The cold woke Austin before the sunlight did.
He opened one eye and winced. Morning light poured through the rotten roof. Out of habit, he reached for the settings menu to turn down the glare.
Nothing appeared.
There were no icons and no volume slider. He couldn’t even mute the sparrows squawking above him. All he got was the smell of wet pine and moldy straw, plus a cold breeze blowing through the gaps in his cot.
He checked his hands. They were pale and bony, with dirt under the nails. His thin wrists had no muscle on them. His coarse hemp clothes were tied with rough rope and smelled damp.
“Great,” he muttered. “Full-body VR with no controls. No menu, no logout. Some genius shipped this thing without an escape key.”
He reached back to pull off the headset he’d been wearing when he fell asleep after a three-day gaming binge. His fingers found only greasy hair tied in a topknot. A chipped wooden pin held it in place.
No headset. No wires.
He tried two fingers, then three. He tapped his knee and waited for a reset screen.
A clear chime sounded inside his head.
Austin stared at the amber letters floating in front of him.
“Unstable alpha build. Of course.” He rubbed his nose. “Ship it broken and let the customers find the bugs.”
Austin had spent fifteen years as a construction foreman. He once made a drywall crew tear out forty sheets because one stud was slightly crooked. On weekends, he played survival games for days at a time. He didn’t build castles. He dug drainage ditches, tested soil, and checked whether roofs could hold their own weight.
It never occurred to him that his heart might have stopped in his desk chair at four in the morning. Rebirth and ancient gods were nonsense. A crashed login server made much more sense.
“Local host,” he read. “Fine. Offline mode. Let’s see what this thing can do.”
He focused on [YES].
Something caught fire behind his belt buckle.
It was not warm or pleasant. It felt like someone had dropped a match into a barrel of fuel.
THUMP.
The force stayed inside his body, but it shook his legs and made his teeth buzz. A tiny spark flared to life in his dantian, the energy center below his navel. It burned like a pinhead-sized sun inside an invisible shell.
Outside, the morning fog vanished. For fifty yards around the shack, the damp air turned bone-dry in an instant.
Three sparrows on the roof lost every feather. The naked birds shrieked and flapped down the gorge in a panic.
Austin breathed out through his teeth. A wisp of smoke curled from his left nostril.
“Good grief.” He coughed into his sleeve. “The feedback is way too strong. Where’s the setting to turn that down?”
He swung his legs off the straw mat. When his sandals touched the floor, a blue spark jumped from his big toe to a plank. The dry wood hissed and turned black.
Austin ignored it. He was too busy studying the shack.
It was a wreck.
The body’s former owner, an orphan named Chu Yuan, had been sent to Clear Sky Sect’s outermost ridge three years earlier. The elders tested his spirit veins, found them useless, and cut his food allowance. Without charcoal or rice, the boy had died during the early spring frost.
Austin looked around the cold shack. However real this game felt, its story was rotten. Nobody should have been left here to starve.
He picked up a battered bowl from a crooked table.
[Chipped Wooden Bowl | Durability: 4/20 | Scrap Value: 1 Wood Splinter]
“Junk loot,” he said, dropping it. “No tools. No supplies. Not even a rusty knife. Whoever balanced the starter loot table should be fired.”
He pushed open the sagging door. Its hinge shrieked and dropped orange rust onto the step.
Austin winced. “Dry metal on dry metal. It needs oil. And that top hinge is out of line. Every time the door moves, it twists the frame. Amateur work.”
Outside, he found more problems.
Thorny weeds covered the yard. Their roots had pushed old stone slabs out of place. The trail was slick with moss and broken shale. The fence leaned, and the courtyard was full of holes, loose rock, and dirty puddles.
A wandering swordsman might have seen a lonely mountain hut.
Austin saw a safety violation.
“The ground slopes toward the door,” he said. His left eyelid began to twitch. “Four degrees. Rain runs straight onto the step. One hard freeze and the porch footing breaks. Who approved this?”
He rolled up his sleeves and grabbed an old hoe from the fence. Its ash handle was rough, and deep rust covered the iron blade.
[Rusted Farming Hoe | Durability: 12/50 | Mining and Tilling Speed Reduced]
“Four point two percent carbon,” he said. “Hit one good rock and this head snaps off. Cheap metal. Cheap work.”
A new screen appeared.
“Fifty weeds and a level yard for fifty experience and a well?” Austin shifted his grip. “Not much of a reward, but at least the quest tracker works. Let’s get started.”
The spark in his dantian responded to his intent. A tiny stream of heat ran down his right arm. Austin felt a pleasant rush of strength, like a game buff.
The hoe reacted very differently.
The rust vanished in a puff of orange vapor. The blade glowed red, then yellow, then blue-white. Heat bent the air around it.
Austin admired the glow. “Nice effect. A little bright, but not bad for a basic farm tool.”
Three thousand paces down the mountain, an ancient instrument began to spin inside Clear Sky Sect’s Grand Astrological Observatory. Bronze rings whirled until their bearings threw sparks. Alarm gongs rang from the rafters.
Elders in pale blue robes rushed across the jade floor.
“Elder Kong!” a junior deacon shouted. He dropped a jade tablet, and it cracked in two. “Pure solar fire has appeared on the western ridge! The needle has passed the Tenth Heavenly Tribulation mark!”
Elder Kong Wen grabbed the railing as his white beard whipped in a sudden wind. He sent his divine sense toward the peaks.
“The Sun-Crow sect vanished ten thousand years ago,” he said. “Has a Fire Phoenix broken free? Has an immortal descended?”
High above them, Austin spat out a piece of grit. He lifted the glowing hoe and swung it into the first patch of weeds.