CHAPTER 49: CHAPTER 10: STARTING GOALS

Tang Tian turned around and found the owner of the notebook standing right behind him.

His face instantly turned as red as a pig’s liver, and Tang Tian had never felt more embarrassed in his life.

He had been secretly observing someone else’s belongings, and now he was caught in the act; he just wanted to crawl into a hole and hide!

Because the situation was so suffocating, Tang Tian’s brain went blank, and he blurted out without thinking, "You, weren’t you going to the bathroom, how come you returned so quickly?"

After he spoke, he wanted to slap himself twice.

Didn’t that just prove he had been plotting to peek at the notebook all along?

"You’ve been spying on me all morning. Seeing how curious you are, I thought I might as well give you a chance," Li Yu said.

Tang Tian laughed awkwardly, "I... I’ve always been curious since I was little, and when I saw you with all those books that hardly anyone reads, I just wanted to know what you were up to."

"For writing."

"Huh?"

"Didn’t you want to know what I’m doing? I’m writing a novel, a fantasy world kind."

"Ah, no wonder there were mentions of nobles and commoners and the like, but is it necessary to go to such lengths? Crafting so much about a fantasy world’s church, starting completely from scratch, don’t you find it tiring?"

"Details are the foundation of everything," Li Yu said. "The more detailed, the more real the constructed world will be. Tolkien created a whole new Elvish language for The Lord of the Rings. George Martin, when he started Game of Thrones, wrote wherever inspiration took him at first, but after a few Chapters, he found it wasn’t going to work, so he went back and began to create the history and relationship charts for the various families and the map of Westeros."

"Oh, is that so... I was ignorant, sorry." Tang Tian picked up the black notebook that had fallen onto the table and handed it back to Li Yu with both hands.

"When your great work is published, I’ll definitely read it attentively."

...

After this socially mortifying incident, Tang Tian naturally didn’t have the nerve to stay in the library anymore, and for the rest of the evening, no one came to disturb Li Yu.

Li Yu didn’t just look at those few books on theology, but he also went through some books on agriculture and social sciences.

He felt as if he had returned to his student days, his interest in the wide array of bizarre and diverse knowledge rekindled.

He spent the entire day in the library, only leaving at noon to grab a fast-food meal opposite the overpass, and in the evening Li Yu went home to cook dinner as usual, Wang Guowei was working overtime and didn’t come back to freeload a meal.

On Sunday morning, Li Yu didn’t go to the library to continue studying but went to the newly joined gym to exercise.

Fitness is something that requires long-term commitment to see results and the process can be quite tough, especially when it needs to be complemented with a diet.

Luckily, Li Yu didn’t expect to become the kind of bodybuilder covered in muscles, and although he was self-teaching Muay Thai, he didn’t aspire to become any sort of fighting expert.

In the Bratis Continent, Half-Beasts naturally had an upper hand in strength and agility, and unless there was a significant gap in training volume, it was difficult for humans to beat them.

Moreover, many Noble Knights spent their days perfecting Martial Arts and figuring out ways to kill, in addition to indulging in eating, drinking, and sleeping around, and Li Yu had no interest in competing with these people.

His main reason for exercising was to keep fit and healthy, at the very least to prevent his physical condition from deteriorating further, and also so he wouldn’t get so tired while traveling.

Li Yu had also considered learning to ride a horse, but after checking the costs of equestrian classes, he decided to learn it elsewhere; once he returned to Green Field, he figured he could just get any Knight Attendant to teach him the skill for free.

In the afternoon, Li Yu made some passionate online purchases on Taobao and Pinduoduo, buying a bunch of household items and then opened up "Red Dead Redemption" that he bought during an Epic sale and played for a while.

The match had barely been going for two minutes, still in the midst of playing the storyline, when Li Yu sensed something was off.

He then brought up the menu and chose to turn off the subtitles. After watching the cutscene again, he controlled Arthur to find the cabin in the snow and engaged in an intense gunfight with the people inside.

Once he had also watched the rest of the storyline, he confirmed something.

That is, he could now completely understand the English spoken in the game.

When the characters in the game started talking, their lines were automatically translated into Chinese in Li Yu’s mind.

Li Yu’s English wasn’t bad when he was in school, but it certainly wasn’t very good either; he only just scraped by in the CET-6 exam, and this level of English proficiency obviously wasn’t enough to allow him to enjoy AAA titles without translations.

Especially once Li Yu brought up the English subtitles and turned the volume down to the minimum, the experience of receiving the language smoothly without any obstacles vanished.

Li Yu had to search his own vocabulary for relevant words and match them to their corresponding meanings, and there were some words he didn’t recognize.

It wasn’t just games – after Li Yu tried using movies, along with videos from Bilibili and YouTube, the results were the same.

It wasn’t just English; French, Japanese, Latin, Spanish, Finnish... even some very obscure languages that only a handful of people in the whole world knew, such as Taushiro language from Peru, Li Yu could understand them upon hearing them.

However, when it came to written words, Li Yu was still as clueless as ever.

The miraculous translation ability he had on the Bratis Continent seemed to have followed him back to his own universe.

Maybe because there had been enough strange events in the past few days, even discovering that he had suddenly become a language expert didn’t excite Li Yu too much or make him lose control.

But soon, he thought of something else.

If his translation ability could work in this universe, what about that godly "Reborn" sequence he possessed... could it also be...?

Unfortunately, this wasn’t something he could just experiment with at will. Li Yu’s first reaction was to contact Xu Mengyuan or Hephaestus, but then he remembered that he didn’t have a way to reach either of them.

As he recalled, the employee handbook of the Third Era did mention that after work hours, employees were not allowed to contact each other.

Luckily, it was already Sunday, and once Monday came and he was back at work, he would be able to inquire about it.

So for now, Li Yu had to suppress his curiosity. He used the Edge browser’s read-aloud feature to surf foreign websites.

He even managed to follow a few of this season’s popular new anime series before the fan translation groups did, and it wasn’t until ten o’clock that he finally turned off his computer, content, and lay in bed.

Li Yu pulled out the black notebook he had brought to the library and flipped it open again.

When playing civilization games, Li Yu would always set a goal for himself at the start of each game, such as aiming for a cultural victory this time, nuking a few AIs, or using Qin Shi Huang to build the Great Wall along the national border, as well as competing to snag as many Wonders as possible, according to his personal preferences.

And now, an opportunity to establish a new order was laid out before him. Following his routine, Li Yu asked himself a question – what kind of world did he really want to build?

As soon as he blurted out ’Saturday’, the answer to this question had, in fact, already been determined.

Unlike the completely utilitarian mindset of most transmigrators, he didn’t wish to re-enact the development process of human civilization in Bratis.

That wouldn’t be much different from the universe he was already familiar with.

Instead, Li Yu preferred to find a new balance between efficiency and fairness, to fill the gap that the pursuit of fairness requires with knowledge and technology accumulated from another universe’s civilization.

If some things just couldn’t be achieved with mere technological development, then he’d try again with technology plus faith.