Chapter Ninety-Seven: Inhuman Reading

By the time Qin Anyi reached Wang Yiran’s home, it was just about six in the evening. He had run there from the place where he had previously met Da Pang, taking the longest possible route and spending more than three full hours on the road. He had nearly circled Changqing City once, treating it as extra training for himself.

Because he had not been sprinting at top speed the entire way, he arrived only lightly perspiring and not especially exhausted. During the past week, Qin Anyi had returned with Wang Yiran every night on schedule, so the gate guard had come to recognize him completely. This time, unlike the first, the guard did not inspect him so strictly. After a casual greeting, he let Qin Anyi in, all the while privately marveling at how fortunate the young man was: not only had he found a wealthy girlfriend, but she was also stunningly beautiful, with a figure that seemed almost perfect. Such luck was not something ordinary people could hope for. To have both fortune and beauty at once was enough to make anyone envious.

“How was your date this afternoon?”

Qin Anyi had just opened the door with the key Wang Yiran had prepared for him when a voice came from inside.

Wang Yiran was curled up on the sofa in the living room, hugging a pillow, watching television with an air of lazy boredom. Her long, snow-white legs, bare beneath a pair of shorts, stretched out casually before Qin Anyi’s eyes.

“Pretty good. The mother of the child I saved last time was very warm and hospitable,” Qin Anyi answered somewhat guiltily.

Fortunately, Wang Yiran had only asked without much thought and did not press the matter further, or Qin Anyi suspected he might have been exposed.

“You’re early today. Our training doesn’t start until seven,” Wang Yiran said without taking her eyes off the television.

Qin Anyi glanced over and found that the books in the archive room had all been replaced again. According to his reading speed, they should be enough to keep him occupied for about another week.

“But I have to say,” Wang Yiran went on, “your reading speed and your memory are far beyond anything I expected or can even comprehend. Including the books added this time, there are more than a hundred thousand reference volumes here, with a total length of nearly a trillion characters. To be honest, I can guarantee that nowhere else in this world could you find another person capable of memorizing so much in their head.”

Wang Yiran hugged the pillow, her voice full of emotion. “And that’s in just half a month... If this had not happened with my own eyes, I would never have believed it. Anyi, I know you’re a genius. I knew that from the very first day of school in early September. But I never imagined you were a genius of this degree. Maybe even the word genius is no longer enough to describe you.”

“That’s rather high praise. This humble subject is deeply honored,” Qin Anyi said at once, flicking his sleeves and bowing with mock solemnity.

“Very well, rise, my lord. Off you go,” Wang Yiran replied, waving a hand, equally amused.

The archive room was not divided into categories with any real significance. The vast collection it held was made up entirely of books of tremendous value, both as collectibles and as sources of information. For ordinary people, they were nothing more than dense, dry volumes of theory, language, and basic knowledge. But for certain others, they could only be described as priceless treasures.

After entering the archive room, Qin Anyi roughly scanned the titles of the books and discovered that Wang Yiran really had not lied to him. At least sixty to seventy thousand volumes had been replaced, and not a single title was the same as the ones he had seen a week earlier. To complete such an enormous task in just half a day, one could only imagine how much labor and resources had been mobilized.

He pushed aside all irrelevant thoughts and casually took the first book from the front row of the shelf. Then he began his rapid reading and memorization at once.

Even with the superhuman memory granted by Qilin as support, Qin Anyi still had to remain fully focused to achieve the best possible results.

Each shelf had eight tiers, and each tier held between twenty-five and thirty different reference books. A single shelf contained roughly two hundred volumes, yet Qin Anyi could scan an entire shelf in only about five minutes.

Just as he was completely immersed in absorbing knowledge, the archive room door was opened without a sound.

Wang Yiran appeared quietly at the entrance, and the automatic door behind her closed again just as silently.

So fast...

She stared blankly at Qin Anyi’s completely unreadable behavior, and in that single glance she was overwhelmed by shock so strong it was almost impossible to suppress.

Even though she had seen it with her own eyes, it still felt inconceivable.

Over the past week, she had not actually witnessed how Qin Anyi read those books. After training, he would go off alone, while Wang Yiran would spend her time on other things. Most of the time, she reviewed the recordings of their sparring sessions, hoping to observe his weaknesses from an outsider’s perspective and then improve upon them.

In Wang Yiran’s original view, Qin Anyi’s desire to read these books might not have been a waste of time, but it certainly could not produce any real results in such a short period. Still, it would at least improve his cultivation and temperament. There was truth in the saying that one’s spirit becomes refined when one’s belly is full of poetry. So she had not stopped him, nor had she discouraged him.

Yet Qin Anyi had given her an enormous surprise, one that was almost frightening in its intensity.

Although she had not thought much of it at the time, after considering it carefully later, Wang Yiran only found it more and more unbelievable.

How could this be possible?

After all, the sheer number of books was right there. Even if Qin Anyi had a photographic memory and could remember what he saw after one glance, with so many volumes in front of him, even skimming ten lines at a time would take years, let alone ten years or eight.

The purpose of this archive room was not really to let someone read all these books in this way. It existed merely as a place for reference and search. In many cases, information stored on a computer was actually less secure than in paper books.

That was why Wang Yiran had been intensely curious. She wanted very much to know exactly how Qin Anyi was doing it.

Today, by sheer chance, she had such an opportunity, and naturally she was unwilling to waste it. So shortly after Qin Anyi went upstairs, she quietly followed after him.

And then Wang Yiran discovered that her entire worldview was collapsing before her eyes.

What in the world was this?

How could this be happening?

To Wang Yiran, Qin Anyi did not seem to be reading at all. He simply picked up a book, flipped through it in about a second, and then set it back on the shelf before taking out the next one.

Was that really reading?

At that speed, he might as well have been using the books as fans.

A little over one second for a whole book?

Even a computer would not be that outrageous. A human being, even less so.