"First, bow to Heaven and Earth — yin and yang in harmony, Heaven and Earth as witness.
Second, bow to your parents — for the grace of birth and rearing, never forgotten by their children.
Now husband and wife bow to each other — joined as one cup, one body, unchanging through high station and low."
A withered, sallow old man with barely a tooth left in his mouth bawled out the rites with gusto, while two young people clutching strips of red hemp cloth knelt and kowtowed in turn.
The bride wore clothes neither new nor quite old, a square of red cloth draped over her head; plain as it was, at least there were no obvious patches on it.
The groom's side was the sorry one — his everyday robe a sloppy patchwork of mends large and small, and he'd had to drape borrowed cloth over it to cover the mess.
Zhou Yuan stood in the boisterous crowd, offering neither blessing nor scorn. All he had was bewilderment.
He'd been an honest Blue Star man, and never expected to wake up one day inside a world that was a game and yet not.
He called it a game world because, in his eyes, everyone had a health bar floating above their head, and he himself had an attribute panel.
He called it "and yet not" because, in the month-odd since he'd crossed over, he'd been probing the matter sideways the whole time, and found that the local villagers couldn't see attribute panels or health bars at all.
They were ordinary living people — born, growing old, sickening and dying, having to toil for their bread, and gossiping in idle hours about this household and that.
Just as Zhou Yuan was deciding this game-ification was his own private cheat, he heard the village elders warn that whenever one went out, one had to beware the deathless, undying demons.
Some of those demons were strong and some weak, but they all shared one trait: they could not die.
No matter how much effort you spent killing them, once the dead of night passed — the hour of Zi — they would revive all the same.
Thankfully the demons each kept to their own territory and never strayed out lightly; otherwise the villages would have had no way to survive at all.
The more Zhou Yuan listened, the stranger it seemed. How could a power as defiant of reason as true deathlessness appear in such weak creatures?
Demons that strong and that unanswerable — why would they imprison themselves? What did they eat, what did they drink? Surely they couldn't all be free of every desire.
Combining this with his ability to see health bars, he couldn't help but form a bold guess.
Perhaps those demons were game monsters — not truly deathless, merely set to respawn on a timer.
But that didn't add up either. If this was a game world, the human NPCs were far too normal; how would you even simulate so many different emotions and personalities?
For the moment Zhou Yuan honestly couldn't tell whether the world had been turned into a game, or only he had.
"Slap."
A rough, broad hand patted Zhou Yuan lightly on the shoulder. The old man, his face a mass of wrinkles, spoke up.
"Shitou, what are you standing there in a daze for — jealous, seeing Ergou get hitched?
Don't go blaming the village for not helping you carry on your line. Your pa went off to the army early, and your ma passed the day she bore you.
Even if the village paid to find you a wife, who'd provide for her once you're in the army? And if your luck held and you left a child behind, who'd look after the mother and babe?"
"Uncle Dahuang, I've no such notions. I was only thinking about the conscription order the county sent down."
"What's there to think about? You're not planning to run, are you? That won't do.
Our village has sixty-seven households and has to hand over twenty-three able men. If you run, some other family has to make up the gap."
"Shitou, all these past years it was other households that sent men — to the army or the corvée.
We all made allowances for you being a child and didn't make you go. But you're sixteen now, a grown man; you can't keep getting out of it."
"How could I, Uncle Dahuang? We've got a conscience too — I'd never run off and bring ruin on others."
It wasn't that Zhou Yuan hadn't thought about running. But the village didn't trust a man with no ties like him, and had assigned three men with families of their own to eat and live alongside him.
He couldn't take three village men on his own, so he could only get a handle on this world's situation first, then work out his next plan.
"The rite is complete!"
At the ringing call, the newlyweds were pushed off to the bridal chamber, and the village women carried out basket after basket of soft yellow flatcakes and a few bowls of rich-stewed chicken soup.
Every villager who'd come to the wedding had brought a gift, so naturally they could all manage a soft yellow cake.
Zhou Yuan and the other twenty-three men bound for the army got not only soft yellow cakes but each a portion of slow-simmered chicken soup.
The soft yellow cakes were made of ji — broomcorn millet — soft and sticky, the texture passable; a little sugar to bring out the flavor would have made them better still.
The rich chicken soup had stewed a long time, a layer of sweet, fragrant fat floating on top, with even two small pieces of chicken in it.
One of these foods wanted sugar, the other wanted salt. Zhou Yuan's mind couldn't muster any interest in eating, but his body craved it fiercely.
"Slurp, slurp..."
Drinking the soup and eating the soft cake, Zhou Yuan could say this was the most flavorless — and the most delicious — meal he'd ever eaten.
Flavorless was the food's true nature; delicious was his body's verdict. A body long starved of any richness wished it could lick the soup-stained clay bowl clean a second time.
He looked up — and sure enough, there really were men licking their bowls. Zhou Yuan, who wasn't, suddenly came off looking quite the gentleman.
"Shitou, don't waste it — lick that bowl clean."
"Uncle Dahuang, I've decided to live a different way. Step one: I stop licking bowls."
"Aren't you something. Then don't go giving it to me."
Once Zhou Yuan had filled his belly, he set off home, the three village men hurriedly following while gnawing their cakes as they went.
His utterly changed spirit and bearing, plus three honest village men trailing after him, made him the most respectable lad in the village in an instant.
"I say, Uncle Dahuang, I'm not going to run, so what are you all following me around for all day?
Hurry on home, the lot of you. If the bride's kin from the other village see this, they'll think us Qiaoxi folk a stingy lot."
"Shitou, we just can't set our minds at ease over you. A fellow with no ties like you — one dive into those old woods and there's no telling how many people you'd bring grief to."
"That's too far. Say that again and I really will run."
"All right, all right, I'll say no more. You're the master; we'll all do as you say."
With some richness in his belly, he should have slept well, but Zhou Yuan tossed and turned and couldn't drop off.
For one thing, the two men asleep on the straw mats snored fit to shake the roof, and Uncle Dahuang, on watch, kept his eyes fixed dead on him.
For another, his ignorance of this new world left him badly short of any sense of security.
But the most important thing of all was that his early plan had failed. He'd used the excuse of wanting to "see a little blood" to seize the village's chicken-slaughtering rights.
Yet after butchering three whole live chickens, he'd reaped nothing — no experience, nothing of the sort.
Which turned his plan of gaining power by hunting poultry into pure fantasy.
"The deathless, undying demons might be monsters the game respawns on a timer. Could it be only they yield experience?
Or maybe the chickens are just too weak to produce experience. Should I try killing a person and see?"
Zhou Yuan stared at the three village men, compared their builds with his own, and decided to cherish his fellow villagers.
These men all had families, after all, and had helped his predecessor live to sixteen. A rabbit doesn't eat the grass by its own burrow — better to leave the village and find some lowlife to experiment on.
"Shitou, what are you always staring at us for? Don't you go doing anything rash.
Imagine — surviving the battlefield only to fall at the hands of your own people. What a joke that'd make."
"Couldn't be. Uncle Dahuang, how about you sleep in my bed and I'll keep watch for you a while?"
"I wouldn't dare. You melon-brained boy, you've been downright sinister ever since you heard that conscription order.
I'm still hoping to go to the army in my own boy's place — I can't have you bringing ruin on me."
"Dahuang, we're all neighbors here, and you haven't a shred of trust in me. I can't be bothered with you. Going to sleep."
TL Notes:
TL Note: The village pet-names are deliberately lowly — Shitou means "Stone," Ergou "Second Dog," and Dahuang "Big Yellow" (a name you'd give a dog) — markers of low birth the story plays for laughs.
TL Note: Blue Star — the novel's name for modern Earth, the protagonist's original world before he crossed over.