I Can Only Cultivate In A Game-Chapter 234: Selene’s Unexpected Visit

"Looks like Fang Chen has a fetish," Brin broke into laughter.

"Careful dude, that could get you arrested in the real world..." Brin couldn’t stop snickering.

Aeri Fan was about to resume her complaints when she suddenly noticed something...

"The pain... It’s gone?" She muttered in confoundment.

Brin suddenly paused upon noticing that the cut on Aeri’s cheek was gone. "Oh it’s healed... Wait the saliva did that?"

They both turned towards Victor with looks of disbelief.

"Howwww??"

Victor chuckled and turned away. "Trade secret..."

Aeri was truly astonished. ’Truly he is no ordinary player...’

"Can you do here too?" She skipped after him while pointing at the injury on her shoulder.

"Nooo you said my saliva was eww."

"I take it back... Your saliva is wonderful."

"No."

"Fragrant."

"No."

"Like mountain dew."

"I hate mountain dew."

"Oh come on!"

Brin followed after them while chuckling.

The trio hurried toward the glimmering river that hung suspended in the air like a silver serpent winding between fractured ridges.

Soon they arrived on one side.

The floating terrain seemed increasingly unstable as plates of stone occasionally shifted in the air, scraping against each other with bone-rattling groans, and some simply collapsed into the black abyss below.

Above them, the roiling mass of dark clouds continued to churn.

Purple lightning cracked through the sky, flashing like the violent pulse of a dying star.

Each time it struck, the very fabric of the space seemed to distort, casting shadows in the wrong directions and bending sounds in reverse.

Victor and the others moved with caution, leaping across hovering platforms of stone, sometimes clinging to craggy ledges or using their qi to push themselves over impossible gaps.

The air was almost oily and the spiritual energy within it felt warped... less responsive.

Drawing qi into their cores was like breathing through a cloth soaked in mud.

"I still can’t sense the others," Brin muttered with a low tone as he scanned the surrounding clouds and twisted ravines.

"Neither can I," Victor voiced with a calm tone, trying not to let frustration seep into his bones.

The river came into full view.

It winded through the air with a current that twisted unnaturally, flowing upward at times, then splitting and rejoining itself.

Beneath it, lightning occasionally struck, sending arcs into the water that made it ripple like a living creature. They kept a cautious distance, but this was the only path forward.

"I swear, this world hates physics," Aeri Fan muttered while glaring at a boulder that had just floated sideways past her shoulder.

They pressed on.

Time dragged. Every step, every jump, every breath took conscious effort.

The direction was never certain, and the longer they moved, the heavier Victor felt. He was used to strain. He had played through sleepless nights, through pain, hunger, and thirst. But this? This wasn’t physical... It was something deeper like a kind of pressure on his spirit.

And then it hit him.

’Today’s Sunday...’

In the real world, the sun would already be beginning to set.

His heart skipped.

’Lectures resume tomorrow. If I don’t log out now, I’ll oversleep. Or worse, Kairo will find me under the sheets still connected to the game.’

"Victor!"

The sound of his real name echoed through the strange world like a ghost.

He stopped and blinked. "Huh? Where did that come from?"

"Victor! Victor!"

That was no illusion.

Someone was calling him from the outside.

His body trembled slightly as reality began to bleed into his senses.

The voice wasn’t distorted like the realm’s sound. It was real... Like that time with his mum.

"Someone’s calling me..." he murmured.

"You okay?" Brin asked, but Victor didn’t answer.

He reached for the logout interface in his mind.

"Gotta go..."

[ Logging Out Of Ascendant Realms... ]

—

(( Real World ))

His consciousness returned to his body causing a disorienting rush of sound and light to hit all at once.

Tap tap tap—

He could feel someone pressing against him through his blanket.

’Shit.’

Without hesitation, Victor activated his Void Emperor Bloodline.

Void qi surged through his body, and with a twitch of his fingers, he cloaked the headset and control cables, covering them in an invisible veil of energy.

His entire gaming setup vanished from sight in an instant, concealed under the veil of Cloaking Void.

Rustle—

The blanket was yanked back.

Victor blinked at the sudden brightness of his dorm light and found two faces staring back at him.

One belonged to Danny, his perpetually tired, overly sarcastic friend.

The other...

"Selene?" Victor blinked in disbelief. "Wait—what the hell? Are girls even allowed in the boy’s dorm?"

Selene gave him a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. "Rules are... flexible when you know how to sneak in without getting caught."

Victor sat up slowly while adjusting his shirt as naturally as he could to hide the now-invisible cables. His heart still pounded from the rush of immersion and adrenaline.

Danny crossed his arms, clearly trying to suppress a grin. "You were out for days. Don’t tell me you were meditating or something."

"I was... napping," Victor muttered.

Selene raised an eyebrow but didn’t push. Instead, her expression turned serious.

"I came because I have something important. About what happened to you. The gas during the Legacy Weapon competition."

Victor eyes narrowed.

"Remember I said I’d look into it—to find out if Derek had a hand in it?"

The mention of Derek made Victor’s body stiffen slightly.

"Go on."

(( Flashback — Two Days Ago ))

The legacy competition was in full swing. The coliseum-like central arena buzzed with excitement. Cheers echoed through the massive underwater dome of the academy as students fought, showed off their awakened abilities, and laid claim to ancient weapons embedded in trials of elemental challenge.

But not everyone was presently at the arena watching.

Selene moved like smoke between stone pillars and utility ducts that lined the higher levels of the academy.

Her footfalls were silent, and her breath steady. Being an assassin-class awakened came with perks most could only dream of. Enhanced stealth, superior agility, and above all, a shroud that naturally warped the attention of those around her.

She crawled over a pavilion like structure and squatted on its roof.

Below, she spotted her target.

Derek and his usual group of elite-clad followers. Four of them walked confidently through one of the less-patrolled corridors behind the central processing wing of the arena. Selene narrowed her eyes and quickened her pace, flitting from shadow to shadow, always just out of sight.

She slowed as she reached the edge of a ledge, crouching low to remain hidden as their voices drifted upward.

"Things didn’t go exactly as planned," Derek muttered with his hands shoved into his uniform pockets as his grin faded into a bitter line.

Another student in his gang who happened to be a Berserker awakened, grunted. "Yeah, but next time, we’ll get him."

A third voice joined in. "He’s gotten really powerful though."

Selene leaned forward slightly upon hearing that.

Her mind hung on *’him’*... Although she had a pretty good idea of who they might be referring to, they still hadn’t said a name.

She wanted confirmation.

"That’s exactly why we need to use underhanded tactics," Derek replied, coldly. "You think someone with a performance like that will fall in a fair fight?"

"But... why didn’t it work?" asked one of the others.

Derek scowled. "I don’t know. The vents were rigged. The override door locks worked. There should’ve been no way out. But somehow... he didn’t pass out. Like the gas had no effect."

Selene felt her stomach tighten.

’It is him. They were talking about Victor.’

Still, it wasn’t enough. She needed confirmation. Names. Details. And she wasn’t going to get them like this.

So she waited.

That evening, when the moonlit corridors of the underwater academy were mostly empty and silent, she waited again.

She perched on a rafter beam in the shadows of a hallway that connected the mess hall to the dorms. Her eyes tracked movement, and when she saw one of Derek’s goons walking alone, she moved.

He was physically the weakest of the bunch... a mage-type awakened. Selene didn’t even need to strike hard.

The first hit was to the gut. The second was q strike to his wind pipe—nothing fatal, but disorienting to prevent screams.

Before he could even activate his system interface to cast a spell, her palm hit the side of his neck in a perfectly angled nerve strike.

*Knockout!*

She slung his unconscious form over her shoulder and vanished into the darkness once again.

Her destination: the southern cliffs...

The southern cliffs was an isolated training ground used mostly by A-ranked students and almost never monitored. No cameras. No instructors. No curious peers.

Selene tied the unconscious mage with a long rope, threading it over a jutting boulder lodged at the top of a sharp peak, more than six hundred feet above the rocky basin below.

When the boy awoke, his face contorted in panic and he screamed.

His body trembled against the rope with widened eyes as they stared into the abyss below.

"You scream all you want," Selene voiced calmly, standing a few feet away with her arms folded, "but no one’s going to hear you. Everyone’s still at the arena."

"W-what the hell is this?! Are you crazy?!"

Follow current novℯls on f(r)eewebnov𝒆l