Yu Huaiting’s uninvited visit had thoroughly provoked Fu Songcheng.
The other’s willful manner—coming and going as he pleased—was only because he was powerful, while Fu Songcheng was just a newcomer.
Even a coward like Chen Muhuai, who dodged instances, could teach him how to survive in the game.
Fu Songcheng didn’t like this feeling. He didn’t like being beneath others. He was used to calmly looking down on the masses from the top.
The next morning, he chose to enter an instance.
The sensation of weightlessness briefly stripped away his senses. When the noisy roar of an engine reached his ears again, he was already sitting steadily in the back row of a bumpy minivan.
[Instance Name: Return to the Living World (D-rank)]
[Clear Condition: Live safely in Ya’nan Village for one month.]
[Player Identity: Zhang Xinci (Female).]
[Identity Background: You are a female university student who volunteered to spend a year teaching in a remote mountain area in order to obtain your school’s graduate recommendation qualification.]
Fu Songcheng stared at the pale blue system panel popping up on his retina, his brow furrowing imperceptibly.
“Female university student?”
What bothered him was the reversal of the gender setting.
Why had he been matched to a female identity?
“Hello, everyone. My name is Shen Ning. I’m also here to teach this time.”
A short-haired girl sitting next to Fu Songcheng was the first to break the silence in the cabin.
Her voice was a little tight, but Fu Songcheng keenly noticed that the fingers gripping her backpack strap were extremely steady, and her breathing showed no panic at all.
An veteran, in disguise.
Fu Songcheng quickly made his judgment internally.
With someone taking the lead, the other five young men in the cabin also began exchanging information.
“Fang Ruiyang.”
“Lü Jia.”
“Xu Jixing.”
“Wei Lai.”
“Lin Wen.”
The five young men’s self-introductions were extremely perfunctory—aside from their names, they refused to reveal a single extra word.
Fu Songcheng could confirm these were all players matched into the instance. Only players would be this cautious.
Afraid of showing their hand too early, of washing their necks clean and handing them to someone else.
Fu Songcheng listened quietly, maintaining a suitable amount of bewilderment and nervousness befitting the “Zhang Xinci” female university student identity. He lowered his voice and spoke in a slightly timid tone: “My name is Zhang Xinci.”
A group of seven—two women, five men.
Everyone warily sized each other up.
Fu Songcheng simply closed his eyes and coldly tapped at the system in his mind:
“System, explain. Why was my identity assigned as female?”
The system panel flickered, and a cold mechanical voice sounded in his mind:
[The identity assignment mechanism, in addition to referencing the instance background requirements, is affected by the player’s bound special relationship.]
[Detected that you and player Yu Huaiting share a ‘Lover’ contract. The system defaults to classifying him in the ‘dominant’ position, while you are classified in the ‘subordinate/female’ position.]
[To fit this instance’s background, your external modeling and the perception of you by NPCs/players have all been corrected to female.]
Fu Songcheng sneered silently in the darkness.
His anger deepened.
Screech—
Accompanied by a piercing, ear-grating emergency brake, the battered minivan finally stopped.
“Teachers, we’ve reached the foot of the mountain. The road ahead is too narrow for the car—I’m afraid you’ll have to walk the rest of the way.”
The driver’s rough voice came from the front.
The “Zhang Xinci” Fu Songcheng was playing had brought two suitcases, one of which seemed to be full of books and was especially heavy. Fu Songcheng pretended the suitcase was too heavy to lift, laboriously dragging it along with the others as they filed out of the minivan one by one.
Outside the car door, a middle-aged man with an honest face stood by the roadside rubbing his hands.
“Oh, we’ve been waiting for you teachers! I’m the village party secretary. Just call me Old Wang.”
The village secretary’s smile was utterly plain and sincere, his eager gaze sweeping over their group of “teaching teachers.”
Fu Songcheng didn’t rush to respond, but unobtrusively observed.
He noticed that when the village secretary came to greet them, the driver who had brought them suddenly looked up and exchanged a quick glance with the village secretary.
That glance was like counting goods.
Fu Songcheng’s heart stirred. His body suddenly tilted to the side without warning, his shoulder slamming hard into Lü Jia beside him.
Lü Jia staggered from the sudden force, his body lurching forward and happening to block squarely between the driver and the village secretary’s line of sight, forcibly cutting off their eye contact.
“Fuck! What are you doing?!”
Lü Jia steadied himself and whipped his head around, furious, glaring fiercely at Fu Songcheng.
He clearly had a bad temper. In this crisis-filled environment, being bumped into for no reason, his first reaction was that the other was about to make a dirty move.
However, when Lü Jia turned his head and clearly saw “Zhang Xinci”‘s somewhat panicked, pale, and delicate face, the killing intent in his eyes abruptly stalled.
He was looking at a woman.
Fu Songcheng precisely caught the shift in Lü Jia’s expression.
He immediately cooperated by lowering his head, putting on the appearance of someone startled, and murmured softly: “S-sorry, I twisted my ankle just now and lost my balance…”
Lü Jia irritably scratched his hair. The curse he’d been about to spit out was forcibly swallowed back, and he muttered through gritted teeth: “Forget it, forget it. Since you’re a woman, I won’t hold it against you.”
In the eyes of all the players and NPCs, his current appearance, figure, and even voice had already been disguised by the system as a young girl’s—and the other players should appear the same way to him.
Advantages and disadvantages alike.
In instances, people always subconsciously lowered their guard around seemingly delicate women—but they also always assumed such women were easy to bully, and showed them malice.
The village secretary seemed not to have noticed this little interlude. He deftly picked up the two girls’ suitcases and cheerfully led the way: “Teachers, let’s go. Once we’re through the mountain, we’ll be at our village.”
The group followed behind the village secretary onto the muddy mountain path.
Fu Songcheng walked in the middle-rear of the group.
He kept his eyes fixed on the road beneath his feet.
The gray-white concrete road disappeared bit by bit behind him.
One step, two steps, three steps…
The moment they rounded a mountain bend and the concrete road behind them completely vanished from sight.
There was no warning at all.
It was as if the power cord in his brain had been yanked out.
The village secretary’s figure ahead instantly blurred. Fu Songcheng felt his vision go dark, and a tyrannical, utterly irresistible drowsiness submerged him completely like a tsunami.
He didn’t even have time for the thought of struggling before he lost consciousness entirely.
…
At the same time, outside the instance, in the high-level player rest area.
Yu Huaiting sat on the sofa, his solid muscles covered in wounds large and small that had just begun to scab over.
He was irritably wrapping extremely cheap, ordinary bandages around his own arm, cursing as he wrapped: “Fuck, all those high-grade potions, and he just takes them and doesn’t even have the courtesy to say thanks. Hiss—”
Because his movements were too big and tugged at his wounds, Yu Huaiting sucked in a breath of cold air.
Just as he was about to bite through the bandage.
Buzz—
A sharp ringing suddenly sounded deep in his brain, and then, without warning, the world before his eyes plunged into a dead, silent darkness.
Control of his body was stripped away in an instant, and an extremely intense vertigo surged up violently.
“Enemy attack?!”
A top-tier player like Yu Huaiting, who had fought his way out of mountains of corpses and seas of blood, had instincts faster than his brain.
Even though he couldn’t see anything, within half a second he shot to his feet, his right hand grabbing at the air—and the greatsword that had accompanied him in slaying countless bosses materialized instantly in his grip.
“Get the hell out here!”
Yu Huaiting roared, his berserk killing intent mixed with sharp sword wind as he furiously slashed at the empty darkness around him.
Boom—crash—!
The tea table, the sofa, even the walls of the rest room were destroyed by him.
His demolition skills were impressive.
Yu Huaiting fought against the air with wit and courage for a full five minutes before the faintness gradually receded like the tide.
Yu Huaiting panted heavily as his vision slowly returned.
He looked at the mess of a rest room, then at the greatsword in his hand, and finally his gaze locked dead onto a glaring line of text that had just popped up on his system panel.
[System Notification: Your lover ‘Fu Songcheng’ has suffered a strong ‘forced unconsciousness/mental interference’ negative status in the instance. You have automatically shared 50% of the negative effect for him.]
Yu Huaiting’s chest heaved violently.
He stared fixedly at that line of text, the veins on his forehead bulging one by one.
“Fu! Song! Cheng!”
Yu Huaiting was so furious he kicked a half-broken sofa flying. “Are you fucking pig?!”
Leave a Reply