A Brush with Life and Death

At twenty-three, Xiao Fan was a dirt-poor delivery man. One day, after injuring himself in a fall the night before, he was lying in bed, bored out of his mind, when a text message popped up on his phone recommending an unbelievable game called Life Experience. Choose any number from 1 to 1,000, and you can enter the game as a character of your choice. You might be a primitive human, an impoverished scholar or a battle-hardened general from ancient times, or a rich second-generation heir or a migrant worker making his way with his bare hands in the modern age... In short, there are a thousand different characters whose lives players can experience. But to enter any character's life, you must complete the mission set by the game.

The System automatically scores your performance. Based on your score, once the game ends, you will receive an "unbelievable reward or punishment."

Xiao Fan was bored out of his mind, so he picked a number and entered a character. To his surprise, he found the game was truly "unbelievably" realistic, and the mission was extraordinarily difficult. Worse still, he couldn't quit... What exactly was the "unbelievable reward or punishment"? He would have to wait until the game ended to find out.