Chapter 1: Laughter |
Early morning, before dawn had broken.
But the streets outside the window facing the road were already bustling with activity.
From the other end of the street, a cacophony of vendors' cries, the creaking of carriages, and the laughter of children mingled together, drifting into the room on the second floor of the detached villa.
These sounds had to travel the entire length of the street and through the villa's own garden before reaching the room behind the second-floor window, becoming almost inaudible. They should have been completely unable to disturb a sleeping person.
Yet, the black-haired man on the bed was still awakened.
He was a man with a somewhat ethereal body and an extremely pale complexion. Despite having no apparent defects, his body gave off a very "withered" feeling.
The man's ears twitched. He rubbed his eyes but showed no intention of getting up, not even bothering to open his eyes, planning to go back to sleep for a while longer.
He felt his head was muddled, his memories all jumbled together, unable to distinguish anything, only feeling dizzy.
But then, he suddenly heard the faint, rustling sound of pages turning.
Back then, while everyone else was playing, there was always someone trying to secretly study ahead.
He abruptly sat up in bed and, without even opening his eyes, turned his head towards the direction of the page-turning sound.
"Audacious! Who dares to read and study in my dorm room? High-achieving students shouldn't disturb others! Have you forgotten the Non-Proliferation of Studying Treaty?"
Opening his eyes, what greeted him were whitewashed walls, a black carpet, a window opened outward, a black Western-style wall lamp embedded in the wall, a half-open wardrobe, a floor-length mirror, a wooden bookshelf holding a few books, and a desk with only a few items on it.
On the desk sat a pen holder with several pens, and in the middle of the desk lay a book spread open on the surface, its pages slowly turning by themselves.
The rustling sound was coming from there.
The pages of that book bore no text, they were completely blank, being turned by an invisible force, slowly flipping from left to right, page by page.
One couldn't rule out the possibility of a studious female ghost sitting there, but judging by the looks of it, there was at least a high probability no living person was studying.
"Huh... where is this..." The man looked somewhat bewildered at the self-turning book, his sleep-addled brain gradually clearing.
A sense of pain arrived, not from his body, but from his memories.
The pain of death instantly appeared in his mind, making him involuntarily raise a hand to press hard on the space between his eyebrows, letting out a sigh.
"Ah, that hurts," the man mumbled in complaint.
As his memories, originally a jumbled mess, began to gradually sort themselves out, he roughly recalled his death.
Crushed, poisoned, dismembered while alive, buried alive, dismembered...
These memories, tantamount to torture, only elicited a couple of complaints from him.
"Right, I'm dead," he said, frowning as he released the hand massaging his temple.
It seemed having his brains scrambled had caused all his memories to be uniformly mixed together. Fortunately, his recovery ability was still pretty good.
As his memories slowly clarified, he roughly guessed his current situation.
"No, that's not right, I'm not dead."
"Hehe, I survived," he chuckled, grinning.
The man turned his head to look the other way. Opposite the window, against the wall on the side that could receive sunlight, stood a three-tiered flower stand holding several flowers he basically couldn't recognize.
Blue, white, yellow, pink, red, purple—aside from a few sunflowers, he didn't recognize a single one.
Looking up, he saw an empty ceiling without a chandelier.
The entire room was filled with a Western classical style, completely different from the man's own former Chinese minimalist-style room.
Looking down, he was wearing a set of gray short-sleeved pajamas and shorts.
One second, two seconds, three seconds...
As time passed bit by bit, the memories in his mind gradually recovered, becoming clearer and clearer, and the pain from those memories grew more and more real.
The corner of his mouth twitched, curling upward slightly.
As the pain gradually intensified, the upward curve of his mouth also grew larger and larger.
After several seconds of silence, he finally twisted his neck, rolled out of bed, and walked barefoot somewhat slowly to the window to look outside. The cool November breeze blew in, but the man showed no reaction.
The speed at which the wordless book automatically turned its pages became faster. It flipped backward from the end to the beginning, rustling all the way to the first page, then immediately stopped, becoming motionless.
The man looked out the window. Below was his own garden, and a bit further out, a two-way lane for carriages.
The sidewalk on the side closer to the man's house was wide and tidy, paved with gray tiles. The facial features of the passersby were, in comparison, more three-dimensional, belonging to the typical Western appearance in his memory.
On the other side of the lane, workers and vagrants, either wearing vests or simply bare-chested, hurried past, as their work for the day was still uncertain.
If they couldn't find temporary work before the sun rose completely high in the sky, they would most likely fall into a vicious cycle of "going hungry, becoming physically weak, failing to find work the next day, continuing to go hungry, becoming even weaker," eventually being devoured by this city until not even their bones remained.
The corner of the man's mouth suddenly twitched. He reached out to touch the window frame, his fingers resting on the windowsill, gently tapping the wooden frame as he watched the scene outside.
Without a doubt, he had transmigrated. That is, if he hadn't entered some "Truman Show" world.
The man looked at this backward room that didn't even have electric lights, at the environment outside the window where the quality of life was clearly inferior to his previous life.
His mouth opened slightly, then quickly closed. He wanted to say something, but said nothing. Only the corners of his mouth trembled a few times.
Feeling the pain continuously transmitted from his memories, growing stronger and stronger, suddenly, his already smiling mouth uncontrollably stretched to its widest grin, so wide that his upper and lower lips instinctively parted, revealing clean teeth.
For an instant, the wind blowing in from outside the window suddenly ceased, and even the air fell into silence.
"Ha..." A laugh escaped from his mouth.
The smile on the man's face grew wider and wider, stretching further and further, slowly tearing the corners of his mouth, spreading to his earlobes.
Blood flowed from the wounds, dripping onto the floor, seeping into the wooden floorboards.
This forced him to raise his hands to cup his face, covering the two large gashes stretching from the corners of his mouth to his ears. From a distance, his action looked more like the coy shyness of a "maiden in love."
The wooden floorboards squirmed slightly. Where the blood dripped, several fine cracks opened and then slowly closed.
"Ha... This is really..." Unsuppressable laughter bubbled up from his throat.
"Hehe... Hahaha..."
With the sound of that first laugh, the laughter within the room gradually grew louder and louder.
But this laughter didn't come entirely from him; more of it came from his surroundings.
The window in front of him laughed, trembling uncontrollably with mirth, the laughter mingling with the creaking, grating sound of metal friction; the bedsheet and pillow beside him also emitted laughter. They laughed so hard they seemed to huddle together; the flowers on the flower stand behind him began to sway. They laughed, rocking back and forth, nearly toppling over from their pots.
The wall cracked open with smile-like fissures; the floor grew soft; the clothes inside the wardrobe made motions as if clutching their stomachs in laughter.
Black text began to appear on the wordless book, written rapidly, the handwriting messy, appearing quite excited.
The man no longer restrained himself. Cupping his face, he let out laughter that grew increasingly loud.
His laughter, the moment it left his mouth, merged with the air, spreading through the air to the entire city.
Even the city itself began to laugh.
The city was permeated with a joyous atmosphere.
This laughter echoed in the heart of every person in the entire city, yet almost no one could perceive it.
It was like the barely noticeable background music in a play; unless it was the musical climax, hardly anyone would pay it any attention.
Only, gradually, one by one, the pedestrians downstairs began to smile.
They felt unusually lighthearted today, sensing that something good might happen.
In this city, children became full of energy, pedestrians walked with lighter steps, and even the vagrants suffering from hunger and cold under the bridge arches, in their daze, felt a surge of warmth, fullness, and joy welling up from the depths of their hearts, unable to help but smile.
In this late November weather, the entire city seemed to have warmed up.
As the laughter spread, color began to appear on the man's face, the feeling of being "withered" faded, and his body gradually solidified.
After a long while, the man finally calmed his emotions, stopped laughing, though the corners of his mouth remained upturned. However, the gashes on both sides were slowly healing.
He ran his hand along the windowsill; it was very clean, without a speck of dust.
He looked at the soles of his feet; he had walked several steps barefoot yet they were also completely dust-free.
Looking carefully, in fact, the entire house exuded an "out-of-the-box new" quality.
Only then did he turn his gaze to the obviously anomalous book on the desk.
That book was now densely covered in black text, an entire volume's worth written in just a few seconds.
However, he couldn't understand the writing on it.
Raising his left hand, he reached over and gently poked the book.
In that instant, he seemed to establish some kind of connection with this book.
In a daze, the man discovered something new in his mind.
It was some basic common knowledge of this world and the language of this world.
Today is November 26th. This is the capital city of Reins in the southern part of the Kingdom of Liastan. The common language is Liastanian. The common knowledge of this world includes...
With each piece of common knowledge added to the man's mind, the text on the book diminished a little.
By the time the man had completely learned the local language and roughly understood the surface-level common knowledge of this world, the black-covered book had once again become almost blank, leaving only a few words on the first page.
It lay closed on the desktop, motionless, seeming somewhat listless.
It gave off a feeling of being completely drained.
The man walked over, picked up the book, and curiously examined the cover.
The black cover had no pattern, only a title written right in the middle.
*The Lunatic's World Travel Guide*
These should have been characters he couldn't understand, but now he could read them.
"The Lunatic's World Travel Guide?" The man ran his hand over the cover.
The texture wasn't rough, but he couldn't identify the material. It felt somewhat soft.
He picked it up and flipped through it.
The book was thick, like a dictionary, but its contents were very sparse, only the first page.
[The Lunatic's World Travel Guide:]
[1. Please accept the kindness of others and thank them. This is polite.]
"Hmm... that's it?" The man flipped back and forth a few times, confirming that this was indeed all there was. "So, after all that writing, only this little bit is left?"
"So it got drained dry by me just now? What a weakling."
He walked briskly to the bed and sat down, casually tossing the book onto the mattress.
Then he leaned back, lying down on the relatively soft bed, recalling the days before he came to this world.
This wasn't his first time transmigrating.
Well... if those past instances counted as "transmigration," he was no stranger to it.
To be precise, this was his seventh life. But it also seemed to be the most special one so far.
He had already lived six lifetimes and died more than six times.
However, in the past, each time he started as a newborn baby and died on his 18th birthday.
Before this time, there were no exceptions.
He could feel that his current body was exactly the one from his sixth life.
Even the clothes he was wearing before transmigrating and the things he carried with him had been brought over together.
He began to think, to consider whether he should change his name.
Noticing that he was clearly in a country resembling Earth's Western Middle Ages, his original name seemed glaringly out of place in such an environment.
Wu Lang—this was his former name. In this world that so clearly leaned Western, it was just too strange.
Should he change it?
He recalled his past lives.
After all, it was a name he had used for so long. To just discard it felt somewhat uncomfortable...
But...
The corners of Wu Lang's mouth moved imperceptibly, maintaining that smile.
Feeling the faint floral scent wafting from beside him, he nodded to himself.
Hmm, better change it.
Thinking simply, several common Western names flashed through his mind, but he rejected them one by one.
"Ah, I'm terrible at naming things," Wu Lang said, his tone somewhat troubled yet still carrying a smile.
He turned his head to look at the Guide he had casually tossed onto the mattress, poked it with his finger, wondering if this self-moving book could help him think of a name.
He picked up the Guide and flipped through it randomly.
The entire book remained blank except for the first page, but on the cover, in the "author" section, he saw a name.
Samuel Gavris.
"Samuel?" He repeated the name.
He was certain that before, this book did not have this name.
"Me?" He pointed at himself.
"Hmm... seems quite nice-sounding?" He pondered.
"Alright then, I'll go by this name."
Once decided, Samuel immediately and smoothly changed his name.
"Excellent. From today on, I am Samuel."
Samuel glanced over and saw his clothes inside the half-open wardrobe. Shifting his gaze downward, on his nightstand, he saw the things that had been in his pockets the moment before he transmigrated.
It was a phone and a case containing wireless earbuds. Being accustomed to mobile payments, Samuel didn't even have a wallet in his pocket at the time.
However, this world probably wouldn't have a bank where RMB could be exchanged for local currency anyway, so it wasn't a big problem.
Hmm... actually, he had been quite wealthy.
Although his residence here had upgraded from a small apartment to a villa with a garden, comparing the living environments, this was actually a lightning-fast bankruptcy.
Picking up his phone, finding a pair of slippers by the bed and putting them on, Samuel pushed open the bedroom door and, wearing the slippers, began to wander around this three-story townhouse.
It was a three-story villa with a garden. The furnishings inside were very tasteful, with many paintings and decorations that looked like antiques.
The decor style wasn't really to Samuel's taste, but he yawned, too lazy to make adjustments.
On the first floor, there was an entrance hall with several chairs and an umbrella stand, and a spacious enough main hall that led directly to the lounge, storage room, washroom, kitchen, and butler's room.
Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, one could see the villa's own lawn, very clean, and the garden was quite beautiful. Samuel always felt the villa's garden was the place the designer had put the most care into when designing this house.
The house was appropriately furnished, the objects exquisite, with numerous bedrooms and sufficient furniture. The entire building was spotless, making Samuel suspect this villa had appeared the very instant he transmigrated.
Finally, he stopped in front of a floor-length mirror beside the entrance, looking at the face reflected in the mirror that belonged to him.
Before transmigrating, this face was the type that wasn't exceptionally handsome but rather pleasant-looking, not standing out but not likely to be disliked either.
But in this world, this face seemed a bit out of place.
Samuel didn't care about being out of place, but he didn't mind making himself look a bit better.
More importantly, in his eyes, this face actually had quite noticeable flaws.
He turned and walked to sit on the sofa, held his face with his hands, and gently pulled.
Soundlessly, Samuel's face came off like a mask, and where the face had been, only a continuous stretch of featureless skin remained, looking like an unfinished mannequin.
He turned the "mask" in his hands to face himself, humming an unknown little tune, reached out and gently stroked it, watching as the facial features gradually became more three-dimensional and better-looking, watching as blemishes disappeared and his skin became smoother bit by bit.
It was unclear how he was seeing anything without eyes at the moment.
The extent of his "face-sculpting" grew larger and larger. The originally minor adjustments gradually twisted the face, misaligning the features, causing flesh buds to grow.
After completely finishing the "face-sculpting," Samuel put this "mask" back on his face.
The face rapidly fused with his body, and even other parts of his body spontaneously adapted.
Bones, internal organs, skin, muscles.
Soon, in just a few short minutes, he had transformed from his originally plain appearance into a mixed-race handsome man with exquisite features and an excellent physique.
Looking at his reflection in the mirror not far away, Samuel nodded in satisfaction.
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