hadn't grasped it before, because they had never witnessed or felt power that so completely exceeded the limits of what a human being could do. Having seen it now, they understood at once how helpless they were against it, and something instinctive rose in them, a longing for strength, a hunger for it.
Not for anything grand. Only for the faint reassurance that they might be a little less vulnerable than they were right now.
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Time passed slowly.
The voices on the field gradually quieted. Under the guidance of their teachers, the students returned to their classrooms and resumed their lessons.
About the tremor, the appearance of the creatures, and the power Ye Xuan had displayed, the teachers said nothing at all. They taught as they always had, as though nothing had happened.
Even so, Ye Xuan could feel clearly how the way his classmates and even his teacher looked at him had changed.
The change wasn't good or bad, but he didn't like it.
He had assumed that in an era like this, showing his strength would only draw simple jealousy. But it seemed they hadn't fully come to terms with what the Spiritual Energy Awakening and the dimensional invasion had brought to the world.
When it came to power that lay beyond their understanding, and to the person who possessed it, they still instinctively felt a distance, something unfamiliar they couldn't quite bridge.
Was it because too few people had obtained cross-dimensional treasures? Or because the mutant creatures appearing so far were still too weak?
Whatever the reason, it hadn't been enough to make them grasp the direction this era was heading.
After school let out, Ye Xuan shouldered his bag and walked toward the school gate with Chen Hao and Zhang Yu.
"For some reason, I have a feeling you won't be coming back to school much after this."
Zhang Yu looked up at the setting sun and spoke out of nowhere.
His voice carried something wistful, and the air around the three of them went quiet. The evening light poured over them, stretching their shadows long across the ground.
"What are you talking about, is the school going to expel Ye Xuan?"
"It was just a bit of wall damage, wasn't it? He can pay to have it fixed. Isn't that enough?"
Chen Hao initially stared at Zhang Yu in confusion, then seemed to understand something, and turned to reassure Ye Xuan with a tone of mild indignation.
"Ye Xuan, don't worry about it. It's a small thing. I'll call my dad. Why make a fuss over a wall?"
"Hawkeye, you absolute..."
"Sometimes I genuinely want to strangle you."
Zhang Yu looked at Chen Hao through gritted teeth, his fist clenching until it cracked.
He had been trying to recreate a scene from a film, building toward something meaningful with the atmosphere he had carefully set up, and one sentence from Chen Hao had dismantled the whole thing.
"But you're the one who said it."
Chen Hao's expression was completely innocent. Zhang Yu had brought it up himself. Why was it suddenly his fault?
Ye Xuan watched the two of them and couldn't hold back a laugh.
"Alright, you two, settle down."
"But it's true that I'll probably be at school less from now on."
"And it won't just be me. The same might happen to you."
"Take care of yourselves."
"If you run into something you can't handle, let me know."
He hadn't expected that only two days after his system awakened, something like this would already be happening. The world had a way of being unpredictable. He had still been hoping to enjoy school life for a while longer.
But this was the path he had chosen.
And it wasn't only him. Chen Hao and Zhang Yu, as awakened ability users, would almost certainly receive contact from someone after today's events. Not just because of their own abilities, but likely because of their connection to Ye Xuan.
It might sound self-important to say it, but in Ye Xuan's estimation, as the second holder of a cross-world character template in all of Xia Nation, he was worth that much.
On the way home, he stopped at a street stall and picked up some vegetables.
He wasn't like the protagonists in other transmigration stories who started out as orphans with nothing. His parents had divorced long ago over incompatibility, and he had chosen not to go with either of them. He had never been particularly close to either one emotionally, even as a child, so living on his own had always suited him better.
That had been true in his previous life, and it remained true now.
As long as there was money, life rarely felt bad. And as it happened, money was not something his parents lacked.