Chapter 28

Progress

"Oh — it's you." Chao Musheng recognized the four girls. "The placement ended — why didn't you go home?"

They smiled with practiced awkwardness and gestured for the group to sit. "Conditions back home are difficult. We thought we'd stay here and earn some money first."

They were terrified he'd press further and expose something. But for reasons they couldn't identify, Chao Musheng didn't pursue it — he simply nodded, as though it made complete sense. "That's sensible."

The barbecue stall was fragrant with cumin smoke, and the four girls worked with real efficiency — in this busy, complicated night market, they managed every customer without dropping a beat.

Chao Musheng's group had ordered a lot of skewers. Wan You couldn't keep up alone, and one of the girls went over to help him at the grill.

Over the heat of the coals, she looked toward where Chao Musheng was sitting. He was clinking cups with his colleagues, laughing openly, his eyes catching the light like scattered stars — the kind of face that made strangers on the street turn to look twice.

If this had been the version of herself that had never entered an instance, she probably would have paused to look too.

Since getting stranded in this world, she had grown more and more convinced that it was real. How else could an NPC have walked out of their own instance and turned up wandering around like this? The Main God would never allow something like that to exist.

Every customer at every stall, every pedestrian walking past — they all had their own feelings, their own small irritations and small pleasures. They weren't walking corpses following system instructions.

Two months ago, they had failed to earn enough goodwill, failed to get the student registry. In the early hours of the last day, the system had declared mission failure.

In the moment the system withdrew, she had been certain she was going to die. The despair and terror of that moment — even now she didn't dare let herself remember it clearly.

For someone who wanted to live, death was the only fear that truly counted.

She didn't know why she had survived when the system tried to eliminate her. All she knew was that after that moment, the system had disappeared.

She couldn't go home. But as long as she was alive, there was hope.

The present was difficult, practically speaking — no money, no ID, too afraid to go to a police station and find out whether she legally existed in this world or not.

She didn't know how Wan You had come to have an identity here, or why he'd been able to stay on and study at Jinghua. But having him as her only connection made survival possible.

And she found, when she thought about it honestly, that she preferred this — even this uncertain, difficult life — to the endless cycle of terror and desperation in one instance after another.

*

"Xiao Chao, how do you know Boss Wan so well?" The team lead had gotten a few cold beers in and loosened up considerably. "We've eaten here plenty of times, and he's never once given us a discount."

Excellent craft, fresh ingredients, one flaw: completely unmovable on price. He wouldn't drop a single yuan.

"It's you paying tonight, Boss — and Boss Wan giving a discount. That's Xiao Chao saving you money." Brother Li topped up the team lead's glass. "Our Xiao Chao is genuinely useful."

Chao Musheng kept his head down and quietly ate his skewers. He didn't like alcohol, and he knew that if he opened his mouth right now, his colleagues would immediately try to pour drinks into it.

The colleagues weren't exaggerating. Wan You and the four girls had done something genuinely impressive with the grill. The chicken wings were tender and deeply seasoned, the beef rich and fragrant, and even their housemade chilled plum drink was better than anything you could buy elsewhere.

Wan You carried a plate of freshly grilled lamb skewers over and set it in front of the team lead. "Thank you for the regular business — these are on me."

He glanced at Chao Musheng. The other person was working through a chicken wing with complete absorption, clearly satisfied.

Hmph.

Wan You lifted his chin slightly. As he should be. His cooking was simply that good.

The team lead's feelings were complicated. The notoriously tight-fisted Boss Wan was voluntarily providing free lamb skewers in this quantity. Was this the true power of being their advisor's most favored protégé?

*

When dinner was over and some colleagues were clearly drunk, Chao Musheng and the sober ones got all the affected parties into taxis before he finally set off alone to take the bus home.

"Chao Musheng." Wan You caught him before he left, and pressed a large bottle of housemade plum drink into his hands. "For you."

"You don't have to—" He said it, but his hands had already closed around the bottle. "Will you be here all summer?"

"The foot traffic is good at this spot. Some people work late and come here for a drink to decompress." Wan You glanced at Chao Musheng — shoes still clean, somehow — and looked down at his own apron, soaked through with oil and smoke. "The money's decent."

"You must work very hard."

Running a barbecue stall took real labor — sourcing ingredients, washing and cutting the meat, threading skewers, seasoning everything. Every step took time and energy.

Chao Musheng remembered how Wan You had been when he first arrived at the school — couldn't make his own bed, eyes turning red with tears at the slightest thing. He never would have imagined him choosing work this physically demanding.

Wan You had expected Chao Musheng to respond with some polite, performative offer to come support the business, or look at him with that particular brand of well-meaning condescension. Instead he got nothing but a simple, genuine acknowledgment — with something almost like admiration in his voice — that the work was hard.

Hard.

He was at the top university in the country. The school had waived his fees because of his circumstances. No classmates mocked him for being poor or thin. And every day, the sunlight on his face was warm.

He looked at Chao Musheng. "Things are good now."

"With skills like yours — it would be a real loss if you stopped just because it's tiring." Chao Musheng lifted the heavy bottle. "On the walk here tonight, my colleagues wouldn't stop praising this place. When you graduate and move on to something else, they'll be the ones grieving."

Wan You raised an eyebrow. Not much he could do about that — he couldn't run a barbecue stall forever.

Although. If Chao Musheng wanted to eat sometime in the future, and he happened to be in a good mood — it wasn't impossible to make an exception.

He was simply that generous.

*

Curly Hair walked out of the company building feeling like every drop of energy had been siphoned from her body.

She would rather square off against something supernatural with a knife in the moonlight than spend another minute managing those customers.

The one who had screamed that Kunlun's products were garbage — then discovered he'd forgotten to plug it in.

The one with no purchase record who insisted the company had deleted his order and demanded a full refund.

The one who'd called in after a failed payment and berated her for ten minutes, when the actual issue was insufficient account balance.

And the one who'd called drunk, said inappropriate things, and then threatened to leave a bad review when she responded with mild sarcasm.

The instance with gold-level NPCs everywhere also had an above-average density of genuinely unhinged civilians. Impressive, really.

[Players, please board the Route 114 bus to Linxi Bridge.]

The stop was empty. According to the sign, there were ten stops between here and Linxi Bridge.

"114..." Ah Ze murmured. "Curly, that number doesn't feel lucky."

"Be quiet." She didn't even look at him. "If you hadn't made that mistake and gotten chewed out by your supervisor, we wouldn't be leaving this late."

She hadn't wanted to wait for him. But if she let this idiot move around alone, he wouldn't survive the night.

Ah Ze didn't dare argue. He hunched his shoulders and showed her a conciliatory smile.

A few minutes later, a green bus pulled up at the stop. The number 114 was printed on the side in clear black paint.

The doors opened. The inside was brightly lit. No passengers. And — no driver.

"A— a ghost bus?" Ah Ze's legs went soft. He didn't dare disobey the system's instruction, but his shaking knees couldn't quite manage the step up.

Curly Hair grabbed him and hauled him aboard, dumping him into a seat.

"Welcome to Route 114. Please tap your card, scan to pay, or deposit coins."

The mechanical voice filled the bus. Curly Hair gripped her defensive item tightly and approached the fare box with great caution.

The coins fell through the slot to the transparent bottom. Nothing strange emerged. No tentacles sprouted suddenly from the mechanism.

Her state of preparedness, in retrospect, made her look slightly paranoid.

The Route 114 bus continued on its way. A few minutes later it stopped again, and a man boarded — eyes crimson, blood seeping from his nose and mouth.

He stood at the entrance. Those red-soaked eyes locked onto Curly Hair and Ah Ze and held.

Ah Ze was too frightened to make a sound. He saw Curly Hair draw a high-grade exorcism talisman from her system inventory, held between two fingers, and grabbed her arm. "Don't — the disposition reading is yellow neutral. It's not going to attack us."

His customer service supervisor had shouted at him for an entire hour today, and was still showing yellow-leaning-green.

A stranger who'd never met them had even less reason to strike.

The air in the bus seemed to congeal. The apparition stood in the doorway without moving. Curly Hair and Ah Ze didn't lower their guard.

A driverless bus moving through the night, a figure at the door bleeding from every orifice — what player wouldn't be afraid?

"Sorry — would you mind stepping aside?"

The voice that broke the silence was so ordinary it was almost surreal.

"Oh — sure, sorry about that." The apparition turned to look at the newcomer, reached into a bag and pulled out a face mask, and shifted sideways to clear the aisle. "Running late after work tonight, forgot to take off the stage makeup."

It was usually quiet on this run at this hour. He'd been surprised when he boarded and found two people already inside — they'd both looked frightened by him, he noticed. Neither had moved further in.

"Xiao — Xiao—" Ah Ze stared at Chao Musheng boarding the bus behind the apparition — who had moved aside for him — and could not produce a complete sentence.

"You're this late too?" Curly Hair retrieved her talisman. "Left behind to work overtime on your first day. Sounds like your colleagues aren't looking after you."

Her competitor had walked past something bleeding from the eyes without so much as blinking. Was she going to show fear?

Laughable. Categorically impossible.

Ah Ze tugged urgently at her sleeve. Curly, please — stop talking — this Chao Musheng might not be a player—

Curly Hair slapped his hand away and shot him a sharp look.

He'd been dragging her down all day, and now he wanted her to back down in front of her competition?

Ah Ze: "..."

She was completely fearless.

Chao Musheng took in the two of them — hollowed expressions, dull eyes, thoroughly worn down by their first day — smiled, declined to comment, and sat down three rows back.

Curly Hair looked at Chao Musheng. Then looked at the empty driver's seat. She could not work it out. Was he genuinely not curious why there was no driver? Or had he become powerful enough that the strangeness of this bus simply didn't register as a concern?

It was late. Chao Musheng, not wanting to wake his parents when he got in, fished his keys out and checked them, then put them away again with some relief.

After hearing about the family in a nearby complex whose front door had malfunctioned during a fire — the electronic lock failing, nearly costing lives — his family had switched back to a traditional mechanical lock.

He'd wanted to point out that electronic locks had a manual override, but in the interests of domestic harmony and his parents' peace of mind, he'd let it go.

Small things like this were nothing compared to keeping the household happy.

*

Wait — what was that thing on this person's keys, just now?

An S-rank item?

Two of them?

Just... hanging off a keyring. Casually.

Impossible. Absolutely impossible.

Curly Hair shut her eyes and refused to open them. Definitely an illusion.

What kind of background did someone have to have to be this extravagantly, recklessly well-equipped?

Were they not afraid of other players stealing from them? Not afraid of bosses coming after them specifically?

*

The bus moved on without picking up another passenger. The silence inside was complete.

Chao Musheng's phone rang. His father.

"Dad, I'll be at the estate in about twenty minutes." He held the phone to his ear, the bottle of plum drink in his other hand. "Buy a drink? Actually — a friend gave me a bottle of chilled housemade plum drink. Do you and Mum want to try some?"

Curly Hair's ears perked up sharply.

Players in this instance were all supposed to be out-of-towners looking for work, renting rooms. How was one person's special setup extended to having parents in the instance?

Corruption. This had to involve some kind of corruption.

*

Ah Ze was growing anxious. Whether it was psychological or not, the bus seemed to be moving unusually slowly — after thirty-plus minutes on board, they'd only passed five or six stops.

The doors kept opening and closing at each stop. People stood on the platforms in perfect calm. Nobody approached. Nobody got on.

He was fairly certain some of them had made eye contact with him, which meant they could see the bus.

At 23:40, the bus finally reached Linxi Bridge.

"Linxi Bridge — please watch your step and exit through the rear doors."

The affectless mechanical announcement came again. Curly Hair got up and pulled Ah Ze off the bus, then turned to find her competition stepping off behind them.

"You're in Xingfu Estate too?"

Across the road was Xingfu Estate. The name meant Happiness. The entrance was falling apart, and most of the lights in the sign had blown — at this hour, only the upper and lower strokes of the characters were visible, leaving something that looked more like 土田 than anything auspicious.

"No — I'm across the road." He seemed to notice their exhaustion and added, helpful: "Don't take this bus tomorrow."

If he didn't have beer on his clothes and needed time to air out, he wouldn't have taken this route himself.

Ah Ze sat up like a signal had fired. Here it is. An NPC volunteering a clue. The part he'd been waiting for.

He grabbed the back of Curly Hair's jacket behind her and squeezed — don't say a word.

Across the road.

Curly Hair hadn't been planning to say anything, because she was staring at the estate across the road in silence.

A grand, immaculate entrance. Security guards in white uniforms. The entire complex lit up and green with trees — all but spelling out "high-end luxury residential" in large letters above the gate.

Compared to this place, Xingfu Estate looked like something dug out of a refuse pile.

He lives somewhere nicer. He gets more respect from his colleagues at work.

Hilarious. She didn't care at all.

Surviving to the end and clearing the instance — that was who won.

"This bus is part of a new autonomous vehicle trial. For safety reasons, the speed is set very low. Given morning traffic in this city, if you leave at six AM you still might not arrive on time."

Chao Musheng was in a hurry to get home. He was worried the plum drink would stop being cold.

Autonomous vehicle trial.

Ah Ze understood everything. No driver because it was self-driving. He'd thought the bus was haunted.

He looked back at the Route 114 bus, still dawdling away from the stop. The apparition from earlier was pressed against the rear window, red eyes wide open, staring directly at them.

Their eyes met. The figure slowly broke into a wide, unsettling grin.

Ah Ze yelped, launched himself a full meter into the air, and bolted instinctively to Chao Musheng's side. "Xiao Chao — help—"

Chao Musheng looked toward the retreating bus. The man in the rear window had already yanked his head back out of sight.

He sighed. That was a genuinely unkind prank. Look how frightened the poor person was.

He gave Ah Ze's shoulder a pat. "Don't worry. He was just joking around to scare you."

The hand on his shoulder was warm and steady. In that instant, a realization crystallized for Ah Ze: Chao Musheng was, in fact, exceptionally approachable. Easy to be around. Safe.

One look from him, and even apparitions stood aside.

Even if he was an NPC rather than a player — so what?

He could still be the person who saved Ah Ze's life in this instance.

It was his own fault, all of it — he'd been too narrow-minded, looking at the world through a player-colored lens.

Technically speaking, NPCs in this instance did have colors. But the fault was entirely his. Xiao Chao had done nothing wrong.

Curly Hair watched Ah Ze run to her competitor in a moment of crisis and frowned with undisguised displeasure.

What was wrong with this useless person? Couldn't he tell who was actually on his side?

*

"Shengsheng!" Chao's father came out of the supermarket with a large watermelon under his arm, spotted his son talking to a young couple from across the road, and waved cheerfully. "Over here!"

"Dad?" Chao Musheng waved back, then turned to the two. "My family's waiting — I'll head off. Goodnight."

Curly Hair studied the man at the supermarket entrance, smiling as he watched Chao Musheng approach. The way he looked at him — there was light in it. Pride, tenderness, and the specific quality of love that only belongs to parents.

Nobody had ever looked at her that way. She had no framework for it, personally. But she was somehow completely certain of what she was seeing: a person looking at someone he treasured.

"Shengsheng — are those new friends?" His father stepped forward, took the plum drink from his hands, gave Ah Ze and Curly Hair a polite nod, and steered his son toward the estate gate. "This heat, and you smell like a barbecue. Go home and shower."

"Interns who joined the company the same day I did." Chao Musheng gave his father a suspicious look. "Dad. Did you and Mum sneak out for a nice dinner while I was gone?"

"Ridiculous — your mother and I would never do something like that." His father held up the plum drink. "Which friend gave you this? Very generous — that's a lot of it."

Chao Musheng folded his arms, making a point. "Changing the subject. Feeling guilty."

His father gave him a firm pat on the back. "Stop stalling, let's go, or your mother finishes scolding me and moves straight on to you."

"Mum would never scold me."

Father and son, who shared three-tenths of their features, bickered their way into the distance.

Curly Hair stood where she was and watched until they were gone.

"Curly." Ah Ze waved a hand in front of her face. "Why are you staring?"

"Thinking about how far I could throw you." Looking at Ah Ze reminded her of his pathetic sprint toward her competition in the moment of fear. "Go find your Xiao Chao. Stop bothering me."

Ah Ze hurried after her. "You're the only person in this instance who's like a big sister to me. I'll be your loyal and devoted follower."

"Go be devoted to the Chao person."

"It's different with him." A pause. "He's not the same as you."

"How is he not the same?" Curly Hair's eyes narrowed. "You think he's better than me?"

"He's a native and we're players." Ah Ze deployed his best conciliatory smile. "Of course it's different."

"What if we both become his devoted followers?" Ah Ze was briefly delighted by his own idea. "He looks like he can actually protect someone."

Curly Hair thought about the three-tenths of shared features between Chao Musheng and his father. "No wonder."

"No wonder what?"

No wonder he could survive technical development and get along so naturally with the NPCs. He was a native of the instance. It all made sense.

She had known it, obviously. No instance she was in could produce a player stronger than her.

"Devoted follower." Curly Hair snorted. "Spineless."

*

The next morning, Chao Musheng stepped out of the estate to find Curly Hair standing at the junction holding a bag of breakfast, smiling at him with full radiance.

"Good morning, Xiao Chao — beautiful day today!" Her eyes curved as much as her curls. "You probably didn't have time to eat before heading out this early — I bought extra. Here, take it."

Could it really be called becoming someone's devoted follower when a player made friends with a native?

That was called ideological progress.