The all-mighty 'cheat'

Jian Shi opened his eyes and looked around. He was confused because he was no longer under the large tent surrounded by beggars. What he saw now was a large room. He was sitting on a wooden chair with a brown desk in front of him. He had lifted his head from the desk when he first woke up.

There was a large bookshelf on each of the three walls around him – on his left, his right, and directly in front of him. He turned his head to look behind him and – sure enough – there was another bookshelf. The four bookshelves were identical. They were slightly taller than his head and were all made of wood, giving them a dark brown color.

Jian Shi stood from the chair. There was a cushion on the part of the chair where he sat on, but the rest was just wood. As he stood and the chair slid backwards, it made a scraping noise. He looked down and realized that the floor was made of marble. As soon as he came to this realization, he began to feel the cold of the floor. He was confirming once again how miserable it was being barefoot. This thought barely crossed his mind when the cold feeling on his feet disappeared.

He began to ponder this phenomenon. His hand clutched his chin and his head tilted upwards. He was about to begin thinking about the fleeting cold when his eyes widened in shock as he noticed that this room had no ceiling. Everything above his head was clouds, or maybe it was fog? 'Clouds and fog are the same thing anyway.'

The room was brightly lit. Jian Shi expected to see some sort of electrical light when he looked up. He was not consciously thinking about it, but it was just what should be expected. Therefore, when he saw the actual reality, the shock was more so evident. The room was lit up by a bright light that was emanating from beyond the clouds. Although the room was not too large, it still made him wonder 'what kind of light was so powerful?'

The room was a large square. He was curious about its size, so he put his left hand on the bookshelf on the left wall. Then, he walked around the entire room without ever removing his hand from a bookshelf. The shelves were connected to each other at the corners, making it so that he could only see the wall at the top of the shelves. Even then, the wall quickly disappeared into the cloud cover at the top of the room. There was not an inch of wall to be seen below the top end of the shelves.

After walking around the entirety of the room, it had taken him ten minutes to return to his original spot. Part of the reason for this length of time was his meandering walking speed while he observed this new environment and thought about how he ended up here. However, the ten-minute walk was also a testament to the large size of the square room.

Jian Shi made a couple of observations while walking around the edge of this room. First, the bookshelves were empty. Each of the bookshelves had five different levels for books. He looked through all five layers of all four bookshelves, but there was not a single book. In fact, there was nothing in this whole room other than the chair and desk he started at. Thus, he walked back to the desk in the middle of the room.

The desk was fairly simple. It had four legs slightly thinner than his own. They held up the tabletop which was about 77 centimeters high. The top was about 162 centimeters long and 82 centimeters wide. He was very familiar with it and its dimensions. That was because this was the same printer's writing desk that he had bought for his home office in his past life. This realization made his head snap towards the chair that was next to the desk. It turns out that this was the kitchen chair that he had used in his study as well.

A sudden thought emerged in Jian Shi's mind. The desk had a thin drawer. It was where he kept his laptop computer. 'If I open this drawer, would my laptop still be sitting there? And if it was, would it have enough battery life to power on? And if that happened too, then could I connect to the internet?' These were certainly fanciful thoughts, but he had come up with a few conclusions during his ten-minute walk around the room.

Jian Shi's extensive expertise in all things reincarnation that came from his long reading list of web novels led him to his first conclusion: this room was his 'cheat'. Every main character in the novels that had gone from Earth to another world had some sort of cheat. Some of these cheats were super powerful and others were borderline useless, but they all still existed in some form or another.

After the day Jian Shi had spent as a beggar, he had accepted his situation. His current mindset was in trying to figure out how he was going to live from now on. His last thoughts before he fell asleep were about the various novels he had read in the past and the way in which the different characters had chosen to live their new lives. He had yet to make a decision on which direction he would be going in. Twenty-four hours was certainly not enough time to decide your purpose in life. Nevertheless, certain aspects of those novels were ingrained in his memory. The all-mighty 'cheat' was first and foremost.

His second conclusion regarded the state of this room. There were no doors or windows, simply four large bookshelves surrounding him on all sides. With no entrances, the likelihood that someone had brought him here in his sleep was severely reduced. Therefore, he must have entered this place in his sleep – meaning that this room was his 'cheat'. However, the shelves were empty. 'There is nothing to take advantage of in here.'

That thought was what led him to look at the desk in the center of the room. Walking over to it, he had not had any fanciful thoughts. He was simply curious 'where is my cheat?' With this idea circulating in his mind, he walked over and investigated the desk and chair.

Now here he stood. Jian Shi was facing the desk. The chair was behind his back. He was burning a hole through the desk with his stare. His heart was beating faster every second. If he had internet access, everything would change.

He could search how to make a variety of different products that did not yet exist in his new world. He could start a business, sell these 'newly invented' products, and be filthy rich. The rest of his life would be lived in not just comfort, but luxury. Everything depended on his laptop being able to connect to the internet. Even if it didn't, 'having a computer in ancient times would still be a pretty big boon to me, no?'

Jian Shi's hand slowly reached out to the desk. He placed his palm at the edge of the tabletop, in the direct center. Then, his hand slowly slid down a few notches and his fingers wrapped around the metal handle of the thin drawer. 'This is it.' He closed his eyes and pulled it open.