To kill time during the summer after her college entrance exams, Jian Ning bought a headset for the heavily advertised game World of the Heavenly Dao, hoping to experience the thrills of the power-fantasy novels aimed at male readers.
She stayed up late every night completing quests. Then one day, she stumbled upon a map that had never appeared in the game's promotions, and discovered several remarkably impressive cultivation sects within it.
After that, she often joined the sect disciples in secret realms, dug for treasure, and grew spirit vegetables. She even started dating a fellow shut-in who was just as honest and taciturn as she was, and just as reluctant to go out.
As an ordinary shut-in, Jian Ning liked boys who were a lot like her and loved laid-back farming games. It was a steady, reassuring kind of happiness.
But when everyone started talking about meeting up in real life, Jian Ning suddenly realized that the gaming friends who had been staying up late “cultivating” alongside her were actually disciples of the major sects in the modern cultivation world.
And the online boyfriend she was planning to meet in person turned out to be a young genius from a top sect, someone who had spent so many years in secluded cultivation that he barely understood social conventions...
When Jian Ning finally met her aloof, impossibly handsome online boyfriend, who barely spoke to her, she nearly burst into tears. Someone who looked like that could not possibly be a shut-in! He was just a handsome guy with unusual interests.
Jian Ning assumed that her attempt to meet her boyfriend in real life had failed because she was an ordinary outsider who knew nothing about cultivation. She went home, logged in, and cautiously asked him when he would be free to visit the game's NPC and get a divorce.
After that, he never replied again.
-
Not long afterward, Jian Ning had an extraordinary encounter of her own.
She was taken in as the sole personal disciple of a powerful but low-profile cultivator of the modern cultivation world.
Her master told her that, as an ordinary person, her having entered that world in the first place was already astonishing.
So the next time Jian Ning met her in-game boyfriend, it was at the Immortal Sect Grand Tournament (no) the special admissions competition (yes).
As the only new student her master's declining sect had recruited in nearly a thousand years, she had no choice but to take on the task of reviving it, putting her on the opposite side of the competition from him.
Jian Ning glanced at her online boyfriend from afar and couldn't help rubbing her face.
This is bad. Why does he look even better now?
I really want to go home and invite him to play Stardew Valley...
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1v1, both leads' first relationships, happy ending.
A slice-of-life story about a couple cultivating together in the modern world.
When the heroine asked to break up, the hero cast a divination. He was exceptionally accurate and confirmed that she really did want to break up with him at the time. He didn't want to, so he stayed silent.
The hero was born with a disability and is deaf, unable to hear any sounds. But he is skilled at divination and using magical artifacts, so few people know about his condition. They just think he is mysterious and doesn't like to talk.
Message: Live well for yourself and for the people who love you.
