"The enemy Han Xin has both blue and red buffs, watch out!" shouted Lao Zhen the jungler, tension evident in his voice.
"Damn it, how did the enemy mage get over here? Call out the missing enemies in mid lane!" questioned the ADC from the suicide lane.
"Madness, shut up if you don't want to lose the match!" Mid-laner Old Man Jiang struggled to scrape together experience, trying to hit max level quickly.
"Can you guys just play safe? I'm still laning here. Hou Yi running Heal instead of Flash is an absolute genius!" the top-laner roared.
The team fight erupted. Fang Zhou controlled his Zhuang Zhou, mashed the ultimate to cleanse the area of crowd control, and instinctively tapped Heal as well, yet the mage still fell beneath the enemy Jing's blade.
Instant kill with a 1a1a combo!
What a remarkably unpretentious sequence of moves.
"I can protect nothing."
Yet a miracle occurred—his ADC somehow did not fall.
Behold, it was Heal Hou Yi!
In that fleeting instant, Fang Zhou fancied he caught a faint glimpse of the legendary lifesteal-pump miracle from a certain bygone season.
Three base inhibitors broken, a reverse-sweep comeback!
[VICTORY]
"Hahaha, I've finally hit Grandmaster!"
Fang Zhou's eyes were bloodshot, blood rushing to his head, and he instinctively slammed his phone down hard onto the desk. His battered second-hand phone let out a miserable shriek as a spiderweb of cracks splintered across the tempered glass protector, shattering the phone itself along with it.
"Boom!"
The trusty device that had accompanied him for so many years thus perished, yet it refused to leave him behind, dragging its beloved master along for the ride.
"What the hell?!"
Fang Zhou's eyes widened. In the final fraction of a second before losing consciousness, amidst the rain of phone fragments, he seemed to spot a mysterious cubic block. He was certain that thing wasn't a phone chip—whose chip was an entire circle larger than the phone itself?
And it looked strangely familiar, as if he had seen it in some cinematic trailer or other.
A thunderstorm broke over the city, and the streetlights suddenly tripped and went dark.
The sky outside grew even gloomier, lightning flashing and thunder roaring. Had Fang Zhou been awake at that moment, he would have noticed that outside the opposing north and south windows, streaks of red and blue lightning were striking ceaselessly, sharply defined against the dark!
Blood streamed endlessly from the unconscious teenager's forehead, while the mysterious cubic block emerging from the phone's wreckage flickered with an arcane red and blue radiance.
[New human located.]
[Ark Core loading identity information, verifying host...]
[Spacetime turbulence detected, jumping through spacetime...]
"Hum~~~~~~~~~~~~"
The Ark Core vibrated, and the surrounding spacetime shuddered along with it, making it impossible to tell which was influencing which.
The space, originally as calm as a mirror, was swallowed up like a vortex by a suddenly appearing spacetime rift—silent at first, growing ever more intense, before vanishing into thin air in an eerie manner, as if nothing had ever appeared at all.
No one knew that a young man's soul had departed this world, plunging into another spacetime carrying his memories.
"According to reports, a teenager in our city was addicted to mobile games and suffered sudden death late at night. Parents are advised to strengthen..."
The weather was gloomy, and a fine drizzle fell steadily.
The heavens were unaccommodating, and the atmosphere inside the classroom was equally low—no, not low, but dead silent. The entire campus was buried in absolute silence!
Near the corridor, at a window seat in the back row, a youth with delicate features suddenly snapped awake from his slumber, dazed as if waking from a profound dream.
"The second semester of junior high..."
"Countdown to the high school entrance exams..."
"Enroll in a magic high school!"
"Awaken magic and become a revered great mage!"
"This is a magical world?!"
Fang Zhou panted heavily, finally grasping the reality that he had transmigrated.
Nor was it a soul-transmigration; in truth, he had already lived in this world for over a dozen years. However, because his young body could not bear an adult soul, he had always appeared somewhat muddled and vacant.
Of course, not demented or foolish, just purely sluggish in his reactions, frequently zoning out, and agonizingly slow to boot up.
Otherwise, he wouldn't even have made it to the third year of junior high!
Right now, however, his brain had suffered a violent shock, thoroughly reviving his memories of a past life while simultaneously officially delivering the golden finger de rigueur for transmigrators.
It was none other than the mysterious cubic block he had laid eyes on right before kicking the bucket in his past life.
"Wait a minute, why does this thing look so familiar?"
Fang Zhou scrutinized the cube within his mind, feeling more and more that something was amiss, until he suddenly let fly with a curse.
"Crap, isn't this thing the Ark Core from Honor of Kings!"
[Beep, host fully awakened, Ark Core officially initialized.]
[Pre-selected hero template loaded. Your initially chosen hero is—Free and Easy Dreamer.]
Fang Zhou: "......"
If he remembered correctly, the so-called Free and Easy Dreamer was none other than Zhuang Zhou. Why bother making it sound so formal? It had almost caught him off guard.
When on earth had he pre-selected a fish, though?
"Don't tell me it has something to do with that match..."
Through the binding connection, Fang Zhou roughly understood the function of this core that shared his name: by unlocking the Ark Core, he could gain hero template inheritances, forge Honor of Kings equipment, and wield miraculous powers from certain background stories, among other capabilities!
"Wait, I also have a childhood sweetheart who lives right next door, and her name is Ding Yumian?!"
"Could this place be... Crap, today is the day her grandmother passed away! She still came to school as usual, and because of her overwhelming grief, she knocked out every teacher and student in the entire school!"
"No, I have to go find her. I can't let a catastrophe happen!!"
Disregarding the study of his golden finger, Fang Zhou let over a dozen years of latent memories drive him as he rushed over to the adjacent classroom, kicked the door wide open, and spotted a girl collapsed on the floor.
The girl kept her head lowered, sobbing softly, trapped deep within agonizing grief.
Fang Zhou knew he could not let her grief continue, or else in a moment everyone in the school would collectively stop breathing and die!
"Yumian!" Fang Zhou shouted at the top of his lungs.
Ding Yumian raised her head slightly, her delicate face stained with tear tracks, looking heartbreakingly vulnerable.
"Fang Zhou... Grandma is gone, it hurts so much..." Ding Yumian glanced at him, murmuring softly.
"It's okay, it's going to be fine. You still have me, and I'll stay with you always. Grandma's spirit in heaven wouldn't want to see you in such grief and pain." Not knowing what else to say or do, Fang Zhou simply squatted down, cupped Ding Yumian's delicate face in his hands, and forced her to look at him.
He couldn't let her sink into grief and self-isolation right now, or something terrible would happen! Normal people couldn't commit suicide simply by holding their breath, because when suffocation reached its absolute limit, no matter how steadfast your willpower, your body's survival instinct would force you to breathe and choose to live.
Yet Ding Yumian's emotional fluctuations were different—she was capable of achieving precisely that.
Because she was a Calamity Bearer! Capable of doing what ordinary mortals could not.