Xiao Ye, a twenty-five-year-old game tester, drops dead at his workstation.
When he wakes up, he discovers that he’s been transported into Oracle Era, the game he tested for three years, whose bugs are plentiful enough to live on. Even more absurdly, he’s using a tester-only account: his level shows LV.1, but he can actually fight at LV.50. The logout button is grayed out, there are no revival tokens, and death means real death.
Xiao Ye makes a decision that goes against everything his ancestors stood for: keep his head down.
Chased by a boar king, he trips over his own feet every three steps? He’s acting. Punches a boss through three walls? Plays dead. Teammates praise his luck? He scratches his head and grins sheepishly. “Maybe I’m having a heart attack.”
He builds a guild, stockpiles supplies, and secretly manipulates the market. On the surface, he’s an LV.1 good-for-nothing guild leader living off others. In reality, he sets the price of every piece of equipment in Qingye Town. When people mock him as a good-for-nothing, he agrees. When they try to steal his divine artifact, he pulls out thirty different schemes for turning the tables on a thief.
People ask, “When are you finally going to get serious?”
Xiao Ye thinks for a moment. “When everyone thinks I’m not worth killing.”
“Isn’t that the same as never?”
He smiles. “Exactly.”
Later, in the server-wide ranked tournament, he wins the championship through a string of “last-second comebacks,” and his hidden combat ranking is revealed: first in the whole game. The people who once mocked him line up to apologize, while the major guilds beg to recruit him. He just looks at his LV.1 level and says calmly, “I’ve gotten so used to pretending, I can’t stop.”
This is a story about keeping your head down, playing the fool, and crushing everyone through sheer superiority.
A friendly warning: this book is packed with laughs and satisfying moments. You might want to keep some fast-acting heart medicine on hand.
