Chương 1: Ten Minutes to the Newbie Village

When Gu Zhiwei disappeared, the product manager had just flipped the deck to slide twenty-seven. The projector screen gave off a blue glow, the AC droned, and the few cups of coffee on the table had long since gone cold, leaving nothing but a faint scorched bitterness prowling the sealed conference room.

"So for this requirement, can engineering get it done toni…" The voice cut off mid-word. Gu Zhiwei was sitting in the meeting room one second. The next, a violent sense of weightlessness seized her. Then she dropped onto a stretch of cold ground in a huge wall-less white space. Her knees hit hard enough to go numb. Where her palms pressed down, the surface sank a little, then rebounded slowly, like a hardened gel. Gu Zhiwei, twenty-four, a software engineer, just graduated. She looked around.

As far as she could see, everything was white. Her phone said 10: 17 a. m. No signal, no network. A burst of cries went up behind her. Gu Zhiwei turned around and saw a white man in a gray suit drop out of thin air, more figures followed close after. Some landed on their feet, some rolled two full turns, and one was wearing nothing but gym shorts, as if a second ago he'd been dripping sweat at the gym. A mechanical female voice spoke right beside everyone's ear. 【Global sampling complete.

】 【Participating players in this batch: twenty. 】 【Welcome to the Myriad Worlds System. 】 【Entry into the beginner's world will occur in ten minutes. 】 【Completion of the designated quest by any player is counted as completion by all. 】 【The first player to complete the mission will receive an additional reward and a chance to unlock a skill. 】 【Death in the world will result in deletion. 】 The crowd erupted. Some shouted that they wanted out. Others kept demanding to know what "deletion" meant.

The system gave no further response. 【Deployment countdown. 】 【10: 00. 】 A black number surfaced above the white space. Gu Zhiwei was watching the countdown when a speck of gray light floated up in the upper right of her vision. Then several thin silver-blue lines unfolded outward, assembling into a translucent interface. 【Personal Panel activated.

】 【Name: Gu Zhiwei】 【Age: 24】 【Strength: 10/100 (current average: 10)】 【Spirit: 20/100 (current average: 10)】 【Skill: Retrocognition[Locked]】 【Available records: hidden】 Strength 10. Gu Zhiwei accepted that fast. She hadn't set foot in a gym since graduation, scraping in at the average was already a mercy. Retrocognition[Locked]. Cool name for a skill, but no explanation attached. Gu Zhiwei: "Unlock." The interface dimmed for an instant. In that half second of darkness, something brushed against her consciousness.

The salty tang of sea wind. A beach so white it dazzled the eyes. A figure with a longbow strapped to her back, running through the surf. Then the vision vanished. 【Unlock conditions not met. 】 The panel returned to normal. What was that vision just now? Gu Zhiwei stared at the word "Locked" for two seconds. Fine. Legacy code, permissions hard locked, zero comments.

"Do you have a panel too?" The question came in Chinese from beside her. A middle-aged man in a navy polo shirt, perhaps in his early forties, glanced first at the badge hanging from her neck, then at her face.

"I'm Chen Li, from Shanghai. Strength 11, Spirit 12. My skill slot is empty." With no way to verify a word of what he'd said, Gu Zhiwei chose to turtle.

"Gu Zhiwei. Strength 10, Spirit 10." She stopped there. Chen Li didn't press.

"Are the rest of you Chinese too?" A pale-faced girl with her hair tied in a low ponytail approached, clutching a half-finished cup of milk tea.

"I'm Su Ye. Strength 5, Spirit 15. My skill is [Affinity with Living Beings]." She hesitated.

"Can I stay with you?"

"Sure." Chen Li shifted to make room.

"Hey fellow countrymen, count me in?" The young man in gym shorts came over, speaking with a slight Cantonese accent.

"Wang Pu. Strength 9, Spirit 9, no skill. You've got to stick together in an escape room, right?" Of the twenty people present, fewer than half were willing to reveal their information. A blonde woman claimed she had a skill, prompting several people to crowd around and press her for details. But she folded her arms and refused to answer, her gaze sweeping past them as she studied every face in the room. When her eyes reached Gu Zhiwei, Gu met her stare directly. The blonde looked away at once. 【05: 02.

】 The countdown kept ticking. When the countdown fell to three minutes, a small sound came from the center of the white floor. Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. A narrow seam split the floor from end to end. Beneath it lay nothing but darkness, and damp air seeped through, carrying the fresh scent of grass and leaves. Several pale blue-white insects flew up from the depths of the crack.

Each was about the size of a fingernail, with translucent wings that gave off a faint glow. The crowd instinctively fell back. The insects circled once in midair, then drifted slowly toward Su Ye. One settled quietly into her hair, wings folding shut. The rest wheeled around her low ponytail. Su Ye went rigid where she stood, her voice shaking beyond her control.

"They… they don't… bite, right?" No one had time to answer. Every panel sprang open on its own at the same moment. 【World Sequence One: Cloudperch Tribe. 】 【Participant identity: member of the ancient tribe of Cloudperch. Departed the settlement before her coming-of-age rite; has now returned to the clan on the eve of the Rite. 】 【Main quest: Gain the priest's trust. Become a successor priest. 】 【Time limit: seven days. 】 【00: 03.

】 The crack suddenly yawned wider, and the white floor collapsed in sections from the center outward. 【00: 01. 】 Weightlessness hit again. All twenty of them, along with the shattered pieces of the floor, plunged into the darkness. The fall seemed to last forever, yet somehow only an instant. Gu Zhiwei heard water first. A roar came at her from far off and then all at once, until her eardrums swelled with it. Cold, wet wind caught her plunging body; the smell of leaf mold and sharp green sap poured into her nose.

The dark peeled away, and a wall of dense foliage rushed up to meet her. Gu Zhiwei threw her arms over her head and face, snapped two thin branches on the way down, and landed hard in a bed of damp, spongy moss. Very hardcore, this delivery method. She pushed herself upright and tested her limbs. Her phone and her badge were gone. Her clothes had been swapped for a coarse gray-brown tunic, a woven vine belt at the waist, supple hide wrapped around her calves.

The fabric rubbed her skin and left a fine, prickling itch. The system couldn't manage even basic protective gear for the drop, but it had found time to dress her up. Its sense of service had been allocated to very strange places. Gu Zhiwei lifted her head and looked out. A solid wall of green crashed into her eyes. The word forest looked shabby here. Colossal trees rose out of the mist, trunks thick to the point of absurdity.

Sparse sunlight dropped between the leaves, lighting up countless golden spores drifting slowly up and down. A gust passed, and all those specks of light scattered at once, as though a soundless snowfall had begun inside the woods. The place Gu Zhiwei stood couldn't even be called the ground. It was a horizontal limb of an ancient tree, broad enough to hold a two-lane road. From the edge of the limb she could see the sea of trees still going down, and down.

Milk-white mist gathered into a long river, winding between the giant trunks. At the far end of the cloud river, a towering mountain rose from the sea of trees. A waterfall dropped from the clouds above, breaking into countless slender veils of water. Sunlight fell through them, and a pale cyan rainbow shimmered faintly along the mountain's waist. Something swam above the waterfall. Gu Zhiwei narrowed her eyes. A massive gray-white shape slowly emerged from the clouds.

It resembled a whale, its back covered in pale blue-white soft scales. Broad, nearly transparent wings spread from either side of its body, fine silver light flowing through the thin membranes. With every beat of those wings, the surrounding clouds rippled outward like water. More of them, slightly smaller in size, followed behind. They dived into the cloud river, then burst out again dozens of meters away, their blue-white scales reflecting a wash of silver light.

Gu Zhiwei held her breath and watched for a full five seconds, maybe more. The panel chose that moment to appear: 【World load complete. 】 【Local language automatically matched. 】 【Hint: The tribe's priests serve the spirits above the clouds. Gaining a cloud beast's approval will substantially raise the priest's trust. 】 She lowered her head to check what she was carrying, and found a piece of black wood tag tucked inside her belt. The front bore a curling cloud pattern, while the back bore three unfamiliar symbols.

She stared at the symbols, and the meaning surfaced in her mind on its own. Gu. Zhi. Wei. These symbols looked nothing like Chinese characters, yet somehow she knew they spelled her name. The edges of the wood were already worn, and the surface of the tag had the oiled gloss that comes only from years of being worn against the body. As though, before she had even arrived, "Gu Zhiwei" had already been living in this world for some time. Fern fronds shivered twice.

"Gu Zhiwei?" Su Ye poked her head out from behind a cluster of enormous leaves and hurried over.

"This world is ridiculous. I got dumped into a tree hollow just now. There was a snail the size of a washbasin in there, and a whole bunch of glowing mushrooms." Click. Their panels suddenly popped up and a map appeared beside the quest information. They checked their positions and decided to follow the broad limb toward the mark that stood for the tribe. The sea of clouds flowed slowly through the branches beneath them.

A few small insects with glassy wings rested on the vine leaves, the sound of footsteps startled them into a flash of deep blue that vanished among the trunks. Ten minutes later, they found the way down. A wooden ladder had been lashed to the trunk with supple vine and bone pegs, spiraling downward. Every so often there was a small platform with a wooden trough of water set on it. On the third platform, a familiar shout came from above.

"Hey! Is that a person down there? If you're a person, say something!" Wang Pu leaned out with his arms around the trunk. He'd been changed into the dark brown tunic young hunters wore, a bone knife and a woven pouch at his hip, dull red diamond patterns embroidered on his bracers. Gu Zhiwei looked up.

"It's a monster."

"Boss, scaring people costs you karma." Wang Pu gripped the ladder and inched down at a pace barely faster than a sloth.

"Brother Chen's behind me. We picked up two foreigners on the way." Chen Li appeared after that, a small scrape at his temple, a stone axe in his hand. Behind him came the man in the suit from the white space and a brown-haired Latina woman. All three were now in local hide and coarse hemp, with light vine armor over their shoulders and backs.

"Should we head to the tribe first?" Gu Zhiwei suggested. Nobody objected, and the two foreigners understood Gu Zhiwei's "Cloudperch" without a hitch. They traded basic information as they walked: the man in the suit was named Matt, American; the brown-haired woman was Maria, Argentinian. Ahead the mist thinned, and more and more daylight came through the leaves. First came a vine bridge spanning the cloud river.

Then rooftops appeared, suspended among the giant trees, thatched with broad leaves and decorated with white feathers. Hundreds of wooden houses had been built at varying heights around the massive trunks. Vine bridges ran through the drifting mist, linking them to one another, while strips of cured beast meat and strings of fruit hung beneath the walkways. Behind the tribe, the magnificent mountain waterfall hung between the peaks like a curtain of light. Cloudperch emerged from the sea of trees, piece by piece.

On the other side of the vine bridge, a middle-aged woman carrying a bamboo basket on her back spotted Gu Zhiwei and looked mildly surprised.

"You came back?" The unfamiliar words translated themselves directly into meaning in her mind. Her voice carried the slight awkwardness of a long separation, along with a faint note of care. What she was to this identity, Gu Zhiwei had no idea. Deciding that the less she said, the less likely she was to make a mistake, she replied: "Before the Rite. One should come back." The woman stared at her for a moment, then gave a soft snort.

"Still the same, never wanting to talk." She turned and went, the purple fruit in her basket knocking together, giving off a sweet-sour smell. Just then a long cry rolled out across the sea of clouds. People throughout the tribe stopped what they were doing and looked up beyond the canopy.

A group of juvenile cloud beasts glided through the waterfall's mist and swam toward the settlement along the cloud sea, sometimes diving into the white vapor, sometimes beating their wings and leaping upward, tracing arcs of blue-green in the sunlight.

"The Choosing of Spirits before the ritual has begun." The middle-aged woman, not yet far away, glanced back at Gu Zhiwei.

"Anyone who wants to become a priest should go and give it a try." The crowd surged toward the highest platform. Gu Zhiwei's panel unfolded on its own: 【Critical quest node detected: Recognition by a Cloud Beast. Gain the voluntary touch of a cloud beast and form a spirit pact with it to earn the priest's trust. 】 A calf the size of a dolphin broke away from the pod and settled crookedly beside a stone pillars. The candidates formed a half circle around it; nobody dared rush it. Some spread their palms open.

Some hummed under their breath. One took out golden-yellow fruit flesh and tried to draw its attention. The calf swam through the crowd, one by one. It touched a boy's fingertip and drew back at once. Its round eyes were a deep, dark color, holding the reflection of every tense face around it. Gu Zhiwei moved to a quieter side of the crowd and crouched down, copying the others by turning her palms upward and keeping herself at eye level with the cub. The calf turned toward her.

The damp vents along its back fluttered softly, and droplets falling from the edges of its wings landed on Gu Zhiwei's wrist. But when it swam to within an inch of her fingertips, it suddenly stopped. It tilted its head, drew its broad wings in close, and drifted backward as if an invisible wall stood between them. Gu Zhiwei kept her hand suspended in the air, patiently waiting.

Then, in the very next moment, the cub darted past her, its tail fin trailing a streak of pale blue mist, and leaped straight into Su Ye's arms just as she climbed onto the platform. Su Ye staggered half a step and caught it on reflex. The calf buried its soft, enormous head against the side of her neck, wound its slender tendrils around her wrist coil after coil until they gave off a warm glow, and let out a doting, fledgling-like purr from its throat.

Before anyone had quite understood what they were looking at, the spirit pact was sealed. Gu Zhiwei watched the quest readout change.

"Player [Su Ye] has been recognized by a cloud spirit."

"Shared quest progress: 12%."

"Personal quest progress: 0%." Gu Zhiwei glanced at the 0% beside her personal progress.

"Hmm... interesting."