How Could I Possibly Be an Omen of Disaster?

[Amnesiac Natural-Born Villain from the Start x Hard-Earned Leveling Progression x Player-Raising Fourth Calamity]

[Plenty of supernatural horrors and freshly reimagined tales of the strange in the dungeons; the main storyline traces the origins of Chinese civilization]

When Jiang Hua opened her eyes, she woke up inside the soulslike game The Unknown Zhou. She thought she was a gaming expert who had transmigrated into the game, with an extremely strong gamer’s instinct: if it was alive, it deserved a couple of slashes.

As it turned out, she accidentally killed the little monster who guided the main quest, leaving behind an NPC supervillain. She unexpectedly unlocked a hidden side quest, causing the entire server’s items to be reclaimed and some maps to be sealed off... but they became her exclusive means of production.

“Uh? I’m really sorry.”

Since things had come to this, she continued recruiting monsters, big and small, swallowing demon cores and snake hearts, imposing a few exorbitant taxes and conscripting labor for infrastructure projects. She happily became the local tyrant of the sealed map.

Until an emergency alert appeared in the game: [You are under attack by Returning Spirit Players]

“Hm? What are Returning Spirit Players? This game has multiplayer?”

And so, one day, Jiang Hua realized she had become a disaster-class boss famous across the whole server.

In the year 3071 of the Tianyu Calendar, genetic diseases ran rampant aboard the Tianyu planetary fleet, and the faith of the interstellar refugees had collapsed.

To correct the refugees’ will and provide them with perfect genetic sequences, a game pod for a game called The Unknown Zhou was secretly launched.

“Use the will of returning spirits to trace your inferior stars.”

The Five Phases are a matter of the solar system. The planetary fleet escaped its fate many years ago.

[Bonus Scene]

Jiang Hua: “I heard your planetary fleet ranks people into all sorts of tiers. Wouldn’t that make me, a test subject sent in for closed beta, the lowest of the low?”

Producer: “Quite the opposite. You’re a Celestial Dragon.”

[Reading Guide]

1. Outside the game, it’s sci-fi about drifting through space; inside the game, it’s Eastern fantasy with a soulslike feel. It’s an open world, similar to Elden Ring, but you don’t need to have played it to enjoy the story. Overall, it’s not really cyberpunk or an infinite-flow story, so it’s hard to categorize, but the dungeons connect to the main plot. The currently published story has already covered what the blurb describes.

2. The main story centers on the female lead. No golden finger; there are little bugs at the bottlenecks. A slow burn, or a rough ride.

Theme: Those starlights have not truly dimmed; they are simply light-years away.