Chapter Eighty-Eight: An Invitation

While the story unfolded, Qin Anyi suddenly found himself living a life so full and tightly packed that even breathing required careful use of time.

The wealth of books in Wang Yiran's home was astonishing. Besides the basement used for training, there was even a separate room of several dozen square meters devoted entirely to shelves upon shelves of books of all kinds. This made Qin Anyi spend more and more time at Wang Yiran's house. Every evening from seven to ten was reserved for training with Wang Yiran and receiving her guidance in all sorts of matters. Apart from that, the time from after school until seven, and then again from ten to eleven, became Qin Anyi's reading time, a period in which he devoured books and filled his mind.

By the time he got home at night, it was usually already around eleven-thirty, and according to Qilin's demands, he had to go straight to sleep. All of his physical foundation training was shifted to the morning. His waking time was brought forward to four a.m., and from then until seven, a full three hours were devoted to training arranged by Qilin.

Qin Anyi discovered that as his body became stronger, his need for sleep decreased as well. Although he slept only a little over four hours a day, he felt neither drowsy nor fatigued.

As for his daytime hours at school, Qin Anyi did not waste them on so-called studying. The knowledge taught in those courses was utterly without difficulty for him now. With Qilin's help, scoring full marks was a trivial matter. Thus, all of his classes were spent in a kind of slumber.

He kept trying, again and again, the training method the mysterious man had given him, struggling in his dreams to build a world.

Because Qilin insisted that nighttime sleep must be deep sleep, so that both body and mind could obtain true rest, Qin Anyi was not permitted to engage in conscious dream cultivation. As a result, this dream training could only be moved to the daytime.

To everyone else, however, Qin Anyi was simply flagrantly ignoring classroom discipline. Yet after the teachers had repeatedly woken him from sleep and posed several deliberately difficult questions meant to trip him up, Qin Anyi had always answered correctly, swiftly and without hesitation. This left the teachers seething with frustration and no outlet for it. In the end, they could only declare indignantly in class that if anyone could answer academic questions as accurately as Qin Anyi did, then they too would be granted the privilege of sleeping in class.

This way of life continued for an entire week. In that week, Qin Anyi had already become capable of constructing an exceptionally realistic dream world, no longer as faint and illusory as before.

But new problems arose as well. The more real this world became, the harder it was to conjure fabricated people within it. For every person that appeared represented an autonomous way of thinking, a personality, and a life history of their own. Only when all kinds of people, intertwined through countless relationships, were woven together could one call it a complete social system. Yet with Qin Anyi's current ability, let alone using his own ideology to build a social order, he did not even have the power to fabricate a single person.

He had reached some kind of mental bottleneck.

By contrast, the training with Wang Yiran proceeded extremely smoothly. As Qilin recovered to roughly seventy percent of its original integrity, Qin Anyi's grasp of the problems arising in Wang Yiran's training became even clearer, and his guidance of her grew all the more incisive and exact. In that single week, Wang Yiran's progress had even surpassed the gains of an entire year before.

Such an outcome naturally pleased Wang Yiran greatly. Her enthusiasm for training soared, and she became utterly convinced by Qin Anyi. The two spent an extraordinarily long time together each day, and because their bodies were often in contact during training, the time they spent alone together gradually became more and more casual.

At the very least, Wang Yiran no longer always wore that training suit in the practice room, the one that wrapped her up so tightly. Many times, in order to make her movements freer and more comfortable, she simply wore short shorts and a top while sparring with Qin Anyi.

This naturally gave Qin Anyi's eyes more than their share of delicious treats. Occasionally, Wang Yiran even used feminine wiles in the middle of their drills, taking advantage of her alluring figure to make Qin Anyi lose focus for a split second before launching a fierce counterattack.

Qin Anyi found such tactics highly enjoyable.

As for the three-hour foundation training every morning, he carried it out with meticulous care. Qilin had devised a new training regimen for him, and given Qin Anyi's current physical strength, this new regimen still ensured that he remained right at the limit of what his body could bear.

This kept his body in a state of rapid strengthening. According to Qilin's estimates, at the current pace of progress, it would likely restore Qilin to about seventy percent of its original integrity before Qin Anyi even underwent the formal assessment for the Glory Dragon Knight.

And according to Qilin, once integrity reached thirty percent, Qin Anyi would also gain the next auxiliary ability Qilin could provide.

Only when integrity reached the appropriate level could Qilin unlock, in correspondence, the powerful abilities originally embedded in Qin Anyi's genes.

In other words, the so-called genetic locks.

At ten percent integrity, the genetic lock that granted super memory could be opened. At thirty percent, fifty percent, seventy percent, ninety percent, and one hundred percent, other special abilities hidden within the genetic locks would be unlocked in turn.

A powerful body and tenacious spirit were the foundation for fully possessing these abilities.

For the first time, Qin Anyi became deeply curious about the genetic locks. According to this theory, any ordinary human being should, in principle, have the potential to become a superhuman.

In both body and spirit, people had developed nowhere near their limits. The genetic locks were the restraints that prevented human power from growing. Hidden deep within human genes, they locked away the heights of human potential at every crucial stage.

What made Qin Anyi curious was why these genetic locks existed in humanity's inherited genes in the first place.

By the logic of natural law and biological evolution, every species is constantly evolving in ways that better suit its environment. No matter the method, becoming stronger is the very capacity that allows life to continue evolving. So why would human inherited genes contain something that so obviously limited the power of the individual to the lowest level?

That did not conform to the needs of evolution at all.

So there had to be something wrong.

Yet even Qilin could only answer that he lacked the necessary authority, leaving Qin Anyi deeply vexed.

As for Wang Yiran's mountain of books, after five straight days of Qin Anyi's relentless conquest, all of them had been memorized in his mind.

After acquiring super memory, Qin Anyi discovered that he truly could never forget anything he saw, and his speed of reading was astonishingly fast. His eyes captured the printed characters with such absurd efficiency that memorizing a whole book of hundreds of thousands of words, from start to finish, took only a little over ten seconds.

When Qin Anyi told Wang Yiran that he had finished every book in her home and asked her to find new ones, Wang Yiran's face was filled with disbelief.

But when Wang Yiran casually took one of those books and pointed at a random passage, Qin Anyi recited it flawlessly, without a single mistake.

Stunned, Wang Yiran pulled out several more at random, selecting passages and content without any pattern at all. Yet Qin Anyi remained able to recite every word without error, without the slightest hesitation.

Faced with such powerful proof, Wang Yiran had no choice but to believe this profoundly maddening fact, and once again she was shocked by Qin Anyi's inhuman performance.

She swore that no matter what else happened to Qin Anyi in the future, she would never again be surprised. This guy... simply was not human.

And during that week, something else happened as well: a major event that shook the entire city of Changqing.

Zhou Lingming, the mayor of Changqing City, who had already served two consecutive terms and held office for six years, was placed under investigation and removed from duty on suspicion of corruption and bribery. The case was still under further review.

This news could be said to have brought final closure to the slander case involving Qin Anyi.

Under the overwhelming pressure from the central authorities, the local strongman Zhou Lingming had not even lasted a week. The entire course of the case appeared so ordinary that no one could have imagined that the beginning of this storm had merely been an inconspicuous rape case.

"Hello, who is this?"

On Friday evening, while walking home with Wang Yiran, Qin Anyi received a call from an unfamiliar number.

"May I ask if this is Mister Qin Anyi? I am the mother of the child you saved before. I wonder if you are free tomorrow. I would like to invite you to my home for a simple meal."

A very gentle voice sounded from the other end of the line.

At once, a figure emerged in Qin Anyi's mind: an especially beautiful married woman with an excellent figure.

"Uh... there's no need to trouble yourself, is there? It wasn't really a big deal."

"That won't do. Please let me express my gratitude properly, or I won't be able to feel at ease."

"Then all right. Tomorrow at noon, then. I have some things to do in the evening."

"Mm, all right. Then we'll contact each other again before noon tomorrow."

The voice on the other end instantly brightened with happiness.