SCE - 5

Chapter 5: Have You Never Been to School?

Yang Xuanse could no longer spare any attention for the Crown Prince's reaction. He began trying to open various apps on his phone to see if the battery would drain.

Thanks to the phone's cache, even without an internet connection, he could still see the original pages of some apps upon opening them—like the last message he had sent to his roommates, and their replies calling him "Daddy."

Aside from that, nothing else could load. The screen just kept spinning. Without a connection, he couldn't open any games, not even the offline ones.

Opening too many apps caused the phone to heat up. Once this knock-off smartphone started getting hot, the battery usually plummeted. However, when Yang Xuanse exited the game, he saw the battery was still sitting comfortably at ninety percent. It was as if, after arriving in ancient times, the battery level had frozen due to the dimensional shift.

Unsure of what else to do, Yang Xuanse kept tapping the screen, desperately hoping the phone would somehow send him back. Though... it probably wasn't the phone that had brought him here in the first place. Rather, the phone itself had become a bug in this era.

After messing with it for a few minutes, Yang Xuanse let his arms drop in defeat. The overheating phone clattered onto the tabletop.

Seeing that he seemed to have lost all hope in life, the Crown Prince asked, "Are you certain you were brought here by this magical artifact? You look so disappointed. Is it because it has run out of magic, and you cannot return?"

Yang Xuanse shook his head. "I'm not sure, I don't know, and I can't go back."

"You can't go back, so you committed murder to vent your frustration?" the Crown Prince pressed immediately, hoping to catch Yang Xuanse off guard and extract a different answer while his mind was unsettled.

"How is that possible? I really didn't kill anyone. I was already inside the inn when I arrived. At first, I didn't even realize there was a corpse in the room," Yang Xuanse replied, completely exasperated.

After saying this, however, Yang Xuanse paused. "Wait a minute. Although I have no idea how I got here, in novels they always say that if you die, you can go back. How about you treat me as an accomplice and behead me just to test it out?"

The Crown Prince raised a brow slightly. "You really dare to try? What if you actually die?"

Yang Xuanse choked on his words. He simply turned around and sat on the floor, leaning against the table leg. In his heart, he cursed the heavens. How did he suddenly end up here?

Could that VR experience hall be some massive human trafficking front?

You go in to play with their facilities, and they ship you off to another era? If his "good sons" (roommates) were sent to other timelines, given their IQs, wouldn't they be meeting their ancestors within a single day?

The more Yang Xuanse thought about it, the sadder he became. He couldn't go back, but he didn't dare to die either. His dad was already getting old. After finishing college, he was planning to go back and inherit his dad's mountain estate so the old man could retire comfortably. Who would have thought he'd check out before his dad did?

---

From his angle, the Crown Prince couldn't see Yang Xuanse. He stood up, walked around the table, and stopped right in front of him. "If you don't dare to die, it means you want to live. But before you can live on, you must first clear yourself of suspicion. Only then will you have a chance to find your way back. Although the lands overseas are far, there are massive ships. It might not be impossible to reach."

Although the Crown Prince's words were heavily constrained by the limitations of his era, they inexplicably touched Yang Xuanse. Perhaps this was the true art of an emperor—using the simplest words to entice the most capable people.

Since things couldn't get any worse anyway, Yang Xuanse nodded. "Then tell me, what else can I do to clear my name?"

The Crown Prince revealed a satisfied expression and slowly crouched down. "You said you appeared suddenly. I shall assume you aren't lying—that a malfunction in your magical artifact caused you to arrive at the wrong destination. That guest room in the inn was completely sealed from the inside, save for the window. This means you were the first person to see the crime scene. What did you see?"

Yang Xuanse thought for a moment, reached back onto the table, and smoothly grabbed his phone—an almost passive reflex for modern people. He opened the photo gallery and, following the chronological order of the pictures, explained the process of his arrival to the Crown Prince.

The gallery even had photos of the corpse. They were much better than anything the Crown Prince's court painters could produce, and they were in full, vivid color.

Staring at the images on the phone, the Crown Prince caught a glimpse of the intently explaining Yang Xuanse from the corner of his eye. A flurry of thoughts flashed through his mind, though he voiced none of them.

Sometimes, ignorant outsiders were incredibly easy to use. By draining them of everything they had, one might just steer this world toward a much broader future.

< div>But things had to be taken one step at a time. The Crown Prince focused on the present. He was currently just the Crown Prince, not the man sitting on the dragon throne. When it came to Yang Xuanse, he had to be cautious.

Completely oblivious to the shifting look in the Crown Prince's eyes, Yang Xuanse earnestly recounted the entire sequence of events. "That's everything. I'm not lying. The timestamps on the photos can prove it!"

---

The Crown Prince snapped back to reality. "Hm? What time?"

"Well, when a picture is taken, a specific time is recorded... Oh no, how am I supposed to convert this time for you? Basically, where I'm from, we count time by 'hours'. Two hours equal one of your shichen. Can you understand that?" Yang Xuanse struggled to explain with gestures.

"Ah, so you mean to say, we have twelve shichen a day, and you calculate it based on twenty-four hours?" The Crown Prince was quite good at mathematics and roughly grasped Yang Xuanse's meaning.

Seeing the Crown Prince's seemingly vast reservoir of knowledge, Yang Xuanse confidently stood up, grabbed a pen and paper, and began calculating the time of death and the conversion between modern and ancient time for him.

Since he didn't know how to use a writing brush, Yang Xuanse used his fountain pen on the rice paper. "Our time is distributed from zero to twenty-four hours. Compared to your shichen, the period between 23:00 and 1:00 corresponds to the Zi hour. But it's not entirely identical due to the movement of the sun and moon, so there's a slight time gap in reality. However, for determining the time of death, this margin of error isn't too significant."