Lin Cimian put down his phone. After washing up, he was about to brush his teeth when he suddenly remembered Good Day’s message.
As if possessed, he wandered into the kitchen, drank a glass of warm milk, and only then climbed into bed.
He stretched and let out a long breath, feeling so comfortable that he could not resist rolling around a few times while wrapped in his blanket. Only after finding a satisfactory position did he close his eyes.
Lin Cimian had just begun trying to summon sleep when his phone suddenly rang. The captain’s name appeared on the screen.
Lin Cimian: (ーー゛)
He shot upright, face darkening, and irritably ruffled his hair into a mess.
What could possibly be so urgent that he could not send a WeChat message? Why did he have to call?!
Lin Cimian had already left the boy group, and his relationship with the captain was terrible. There was no longer any need to maintain a false appearance of harmony. Gritting his teeth and summoning his courage from sheer irritation, Lin Cimian decisively hit Decline and switched on airplane mode.
In that instant, the whole world became quiet.
Having finally done something he had always wanted to do, Lin Cimian felt satisfaction tingle all the way across his scalp. Smiling broadly, he burrowed into his warm blankets and drifted into sleep in an exceptionally good mood.
…
On the other end of the phone, the captain sat in a noisy bar, staring at his phone in disbelief as though Lin Cimian hanging up on him constituted some monstrous crime.
Before the call, the group had all been drinking heavily. The captain had been nursing a bellyful of resentment and had spent ages making sarcastic, spiteful remarks.
“What friends could Lin Cimian possibly have? After quitting the industry, he’s definitely cooped up indoors every day, going crazy from how miserable he is. Maybe he’s even developed some kind of psychological problem!”
“You have no idea how unlikeable that guy Lin Cimian is. I lived under the same roof as him for so long back then, and just thinking about it now disgusts me.”
“Don’t believe me? I’ll call him right now. Lin Cimian will come running the second I ask. He’s the kind of person who can’t stand being lonely. Once he gets here, not only will he pour drinks for me, he’ll thank me for introducing him to friends!”
Now, listening to the busy tone on the other end, every word he had said earlier slapped him across the face, leaving it burning.
“Fuck. He doesn’t know what’s good for him!” The captain lost his temper and slammed his phone onto the floor, wishing he could pretend it was Lin Cimian and stomp on it a few times.
His drinking buddies froze awkwardly too, exchanging looks with eyebrows raised, their eyes full of ridicule.
They all knew why the captain was so angry.
The captain looked down on Lin Cimian, but now that M&N no longer had Lin Cimian, its popularity had been severely affected. Several collaborations and endorsement deals that had nearly been finalized had fallen through one after another.
The manager had been furious. He had torn into the captain for his past conflict with Lin Cimian and viciously stabbed straight at the captain’s arrogant pride.
—“Didn’t you used to look down on Lin Cimian? Didn’t you think he was the one rotten piece spoiling the whole group? Didn’t you think M&N would reach new heights once he left?”
—“And what happened? Lin Cimian was the soul of M&N. Without him, people aren’t even willing to spare half a glance for the rest of you. Weren’t you so full of yourself, convinced you were the most talented one and certain you’d make it big in the entertainment industry? The fact is, you can’t even compare to Lin Cimian’s little finger!”
The captain was so furious that for a moment he hallucinated someone cursing him right beside his ear. He suddenly swept one arm sideways and knocked bottle after bottle of alcohol from the table.
Glass shattered across the floor, shards spraying outward as a small chorus of startled cries rose nearby.
The captain’s leg was cut as well, but he felt no pain. His expression twisted, his breathing heavy. Incapable of changing his current situation, he could only behave like a loser, making vicious declarations in a desperate attempt to salvage his shattered self-esteem.
“After quitting the industry, Lin Cimian is nothing! All I need is one perfect performance and I can easily get onto the trending list. He’ll never be able to do that again!!”
Perhaps it was coincidence. Or perhaps Lin Cimian was somehow responding to those words from afar. At the bottom of the trending list, a new topic appeared:
#Dream Record of the Nine Heavens#
After opening the topic, the most popular post was a video released by the official account.
@Dream Record of the Nine Heavens: We finally got to see the Nine-Tailed Fox True Form. Crying.jpg.
The official account was constantly fooling around and so active it looked like a parody account, yet its follower count was unexpectedly high. Many players received the notification immediately, while others spotted the trending topic and clicked in out of curiosity.
The official team was dependable when it came to production. The footage was clear, the music carefully chosen, and the edited video received huge numbers of likes. It was polished enough to serve directly as promotional material.
At first, the comments were all praise, but other voices quickly appeared.
[Joyous Union has this talent?]
[Let me explain on the official account’s behalf. Yes, it does, but Joyous Union has been ruined by every variety of online scammer and gets cursed nonstop. This is the first time anyone has ever triggered the talent.]
[Just look at the word “finally” and that exclamation mark in the title, and you can feel the planners’ excitement and emotion after being cursed at countless times.]
[This Joyous Union player looks familiar. Isn’t he the one who found that game bug earlier?]
[That’s him! Our Mianmian is cute, ridiculous, mechanically skilled, has a sweet voice, and loves supporting useless men. Invest in him now—you won’t regret it.]
[This Joyous Union player isn’t related to one of the game designers, is he? The official account specially edited a video for him and even added background music. That’s pretty suspicious.]
[You really can’t blame the official team for this one. I recommend finding the original video. I refuse to be the only person brainwashed by it. Dog-head.jpg.]
[I’m back. Truly a musical genius. Thanks to him, this song is now stuck in my head.]
By personally putting up a golden signboard for him, the official account sent a huge wave of viewers flooding into Lin Cimian’s livestream. His follower count shot upward in a straight line, successfully placing him on the platform’s rankings for new streamers.
It had been half a month since Lin Cimian left the entertainment industry. Starting from absolutely nothing, he had become the first streamer to receive official backing—and had appeared on the trending list before the captain and the boy group did.
The moment Lin Cimian started streaming that afternoon, the barrage of comments nearly blinded him.
[Oh? The real man is here?]
[A true man. Are we fighting again later?]
[Several dozen of us discussed it and decided we’d like to jointly become your number-two patron. Can you give every one of us a purple weapon?]
[Holy shit, he received this many gifts the second the stream started. Looks like he’s got some tricks up his sleeve. Side-eye-smile.jpg.]
[Fun fact: a streamer can only receive their share of gift revenue after signing a contract. The streamer hasn’t signed, so he hasn’t earned a single cent. Meanwhile, the purple weapon and various gifts he’s given away in-game are already approaching five figures. How is this an online scam? This is clearly charity. The only problem is that I’m not the charity recipient. Sob sob.]
Lin Cimian had already received private messages from the platform asking him to sign a contract. Even after he politely declined, they followed up multiple times.
With no other choice, Lin Cimian admitted that he was still a minor and had no guardian available to sign for him. The platform could not exactly break its own rules, so after repeatedly emphasizing that he absolutely had to sign with them once he became an adult, they reluctantly backed off.
Lin Cimian wanted high viewership, but even he had not expected it to grow this quickly. Worried he would not be able to manage it, the platform even assigned multiple moderators to his channel, directly banning anyone who came in just to curse at him.
With so many people suddenly watching his stream, Lin Cimian could not help becoming nervous. He unconsciously clicked his mouse twice and accidentally entered the patch of wasteland he had only recently opened up.
At last, he had something to do. He rummaged through his warehouse, found some rare seeds, and planted them in his medicinal field.
The rarer the medicinal plant, the lower its chance of sprouting. Fortunately, Joyous Union possessed a special planting talent. Once the Prayer Dance was performed, the success rate rose dramatically.
Before this, Joyous Union had always been seen as a useless support class. Its special planting talent was practically the only respectable thing it had, so Joyous Union players had somehow become absurdly competitive over it. There had even once been a small-scale video competition to see whose Prayer Dance looked best.
The official developers had put no effort into this feature at all. Players had to choreograph the dance themselves, and those who did not know how simply flailed around [censored] at random.
Lin Cimian belonged to the latter group, but he had at least put a little thought into it.
Instead of standing stiffly in place, he first lifted one leg to the left and then the right. Afterward, his entire body twitched several times as though he were having a fit, and then for no discernible reason he began circling the seed.
The livestream viewers: “…”
[I may not be well educated, but don’t lie to me. How is this a Prayer Dance? You’re clearly performing a shamanic ritual!]
[Nothing wrong with that. They’re basically in the same category anyway.]
[The streamer made his character’s face so pretty, so his aesthetic sense should be decent. Why does he keep doing these bizarre, ridiculous things?]
[HAHAHAHA let me go first—this perfectly matches my current mental state.]
[Confirmed: Chinese people don’t scam fellow Chinese people. This Joyous Union player isn’t running an online romance scam, mainly because he doesn’t have the qualifications. Dog-head.jpg.]
After planting the medicinal herbs, Lin Cimian did not linger. He wanted to find a new scenario, but he got distracted halfway through when he noticed a red dot on his mailbox. As if possessed, he clicked it.
Because of the mechanics of the Black Bear Takes a Bride dungeon, Lin Cimian had spent the entire run locked inside a dark room and had gotten virtually no gameplay experience. The official team had therefore sent everyone a link where they could switch between both players’ perspectives and replay the entire dungeon exploration process.
Lin Cimian directly selected Good Day’s perspective.
In his impression, Good Day was a complete beginner who never spent more than two hours online each day.
He did not even do daily quests, so Lin Cimian had assumed he was probably unfamiliar with the skill interface too. But from Good Day’s point of view, it became clear that his mechanics were actually quite good.
The most difficult section of the dungeon was the Jungle Maze Formation. Most players became trapped there and failed to escape even after time ran out. Good Day, however, moved as though he had seen the answer in advance. He never hesitated over a single step and passed through the maze at astonishing speed.
The livestream viewers stared in disbelief. Someone raised a question:
[He didn’t use a cheat, did he? He even knew some paths had to be looped through twice. How would a normal person ever think of that?!]
Seeing the comment, Lin Cimian explained.
Sleepless Tonight: Did everyone see the pattern at the entrance? That was actually a flat diagram. To put it simply, the maze originally existed inside a cube. When you forcibly flatten it into a plane, routes at higher and lower elevations overlap. Although we’re walking through a two-dimensional maze, we have to follow the routes of the three-dimensional maze. That’s why some paths have to be walked several times. They look like the same path, but they’re actually different routes. All of that can be worked out through analysis. He wasn’t using a cheat.
After Lin Cimian finished explaining, some of the viewers became even more devastated.
[What flat diagram? Wasn’t that just random scribbling?!]
[Fuck. So people who are bad at math don’t deserve to play games, is that it?]
[I analyzed it following the streamer’s method. It works, but my abilities are limited and I still can’t calculate the correct route.]
[This is exactly how I feel in advanced mathematics class. It sounds like someone reciting scripture from heaven.]
After replying, Lin Cimian continued watching Good Day’s point of view. After the Jungle Formation, Good Day encountered one trap after another, all extremely difficult. Lin Cimian analyzed them while explaining them to the livestream. The viewers kept exclaiming that they had learned something and wanted to pull out little notebooks to record the key points.
The footage continued. Lin Cimian’s emotions grew complicated. Good Day had worked so hard while he himself had sat in the dark room doing absolutely nothing. It gave him the uncomfortable feeling of receiving benefits without earning them. Thinking back to how confidently he had once said he would take Good Day around the game, the tips of his ears suddenly felt warm.
While his thoughts wandered in every direction, Good Day reached an open clearing and stood there without moving for a long time.
Lin Cimian’s attention returned to the screen. He watched in confusion for a while. Just as a trace of familiarity arose, he suddenly heard his own voice without warning.
“H-husband.” His voice became softer and softer, its ending trembling, muddled enough that he nearly bit his tongue.
!!!
Help. Had his voice really been shaking that badly?!
Lin Cimian was instantly so mortified that he could have dug out an entire four-bedroom apartment with his toes. He had to press down on his right hand with all his strength to barely suppress the impulse to close the website in front of so many viewers.
At the time, he had been trapped in the dark room and unable to see what Good Day was doing. Only now did he realize that Good Day had walked several steps toward the sound of his voice and had already found the seal. He could clearly have broken it immediately with his sword, yet he had unnecessarily answered Lin Cimian first, almost as though… he were soothing the nervousness and fear in his voice.
The thought surfaced in Lin Cimian’s mind, and his ears reddened uncontrollably. He immediately felt that he was being far too self-important.
The comments showed no such restraint. These people could ship heaven with earth; they could probably ship a plastic bag with a fire hydrant if the wind blew it on top. How could they possibly miss sweetness like this?
[AAAAAA he dotes on him so much. Those two are definitely true love!]
[Lock them together forever. I swallowed the key.]
[?? Does anyone else think Good Day’s voice sounds kind of familiar?]
[Plus one, but I don’t dare identify it. I don’t even dare think of that name.]
[Help, I also think he sounds like Yan Shiyue!]
Yan Shiyue’s name appeared so abruptly that Lin Cimian stared blankly at the screen. The other livestream viewers burst into laughter too.
[HAHAHA how could it possibly be Yan Shiyue? My bedridden grandfather suddenly starting an online game would be more believable than Yan Shiyue.]
[Ten-year veteran fan here. Confirmed: this voice is exactly the same as Yan Shiyue’s.]
[He must be using a voice changer. How could Yan Shiyue possibly be his number-one patron and play games with him too?]
[LMAO. If this were true, it would be explosive enough to compete with Lin Cimian quitting the entertainment industry!]
[Maybe I’m overthinking it, but there was one time Lin Cimian’s affected cute voice slipped, and his real voice sounded a lot like the streamer’s.]
Lin Cimian, suddenly dragged into the conversation: “…”
His gaze darted around. He had only been guilty for one second when the next comment nearly made him stop breathing:
[Personally, I think the most explosive possibility is that after quitting the industry, Lin Cimian became a game streamer, his number-one patron is Yan Shiyue, the two developed feelings for each other in the game, and then got together!
