Translator: AnubisTL
The morning sunlight filtered through sparse clouds, bathing the clean, tidy street.
Jieming walked between Amy and Victor. In his ears, Amy's crisp voice chattered excitedly about their new university life, met by Victor's occasional, short, and calm responses.
A perfectly measured smile graced Jieming's face—the kind of expression a young student, newly stepping onto a university campus, should wear, blending anticipation with a hint of nervousness.
Yet, deep within, his cold reason was racing, analyzing the suffocating predicament he now faced.
Suppression... a comprehensive suppression of all transcendent powers. Jieming felt his inner strength stagnate, as if it had sunk into deep-sea silt.
The vast spiritual power of a Nascent Soul cultivator within his dantian, the mental power of a third-tier wizard in his sea of consciousness, and even his body, which should have possessed terrifying strength after being tempered a thousand times by the Body Tempering Method—all were now dormant, as if they had never existed.
He was now a complete and utter ordinary human. In fact, due to the jarring gap created by his mental habits, he felt even weaker than a normal person.
This plane was eerily strange beyond all imagination.
It wasn't illusion magic—his protective magical treasure, the Profound Astral Red Dust Barrier, had remained completely dormant, proving this wasn't a mere spiritual hallucination.
Yet, it was absolutely not real.
Amy and Victor, who walked beside him, were comrades he knew for a fact had perished. And his "parents" at home, identical in appearance and temperament to those from his past life, silently testified to the falsehood of this place.
Is this a forced identity implant and memory overwrite? But why didn't the Profound Astral Red Dust Barrier activate? This should still be a form of mental interference...
Jieming speculated that his awakening was likely the result of several factors converging.
First, the Body Tempering Method had granted him a profound "self-adaptive evolution" ability. After enduring the long-term erosion of this memory overwrite, he had finally developed a resistance—much like an immune system eventually identifying and purging a virus.
Second, the appearance of Amy and Victor had created a conflict with his true memories so violent it was like a boulder crashing into a still lake, shattering his obscured perception.
I'm in deep trouble, Jieming thought, his heart sinking.
The most critical problem was his completely distorted sense of time.
The ten-year deadline set by the eighth-tier expeditionary force commander outside hung over his head like the Sword of Damocles.
And he had no idea how much time had passed—from the moment he fell into this plane to the moment he broke free of the false memories.
One year? Three?
Or even longer?
His instinct was to connect with his internal space. There, he had pre-set timing devices, an automated factory, the massive Black Giant Legion, and a fifth-tier large elemental pool serving as the energy core.
If only he could sense his internal space, the problem of time would be solved.
However, this plane blockaded all transcendent powers. His connection to his internal space had been completely severed, as if his signal were being totally jammed.
Yet, there was still a chance.
Jieming could faintly feel an extremely weak, almost imperceptible tugging sensation emanating from his dantian.
It was like a drowning man seeing a sliver of light piercing the water's surface.
He knew that if he could just mobilize a wisp of spiritual power to that spot, he might be able to use it as a fulcrum to pry open a crack and re-establish his connection to his internal space.
The difficulty lay in the fact that his spiritual power now moved at a snail's pace.
The same spiritual power that once surged like a mighty river at a mere thought was now sluggish and viscous.
Every attempt to nudge his spiritual power felt like trying to push a mountain.
Combined with the seal on his mental strength, he had lost the ability to manipulate it with precision, forced to rely on his most primal will to clumsily guide it.
"Jieming? Why do you keep spacing out today?" Amy's voice, tinged with confusion, broke his train of thought. She tilted her head, her eyes filled with concern.
Jieming snapped back to reality, a sheepish smile spreading across his face. "It's nothing. Maybe I'm just... a little too excited about starting university. I didn't sleep well."
He grew inwardly vigilant. Not only was his power diminished, but even his cognitive processing had regressed to the level of an ordinary person. He could no longer multitask or process vast amounts of information in parallel as he once had. Just now, simply losing himself in thought had nearly exposed his distraction to the outside world.
Beside him, Victor pushed up the glasses on the bridge of his nose and spoke calmly, "No need to worry. You entered with the top score; your foundation is solid."
His tone was exactly as Jieming remembered it—so calm it lacked even a hint of fluctuation.
Jieming smiled and played along, simultaneously beginning to rapidly extract the "common knowledge" and "settings" that had been forcibly implanted into his mind.
According to the "common sense" provided by the false memories in his mind, this world was a rare "galaxy-type plane."
Stars, planets, galaxies... its structure was astonishingly similar to the universe of his past life.
According to this "common sense," the plane was vast and boundless, containing at least several galaxy clusters the size of the Milky Way.
If this "setting" is real, and not just a fake background simulated by the plane... Jieming's heart sank. Then the physical scale of this plane has already reached the standards of a super-large plane, perhaps even larger.
The human civilization ruled this planet and even the surrounding star regions.
Its technological level was slightly higher than that of his past life, roughly at the stage of being able to carry out large-scale outer space migration.
And his current identity was a freshman who had just been admitted to university to study physics.
The "him" in this world possessed clear and complete memories of his family and growth trajectory—of course, after he woke up, these memories felt as if they were separated by a layer of frosted glass, filled with a sense of alienation.
Amy and Victor were his childhood friends, and they had all been admitted to this university together.
A sleek, streamlined hovercar glided silently past them, its wake stirring the tips of his hair.
Jieming watched the high-tech vehicle, his gaze clouded with an insoluble confusion.
Too real... And why this environment? he wondered.
The core of illusion magic—or any mind-manipulation technique—was to deceive the senses by creating a false reality. They typically constructed the most familiar environment for the victim to minimize dissonance.
Yet this world, while echoing the sci-fi stories of his past life, lacked the "familiarity" of his own lived experience in its details and atmosphere.
Why would the Plane construct an environment that wasn't "absolutely familiar" to him? Was it to reduce the risk of detection by minimizing déjà vu, or did it have some deeper purpose?
As they talked, the university's grand entrance came into view.
Maintaining his outward expression of excitement tinged with nervousness, Jieming followed the crowd into the campus.
After parting ways with Amy, he relied on his memories to find the lecture theater for his upcoming class.
The familiar tiered seating arrangement caused him to falter for a moment.
He found a seat in the middle-to-back rows, a spot that wouldn't draw much attention.
Before him was a smooth desk with an embedded LCD screen.
Almost by instinct, the moment he saw the screen, his palm pressed down on a designated area.
Hum...
A soft light screen instantly popped up before his eyes, displaying course information, personal accounts, campus navigation, and other functions.
Jieming, however, jerked his hand back as if he'd been burned, his heart tightening slightly.
It wasn't the light screen itself that had startled him, but the action he'd just performed—so smooth and natural. It was pure muscle memory and a conditioned reflex formed by this body's long-term life here!
(End of the Chapter)
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