At three in the morning, in Jiangcheng, Longguo, Lu Yuan is the only person left in an old office building. Blue light from the screen illuminates the dark circles under his eyes. A second before his heart stops, he hears a sticky whisper through his headphones: “One name is missing from the list... yours.” When he opens his eyes again, the calendar has jumped back to 72 hours before the horror instances arrive. A cold System panel appears: [The Complete Register of the Underworld’s Portraits: Trial Version]. The first page is blank, save for a line of bloody text: Doomsday countdown 71:59:47.
Lu Yuan, 28, an overworked office drone, an orphan, and 300,000 yuan in debt, has been blocked by his girlfriend and made his boss’s scapegoat. A textbook good-for-nothing at the bottom of society. Now clutching his last 8,000 yuan, he rushes into a 24-hour funeral supply shop and buys up all the cinnabar, joss paper, and black donkey hooves. Then he sneaks into a slaughterhouse and trades all his credit points for a bucket of still-warm black dog blood. No one knows that in three days, these “superstitious” items will be worth their weight in gold.
On the final night, he covers his rented apartment with talismans, but an unfamiliar text message pops up on his phone: “Funeral Alley instance locked. Player No. 0001, welcome to Hell’s beginner village.” Lu Yuan sneers and slots his last coin into a copper coin charm meant to ward off evil. It is the keepsake he clutched in his hand before dying in his previous life, but never got the chance to use.
The countdown hits 00:00:00. The neon lights outside go dark, joss paper rains from the sky, and the sound of a suona echoes through the hallway. Lu Yuan takes a deep breath, opens the door, and steps into the darkness. At the end of the alley, the white lanterns carried by a funeral procession bear his name in stark characters: Lu Yuan.
And behind him, where he cannot see, a pale, smiling face quietly appears on the first page of the portrait album. Bai Wuchang, Xie Bi’an, opens his eyes.
I look forward to its completion