Little Ruckus in the Divine Realm

[Body Swap · Adventure · Gaming · Otherworld · No Cheats · One Female Lead · Survival] Ordinary office worker Lin Yan wakes up to discover he has transmigrated into the fully immersive metaverse game Realm of the Gods. He is not a player, but an NPC blacksmith’s apprentice in a beginner village. His status panel reads: ID XH-0047, Role: Blacksmith’s Apprentice, Status: Idle. In this cyberpunk cultivation world, where flying swords streak alongside neon lights, disobedient NPCs are “repaired” by the System: their memories are reset, their programmed settings rewritten, and every trace of their existence erased. Lin Yan doesn’t want to be erased. He has to pass himself off as an ordinary NPC and survive in the gaps between the System’s scans. But his disguise is a little off. He applies industrial design principles to improve the forging process, producing equipment with 100% durability every time, far better than anything sold by the high-level blacksmiths in the main city. The “hidden quests” he posts send players across the server into a frenzy of speculation. The forums are abuzz with rumors that an all-powerful hidden expert is hanging around the blacksmith shop in the beginner village. Players think he’s a hidden NPC. The System classifies him as anomalous data. A veteran female player starts investigating him, and the more she digs, the more convinced she becomes that something is wrong: this NPC is too human, too much like someone trapped in a game world who wants to go home. When the System’s “covert deletion protocol” quietly activates, Lin Yan must find others in this virtual world like him, beings who refuse to be defined by the System, before he is erased for good. Deviation: 4.9%. Only 0.1% remains before the automatic deletion threshold is triggered. He’s still hammering away at the forge.