The Vanishing Shut-In

Preface: The Vanishing Shut-In

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After entering the workforce, Tang De had spent several years maintaining a leisurely but steady job. In his spare time, his greatest hobby was competing against others in video games. If there was anything unusual about him, it only showed in an online game called Warcraft!

As a Warcraft fan, he had started playing the game before college.

As a bit of a shut-in, aside from his relatives and classmates, most of the friends he got along with were people he had met through the game. He wasn't an internationally top-tier player, but he was still quite well-known among the players at his school and in the surrounding area.

Then one day, the power lines in his residential neighborhood were being renovated. By coincidence, the work was interrupted by a rare, violent thunderstorm, and the workers had to stop. The power had not yet been turned on, so some newly installed cables were still exposed. Just then, a terrifying, enormous bolt of lightning, twisting like a mass of writhing serpents, was drawn to the exposed high-voltage lines and came crashing down from the sky.

The small place Tang De rented for himself was right next to the construction site. Charged with the force of the enormous lightning bolt, the high-voltage wire whipped about as if it were being yanked by an unseen hand. With tremendous force, it shattered the window of his home and shot inside. The powerful current somehow formed a blinding ball of lightning in his bedroom, suspended in the air.

Then the ball of lightning suddenly expanded violently before contracting inward with a jerk, shrinking into a speck of light invisible to the naked eye in less than a millisecond.

The speck contained all the power of the enormous lightning bolt, along with terrifying energy. The qualitative change tore through space, opening a palm-sized rift in the center of the bedroom, which was less than thirty square meters in size.

There was no scenery within the rift, yet anyone who looked into it could feel that it contained a terrifying storm. It was as if countless living beings across endless worlds had been destroyed in an instant, reborn, and then destroyed again. A pinpoint of golden light drifted near the rift's opening, seemingly trying to break free of some kind of restraint and escape into the real world.

But the terrifying force within the rift was too powerful. The golden light had almost reached the opening and had faintly taken the shape of a book, but in the end, it fell just short.

Seeing the rift about to close under the force of the great world, the golden object refused to accept defeat. It harnessed the surrounding storm's power and abruptly unleashed a powerful suction force, barely managing to extend it beyond the rift. It swept up every living thing within roughly three meters of the opening, then, with its prize in tow, was flung an unknown distance away from the rift by the storm.

It all happened in the blink of an eye. Unlucky Tang De was in the middle of an intense match with his teammates at his computer in his previous life, and the battle had reached a life-or-death moment. Before he could react, he barely managed half a scream before the rift created by the lightning bolt suddenly appearing in his room sucked him in. His body was destroyed instantly, while his soul was swept into the terrifying spatial storm under the protection of a point of golden light.

Only after his soul merged with the golden object shaped like a book did Tang De learn that the culprit responsible for his death in that world was the very artifact that had preserved his soul: the Book of Truth.

But although it was a powerful artifact of legend, it could do little in the turbulent spatial storm beyond the universe, one of the most dangerous places of all. It could only hunker down and passively protect itself.

If not for a once-in-millennia qualitative change in the power of lightning, which had pierced the stable spatial barrier of that world by striking a single point, the Book of Truth would never have had a chance. It had been near the rift in space, but the world's barrier had proved far stronger than the Artifact Spirit had expected. In its current state, with no one to wield it and no strength left to follow up, it simply couldn't break through the rift's opening, escape the terrifying spatial storm, and descend into that primary material world.

In the end, with no other choice, the Artifact Spirit—which had not yet developed true intelligence—could only think of drawing a living being inside to become its master. With an intelligent being actively controlling it, the artifact could wield greater power, and perhaps one day it might manage to escape this dangerous, desolate spatial turbulence.

And so, protected by the artifact, Tang De's soul fell unconsciously into a state close to sleep. In a daze, he drifted through the turbulent flow of time and space with the Book of Truth for an unknown length of time.

Then one day, the crystal wall surrounding a vast multiverse began to ripple under the power of certain mighty beings, forming a series of tiny cracks, each just wide enough for an insect to fly through.

The Book of Truth was nearby. Seizing the chance, it instantly passed through the universe's barrier and entered the primary material plane of an unfamiliar universe.

After descending into the primary material plane like a shooting star, the artifact had spent countless years in the spatial turbulence, nearly exhausting its energy. It could only passively yield to this world's gravity as it fell from a height of several thousand meters.