NOVEL NEXT Chapter 4 - Encounters
Chapter 4: Encounters
“He was harmed by the total force.”
“Do you only get excited about the character’s stats?”
In his past life, when playing this magical girl gacha mobile game, his friends who entered the fandom together often teased him like this. In reality, he was a power enthusiast. Plot, character design—all secondary. For him, the most crucial aspect of a character was her power!
“Eh? Are you skipping the story again?”
“Isn’t the essence of this game the CG during the dark fall? Why are you always skipping it?!”
He still acted according to his own preferences, turning a deaf ear to his friend’s advice. How to efficiently clear dungeons, how to deal the most damage to bosses—these were the only questions he pondered!
Missing special dialogues of characters didn’t matter to him; as soon as he obtained a character, he immediately performed a dark fall. After the dark fall, the character’s attributes could multiply several times! Even a fool would know how to choose, right?
Soon! It’s almost time! He would graduate from this mobile game soon!
Honk!
The roaring sound of a large truck’s horn came!
He turned his head—
The white light of the car headlights took away all his vision—!
…
…
Yawn.
Qing Yue finally woke up from her dream.
She lifted her head from her own arm, still in the classroom.
Ah, what the heck, turns out she just fell asleep during class. It must be because the hunting last night was too exhausting.
Qing Yue moved her slightly numb hand and then tidied her somewhat messy hair.
In front of her, Ashu somehow noticed her situation. He slightly tilted his head back and softly asked with concern, “Xu Qing Yue, are you feeling unwell again? Do you want to rest in the infirmary?”
He looked like he was saying, “If you need it, I can take you there.”
Approaching her, he seemed to smell a faint floral fragrance, involuntarily sniffing it with the tip of his nose. Only then did he realize his indiscretion, and his face turned slightly red.
Being frail and sickly seemed to be the stereotype of Qing Yue in the eyes of others.
“No need, thank you.”
Qing Yue responded coldly to his kindness.
She listened to the remaining classes of the day in a daze, but perhaps due to her consistently excellent grades, the teachers didn’t bother her much.
Finally, she endured until the boring school time ended.
As a lone individual, Qing Yue naturally didn’t participate in club activities. Now fully awake, she picked up her bag and left the classroom.
Maybe this was the legendary “sleepy during class, alert after class” magical constitution.
The campus was still lively after school, with young boys and girls finding ways to enjoy their youthful sweat.
Qing Yue saw Ashu, who belonged to her class, on the playground. It seemed he had formed some strange club and was currently recruiting new members by holding a sign. It had been a long time since the school started, so it wasn’t easy to recruit free individuals without a club.
When Qing Yue passed by, he came over to promote his club to her. However, Qing Yue didn’t pay attention to what he said and politely declined.
She had more important things to do and couldn’t waste time in such places.
Leaving the campus, she entered a small alley.
After confirming that there was no one around, she transformed into her magical girl form—
A pure black chest wrap outlined the silhouette of two towering snow-capped mountains. She wore a light purple denim vest over it, revealing the charming vest line of a girl. Below was a deep purple hot pants, and her long and fair legs were covered with the same over-the-knee boots.
Finally, the girl’s hair and the same color were dyed with the glow of magic, turning into an anchor-adorned chain in her hands.
“Purple dreams bring eternal peace, magical girl Snow Qing, reporting for duty.”
This was Snow Qing’s magical girl form.
In fact, each magical girl’s form was different, not only in color but also in clothing style. For example, Snow Qing’s design was a lightweight type, forming a sharp contrast with Qing Yue’s usual fragile girl image.
Snow Qing transformed into a magical girl for the convenience of her subsequent actions—because she was about to start foraging.
Different from hunting at night, when no one was asleep, it was impossible to collect spiritual energy through dreams now. What she had to do now was to find those monsters—or more accurately, to find their corpses.
Directly hunting monsters could indeed supplement magical power, but the cost-effectiveness was too low. Excessive use of power would continuously deepen Snow Qing’s degree of monsterization, not worth the gains. So, she rarely personally dealt with monsters but instead tried to find those already dealt with by other magical girls. Because even from living monsters, she could gain spiritual energy, and if it was a corpse, she could still collect the residual souls to refine into spiritual energy.
This was the unique ability of the spiritual system.
Generally, magical girls treated monsters with “kill and bury” after dealing with them, tossing the remains casually and then running to other places. Normally, these remains would gradually dissipate into useless magical power residue in the air. However, if she arrived in time, Snow Qing could refine them into spiritual energy while they had not completely disappeared.
In short, it was like having a warm meal.
Although it always felt pitiful to pick up someone else’s trash, Snow Qing adhered to the principle of not wasting anything that could be eaten. So, she was quite enthusiastic about scavenging corpses.
Because of Snow Qing’s frequent behavior of clearing the battlefield after the magical girl fights, some busybodies called her the “Cleaner Magical Girl.”
Anyway, white-picked meat should not be wasted. Snow Qing happily embarked on her corpse-scavenging journey.
To eat magical power without fighting was the best.
She arrived at the location of one of the corpses; she turned her invisible purple chain into shape and threw it towards those chunks.
This chain was her exclusive weapon as a magical girl, and like herself, it was also spiritual attribute. Therefore, it could penetrate large bodies and hook out the souls inside.
Snow Qing raised her right hand, and the invisible monster soul was brought out by the equally invisible chain.
Her left hand grasped the unseen soul, then held it inside her body. Currently, she couldn’t refine the soul into spiritual energy. This was a skill possessed only by monsters, so she had to wait until the night to conveniently do it.
Next, what she had to do was repeatedly run through the map and scavenge corpses.
…
“OK, another place done. But there seem to be quite a lot of bodies today, and these wounds… seem to be caused by the same weapon. Did someone massively hunt monsters here? But there doesn’t seem to be any live broadcast on my phone about it.”
Snow Qing was a bit puzzled but didn’t stop her steps towards the next location.
Suddenly—
She hid in a small alley.
It seemed that the “culprit” on the battlefield ahead had not left yet.
It was a white magical girl.