---o---
"You're saying this is a Curio?"
"It is a Curio."
"Really?"
"Yes. This one is rather special."
"This isn't a Curio at all!!!"
"I am the Curio Forger. If I say it's a Curio, it's a Curio. Try it if you don't believe me!" Chen Li guaranteed with absolute confidence.
Haruhi Suzumiya looked at the crudely made gun in her hand, highly skeptical of its authenticity. However, she then glanced at the tablecloth in front of her, which was indeed capable of producing a great deal of delicious food, and felt that Chen Li's words might have some credibility after all.
"Do you need me to explain the gun's effect for you again?" Chen Li asked.
Since Haruhi was the first to respond, Chen Li would naturally respond to her in kind. And arriving in her world was so effortless it was almost hard for him to believe. Chen Li felt that this was perhaps how a client should treat a monopolistic supplier like himself.
"Fine, explain it one more time," Haruhi nodded.
When Chen Li had handed her the Curio and explained its effects earlier, Haruhi had been staring at him the whole time. It wasn't because he was devastatingly handsome. Well, he was quite handsome, but the main point was that this was the first time Haruhi had ever met a transmigrator.
She had never even dared to dream of something like a person from another world; her dreams were limited to espers, time travelers, and aliens.
"The name of this gun is the Stance-Swapping Gun. Its function is to make the target switch stances with you after you pull the trigger. But it can only swap stances. For example, if this young man named Kyon here asks you to go buy something, you can pull the trigger on him. That way, he'll be the one going to buy it, not you," Chen Li explained.
"What? You dare to order me to buy things?" Haruhi glared at the ordinary young man, Kyon, standing beside her.
"Weren't you listening? He said 'if'," Kyon retorted.
"Oh... 'If' isn't allowed either!"
"Yes, yes, of course," Kyon said, rolling his eyes.
"Then, if I shoot you with this while you're transmigrating back, does that mean I'll be the one traveling to another world instead of you?" After a moment of silence, Haruhi suddenly posed a question that made Chen Li's scalp tingle.
"Theoretically, yes. But if you really want to transmigrate, you don't need to go through all that trouble. I can take you to my world for a look," Chen Li said.
Since he hadn't witnessed Haruhi's miraculous powers firsthand, Chen Li didn't know to what extent she could affect his transmigration. But in any case, it was best not to have any interference with a delicate process like world-hopping.
"And it's worth mentioning that as a Curio Forger, I have a passive ability that makes me almost immune to the effects of all Curios. So using this gun on me won't have much effect," Chen Li added after half a second of thought.
What he said was true; the negative effects of any Curio were greatly weakened when used against him by others. But he had specifically added this "setting" because the gun in Haruhi's hand wasn't a Curio at all. It was just a gun-shaped object he had casually molded out of Soul Steel. It was just an outer shell with no internal mechanism, as a real gun wasn't suitable for a young girl to play with.
If he hadn't added that setting, who knew if this fake Curio would actually work on him?
"Oh..." Haruhi seemed a little disappointed.
"Why do you look so disappointed? Did you really want to take my place?"
"Of course not! Since you've joined the SOS Brigade, you're one of us now. How could I possibly screw you over?" Haruhi patted her chest, giving her assurance.
"When did I join the SOS Brigade?"
"Just now."
"Not interested... oh, wait, actually, that's fine." Chen Li was about to refuse when he remembered something. He quickly handed a Friends Circle terminal to Haruhi.
Spare Tire +1.
Chen Li would allow Haruhi to join the main Curio group chat, but he would absolutely not allow anyone to share the plot of her own series with her. That would cause huge trouble.
In fact, after he severed the connection between the Previous and Current Eras, Chen Li was already planning to upload all the plot details of the Honkai series to the group chat. But before that, he had many things to do. This included, but was not limited to, leaving behind slogans like "Chen Li was here" in various places and leaving more of his custom-made, attribute-bearing weapons in the Previous Era to try and artificially cultivate Entries.
The situation with the Previous and Current Eras was a rare opportunity, and he naturally wouldn't waste it. Leaving his own creations in the past to let them incubate Entries over time was one of the intended uses of his professional skill, [Appraisal].
"What's this?" Haruhi asked, fiddling with the new phone.
"Just think of it as a chat room terminal. But the people in this chat room are from different worlds. Every one of them is talented, and they're all great to talk to," Chen Li said.
"Sounds interesting."
"Anyway, why don't you try out this gun first?" Seeing Haruhi so easily distracted, Chen Li quickly pulled the topic back.
He wanted to conduct an experiment: to see if he could pass off a fake Curio as a real one and use Haruhi's wish-granting ability to give it miraculous effects. Although a fake Curio created this way might lose its power in other worlds, or perhaps only retain a fraction of its effect, Chen Li was curious if he could use this method to generate an Entry.
"So how should we test it? I've got it! Kyon, tell me to go buy something, then I'll shoot you and see if you go buy it instead," Haruhi came up with a great idea.
"I feel like that's useless, because you wouldn't listen to me in the first place. So by that logic, even if you use the gun, I won't listen to you either, right?" Kyon retorted.
"True... then... Asahina, go buy some snacks to treat our guest," Haruhi said, picking an easy target.
"Ah? O-Okay..." A doll-faced upperclassman with chestnut-brown hair in the SOS Brigade's clubroom subconsciously stood up.
Mikuru Asahina. Her true identity was an investigator from the future. Her target of investigation was, of course, Haruhi Suzumiya. She had originally intended to observe from a distance, but was forcibly recruited into the SOS Brigade because Haruhi declared she needed a "loli, big-breasted, moe mascot character." The meek Mikuru naturally became Haruhi's gofer.
But just as Mikuru was about to leave the clubroom, Haruhi fired a shot at her.
Then, Mikuru stood frozen in place, while Haruhi herself left the clubroom of her own accord.
"What a ruthless person. Experimenting on herself," Chen Li commented upon seeing this.
After Haruhi left, the gazes of everyone else in the SOS Brigade clubroom fell upon Chen Li, the Curio Forger.
The composition of the SOS Brigade was unusually complex. Besides Mikuru, the time traveler...
Itsuki Koizumi, who looked like a handsome young man, was actually a member of the esper organization known as the "Agency." He could exercise his powers within the "closed spaces" created by Haruhi's mental stress.
Yuki Nagato, a petite, beautiful, silent, and expressionless but very cute girl, possessed the "four-no" attributes of "no mouth, no expression, no emotion, no impression." Her true form was a contact interface created by the "Data Integration Thought Entity" (an alien).
The ordinary-looking and ordinary-natured Kyon was the only truly normal human in the SOS Brigade, serving as the narrator and comic relief. But in this time and space, he possessed the greatest ability to influence Haruhi.
All in all, Haruhi's wish to meet time travelers, espers, and aliens had already been fulfilled. She just didn't know it.
"Alright, I've sent Haruhi away. Let's talk openly... you observers with your various motives and messy identities." Chen Li gave everyone a smile.
"Hmm?" Everyone's heart skipped a beat.
"In fact, the gun in Haruhi's hand just now was merely a toy I molded. It was a prop I wanted to use to test if she could truly make wishes come true," Chen Li explained.
"Eh? Then your identity as a Curio Forger is also..." Kyon looked at Chen Li in astonishment. This guy is ruthless, being able to run circles around Haruhi like that.
"Oh no, that part is real. But I can't help wanting to be lazy. Since Haruhi can make wishes come true, why should I bother putting in the effort to forge a Curio?" Chen Li spread his hands.
"To think you'd lie for such a trivial reason," Kyon continued his吐槽.
"You can't put it that way. Forging Curios is very expensive. I'm not charging Haruhi for the toys I make for her. Isn't that very conscientious of me?" Chen Li said.
"Then may I ask, for what purpose did you approach Haruhi Suzumiya?" Itsuki Koizumi, who always had a smile on his face, was no longer smiling.
The fact that this person knew about Haruhi's powers was far more troublesome than him being a real Curio Forger.
"Purely by coincidence. But now that I've made contact, I don't intend to back down. Let me put it another way... Gyehehe... you wouldn't want me to tell Haruhi Suzumiya the truth about her wish-granting powers, now would you?" Chen Li propped up the corners of his mouth into a grin with his index and middle fingers and delivered the classic, can't-get-any-more-classic villain line.
"Ehh?!"
---o---
"I'm back! And let me tell you, this Stance-Swapping Gun is amazing! I used it to get a ton of free snacks! Huh?"
When Haruhi returned to the clubroom, she found that everyone's expressions were a little strange.
Kyon looked half-happy, half-worried, but mostly happy.
Itsuki Koizumi was expressionless.
Mikuru Asahina looked like she was on the verge of tears.
And Chen Li? He looked absolutely delighted.
"Why do you have Nagato's glasses?" Haruhi asked, looking at Chen Li with confusion.
"I traded with Nagato," Chen Li said.
"What did you trade for them?" Haruhi asked curiously.
"I traded a Hatsune Miku autograph with Kyon for the right to make him a beast of burden for a day, and then I used that right to trade for Nagato's glasses," Chen Li spouted nonsense with a perfectly straight face.
Kyon, standing to the side, was quite dissatisfied with being inexplicably turned into a beast of burden—Couldn't you have come up with a better excuse?—but he decided to let it go for the sake of the Hatsune Miku autograph.
"Eh? A Hatsune Miku autograph? I want one too... Wait, isn't she a virtual singer? Where did an autograph come from???" Haruhi was stunned for a moment.
A handwritten autograph from Hatsune Miku? Isn't that just as mind-boggling as hearing a rumor that Luo Tianyi does drugs?
---o---