(Safety notice: This is a completely fictional urban setting. Its world is managed by four major corporations and numerous large, medium, and small companies—a typical corporate world.)
(Brain storage: A reasonable, coercive-style story. The characters won't get dumber. Updates will be regular, though there will definitely be bugs. I'll do my best to fix them, so please forgive me.)
Xu City, Jia City District.
The corporate security office under the jurisdiction of Xu Corporation.
Inside an interrogation room fitted with iron bars.
The gray-and-white tones were cold and gloomy.
A concrete wall fitted with thick bulletproof glass stood like a massive barrier, completely separating the interrogators from the person being questioned.
On this side were the interrogators; on the other, the person being questioned. A young and an old security guard were taking a statement from a young man.
The young man being questioned, Gao Linzhi, sat in silence.
Just an ordinary transmigrator, reborn in the Corporate World, now twenty-three.
He was in another world, halfway through his life, and had no system.
This place was utterly different from the Earth of his previous life.
There were no countries, only companies large and small, much like the Umbrella Corporation in Resident Evil, managing every aspect of people's lives from birth to death.
The rule was ironclad, the net all-encompassing, the class system rigid, and the hierarchy clear.
Ordinary people without connections could only make a little money.
Their safe wealth limit was ten million.
Once you exceeded ten million, people would come after you.
Every year, there were always geniuses who thought their exceptional gifts—whether a good body or a good brain given to them by heaven—would let them make a fortune and leap up the social ladder. It was basically a death wish.
They would turn up dead with eight bullets in them, get lucky and be reborn, or build a fast-rising unicorn company only for it to inexplicably run out of cash and be swallowed up... Things like that happened all the time.
The only viable path was to kneel before the powerful and become their dog.
A son-in-law, a foster son, a disciple taken into the inner circle... Those were the final destinations of most gifted commoners.
But Gao Linzhi had been born with all his memories from his previous life intact. His pride had been there since childhood.
His legs didn't work right. He couldn't kneel.
The two worlds differed in many ways, but their cultures were broadly similar.
In his previous life, Gao Linzhi had spent twenty years reading web novels.
All he had to do was adapt stories into text and polish them carefully. Building a fortune of over a billion wouldn't be a problem.
Fortunately, he had been most fond of novels about the reasonable faction and the Stealthy Cultivation Genre. And since the internet was just as advanced in this world, people were always venting their frustrations online, and their posts weren't deleted quickly enough. That was how he discovered the truth about this world.
So at twenty-three, when he had only made eight million, he clearly sensed a few eyes watching him. He pretended to have no grand ambitions and to be content with a modest fortune, then decisively stopped.
A fully paid-off house, a fully paid-off car, four million in savings, and he still went to work.
All that remained was to wait for a cheat.
With a cheat, he would rebel. Without one, he would live comfortably for the rest of his life.
At that moment, Gao Linzhi wasn't a suspect.
He was merely the second person to discover a suicide, and he had complete security footage and eyewitness testimony to prove his innocence.
But judging by the way the security office was acting, they were interrogating him as if he were a criminal.
The young security guard opposite him was still turning to say something to the old security guard.
"They should've slapped the cuffs on him right from the start and given him a scare. That would've loosened his tongue in no time."
Gao Linzhi felt angry when he heard that, but for the moment, he could only put up with it.
That was how corporate lackeys really treated someone without connections.
Even if he worked diligently, had no loans, came from a good family, and paid his taxes on time...
At least he knew what he had gained from the suicide scene.
The day when he would "stop eating beef" wasn't far off.
At that moment, a game panel appeared in his mind.
[Player: Gao Linzhi.] [Constitution: 5] [Spirit: 7] [HP: 50 (Constitution x10)] [MP: 70 (Spirit x10)] [Level 1] [Experience: 0/100] [Talent: The Only Ordinary Player (Unique Dark Gold Quality)] [You carry the mysterious Power of Space-Time. After the incomplete Skyfall Game System attached itself to you, it combined with that power, making you the only ordinary player able to enjoy the complete game functions.] [Other players only have access to some game functions: no resurrection, no health bar, no Mana Bar. But defeating monsters grants experience and materials, which can be used to level up, allocate points, and improve skills.] [Would you like to enter the game now?]
Of course, he wouldn't enter the game. He had two hostile NPCs right in front of him.
An Ordinary Player was basically a Dragonborn. Even if he hit a chicken, the whole city would chase after him.
"Engineer Gao, don't be afraid. We're just asking some routine questions. Just tell us the truth," the old security guard said kindly.
Gao Linzhi raised his head and looked at the two men.
"Gao Linzhi, tell us carefully how you discovered Li Ziming's death. Don't leave out a single detail. Especially anything you took from the scene—you'd better explain it all, exactly as it happened!"
"You know what happens if you deceive the company!" the young security guard snapped.
At the same time, he fixed Gao Linzhi with a haughty stare.
There was thirty percent suspicion, thirty percent intimidation, and forty percent contempt in his eyes.
Gao Linzhi took a deep breath, gathered his thoughts, and began to recount what had happened.
"At ten this morning, Brother Li was late again."
"Then a client called with an urgent request to fix a system bug right away. That module was the one Brother Li was personally responsible for."
He stopped there. A horrifying image surfaced in his mind.
Brother Li hung from the ceiling, no longer wearing the kind smile of the good-natured man he usually was.
Only his two bare, hairy legs, his deathly pale face, his blank gray-white eyes, and his lolling tongue remained...
Beneath his hairy legs lay two objects.
A glowing blue orb.
And a black-and-white game poster:
"Skyfall, the all-new, next-generation, realistic alternate-world game! Blue Star people don't lie to Blue Star people!"
There was also a line of messy red words written in blood on the poster: "If we won't be your dogs, does that mean we have to die?"
The handwriting was unmistakably Brother Li's.
Below it was a line in black: "Yes!"
Gao Linzhi, who had played plenty of games, had accidentally touched the orb with his foot while trying to save him.
The customer service manager who had gone with him, Lin Qing, seemed not to have seen the Blue Orb.
After screaming, she hurried forward and picked up the game poster. She looked delighted.
If he hadn't told her to call the police, she seemed like she would have turned and left.
Thinking back on it now, Gao Linzhi felt she might have known more than she let on.
If Gao Linzhi hadn't been a transmigrator, then under normal circumstances, Lin Qing would have been the one to gain access to Skyfall.
That was reality. Good luck always went to someone else.
When it was your turn, you weren't especially unlucky, but you didn't get lucky either.
But he was still a transmigrator, and he had the mysterious Power of Space-Time.
The Skyfall Game System had absorbed his Power of Space-Time, which was why it had given him full access to the game.
That explained everything.
At that moment, Gao Linzhi was thinking all this as he spoke aloud:
Before you continue