A Chinese Ghost Story???

It seemed like only a moment had passed, yet it also felt as though a very long time had gone by.

In his grogginess, something light and airy, yet carrying a thick, utterly inescapable stench of mold and rot, suddenly rushed into He Qiu's nostrils.

It forcibly dragged him out of that bottomless abyss where his entire consciousness had been muddled and hazy, an abyss somehow even more terrifying than the warm bedcovers at home in winter.

He abruptly opened his eyes. The faint inner energy within He Qiu, still far from obvious, began circulating on its own with almost instinctive familiarity, but everything before him remained blurry.

Only after two or three seconds did his vision finally return to normal focus.

Above him were broken wooden beams draped in cobwebs. Through the gaps in shattered tiles and rotting thatch shone a gloomy, starless, moonless light, more like the dark red glow of a city deep at night.

His mind was still terribly foggy, but then he remembered that he had just selected a mission world on the platform. So this was what it meant to "enter."

Though the ground beneath him was covered in a thick layer of dust and dead leaves, the splinters and rubble within still dug painfully into him.

He had only just climbed to his feet and instinctively taken a deep breath when He Qiu realized something was wrong.

Even the air here was permeated by a complicated stink: the fishy odor of dirt, the sour reek of rotting wood and fallen leaves, and an almost imperceptible yet scalp-crawlingly cloying sweetness.

His mind gradually became fully awake.

The first thing he noticed was the sensation of touch.

The modern casual clothes He Qiu had been wearing, along with the hiker-style tactical vest he had bought