MTL - Dali Temple Small Dining Room - Chapter 100 Octagonal Rice Dumplings (1)

Bestselling author Elias Vayne has spent years writing stories to escape the horrors of his past. As a child, he was the sole survivor of a massacre that wiped out his entire orphanage. He doesn’t remember how he survived—only that when the slaughter ended, he was the only one left standing.His latest work, The Arcane Academy Chronicles, takes place in Veylin Academy, a prestigious school of magic and combat. But one night, after finishing the final chapter, Elias wakes up inside his own book—not as the hero, not as the villain, but as an extra. Worse, he’s been reborn as Kael, the very same orphan who survived a similar massacre in the story.But something is wrong. The academy isn’t as he wrote it. Characters are acting off-script, unknown forces are rewriting events, and the mystery surrounding Kael’s survival mirrors the one in Elias’s real life. The more he tries to regain control of the narrative, the more he realizes this world may not be his creation at all.

Senior high school student Dugu Hong was logical autistic and had a very high IQ. Despite his impressive IQ, he was never taken seriously by his teachers or schoolmates. While playing a recently released eastern Wuxia online game called Jiang Hu, three vicious classmates trapped Dugu into a mountain cave in the game with no hope of escape unless he deleted his account and re-register it. Not succumbing to their demands, Dugu decided to stay in the cave and explore the game system, which benefited him greatly. His persistence to obtain massive internal strength aided him in finding a superior way to improve himself, and thus opened the function of inner observation of the main and collateral channels. Meanwhile, in the real world, he discovered he had supernatural powers when he tried to save the girl he secretly loved who had caught the eye of a gangster on the suburban railway.

The rivers and lakes carry wine with swords, the waist is slender and the palm is light.

The young man carried a long knife on his shoulder, and hung wine on his waist, striding forward, but the rivers and lakes in his heart were vaguely visible.

Turning a page in the book of troubled times, the rivers and lakes have been raining nightly for decades.

Looking back suddenly, the world has been shattered.

- Description from novelbuddy

Jaden Cross is a young man trying to survive in the shadows of Neo-Lagos, a futuristic city where the poor live in broken homes and forgotten slums. Orphaned at six and forced to grow up fast, Jaden spends his days fixing scraps and dreaming of a better world—a world he believes he’ll never see.Until one night, everything changes.A mysterious glowing orb appears in the sky and connects with Jaden’s mind, activating the Tech Architect System—a powerful, sci-fi interface that gives him access to futuristic blueprints, instant-building tools, and system quests that reward him for solving real-world problems.His first quest? Restore power to his neighborhood using solar microgrids.Soon, Jaden is building cooling shelters, clean energy systems, and AI-run apartments—one project at a time. But with each success, he draws more attention. The city’s leaders want to control him. A rival from the tech underworld wants to steal the system. And darker forces are watching from the skies, waiting for the Architect to grow.Armed with only his mind, his hands, and the Tech Architect System, Jaden must rise from the ruins of poverty and become the builder of a new future.But in a city full of secrets, will he remain its hero… or become its biggest threat?