"B-Broken?" Qiqiong stared in disbelief.
His golden finger had just arrived.
He hadn't even used it once.
And now it was already broken?
How was that remotely reasonable?
"Does the manufacturer offer after-sales support?" he asked, with grave seriousness and impeccable politeness.
"…"
The question interrupted the System's noodle-like tears. It turned silently toward him, still sniffling.
Even though it had no human features—just a sci-fi-blue screen—Qiqiong could still somehow sense its pitiful grievance.
Or rather—
Were you really being polite?
There was no after-sales support.
It could go back to the factory, perhaps.
The problem was, it had only just left the factory.
"Just kidding," Qiqiong said awkwardly, raising a hand.
A free golden finger was still a free golden finger. Even if it was broken—hell, even if it exploded—he'd still have to praise it for exploding magnificently.
That said, it was hard not to feel a little regret over having your brand-new cheat system snap in half the moment it arrived.
And more importantly, it had broken itself protecting him from Aha.
Granted, even if the System hadn't stepped in, Aha might not actually have hurt him. As the god of joy and mischief, Aha only wanted chaos and entertainment.
But becoming a toy for the Elation Aeon—
never mind the outcome, the process alone would probably have been far more "tragic."
At the end of the day, the System really had taken this hit for him.
"It's not completely broken," the System said in a tiny voice, squirming a little.
"Just… a little broken. Just a little."
Hearing that, Qiqiong's expression—which had been tinged with comfort—froze.
So it wasn't totally broken?
It still worked?
Then why didn't you say so earlier?!
Feeling like his emotions had been wasted, Qiqiong choked for a few seconds before smiling again.
Even a damaged golden finger was better than no golden finger at all.
"Right. Before anything else—what kind of system are you?"
As one type of cheat, systems came in countless flavors. Among them, the most convenient class was obviously the sign-in system.
You did nothing.
You just visited a location, checked in, and got rewarded.
Practically zero-cost looting.
But judging by the System's performance so far, Qiqiong suspected he could only dream about getting something that convenient.
He gestured grandly with one hand, inviting it to begin.
The System floated forward.
"You should understand just by taking a look."
The screen drifted right in front of him.
The moment Qiqiong saw what was displayed on the mysterious interface, his eyes widened, and the words burst out of him on instinct:
"Holy hell. Honkai."
What filled the screen was unmistakably the UI of Honkai Impact 3rd.
Or rather—not exactly.
There were still differences from the actual in-game interface.
Qiqiong's expression gradually turned strange.
The whole layout looked a little emptier than the real game, but the distinctive icon style made the System's function easy to guess.
On the left side, only three buttons remained:
Missions, Mail, and Shop.
On the right, there were likewise only three:
Equipment, Valkyries, and Supply.
The background wasn't the Hyperion's bridge, but the Astral Express racing through the galaxy—something like the opening Star Rail animation.
Qiqiong's eyes sharpened.
"You're using Honkai Impact 3rd's old UI, but your background is Star Rail. What kind of system are you, exactly?"
"A Honkai game system," it said.
"Don't forget that Star Rail has 'Honkai' in the title too. Ahem. Besides, there are a lot of quality-of-life improvements in Star Rail, so I just… borrowed a few things."
Borrowed?
Theft among systems surely didn't count as theft.
"Star Rail's optimization really is solid," Qiqiong said, mentally replacing "borrowed" with "stole," and nodding his approval.
Auto-battle.
Daily tasks you could clear in minutes.
Everyone knew the younger sisters under HoYoverse were usually the testbeds.
He tapped into the Supply module, only to find that the background wasn't the familiar bridge and Homu crates, but blue skies and white clouds.
"Holy hell. Genshin."
Qiqiong leaned back dramatically.
"How much stuff did you stitch together?"
"Ahem. Don't worry about the details."
"…Fine."
It was just some UI elements. Not a big deal.
"So this means I can draw Valkyries?"
Browsing the gacha interface—whose layout was blatantly borrowed from Genshin—Qiqiong quickly grasped the System's basic use.
Then, suddenly, another thought struck him.
He scrutinized the banner screen.
"But… aren't those Valkyries already in this universe?"
While Star Rail had been downloading and installing, he'd looked up videos about the Honkai Impact 3rd x Star Rail collab on Bilibili.
According to the newest Honkai lore, the solar system where the Cocoon of Finality existed seemed to actually be somewhere in the Star Rail galaxy—just very far away and hidden. The Cocoon itself appeared to have been shielding the solar system all along.
"The character cards you draw won't be the original people themselves," the System explained.
"I see."
Qiqiong nodded.
That answered that.
Rubbing his hands together, he looked up to the crystal count in the top-right corner.
0
"System," he said, "don't tell me there's no newbie gift pack or starter rewards?"
A game system ought to have some kind of beginner welfare.
After stealing… sorry, borrowing… from so many other systems, surely it hadn't forgotten that.
"There was one originally…" the System muttered weakly.
Qiqiong's smile froze on his face.
"My core logic is based on Honkai Impact 3rd, so I was originally supposed to give you one supply card guaranteed to produce a character."
Qiqiong knew exactly what that meant: the beginner tutorial pull in Honkai 3rd that always gave you one of the starter trio—usually B-rank Bronya.
"But just now, Aha scrambled part of my code. That supply card crashed."
"And there are also… some problems with the pool and the shop."
Its voice kept getting softer and softer.
It was practically a mosquito by the end.
It even broke my beginner pull?
"Aha, you bastard! I'll kill you a thousand times—ten thousand wouldn't even be enough!"
Qiqiong clenched his fists and roared.
Then he suddenly froze.
His mouth slowly fell open.
"Wait. System. What else did you say?"
"…The pool. And the shop."
"The pool? The shop?"
His voice shot up in pitch as his face filled with horror and disbelief.
He flipped through the gacha interface but didn't see any obvious abnormalities. Then he returned to the main menu and opened the shop.
Every slot was pitch-black.
At the bottom, a message read:
All items sold out. Restocking in progress.
"The item generation module broke. But that's not a major problem."
The System didn't feel like repairing it.
Instead, it had an excellent idea:
Later, it could probably rent the shop module out as a storefront to other systems. Or maybe just copy-paste item links from an inter-system market.
"…"
Qiqiong fell into a silence of a very particular kind.
The problem really wasn't that big.
He had no idea what absurd plans the System was cooking up.
But—
everyone knew that the sort of stuff sold in gacha game shops was usually garbage.
There was "completely useless garbage," and then there was "barely useful garbage."
Not having it wasn't a great loss.
"But what about the pool?" he asked. "What's wrong with that?"
The shop was one thing.
The pool was another matter entirely.
"Well… aside from character cards, my pool and shop originally only contained equipment and items from the Honkai series."
"Aha broke open four sequence slots in my pool, which caused the draw index to point into endless void."
"Now anything can potentially be drawn from those four sequence slots, and they are no longer constrained by the reward or ten-pull guarantee systems…"
Hearing that, the heart that had been sinking straight toward the abyss abruptly stopped—
and bounced right back up.
Reading the explanatory text the System provided, Qiqiong hesitated.
"Isn't that… a good thing?"
The System's pool was divided into seven rarity levels, from one-star to seven-star.
Qiqiong glanced at the seven-star rates and immediately ignored that category entirely.
Every ten-pull guaranteed at least one four-star.
Every twenty pulls guaranteed a character card.
And character cards started at four-star.
But now, with four sequence slots broken open, not only had the guaranteed slots effectively expanded, the probability of pulling high-rarity items from those slots had also increased by several percentage points.
More importantly, the pool had changed from a limited finite catalog into an effectively infinite resource field.
"That range expansion can indeed be considered a good thing," the System said darkly.
"But I hope you can maintain that attitude after drawing something like Gatanothor or the Shattered Dream Blade."
The grin on Qiqiong's face vanished.
Wait.
What?
Gatanothor?
That blade of ultimate NTR doom?
So that's what "not constrained by the reward system" meant?
"Are you saying I can draw harmful entities and cursed items too?"
"Yes."
"Normally speaking, most items in the pool would be positive-benefit items. A smaller portion might have side effects, but even those would still be restricted by System rules."
"But now, anything drawn from those four sequence slots falls outside those restrictions. If you pull some special cursed object, there's a high probability the curse will act directly on you."
It was like this:
Imagine a pool with ten pipes at the bottom, all supplying clean water.
Now imagine the bottom gets punched open, and four of those pipes are ripped free and connected instead to a vast, bottomless ocean full of fish, monsters, and who knows what else.
The filter screens on those pipes have been destroyed.
Once you turn on the flow, there's no telling what kind of demons might come through the other end.
"For items without self-awareness—or with only very weak self-awareness—I can still more or less force them into the equipment inventory."
"But if what comes through possesses a strong independent will, it can break free of those restraints. Conservatively speaking, it would probably appear somewhere within a few hundred kilometers centered on you."
The System spoke with extreme caution.
"And… the probability of drawing Chaotic Evil-aligned beings will be higher."
With the System's current power, the suction from those pipes might not be enough to forcibly drag over the truly huge fish in the sea.
But across the multiverse, there were countless villains dreaming of invading other worlds and conquering the cosmos.
If you stuck a pipe in front of them—
they might just crawl in on their own.
"There are lots of other possibilities too. Basically, whatever comes out of those four sequence slots, no matter how strange, wouldn't be surprising."
"…"
Qiqiong went quiet.
It was obvious enough: Aha's goal was to use the System to introduce more variables into this universe.
Was that a problem?
Well…
Not a big one, maybe.
After all, Honkai had its own examples already—like the Sky People, who had once tried invading parallel worlds.
They just got stopped by the Saint Fontaine squad before they could really succeed.
Because if they had made it here and tried to conquer the galaxy…
The Anti-Matter Legion, the Xianzhou Alliance, the Garden of Recollection, the IPC:
"Yes, go on. We're listening."
That said, another question rose in Qiqiong's mind.
"By the way, System—if you were capable of driving Aha out, why didn't you do it from the start?"
He poked at the screen with a finger.
"Ah, well, that's… that…"
The System hemmed and hawed for a long while. Seeing that Qiqiong clearly had no intention of dropping the matter, it finally gave up and explained.
After hearing it, Qiqiong was rendered speechless.
The logic was simple.
A human brain could theoretically store around a hundred trillion bits of information—comparable to the storage of ten thousand computers—and potentially exceed high-end strategic supercomputers by eight or nine orders of magnitude.
There were even old martial arts examples claiming that if you placed an even greater burden on an injured body part, the body would respond.
The human body was amazing, wasn't it?
And yet, with such a complex and miraculous structure, how much of it could the conscious mind truly control?
The System's source code counterattacking Aha was like the human immune system destroying a virus.
It wasn't something the System's conscious self could directly control.
The System being powerful did not mean the System's personality had usable power.
The inequality was absolute.
"So you're basically a useless loser," Qiqiong said flatly.
The screen cracked.
And yet, there was no rebuttal.
Hey.
At least deny it!
The atmosphere fell into an eerie silence.
After a long moment, Qiqiong sighed.
"Forget it."
"It's all that damn Aha's fault…"
"Exactly! It's all that stupid Fool's fault!"
Qiqiong and the System cursed Aha together in righteous fury.
Then Qiqiong noticed something.
The Mail icon on the System interface now had a little red dot.
"Hm?"
He blinked.
That module actually worked?
He'd thought it was just there to make the layout symmetrical.
He opened it.
A single message appeared before him.
The moment he read it, he sucked in a sharp breath, and then his expression changed instantly.
"System, stop right there. How can you insult our dearest friend and closest relative like that?"
The System froze on the spot, instantly going slack with confusion.
It was clear from Qiqiong's tone that he meant every word with the utmost sincerity.
The System quickly ran a check on the contents of the message.
Then it, too, fell silent.
For the sake of our precious and sincere friendship, please accept this small token from Aha — Crystals x1600.
Although this was a Honkai Impact 3rd-based system, the draw currency had been optimized to 160 crystals per pull.
Which meant this was—
a full ten-pull.
Watching his host suddenly brighten with delight, eyes sparkling as if he had forgotten all previous grievances, the System sank into silence.
It had nothing more to say.
-------
My : pat*eon*com/RuneA
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