Blue Star, Magic City.
Inside a shabby rented room.
Chen Du stared at his phone screen. A row of messages on a job-hunting app had been read but left unanswered.
He swiped away the app and casually opened a short-video platform, hoping to bury himself in the pleasures recommended by the algorithm.
The first few videos were nothing unusual: pretty women, delicious food, or utterly pointless videos of people goofing off.
Then Chen Du came across the next video, and something was off.
A man in an ordinary black hoodie stood on a rooftop. He opened his mouth, and a ball of fire gushed from deep in his throat. When the flames vanished, his lips, mouth, and tongue were unharmed.
There were no signs of editing at any point.
Chen Du immediately opened the comments below. The comments were all expressions of disbelief.
"Those special effects are awesome!"
"That looks way too real."
"Any experts care to explain? Just a stunt for views, right?"
Chen Du froze for a moment, then swiped to the next one.
Like the first, the next video was blurry, clearly shot in a hurry on a phone.
In the video, a rift had appeared in the sky over a city, with an indescribable purple light shining from within.
The video was only seventeen seconds long. In the final three seconds, the trembling voice of the person filming could be heard: "Do you see that? They aren't making a movie."
Chen Du reflexively swiped down again. This time, a young woman was livestreaming.
She casually waved a hand, and an entire row of books on the shelf behind her rose into the air, slowly rotating in midair. Her face was full of excitement.
Chen Du's smile vanished. He sat up straight and kept scrolling. There were more and more videos like these. In one, trees in a mountain forest grew wildly at a speed visible to the naked eye late at night.
In another, someone claimed that a wound had healed on its own in a matter of seconds... In short, the more he scrolled, the more unbelievable and outrageous the videos became.
What these videos had in common was all too obvious: the people who posted them were all ordinary people, the filming was crude, and there was no sign of polished production.
Moreover, the reactions of the people in those scenes—the genuine fear and confusion—were beyond even the finest actor's ability to portray.
Chen Du's breathing quickened.
"This is thrilling..."
He opened his notes app and began frantically taking screenshots, recording his screen, and writing down account IDs.
Anyone who wasn't a fool knew this was very likely a sign of spiritual qi revival!
Spiritual qi revival was actually happening?!
It meant the world would undergo a drastic upheaval. Countless opportunities would be there for the taking, and countless struggles and conflicts would erupt. It would be an immensely bloody and glorious era.
But Chen Du remembered a joke he and his roommates had made in college: if spiritual qi ever revived, would ordinary people like them, with neither family background nor resources, have to line up just to become cannon fodder?
He hadn't expected the joke to come true.
Yes, before spiritual qi revived, you were an ordinary person.
After spiritual qi revived, weren't you still an ordinary person?
The rich relied on technology, the poor on mutation. Which did you have?
The sky outside the window darkened. After saving his seventy-third screenshot, Chen Du decided to get some sleep first.
He knew he would organize these clues tomorrow and find a way to contact the people who had posted them.
He had even marked the locations of several abnormal incidents on a map.
He set an alarm and closed his eyes.
By the time the alarm went off, the morning light was already dazzling.
Chen Du sprang out of bed and immediately opened his phone's photo gallery.
Blank!
All seventy-three screenshots displayed the message: "File corrupted."
Had the mysterious hand behind the scenes acted so quickly?
Chen Du then opened his notes app. The densely packed notes from last night were still there, but every one of them had turned into garbled text.
Trembling, he opened the short-video platform. The entries for the videos he had watched yesterday were still in his viewing history, but their titles and thumbnails had all turned the same shade of gray.
When he tapped them, there was only one line: "This content has been deleted for suspected violations."
Was that hand so powerful?
Chen Du frantically searched for any related terms, but found nothing, as though those videos had never existed.
He also found the accounts of those who had posted them. Some had been deactivated outright, while others were still posting updates, but their latest videos were trivial snippets of daily life, and no one in the comments mentioned the abnormal content they had posted before.
Only one person's account had retained all its posts, but that person had just made a new post with a picture of a cup of coffee. The text read: "A lot of people have asked where the video I posted yesterday went. What video? I didn't post one."
Chen Du put his phone on the table, feeling thoroughly depressed.
He was twenty-two. He had worked desperately to get into college, but after graduating, his résumés had sunk like stones into the sea.
Now he had only six thousand yuan left in savings and lived in a ten-square-meter room partitioned off from a larger unit.
These days, academic qualifications had lost their value. Junior college graduates were everywhere, and bachelor's degree holders were worth less than dogs.
He was the kind of ordinary person nobody would look at twice on the street.
He had run into walls everywhere he looked for work, leaving him feeling abandoned. He had clearly worked so hard, yet without his noticing, when had the world become so ruthlessly competitive?
Now spiritual qi was reviving, and he once again felt abandoned.
But he was absolutely certain of one thing: those videos were real, and that information was real.
Overnight, some force had erased them from the entire internet, as though someone were clearing the scene for what was to come.
Chen Du slowly stood and walked to the window.
Outside was the most ordinary of city streets, full of people, horses, and traffic. Everything seemed the same as yesterday.
But in truth, heaven and earth had undergone a tremendous change; it was just that many people hadn't realized it.
Yet just then, before Chen Du realized what was happening, a golden light flashed before his eyes, and lines of text appeared:
[Talent awakened: World's Spiritual Endowment]
[Level: Lv1 (0/2)]
[Ability 1: Infinite Awakening Lv1 (0/2): The world has spiritual endowment, bestowed upon one person. Each time you enter an entirely new "world" (in either body or true spirit), you will randomly awaken a talent that resonates with the rules of that world.]
[Note: What is a "world"? The Age of Dharma Decline has ended, and spiritual qi revival has arrived. The old rules are crumbling, and a new order is taking shape. In the cracks between the old and the new, those "worlds" that have been sealed, hidden, and folded away for countless ages are reemerging one after another. A world in every flower, a bodhi in every leaf. Secret realms, grotto-heavens, remnants of lost realms, foreign realms... all are among them.]
Chen Du slowly let out a breath. Was this his golden finger?
A simple, straightforward awakening talent!
It seemed to be a pretty good talent. Enter a recognized new world, and he could obtain a talent.
Next, he took out his backup phone and began searching for every piece of abnormal information he could remember.
Only this time, his search was more targeted.
For example, a mountain suddenly shrouded in fog, where people who entered would wander in a circle and return to where they started.
Or an old neighborhood that clearly existed on the map, but navigation could never direct anyone to it.
Or a security guard at an abandoned factory who said he heard people talking inside in the middle of the night. He went in to investigate and found no one, but a shadow really had flitted across the surveillance footage.
These should be entrances to "worlds," or strange phenomena that were definitely connected to them.
And he, Chen Du, was the person who could pick up a free talent every time he stepped into a new world.
Outside the window, it had started raining again.
Deep in the curtain of rain, lightning flashed silently. It wasn't the usual ghastly white, but the strange purple light he had seen shining from the rift in the video.
Chen Du turned off his phone and closed his eyes.