Chapter Twenty-Four: Counting the Harvest

Darkness, endless darkness.

Zhou Shu floated endlessly in this void.

He was utterly exhausted—training like a dog every day, only to die on the beach.

Loop.

Loop.

He had looped ten times.

Just as he was slipping into a daze, thinking he might as well get some sleep, a faint voice drifted over from the distance.

“Zhou Shu~ Get up~ Time for morning study~ You’re going to be late~”

“Brother Zhou, wake up~”

“Hey idiot, get your ass out of bed!”

“Huh?! What morning study?”

Zhou Shu jolted upright in bed, immediately greeted by the wailing and howling of the boys’ dormitory waking up, mingling with the blaring reveille from outside.

“I want to soar higher ♪~ fly higher ♫~”

Ah, he really had been flying just now, and then plummeted—no wonder this song was unlucky. The singer of this tune had never once made it to the top of the trending charts.

“My friend, did you sleep yourself stupid?” Li Yuankun came out of the bathroom and patted the bedframe. “Come on, get up, we’ve got morning study.”

It was only then that Zhou Shu returned to his senses: ten cycles of virtual training were over, and only a single night had passed in reality. He hurried to put on his pants and get out of bed.

But as soon as he was dressed and standing, he felt a bout of dizziness and a dull ache in his waist.

He twisted his hips a couple of times, rubbing his lower back. Xia Liang, the notorious dorm Romeo who had never managed to land a girlfriend, caught sight of him and joked, “Whoa, my man, were you dreaming of seven rounds in one night?”

Zhou Shu, recalling everything he’d done the night before, shook his head and replied, “Not just seven—ten times, in fact. It was a real fight for my life.”

“Hiss—”

“Wow, Brother Zhou, you’re a legend!”

“My man’s got iron kidneys, I’m jealous.”

“Zhou Shu, that’s nothing. If it were me, I’d go for at least twenty!”

“Yeah, right. With twenty times, you’d be nothing but a smear on the sheets…”

The dorm erupted in banter, the ruckus growing even louder, though no one took it seriously. After a hasty wash-up, they all hurried out together.

This was just the daily life of high school boys.

Walking down the corridors of the academic building, they saw some students had already arrived, and every classroom was filled with the loud recitation of texts—Chinese, history, English, and more.

It was as if the louder they read, the more firmly the knowledge would stick.

All these voices combined into a constant buzzing, making Zhou Shu’s head feel hot and his dizziness intensify.

It was a chilly morning, only eight degrees outside. His exposed hands felt cold, so as he walked, he pressed his icy fingers to his forehead, hoping to cool his brain by physical means.

He asked Xiao Shou about it, learning that this was a side effect of running ten scenarios overnight—his mind had been hyper-tense, and he’d burned through too much energy, leaving his legs and back aching as well.

“What can relieve my woes?”

[Add points!]

“...”

Zhou Shu sat at his desk, randomly grabbed a book from the “wall of textbooks,” and opened it to pretend he was reading, while he checked over last night’s gains.

“Wow, I’m strong!”

The joy of getting stronger seemed to lighten his dizziness a little.

Looking at his attribute panel, Zhou Shu’s fingers twitched, and he instinctively picked up his ballpoint pen and started spinning it.

This was a leftover habit from spinning coins in the virtual battlefield as a dexterity exercise. After lights out, he couldn’t practice with the speed ball, so he’d spend time spinning a coin in bed.

Now, just out of training, he hadn’t yet shaken the habit.

But since all payments were made by QR code now, and he hadn’t carried cash or coins in ages, he could only use a pen as a substitute.

[Hunter System]

[User: Zhou Shu (Rookie)]

[Mental: 0.93 (+0.23)]

[Strength: 0.74 (+0.11)]

[Agility: 0.75 (+0.08)]

[Endurance: 0.72 (+0.11)]

[Constitution: 0.74 (+0.1)]

[Languages: Native (Mastery), English (Beginner)]

[Weapons: Firearms (Beginner), Powered Exoskeleton Operation (Beginner)]

[Support Equipment: Edge of Tomorrow Model Powered Exoskeleton (Good Condition)]

[Source Energy: 1.37]

[Source energy sufficient. Would you like to allocate points to items below maximum?]

The “Simulation Mode” tag had disappeared from the system name, confirming he was in the real world.

This display was quite handy, serving as an anti-addiction reminder; if he ever got confused about what was real, he just needed to check for the suffix.

Language skills remained unchanged, but now he had two new “beginner” skills: firearms and powered exoskeleton operation.

Unlike subjects requiring subjective understanding, these were purely a matter of proficiency and could be mechanically improved, making them easy to display.

As for firearms, Zhou Shu could aim, disengage the safety, and fire—his accuracy uncertain, but from the second shot onward, at least he wouldn’t miss the target.

He’d also learned to disassemble, maintain, and reload, but had never actually reloaded under fire.

Because he always died before he could.

This was probably why the movie’s heroine relied so much on melee weapons—after all, ammunition in the movie was scarce, and you’d run out after just a couple of bursts.

If he had to set the standard, he wouldn’t leave the house without three hundred rounds.

With a powered exoskeleton, what’s a little extra ammo to carry?

Of course, considering the actual battlefield conditions in the film, many soldiers died before firing a shot, so who could say for sure?

His exoskeleton operation was similar—basic maneuvers were no problem, and he could maintain steady firepower.

But to dart and weave across the battlefield like the film’s protagonists, slaughtering monsters left and right, he still had a lot of training ahead.

Thankfully, both skills were still at the beginner level, lacking much muscle memory, so there wasn’t much difference between virtual and real-world operations.

If he advanced further, he’d have to use source energy to “bring them out” with him; mere experience wouldn’t be enough to make him a master operator in reality.

Still, if he didn’t want to use up his energy, he could always practice the old-fashioned way.

With experience, learning would be fast.

That was for proficiency. As for the exosuit manufacturing skills Zhou Shu wanted most, he hadn’t even touched the threshold, much less reached beginner level.

Even pestering the mechanics repeatedly, he hadn’t learned much.

He even started to doubt whether learning exoskeleton manufacturing in the army was a reliable path.

His greatest gain, without question, was the improvement to his five core attributes.

All his stats now exceeded 0.8, above the average adult standard.

His lowest, agility and endurance, stood at 0.83; his highest, strength, at 0.85—a transformation overnight from the physique of an ordinary art student to that of a varsity athlete, nearly at the national second-tier level for strength.

Moreover, his strength attribute was distributed throughout his body, not just concentrated in legs or arms, so he could reach second-tier standards in disciplines requiring different limb strengths: sprinting, long jump, shot put, weightlifting, and the like.

Once he finished allocating all his points, that is.

But what did it matter?

He had planned to go the mage route, but after all that training… a brand new berserker had emerged.

Still, effective training was good, but as he tallied up his gains, he realized the total points he could allocate exceeded 0.6 units, while he had only 1.37 units of source energy.

Just like when he activated his English dialogue skill, he hesitated.

How should he distribute them?

If he spent it all, he’d burn through nearly half his source energy reserves.

Just the increase to his mental attribute was 0.23 units—he was certainly… mentally tough.

Strength and endurance were a little strange, though; his research showed that each day of scenario training added about 0.01, but he died quickly on the battlefield, so ten scenarios made 0.1.

They should have matched the increase in constitution exactly, so where had that extra 0.01 come from?

He asked Xiao Shou and learned that, according to the records, he’d earned it from his last three-on-one battle.

That time, his mind was stretched to the limit, his body performing in perfect sync at maximum output, so he’d gained an extra “extreme training” bonus, with 0.01 added to three attributes.

Yes—strength, endurance, and agility all benefited.

That battle had been different from his first kill or previous fights; those times, the monsters’ attack paths just happened to line up, so all he had to do was pull the trigger, letting the exoskeleton’s support and firepower do the rest.

In reality, slaying an alien beast would have yielded him some source energy.

But in the virtual battlefield, to gain improvement, to boost attributes, he had to move, not rely too much on his gear.

Seeing this requirement, Zhou Shu realized the system wanted him to wrestle monsters hand-to-hand, or at the very least, fight like the movie’s heroine—charging into the fray with a helicopter blade in hand.

In short, he had to get his whole body moving, with mind and body working as one.