Huang Xiu opened the freshman handbook, slowly reading it under the brilliant sunlight streaming through the window.
The handbook wasn’t thick, and its initial pages were filled with tedious platitudes.
It detailed Tiandu University’s standing in the Present World, defined Awakened individuals, and outlined the laws they must abide by in this realm.
One crucial point was the prohibition against using supernatural abilities on ordinary people.
To ensure new students wouldn’t miss it, this rule was printed in the largest font, occupying half a page, and highlighted in red.
While it might seem excessive to some.
Huang Xiu understood that behind every repeatedly emphasized rule lay the bitter lessons of the past.
She continued flipping through the handbook, quickly locating her objective: the registration tutorial for a Void Realm Network account.
[First, enter the website address, then….]
“Wait a minute…”
After finishing the tutorial, Huang Xiu was about to put it into practice when she quickly noticed a critical detail.
The tutorial was exclusively for desktop computers; there was no version for mobile phones.
And she… didn’t own a computer.
She had owned one before, but it had broken down, and by then, she was already of high school age.
Her parents hadn’t replaced it, promising to buy her a new one once she got into university.
“It can’t be that it only works on a computer, can it?” Huang Xiu hastily began flipping through the remaining pages.
Soon, she found the answer in the detailed Q&A section at the back.
The Void Realm Network’s initial login required a computer, but subsequent access could be done via an application downloaded from the website.
“What a classic, shoddy, pseudo-official website.”
Huang Xiu buried her face in her hands. “It looks like I’ll have to go to an internet cafe.”
With no computer at home, even an express purchase from ‘Some-Jing’ would only arrive the next day.
Yet, at this very moment, she was too impatient to wait, eager to discover what exactly this “Void Realm Network” entailed.
In a flash, she changed her clothes, rolled up the freshman handbook, and tucked it into her pocket.
Grabbing her ID card and phone, Huang Xiu headed out.
“Where are you off to?” Her mother, hearing the commotion, poked her head out from the bathroom to ask.
“To an internet cafe.”
Even going to an internet cafe was better than cooping herself up at home, her mother remarked with considerable relief:
“Go on, go on! Just remember to be back for lunch.”
“Alright!” Huang Xiu replied, slipping on the pair of white, cookie-soled sneakers her Senior Female Student had sold her, and then stepped out the door.
Ying City in May was already catching the tail end of summer, with temperatures climbing steadily each day.
In recent days, it had consistently hovered around thirty degrees Celsius.
Huang Xiu wore a pure white cotton short-sleeved shirt and black capri pants, prioritizing coolness.
There were many internet cafes near Mingzhu Community, but most had rather poor environments, filled with acrid, lingering cigarette smoke.
Huang Xiu had never been fond of them before, as she would return home with the smell of smoke clinging to her nose and hair.
After her transformation, her senses had become significantly more acute.
Not only did she detest the smell of smoke even more, but she also became far more meticulous about cleanliness.
“I’ll go to the best one,” she decided.
Huang Xiu decided to treat herself, opting for a newly opened internet cafe this year that even boasted a smoke-free zone.
Since it wasn’t far and she rarely ventured out, she decided to walk.
It was a weekend, and the streets were bustling with pedestrians, but a captivating girl like Miss Xiu Xiu was a rarity.
Perhaps it was because the sunlight was still quite strong.
Although her outfit was rather ordinary, her undeniable beauty ensured that Huang Xiu garnered no small number of admiring glances.
With a brisk walk, she soon arrived at the internet cafe.
There was another significant reason Huang Xiu chose this particular cafe: she still had unused credit on her old membership card.
However, she had forgotten one crucial detail.
Huang Xiu had money on *that* card, but not on *this* one!
And so, Miss Xiu Xiu, with a hint of sorrow, opened yet another membership card and loaded fifty yuan onto it.
“I’ll spend all this money, and then I’m never coming back!” Huang Xiu grumbled.
She meticulously wiped down the keyboard and mouse with a wet wipe.
Only then did she power on the computer, and following the tutorial, she typed in the fifteen-character-long string.
A completely blank, pure white interface appeared.
“Enter the key on the blank interface…” Huang Xiu sequentially pressed the alphanumeric key on the keyboard.
As her fingers lifted from the keyboard.
A colossal eye icon materialized on the screen, blinked twice, and then vanished.
Huang Xiu knew this was the symbol of the Void Realm Network.
The handbook had stated that the appearance of the eye symbol meant the AI system had successfully connected to the computer.
“Now, I just need to wait for the AI system to conduct a security check on the computer,” Huang Xiu murmured with shy anticipation.
She then watched firsthand as the computer began to lag, hearing the buzzing whir of its cooling fan.
It sounded like the computer’s dying scream!
“Boss, my computer’s lagging!”
A sudden roar erupted from outside the private room, followed by the resounding thud of a table being slapped.
The sound was loud, rather startling.
“Damn it, mine’s lagging too! I was in the middle of a team fight!” It wasn’t just one person experiencing the lag.
Curses rose and fell… The entire internet cafe had frozen.
Inside her private room, Miss Xiu Xiu, the unwitting culprit, instinctively recoiled, then silently locked the door.
‘This wasn’t my doing…’
The AI system’s scan was swift, concluding in less than half a minute, and the rapidly spinning fan gradually slowed its pace.
The pure white interface on the screen slowly refreshed, revealing a new page.
The page was remarkably clean, devoid of advertisements on either side, and featured an eye-friendly green background.
In the top left corner, the three elegant Song-style characters for “Void Realm Network” were neatly displayed, while a quick navigation bar spanned the upper center.
The navigation bar comprised three sections: [Forum], [Tasks], and [Organizations].
Below the navigation bar were rows of rotating news images, but the text beneath them was pixelated and unreadable.
Huang Xiu wasn’t concerned, knowing from the freshman handbook that these features would only become accessible after she completed registration.
Registration proved simpler than she had imagined, differing little from a standard website signup.
Besides her ID number, real name, and phone number, the only additional requirement was a mandatory referral code.
Huang Xiu didn’t know what others’ referral codes were, but for her, it was simply her student ID number.
“Choose a nickname?”
Huang Xiu scratched her head, a troubled expression on her face; naming things had always been her weakness.
Otherwise, her online aliases and game names wouldn’t have been simple homophones of her own name.
Yet, such an approach was clearly unfeasible now.
Her previous names were too distinctive, making it easy for Tiandu University alumni to ‘dox’ her.
“Fine, I’ll just call myself Senluo.”
Too lazy to ponder further, Huang Xiu typed in the name and pressed Enter.
Excellent, no duplicate names.
The account logged in, and the interface refreshed.
The news on the homepage was finally un-pixelated, revealing its true content to Huang Xiu.
There was a plethora of news, but the most prominent and centrally displayed item was undoubtedly the most significant.
Therefore, Huang Xiu focused her attention on the central news article.
[The Global Void Realm Governance Council announced that the number of Void Realm incursions this year is likely to be the highest in a decade.]
Accompanying the text was a line graph, where the data point for 2016 had already reached the same height as the previous year.
At first glance, it seemed that the number of Void Realm incursions this year wasn’t particularly high, but it was only May.
“The Global Void Realm Governance Council?”
A puzzled expression crossed Huang Xiu’s face; she wondered what this organization was.
Moving her mouse, she double-clicked to enter the detailed secondary page, where she read carefully, and soon, a realization dawned upon her.