"Ah..." Samuel sighed, engaging in profound self-reflection.
I actually didn't shift the blame onto someone else. How detestable! This is unacceptable. How can someone so normal ever hope to become the top of the Bottom-feeder Leaderboard?
I need to seriously reflect, I need to learn how to elegantly pass the buck!
Yes, he deeply reflected on his own problem.
Holding the Travel Guide with one hand, Samuel fell into a few seconds of silence, even temporarily ignoring the surrounding smells.
Tentatively, his right hand holding the Travel Guide exerted a slight force, injecting another portion of that unknown energy into the book.
The entire Travel Guide immediately lit up with specks of fluorescent light, and the previously somewhat dry-looking paper now appeared much more premium.
Its texture instantly transformed from a roadside stall notebook into a royal library collection.
"Oh ho, now it finally has a bit of that 'wordless heavenly book' feel," Samuel said, flipping through the changed Travel Guide. He casually turned to the last page and saw his own profile.
The preceding content remained unchanged, but a new section had appeared at the very bottom.
[Law Marks: Clown, Actor, Magician, Bard, Toymaker, Performance Artist]
[Law Rhymes: ???, Person in the Play, Absurdity Clown]
"Law Marks? Law Rhymes? What is this?" Samuel looked at the newly appeared content in the book. "Are these more new proper nouns popping up?"
"I haven't even finished the tutorial yet, and nobody gave me a tutorial either. I haven't even left the starter village, and you keep throwing proper nouns at me that I don't understand."
The Travel Guide continued to play dead, offering no response, leaving Samuel to ponder on his own.
After thinking for a moment, he reached a conclusion: "Feels a bit like game classes."
"Oh, I get it. The first few are basic classes, and the later ones are advanced classes."
"So, I completed some class change quest without even realizing it?"
"Hmm... If we go by this logic, the First Life was Clown, the Second Life was Actor, the Third Life was Magician. Hey, you know what? The skill sets actually match up."
As he thought about it, Samuel had a sudden realization. "Oh, so that's how it is. My first six lives dying over and over were just me grinding experience and gathering bonds."
"Gather six basic class bonds to upgrade into the advanced class 'Person in the Play'."
At this point, the Travel Guide finally gave a response.
It automatically flipped forward a few pages to a blank page, where black text surfaced.
"Close, but the Law Rhyme you condensed after obtaining six Law Marks is 'Absurdity Clown'."
"Is that so," Samuel stroked his chin. "I saw 'Person in the Play' listed first, so I thought 'Absurdity Clown' was a subsequent promotion."
His fingers lightly tapped on the book page. After a few seconds of silence, Samuel asked a new question: "You didn't answer before, but can you tell me now? What exactly are you?"
Perhaps because the ink was finally sufficient, the Travel Guide was no longer in a hurry to absorb the originally written text.
Below the text, new content appeared.
"As I said earlier, I am an extension of your will and abilities."
"To put it bluntly, I'm probably some manifestation of the Law Marks 'Bard' and 'Toymaker' after being enhanced by the Law Rhyme 'Absurdity Clown'."
"Bard and Toymaker?" Samuel recalled. "Those should correspond to the abilities I gained in my Fourth and Fifth Lives."
A white halo covered his eyes as thirty-six years of memories from those two lives flashed before him in an instant.
In the Fourth Life, perhaps because he had instinctively used his abilities from birth to adjust and transform all his organs, including his brain, he had assimilated all memories from his previous lives by around age three.
Not just general memories, but all of them, everything.
His memory had received a massive boost, allowing him to recall every detail from his first three lives. From his first bed-wetting in the First Life to every single moment of those three deaths.
His ability to mimic others had also improved.
When he imitated someone, he could not only sense their emotions and mood, but also to some extent perceive their thoughts. He could even inversely influence their emotions. If he influenced a specific person over a long period, theoretically, he could gradually replace that person, subtly transforming them into his own "avatar".
However, this process would be extremely lengthy. With his abilities at the time, replacing an ordinary person would have taken decades, and he clearly didn't have that much lifespan.
Some people are just like that, spreading experiences, stories, and ideas.
It's just that the ideas being spread were slightly more... substantial.
Additionally, he gained considerable verbal brainwashing ability. Even without imitation, he could guide and manipulate others' emotions to a certain extent. This oral ability combined with his power to create illusions meant that as long as he described a story and evoked sufficient emotional resonance in others, he could, to some extent, make scenes from the story appear in reality, almost indistinguishable from the real thing.
This even reached the point of being able to interfere with reality.
He had once been a late-night online story streamer. During his best-performing stream, he fabricated a story about a hero battling a fire giant and successfully left faint cracks and some scorch marks on the ground after the story ended.
Yet, he still failed to survive past his eighteenth birthday that life.
At that time, he had left the house that had killed him three times in a row and came to the forecourt of a large shopping mall, planning to tough out that difficult night there.
Since it was a large mall, there were quite a few people even late at night.
That life's Samuel had used his ability to influence emotions to develop online for over a decade, becoming a somewhat famous streamer.
At the time, he was live-streaming, stirring his audience's emotions, performing magic tricks in the plaza, using his ability to make illusions affect reality to construct a barely passable "refuge" for himself.
In just one night, he dodged three instances of objects falling from height, avoided two loose manhole covers, reported a leaking electrified plaza decoration, used illusions to drive away a drunken lunatic across the street while calling the police, and used his far-above-average physical abilities to dodge an out-of-control car charging toward him.
He felt he had done well enough. In a game, he'd be a maxed-out agility assassin at the very least.
One that also moonlighted as a high-level mage.
But in the end, he still died.
The mall's glass was shattered from the inside. An entire glass facade, six stories high and hundreds of meters long, shattered in mid-air.
Although Samuel didn't understand why all the glass on one side of a mall would be connected, nor did he understand how one person could shatter the entire glass facade of a large mall building.
But the result was that the glass falling from the sky came at him like flying daggers, blanketing the sky, seemingly intent on executing him by a thousand cuts.
Those glass shards easily pierced through the barrier Samuel had barely managed to construct for himself.
Even with maxed-out agility, when facing a large-scale AOE attack, he could only type "GG" amidst a stream of curses.
As if afraid he hadn't died properly, the three-hundred-pound stomach that shattered the glass also fell down and landed on Samuel.
This was the power of the stomach, rotating three hundred horsepower—the Liangzi Demolition Fist.
The main theme was the king descending from heaven, wrathful and ferocious.