Chapter 00090: Sky Upholding Book
# Sky-Upholding Book
Chapter 90
Novel: AFK Game: Portal to Another World
Chapter 90 Sky-Upholding Book
To want to die but fail to do so, in a sense, is a good thing.
Just take it as advice from the heavens.
Don't die, live a good life.
But for someone like Yang Yiyi, who had jumped off a cliff and failed to die, this news was half good, half bad.
Although she hadn't been dashed to death, every part of her body ached.
Her internal organs felt as if they had been displaced, making it difficult even to turn over, let alone get up.
Yang Yiyi rested on the spot for nearly half a shichen before she recovered a little strength, struggling to turn over and try to get up.
She quickly discovered that she had fallen onto a platform less than three zhang wide.
Below was a bottomless abyss of ten thousand zhang, and above was a rugged cliff face of strange rocks.
Being stuck in such a place was worse than being dashed to death outright.
In any case, she was just waiting to die here.
Yang Yiyi's heart hardened.
She had already jumped once anyway, so what was the big deal about jumping again to get it over with.
But just then, an oriole flew towards Yang Yiyi, grazing the treetops of a pine tree.
It circled over her head and then plunged headfirst into the cliff face to one side.
This made Yang Yiyi very curious.
Did even the birds not want to live anymore?
Then she saw it.
The oriole easily passed through the cliff face, like a raindrop sinking into water!
Greatly surprised, Yang Yiyi staggered and dragged her body towards the cliff face.
She reached out a hand and touched nothing.
Rolling forward, as the light dimmed, she saw a cave hidden behind the stone wall.
Inside the cave, a spring gurgled.
A beam of sunlight descended from above, and several climbing ivies stretched along the cave wall towards the light.
The oriole flew to a rock on one side, where there was a small nest with four or five chicks scrambling to be fed.
At this moment, she couldn't be bothered with whether the cave entrance was sealed by the fabled immortal arts.
Dragging her battered and bruised body, she crawled towards the spring, scooping up a handful of sweet spring water and bringing it to her lips.
Having not had a single drop of water all night, she was both hungry and thirsty.
The clear spring water tasted like the nectar of the gods.
In any case, she first drank her fill of water, drinking so much she almost forgot to breathe.
The clear spring water reflected Yang Yiyi's disheveled and wretched appearance.
At that moment, Yang Yiyi really wanted to cry her eyes out.
But before her tears could well up, she saw something white glinting in the spring water.
Yang Yiyi fished it out and found it was a jade tablet.
This jade tablet was about three cun long and less than one cun wide, pointed at the top and flat at the bottom.
It was made entirely of mutton-fat white jade, without a single impurity.
Normally, if Yang Yiyi had picked up such a treasure, she would have been too excited to sleep, already scheming to go to the city to sell it and buy some nourishing supplements to bring home.
But now, she couldn't feel happy at all.
After all, this thing couldn't be eaten or used as medicine, so after a glance, she tossed it back into the water.
Yang Yiyi tried to stand up to look for some food, and hopefully, find a way out.
But her body simply wouldn't allow it.
After a few tries, she sat down powerlessly on the ground.
As her hand braced against the floor, she touched that jade tablet again.
It was strange.
Yang Yiyi remembered tossing the jade tablet back into the water.
She didn't know why it had suddenly appeared by her hand.
She was too heavily injured, and her mind was a bit hazy.
She couldn't remember if she had thrown it or if she had been holding it all along.
Lifting the jade tablet to look, she saw twelve large characters written on it.
Know the principles of heaven, comprehend all things, reverse heaven and earth, manipulate the sun and moon.
Flipping the jade tablet over, the other side was carved with a pattern of two dragons playing with a pearl.
Between the two dragons were three gilded characters.
“Sky-Upholding… Book?”
An intense pain and dizziness assaulted her after she made out the three characters on the jade tablet.
Yang Yiyi felt the world spin before her eyes.
Her hand went slack, and she fell backward, fainting completely.
So she didn't see that the jade tablet was now strangely floating in mid-air, even wobbling slightly up and down, left and right...
–‐‐——–‐‐——
Regardless of whether it's Wuxia or Xianxia, when the protagonist jumps off a cliff, there's a high probability of a fortuitous encounter.
When passersby or villains jump off a cliff, there's basically no chance they'll last another second.
Li Chengxi used to think this was just a trope, but the cutscene on the screen gave an explanation.
The protagonist doesn't die from jumping off a cliff because a passerby jumped first, using their body as fertilizer to make the vegetation grow, which could then catch the protagonist who jumped later.
Seriously, I'm moved to tears.
“Next up should be finding some divine technique or secret art to start a badass Long Aotian life with lightning... uh, a Feng Aotian life, right?”
Li Chengxi complained as he looked at his computer screen.
This development was cliché, but a classic.
Compared to Viola's time, which was just a group of NPCs on horseback riding into a fortress, this opening cutscene was a bit long.
It might also be because during Viola's cutscene, Li Chengxi had gone to boil water and completely missed the preceding events.
In any case, on the screen, the protagonist who was caught by the pine tree slowly woke up and crawled along the platform towards the side closer to the mountain.
The scene then changed, and this time the screen showed a pixel style cave.
It had the feel of an old Wuxia game.
The Chibi Figure who had fallen from the cliff was lying by a spring in a corner of the cave, sloshingly scooping up water to drink.
To Li Chengxi, it was as if she'd never had a drink of water in her life.
Afterward, Li Chengxi saw her fish a white object out of the spring.
Its size was a bit like a large-screen phone, but due to the pixel style, the finer details were unclear.
Then, this person forced herself to walk a few steps forward, but perhaps because she was too severely injured, she lay back down on the floor and stopped moving.
Li Chengxi highly suspected that this was the same trope as the person he just saw fall to their death.
This NPC would die, and another would continue.
Fortunately, at this moment, the cinematic black bars at the top and bottom of the screen disappeared, indicating the end of the cutscene and that he could now take control.
Just like with Viola's scenario, there was still no beginner's guide.
The difference was, this time the letters AWSD actually appeared on the screen, indicating that he could move using the keys.
“Did the idle game turn into an RPG? A female protagonist one, at that?”
To be honest, the female-protagonist RPGs Li Chengxi had played the most were... adult games.
He reached out and pressed the keyboard a few times, and Li Chengxi immediately frowned.
Because he saw that the female NPC on the screen, who he suspected was the protagonist, didn't move at all and was still lying on the ground.
My keyboard couldn't be malfunctioning, could it?
All four keys malfunctioning at once?
After pressing a few more times with no response, Li Chengxi pressed and held a key.
He really thought his keyboard might be broken.
After all, it was a ten-year-old computer; it wouldn't be strange for something to go wrong.
Then, to his surprise, he saw that the NPC he thought was the protagonist still didn't react, but the white object fished out from the water was moving in a certain direction...
“What the hell? I'm that white lump?”
This kind of RPG was too ahead of its time.
It didn't feel like something a carbon-based lifeform could come up with.
Fortunately, besides AWSD controlling up, down, left, and right, his previous experience was still effective.
Li Chengxi let go of the keyboard, moved the mouse, and first clicked on the female NPC lying on the ground.
The artwork that popped up was still very different from the game screen.
The game had a refined, high-definition pixel style, and the characters were all Chibi figures, while the artwork was realistic, looking almost like a photograph.
The artwork showed her wearing a one-piece floral print short skirt, but unlike the provocative short skirts in Japanese manga, she wore an inner shirt and pants underneath.
Paired with a braided pigtail tied with a red cord, this look reminded Li Chengxi of the Wuxia films from Hong Kong in the seventies and eighties, giving it an old-school flavor from that era.
As for her looks...
Anyway, she didn't look like a valiant and heroic female warrior, but more like an actress playing the young lady's maid in a historical drama.
Although she was undoubtedly a beauty, she was of the gentle, girl-next-door type.
The nameplate below read ‘Yang Yiyi’.
(End of chapter)