Online Game: The Advent of Guixu

On Shen Ye's first day in the game Divine Miracle, he was swindled out of all his starting funds.

Penniless and without a single piece of equipment, he squatted in a run-down blacksmith shop in the beginner village, working the bellows for an NPC on the verge of senility.

Everyone said the old man was useless, his rewards stingy, and his quests a waste of time.

But Shen Ye noticed a pattern in the rhythm of his hammering:

Three short strikes, one long. Two short strikes, two long.

It was muscle memory, something a person who had once stood at the peak had left imprinted in his body.

On the seventh day, the old man handed him a yellowed blueprint.

"I'll teach you to forge this sword."

Later, Shen Ye took that sword and fought his way from the beginner village all the way to the Pantheon.

He drove the number-one warrior on the server to say just one thing in the post-match interview: "My gear's not good enough, so I'll make up for it with brains."

The berserkers of the Northern European server bowed their heads before him.

His name was first on the Destroyer organization's hit list.

But Shen Ye didn't know that, before him, thirty-seven others had walked the same path.

They were all called Guixu.

And every one of them had disappeared.

The sword in his hand had already devoured thirty-seven shattered divine cores.

"All things return to silence. It is both the end and the beginning."