Su Li is a second-year student at an agricultural and forestry university. His special skill is recognizing 137 kinds of rice disease. That skill won't fill your stomach, so he took the entrance exam to become a temporary worker for the national “Gate” team.
Behind the Gate is a supermarket. The shelves are stocked with everything, but the cans aren't labeled with prices. Instead, they say “30 kcal.” Take a can, and your body loses 30 kilocalories of energy. Old Zhou hauled out three crates of cans, then crouched on the ground and ate five compressed biscuits before he could recover. Su Li pulled out his notebook and began writing: “Carrying limit ≈ two crates of cans. I ate the rest along the way, so I got them for free.”
His teammates asked how he knew all this. He said, “There's a library in my head. The information just appears on its own.”
His teammate said, “Then look up how to open this thing.”
Su Li closed his eyes for three seconds. “...Someone tore out page 47. Next time we enter a dungeon, can someone remember to bring glue?”
Later, he discovers that the other side of the Gate holds more than just a supermarket: there are talking trees, a kitchen that uses scents as passwords, a mechanical city whose clockwork explodes when wound too tight, and interstellar ruins where humanity has already been wiped out once. Every world has its own rules. He follows just one: calculate what you can, and if you can't figure it out, stay alive first.
This story has no overpowered hero, no protagonist's halo, and no one-shot, level-999 victories. The protagonist makes mistakes, teammates make sacrifices, and the nation argues. Among the think tank members advising him are a retired ship captain, a middle school physics teacher, and an anonymous online user convinced that “spit works for cleaning sensors.” His best friend dies in there.
