The Sims

In the urban-rural fringe, inside a partitioned rental room less than five square meters in size.

Bang!

Zhou Ming viciously threw his suit jacket onto the floor. His eyes red-rimmed, he tilted his head back and collapsed heavily onto the creaking single bed.

Endless frustration surged through him. Three days—he had only worked that seemingly respectable sales job for three days before offending his supervisor over some trivial matter. He had been made an example of and kicked out of the company without receiving a single cent.

Yet the suit he had bought just to look presentable at work had cost him a full three hundred yuan!

"Aah!"

Zhou Ming gripped his hair and let out an unwilling roar in his heart.

Why? Why was I always so unlucky?!

It had been more than three years since he graduated from university. Salesman, security guard, assembly-line worker, construction laborer—no matter what job he took, no matter how he performed, something would always happen. Either he got fired or quit on his own. He had never lasted three months at any job.

Zhou Ming had looked for reasons in himself too. Was it because he was too aloof and withdrawn? Because he was not smooth enough in dealing with people and did not know how to flatter them? Or because he was too ugly and people disliked looking at him?

None of those were it!

Zhou Ming believed that although he was somewhat distant, he was not arrogantly self-righteous. Although he was not particularly tactful, he was not so blunt as to leave others no room. As for his appearance, he was 170 centimeters tall, with ordinary features, neither fat nor thin. No matter how he looked at it, the word "ugly" had nothing to do with him.

What exactly was the reason he had been doing so terribly ever since graduating from university?

Zhou Ming racked his brains but could not figure it out.

Beep, beep, beep~

"Are you still troubled by the disappointments of life?"

"Are you still resentful of your terrible circumstances?"

"Do you want to change your life?"

"The Sims—change your life, starting now!"

A mechanical synthesized voice seemed to ring beside his ear.

"Who? Who's talking?" Zhou Ming jolted upright and looked around, but all he saw were the mottled gray-white walls surrounding him.

"Hello, Host. Due to the immense mental fluctuations detected in your brain, you have fortunately become a lucky user of The Sims on the Alpha 1078 Plane. After binding to this system, you will qualify for a lifetime of free access to The Sims. Would you like to bind?"

"Wait, I have a question. What exactly is this The Sims system?" Zhou Ming asked impatiently, both shocked and delighted.

A system—Zhou Ming had spent years reading webnovels, so he was intimately familiar with the word. Once a protagonist obtained a system, no matter how unlucky or miserable he was, he could instantly turn his life around, trample all sorts of rich and handsome rivals beneath his feet, and win countless beauties.

I never thought something this good would happen to me today.

"The Sims is a life-experience game invented by a higher-dimensional civilization. In this game, players may assume any role in any civilization along any timeline. Based on their differing performances in the game, they will receive different achievement rewards, and some of those rewards may be brought back into the real world..." The system went on and on for half an hour.

After listening to the system's explanation, Zhou Ming's face was filled with wild joy, his mouth hanging open in an "O" shape as boundless waves surged through his heart.

"Starting today, I'm finally going to make it big!"

An hour later.

After familiarizing himself with the various functions of the system interface, Zhou Ming returned to the main Task Panel.

The main Task Panel displayed a long row of draggable mission maps. Aside from the first mission map, Zhang Ergou's Counterattack Life, the dozen or so maps after it were all grayed out and locked. Clearly, the later stages could not be unlocked until he cleared the earlier ones.

"How do I unlock the later maps?" Zhou Ming asked the system.

"When the Achievement Points earned by the player in earlier stages exceed the minimum requirement for unlocking the next stage, the next stage will unlock automatically."

"What about the first map, Zhang Ergou's Counterattack Life? How many Achievement Points does it require?"

"Zhang Ergou's Counterattack Life is a beginner map and requires no Achievement Points to enter."

"Then how do I earn Achievement Points?"

Zhou Ming looked at the second mission on the Task Panel, Lord's Dispute. After clicking it, a prompt appeared stating that 500 Achievement Points were required to unlock it.

"Achievement Points are earned in six major areas: the player's personal wealth, power and status, reputation, life partner, number of descendants, and lifespan. The system will grant corresponding Achievement Point rewards based on the player's performance in these six areas."

"You mean that the greater a player's personal wealth, power and status, reputation, number of life partners and descendants, and lifespan, the more Achievement Points they'll receive?"

"...You can understand it that way."

"What about the conversion rates? How are wealth, power, reputation, partners, lifespan, and all those things converted into Achievement Points?"

"The system has its own conversion formula. As long as the player performs at Grade A or above in the game, the Achievement Points earned will be enough to unlock the next stage."

After another round of explanations from the system, Zhou Ming understood how the game worked. But what made him feel miserable was that in The Sims system, there were pitifully few settings related to cheat abilities.

"System, do the game characters I play really not even have basic traits like photographic memory, the strength of an ox, or immunity to poison?"

"Sorry. To maintain game balance, such traits only appear on special game characters. To play these special characters, the Host must purchase the corresponding Character Card."

Zhou Ming went to the system store and took a look. He found that even the cheapest Son of Landlord's Butler Character Card required 5,000 Achievement Points. That was not even mentioning Character Cards such as Son of Great Merchant and Son of King, which cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of Achievement Points. With his account balance showing zero, all he could do for now was fantasize about them.

"Without cheat abilities, System, can I bring my existing memories into the game?"

"Yes. However, for the protection of the player's body, the Host may choose between two modes to enter the game. First, inject all of the original consciousness into the game character, erase the game character's original personality, and retain only some basic information. Second, retain the game character's original personality and memories, while injecting part of the Host's personality and carried skill information... The Host may refer to these two modes as 'Replacement Mode' and 'Injection Mode.'"

Replacement Mode and Injection Mode each had their strengths and weaknesses. The advantage of Replacement Mode was that it gave the player a stronger sense of immersion, with greater freedom and independence in personality and behavior. Injection Mode, on the other hand, manifested as the player's subtle influence over the game character, somewhat like Soul Symbiosis. The player was also more like the Old Grandpa hidden inside a ring in fantasy novels.

Of the two modes, Zhou Ming naturally preferred the more flexible Replacement Mode. Moreover, he could bring his life experience into the game. The effect would not be inferior to the "omniscient and omnipotent" cheat abilities of protagonists in certain rebirth novels. At the very least, with the soul of a mature adult starting from a low point in a completely unfamiliar environment, he could always avoid quite a few failures and setbacks that would otherwise be unavoidable during the process of learning and growing.

Thus, that evening, after spending more than eighty yuan on barbecue at an upscale stall on the nearby snack street, Zhou Ming returned to his rental room. He locked the door behind him and, filled with incomparable anticipation, entered the first beginner map of The Sims—Zhang Ergou's Counterattack Life.