Synopsis
In 2020, the city went into lockdown amid the pandemic. Thirty-two-year-old Shen Yuan was stuck in his rented apartment when a game recommendation caught his eye: the twentieth-anniversary celebration of Deep Devotion to the Old Sword.
He paused. He’d played that game ten years ago.
Back then, he was a sophomore, skipping class with his roommates, Lao Ma and Fatty, to play at internet cafes and run dungeons together. His Taoist character, “Swordheart and Lute,” was famous across the server. They’d talked about starting a studio together and roaming the world with swords in hand. Then they graduated and went their separate ways. He never opened the game again.
He logged in to his old account. On his friends list, “Old Ma Knows the Way” had been offline for 2,803 days, and “Fatty Loves Meat” for 2,756. He stood in the city of Tianjing for five minutes, then quietly logged out.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to play. It was just too lonely.
But there was a line of tiny text at the bottom of the announcement: Nostalgia Server: Looking Back Again. Relive the classic version, with every player starting from scratch.
The next day, Shen Yuan created a new account called “Old Shen Is Here.” What he didn’t know was that Lao Ma and Fatty had made the same decision in their own cities.
Three men in their thirties logged into the same server at the same time, from three different cities. Lao Ma was a warrior named “Old Ma Is Here Too,” and Fatty was an archer named “Fatty Got Slim.” Wearing coarse cloth tunics, the three stood in the beginner village, stared at one another, then burst out laughing.
In the days that followed, the anxiety of lockdown and the exhaustion of everyday life slowly faded away in the game. Just like ten years ago, they fought monsters, saved up money, and learned skills. They founded a guild again and named it “Starting Anew.”
