In a cramped, windowless rental room retrofitted by a cost-cutting landlord, the air hung stale despite the meticulous tidiness. A single bed and desk devoured most of the twenty-square-meter space, leaving little room for anything beyond scattered feminine garments on the mattress.

  The shower’s hiss echoed from the bathroom, its frosted glass door fogged with steam that silhouetted a lithe figure.

  Suddenly—

  Zzzt!

  A black singularity spun counterclockwise at the room’s center, reversing entropy itself. From this inverted cosmic maw tumbled a robed figure, crashing onto the bed with a groan of protesting springs.

  The shower stopped mid-rinse. Silence thickened like clotting blood.

  Wang Yi—now sprawled across floral bedsheets—plucked a lace undergarment from his hair, nostrils flaring at the mingled scents of lavender detergent and ozone. His disoriented gaze swept the room: familiar yet alien, like a half-remembered dream.

  Three years. That glitchy “system” might as well have been malware.

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  Twenty-one years prior, he’d been reborn into this late-20th-century parallel world as a fetus. Orphaned young and raised by miserly relatives, he’d bided his time—studying voraciously, skipping grades, harvesting future knowledge like a ghost in the machine. By eighteen, he’d mapped his ascent: a TikTok-style video platform to outmaneuver this timeline’s tech giants.

  But on the eve of his empire’s launch, the delayed “Golden Finger” finally activated—a soul-bound cheat module offering:

  

  
1. A half-cubic-meter dimensional pocket


  
2. Ten daily minutes of quantum-cognition overclocking (stackable to 100 days)


  
3. Multiversal traversal


  

  For six months, he’d prepared like a soldier prepping D-Day—mastering combat skills, smuggling weapons via tourist visas, even reverse-engineering the mythical Miura-ryū swordsmanship. His final act before triggering the jump? Pilfering a prototype energy blade from a Silicon Valley black lab.

  The system crashed mid-transit.

  Trapped in a low-magic realm for three grinding years, he’d survived through hyperrational calculus: using overclocked cognition to dissect necromantic runes, merging dark magic with semiconductor physics. When he finally jury-rigged a return spell using a mana reactor built from repurposed GPUs, the system’s interdimensional drive fried itself permanently.

  Now, lying in this anachronistic bedroom, Wang Yi flexed reality-warping senses honed in two worlds. Ambient magic here felt torpid—a dead channel compared to the screaming dataflow of the arcane network he’d engineered. His portable mana reserves (stored in that stubborn half-cubic pocket) glowed warm against his hip.

  A bathroom door creaked.

  Through the steam emerged a pale hand reaching for a phone on the nightstand……