The Sims

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

"Bang!"

Throwing his suit jacket heavily onto the floor, Zhou Ming, with red eyes, lay back heavily on the creaking single bed, his head tilted towards the ceiling.

An overwhelming sense of frustration surged through him. Three days. This seemingly decent sales job lasted only three days. Because of a small matter, he offended his supervisor and was made an example of, kicked out of the company without a single penny.

And that suit he wore to look presentable for work cost him a full three hundred silver dollars!

"Ah!"

Zhou Ming grabbed his hair, letting out an unwilling roar from within.

Why! Why am I always so unlucky?!

It had been over three years since he graduated from university. Sales, security guard, assembly line worker, bricklayer – no matter what job, no matter how he performed, for various reasons, he was either fired or quit voluntarily. He couldn't hold down a job for more than three months.

Zhou Ming had also looked for reasons within himself. Was it because his personality was too cold and aloof, or because he wasn't smooth enough in dealing with people and couldn't flatter others, or was it because he was too ugly and disliked?

None of those!

Zhou Ming believed that although his personality was somewhat cold, he wasn't self-righteous. While not smooth in dealing with people, he wasn't completely heartless either. As for his appearance, he was 170cm tall, with facial features not much different from ordinary people, neither fat nor thin. He couldn't possibly be described as ugly.

What exactly was the reason that he had been so miserable since graduating from university?

Zhou Ming racked his brain but couldn't figure it out.

"Beep beep beep~"

"Are you still troubled by the dissatisfactions in your life?"

"Are you still feeling unfair about your terrible living situation?"

"Do you want to change your life?"

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

A mechanical synthesized voice seemed to sound in his ear.

"Who? Who's speaking?" Zhou Ming was startled, looking around, but only saw the mottled gray and white walls.

"Hello, Host. Due to detecting a huge mental fluctuation in your brain, you have fortunately become a lucky user of The Sims on the Alpha 1078 Plane. After binding this system, you will gain the qualification for a lifetime free experience of The Sims. Do you wish to bind?"

"Wait, I want to ask, what is this The Sims system?" Zhou Ming, both surprised and delighted, asked impatiently.

System. As someone with many years of experience reading web novels, Zhou Ming was very familiar with these two words. Once a system attached itself to a protagonist, no matter how unlucky or miserable they were, they could instantly turn their lives around, step on all sorts of rich and handsome guys, and win the hearts of countless beauties.

He never expected such a good thing to happen to him today.

"The Sims is a life experience game invented by a super-dimensional civilization. In this game, players can play any role in any timeline and any civilization, and based on the player's different performance in the game, different achievement rewards will be issued, and some of these rewards can be brought back to the real world..." The system chattered on for half an hour for Zhou Ming.

After listening to the system's explanation, Zhou Ming's face was filled with ecstasy, his mouth forming an "o" shape, and his heart was already surging with infinite waves.

"From today onwards, I'm finally going to get rich!"

An hour later.

After familiarizing himself with the various operations on the system panel, Zhou Ming returned to the main mission panel.

On the main mission panel, there was a long list of draggable mission maps. Except for the first mission map, Zhang Ergou's Counterattack Life, the subsequent dozen or so mission maps were displayed as locked and gray. Clearly, without clearing the previous levels, the later levels could not be unlocked.

"How can I unlock the maps after this?" Zhou Ming asked the system.

"When the game achievement points obtained by the player in the previous levels exceed the minimum threshold for unlocking the next level, the next level will automatically unlock."

"What about the first map, Zhang Ergou's Counterattack Life? How many achievement points are needed?"

"Zhang Ergou's Counterattack Life is a novice map and can be entered without achievement points."

"Then how can I get achievement points?"

Zhou Ming looked at the second mission on the mission panel, Lord's Dispute. Clicking on it brought up a prompt stating that unlocking it required 500 achievement points.

"Achievement points are obtained from six major aspects, including the player's personal wealth, status and power, reputation, life partner, number of descendants, and lifespan. The system will award corresponding achievement points based on the player's performance in these six areas."

"You mean to say that the more personal wealth a player has, the higher their status and power, the greater their reputation, the more life partners and descendants they have, and the longer their lifespan, the more achievement points they will get?"

"...That's one way to understand it."

"What about the conversion ratio? How are things like wealth, power, reputation, partners, and lifespan converted into achievement points?"

"The system has its own conversion formula. As long as the player performs at an A-grade or higher in the game, the achievement points obtained will be sufficient to unlock the next level."

After another explanation from the system, Zhou Ming understood the gameplay of this game, but what made him feel frustrated was that in this The Sims system, the settings related to cheat abilities were surprisingly few.

"System, the game character I want to play, doesn't even have the most basic settings like photographic memory, strength like an ox, or immunity to all poisons?"

"Sorry, to maintain game balance, these settings only appear on special game characters. To play these special characters, the host needs to purchase corresponding character cards."

Zhou Ming went to the system store to take a look and found that the cheapest [Son of Landlord's Butler] character card required 5000 achievement points to redeem, not to mention character cards like [Son of Great Merchant] and [Son of King] which cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of achievement points. With his account balance showing 0, he could only fantasize about them for now.

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

"Yes, but for the protection of the player's body, the host can choose between two modes to enter the game. One is to inject all of the original consciousness into the game character, erasing the game character's original personality while retaining only some basic information; the second is to retain the game character's original personality and memories, but inject a portion of the host's personality and carried skill information... The host can refer to these two modes as 'Replacement Mode' and 'Injection Mode' respectively."

Replacement Mode and Injection Mode each had their pros and cons. The advantage of Replacement Mode was that the player had a stronger sense of immersion, and their personality and behavior were more free and independent. Injection Mode, on the other hand, manifested as the player's subtle influence on the game character, somewhat like "soul symbiosis," where the player was more like the "old grandpa" hidden in a ring in fantasy novels.

Between the two modes, Zhou Ming naturally preferred the "Replacement Mode" which offered greater freedom. Moreover, he could bring his life experience into the game, and its effect was not inferior to the "all-knowing and all-powerful" cheat abilities of protagonists in some rebirth novels. At the very least, the soul of a mature adult, starting from a relatively low point in a completely unfamiliar environment, could always save a lot of necessary failures and setbacks during the process of learning and growth.

So, that evening, after eating a barbecue worth over eighty yuan at a high-end barbecue stall on a nearby snack street, he returned to his rented room, locked the door, and with immense anticipation, Zhou Ming entered the first novice map of The Sims - Zhang Ergou's Counterattack Life.