Perhaps because he felt in his heart that this prologue would not last long, Ji Zhao carried on with the game.
Two options, "Train" and "Dispersal," had appeared on the bed. Ji Zhao clicked one: running a cultivation method through one full circulation earned experience once, and the time it took depended on the nature of the method and on one's own meridians and martial theory — usually around an hour.
Ji Zhao was in no hurry to disperse and start over. He went out for a wander first — as the saying goes, train hard and you end up a beggar, wander idly and you end up a great hero. One look at the protagonist's aptitude was enough to know that grinding away with his head down was a one-word proposition: cooked. With that pitiful nine-square grid, who exactly was he going to out-train?
Outside, Wang An was still practicing beneath the great tree. Ji Zhao went up to him and pressed Enter, and besides the dialogue there was now an Observe option as well.
【Character: Wang An】
【Comprehension: 8+7】
【Constitution: 6+7】
【Martial Attainment: 264】
【Common Traits: Constitution Lv2, Comprehension Lv1, Innate Lv1, Godspeed Lv1】
【Unique Trait: None】
【Overall Rating: D-Lower】
Ji Zhao tried talking to him.
【Wang An: "You'll have to forgive the poor showing, Young Master Zhao. I've only ever trained in some crude country kung fu, and I laid down blade and spear thirty years ago. I never thought that at my age I'd still run into something like the Black Cavalry bandits raising havoc..."】
He hit Enter again; it was the same line.
Ji Zhao promptly steered his character off to go pester that eldest sister of hard-to-tell sex, to see whether he could pick up any quests from her — something along the lines of "repairing the city gate requires such-and-such materials" — after which he would go running east and west. After all, unclogging toilets was, like whacking lobsters with a little wooden stick, one of those parts of an RPG that simply has to be savored.
【Ji Bei: "Don't bother me."】
"...Right you are." Before leaving, Ji Zhao took a look at Ji Bei.
【Character: Ji Bei】
【Comprehension: 13+30】
【Constitution: 10+20】
【Martial Attainment: 3548】
【Common Traits: Constitution Lv4, Comprehension Lv5, Innate Lv4, Crush Lv3, Godspeed Lv3, Duel Lv3, Peerless Lv1, Martial Might Lv3, Adversity Lv3】
【Unique Trait: None】
【Overall Rating: C-Peak】
Out of the Ji household, Ji Zhao made a circuit of Anchun County. There was no telling what serious illness this game author's head was suffering from: the place had been stuffed with a great heap of pointless buildings, nine tenths of any given street being ordinary houses you could not enter, with the streets crowded by NPCs who had nothing but a dialogue option. Ji Zhao worked through them one by one, and it was the same handful of lines over and over, not a single one of them with any nutrition to it.
【"The city's not about to fall, is it? My girl at home... haah."】
【"To resist the Ning, His Majesty has taxed us without mercy, knocking the bones and sucking out the marrow of the southern folk — and so the Sacred Might calamity came about..."】
【"They say that Whip-and-Mace Fiend Liu Wei devoured his own younger brother in the womb, and so came out with two heads and four arms, two hands holding maces and two holding whips. That's where the name Whip-and-Mace Fiend comes from."】
【"That Liu Wei hasn't many men under him — they're nothing but a pack of roving bandits, and the Duke of Sacred Might gave him little enough of the weaponry he seized. If the Ning hadn't attacked and opened the front, so that every able-bodied man in the prefectures and counties was conscripted away, how could a force that size ever take a city..."】
【"A pity! The Ning bring no peace, and the land of Yan knows no ease!"】
Ji Zhao walked for several minutes without ever finding a single NPC with a yellow exclamation mark over their head, or even a second building he could enter. Irritation set in; the whole exercise felt truly pointless.
BZZZ, BZZZ, BZZZ—
The phone he had left on the computer desk had begun to vibrate. He picked it up: the caller was Master Zheng... As a professional player, Ji Zhao did not fight purely by self-taught street methods. He was accomplished in a variety of combat disciplines and had never once stopped learning, and this Master Zheng was one of his twenty-odd coaches.
"Hello."
"It's me, Zheng Xingguo. Do you have time now, Mr. Ji? It's the hour we agreed on for boxing practice. If it's convenient, I'll drive over right away."
"Mn, I'm free. Come on over. I'll warm up."
Ji Zhao casually pressed the C key. Ordinarily that was how single-player games worked: press the inventory or attribute key and the game paused, the same as hitting Esc. He paid it no further attention, stood up, and left the room.
But in the upper right corner of the screen, the time went on ticking, minute by minute, second by second.
...
As he stepped out of the room, a wave of dizziness passed through Ji Zhao's head for no reason at all. The feeling came as quickly as it went, vanishing without a trace in the space of an instant.
Ji Zhao shook his head, only to find that for some reason the world before him had gone blurry. Details his eyes had once caught clearly were now hard to make out.
【"...?"】
【"What's going on?"】
Ji Zhao knew perfectly well that he was not in especially good health. He was not doing fitness training; he was training in martial arts, and there was no such thing as martial training that did not harm the body — in fact, even fitness training harms the body when taken to excess. Once anything is raised to a professional level, it is bound to be bad for you.
【"I should go to the hospital and have this looked at."】
Ji Zhao did care a great deal about his body. He headed downstairs, pulling out his phone to call Zheng Xingguo as he went, but the moment it started ringing he remembered the man might be driving and unable to answer. He was about to end the call when it connected, and Zheng Xingguo's somewhat stiff voice came through the phone.
"Hello, Mr. Ji. I am your boxing master, Zheng Xingguo. What can I do for you?"
The words were exceptionally odd, nothing like anything a person would say in ordinary conversation, and Zheng Xingguo's tone was strangely stiff, without any variation of feeling in it. But Ji Zhao's mind was on his eyes just then, and he did not really catch what Zheng Xingguo had said. He hurriedly threw out a "today's training is cancelled" and hung up.
Ji Zhao drove to the hospital, meaning to register with ophthalmology.
The clerk at the registration desk wore a perfect smile, as though it had been rehearsed before a mirror a million times over until not the slightest flaw remained: "Good day, sir. Which department would you like to register for?"
"Ophthalmology." Ji Zhao was brief and to the point.
"Certainly. Please scan this code."
Ji Zhao could not help glancing at the clerk, who kept up that regulation service smile the whole way through... For anyone in the service industry, holding a smile that perfectly standard all day long would be an enormous feat, and yet for some reason it struck Ji Zhao as uncanny. He swept his gaze over his surroundings on reflex, only to find that the clerk at the next window was smiling in exactly the same way.
That truly did make the hairs on his neck rise, but Ji Zhao merely pulled his gaze back at once... In fact, the whole way here, he had kept catching a sense that things were off.
For instance, the way the many cars on the road moved in sync: their turn signals flicked on in perfect unison, and when the red light was about to turn green they all hit the accelerator at the same instant, like siblings from a single birth sharing one mind. The pedestrians on the street, and everyone in the hospital now as well, all moved with the same uniformity when they walked, exactly as though different models had been fitted with the same set of animations... All of it together produced an immense sense of wrongness.
【"It's exactly like..."】
Ji Zhao took a few steps back and turned to look. The hospital staff at the other windows were all holding that same uncanny smile, while the people collecting their medicine looked perfectly normal, as though they noticed nothing at all.
【"...being inside a game...!"】