Time went back to before the transmigration.
As a child from a working-class family, our protagonist, Li Xing, had upheld the independent, self-reliant spirit of not burdening his family after graduating from university.
Once again, he had successfully joined a company after graduation, only to be let go.
Unwilling to be a dog and determined to live like a human being, he had struggled through part-time jobs and manual labor, saving up capital to start a business.
But the reality was that he had failed to earn the title of wage emperor and was even worse off than the working stiffs in movies, TV shows, and anime.
Late one night, in the rented room where he lived,
Li Xing lay on his bed, looking at the phone screen before him, a tear rolling down his cheek.
"How the fuck do you manage to live alone in a huge commercial-residential apartment in the city center and still cry poverty?" With that, he closed the TV show and uninstalled the app.
He wiped away his tears and thought for a while. Then he picked up his phone and called his father.
After the call connected, Li Xing's voice began to choke up for some reason.
Under his father's questioning, Li Xing explained his situation.
"If you really don't know what to do, come home and rest for a while! I understand you don't want to be a dog, but you can't work yourself as hard as a dog and still live worse than one!"
His father's joke made the already dejected Li Xing burst out laughing through his tears, sweeping away the gloom in his heart.
Having come to terms with things, Li Xing listened to his father and returned to his hometown, Luoshendu!
On the ride home, Li Xing looked at Luoshendu, now unfamiliar to him after its development, and was a little surprised.
It was clearly the most livable place, yet for some reason, most of Li Xing's classmates had gone to the Magic City.
Li Xing didn't want to say why, nor could he be bothered to think about it.
In fact, Luoshendu's current state of development wasn't bad, but it couldn't be called good, either. Whether it was judged good or bad largely depended on what it was compared with, putting it in a very passive position. But there was one thing the people of the Divine Capital all agreed on: no matter what, the Divine Capital was better than Los Santos, and much better at that!
What, you ask how it was better?
Obviously! One was a divine capital, and the other was a holy capital. They weren't even in the same realm, so how could there not be a gap?
Naturally, after returning home, Li Xing didn't encounter the sort of bullshit plot found in movies and TV shows: meeting a benefactor before even reaching home, immediately finding a job, getting promoted and receiving a raise, marrying a rich beauty, becoming CEO, and finally reaching the peak of life.
Father and son simply sat in silence, with nothing to say to each other. Things were just as they had always been when he came home on break: they ate, drank, and cleaned when it was time to clean.
His mind in turmoil, Li Xing went out for a stroll after dinner. On the bus, he stared blankly through the window at the city, both familiar and strange.
Amid the rows of high-rises, a conspicuous building suddenly appeared by the roadside. Li Xing only caught the two characters for "academy" on its sign before it hurriedly vanished from sight as the bus drove on.
The sight would normally have passed through his mind in a flash without leaving much of an impression. But as the bus moved toward his home, all kinds of similar academy buildings appeared from time to time in Li Xing's vacant eyes!
"Huh! Since when did the Divine Capital have so many academies!?"
As the bus approached the stop near his home, Li Xing got off early.
There was no other reason; he was simply curious about the academies that seemed to cover the city, so he got off at the stop closest to home.
Looking at the academy before him, with its Western university architecture straight out of a Chinese person's stereotypical image, Li Xing guessed it was the one closest to his home!
He scanned his ID card and went in.
It was as quiet as usual inside, just like a university library.
Only, most of the books on display were biographies of the older generation, and most of their covers were red.
After nodding a greeting to the administrator on duty, Li Xing stepped forward, picked up a red-covered book, and found a seat in a corner. He opened the book and began reading.
As someone who was both between jobs and unemployed, Li Xing naturally felt a little uncomfortable facing his father at home. His classmates and friends were all in the hottest places, not in this city.
For someone as lonely and isolated as he was, finding a quiet place to read was indeed a pretty good choice.
Time passed bit by bit, and the elderly men and women resting and reading newspapers in the academy went home one after another.
The librarian, who had been watching Li Xing all along, looked thoughtfully at him as he immersed himself in the book.
After some time, the administrator finished tidying the academy and glanced at the clock in the hall.
He saw that Li Xing was still just as absorbed in the book in the corner. Smiling, he walked over and asked softly,
"Well? What do you think of the book?"
The administrator's sudden greeting brought Li Xing back from the sea of books in an instant. He looked at the handsome administrator before him in confusion.
"Well? Can you understand it?"
At that moment, a thought suddenly surfaced in Li Xing's mind. There was one kind of handsome that women found handsome, and another kind that both men and women found handsome. As a man who couldn't have been any straighter, Li Xing thought the administrator before him belonged to the latter category.
Just hearing him speak gave Li Xing a strong desire to get close to him and become friends.
"I understood it, all right!" Li Xing was a little embarrassed. "It's just a shame I can only understand it now!"
Seeing Li Xing looking a little shy, the administrator smiled and reassured him, "That's all right. With this book, as long as you understand it now, it's not too late, right?"
Listening to him, Li Xing closed the book and looked at its cover. "I suppose so!"
"Oh, right!" Li Xing looked at the administrator in puzzlement. "Excuse me, did you need something?"
The administrator simply pointed at the electronic clock hanging in the hall, smiling without saying a word.
Realizing what it meant, Li Xing hurried to his feet. "I'm sorry! I was so absorbed that I lost track of time. Sorry for the trouble!"
"It's all right! You can take it home and read it there."
"Um... is that okay? How much is the deposit?"
The administrator simply smiled. "There's no deposit, just a processing fee of one hundred yuan. Get an academy identity card, and you can borrow books whenever you like! Believe me, it'll be good for you."
Looking at that friendly smile,
Li Xing awkwardly scraped together one hundred yuan from his wallet and handed his ID card to the administrator.
Still smiling, the administrator took the hundred yuan, made up of five-, ten-, and twenty-yuan notes, from Li Xing. After entering Li Xing's ID details into a dedicated database, he gave him an academy identity card.
Li Xing paid it little mind. He put away the academy card and his ID card, nodded to the administrator, and left the academy with the book.
After going outside, Li Xing walked along, planning how to fit the academy into his life in the future.
The administrator watched Li Xing's departing figure and murmured to himself,
"I look forward to our next meeting!"
When Li Xing got home, it wasn't dark yet.
The sun, which passersby jokingly compared to a tomato, still hung on the western horizon.
Seeing that his father hadn't returned yet, Li Xing went straight to his room.
After changing into loose clothes, he placed the borrowed book by the head of his bed.
He casually left the identity card he had just obtained on the computer desk along with his ID card.
He poured himself a cup of cooled boiled water, locked the door, and sat down in the chair at his computer desk.
He turned on the ten-year-old computer he had just wiped clean the day before. Looking at the familiar XP desktop, Li Xing opened an old game on the old computer.
Compared with games nowadays, Li Xing preferred the old games of the past. In his eyes, games used to be made for people to play, whereas games nowadays were more like they were playing people. In particular, Li Xing had never understood people who got angry playing games and were ready to fight their own friends and family.
Whenever he saw his university roommates get angry and even come to blows over playing games together, Li Xing couldn't help asking himself, Are people playing the game, or is the game playing them?
Rather than being fond of old games, Li Xing was more fond of the atmosphere in which he used to play them.
Scanning the games on his computer, which was over ten years old, Li Xing thought for a moment and made up his mind.
"Warcraft, then! It's highly replayable, and if nothing else, I can still say 'who's your daddy'! Either way, it's always entertaining."
Li Xing then opened the game and picked a 3C map he had played before from the many map libraries. He started the game immediately.
As he waited at the loading screen,
Li Xing somehow felt the game was taking a little long to load this time. But remembering that the computer was over ten years old, he stopped dwelling on such things.
He swallowed a mouthful of cooled boiled water and immediately declared, "Long live understanding"!
Then he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes to rest, ready to listen to the game music once it had finished loading.
Perhaps Li Xing hadn't touched a game in too long. Readers with relevant gaming experience would know that this ten-year-old game had no feature that loaded straight into a match once buffering was complete, much less when Li Xing hadn't even chosen an opponent before starting the game.
In short, Li Xing had started a game for nothing.
But Li Xing, who should have been waiting for nothing, didn't know that as he closed his eyes and waited for the buffering, time in the entire room suddenly slowed. Finally, the instant the screen finished buffering, the academy card and his ID card merged into one, giving off a burst of golden light that filled the room.
Unable to open his eyes against the light, Li Xing subconsciously assumed that the computer and monitor were malfunctioning and instinctively tried to press Alt+F4.
But the moment he pressed the Alt key, the game's loading-complete sound rang in his ears. Then the light from the merged cards enveloped Li Xing and carried him away, making him vanish from in front of the screen.
In the room where the light and Li Xing had disappeared, the computer and monitor stopped working, as though their power had been cut off.
Everything in the room was as usual. Apart from the clothes on the bed and the phone and red book by its head, there was nothing to prove Li Xing had ever come back. Time in the entire room also fell into a state of standstill.
Meanwhile, in the world of Azeroth, a burst of golden light suddenly appeared in Elwynn Forest on the continent. The light did not fade; instead, after gathering into a human shape, it gradually merged with that shape.
At last, Li Xing's figure appeared, and the remaining light shrank smaller and smaller until it entered the space between his brows.
Li Xing then opened his eyes.
Finding himself suddenly in an unfamiliar forest, Li Xing sat beneath a tree's shade and muttered to himself,
"Where the fuck is this!?"