Chen Huai’an used to believe his future would be ordinary in the best possible way. Finish university, land a stable job, live quietly, nothing over the top. For someone who had grown up alone, that kind of life sounded more than enough.
His parents had died years ago in a wildfire while working as forest rangers, leaving him to grow up without much of a safety net. From that point on, everything depended on his own effort. Scholarships kept him in school. Careful budgeting stretched every small income further than it should have. Between classes he worked part-time whenever he could, slowly pushing himself forward until he finally made it into a top university. For the first time, the future didn’t look like a constant struggle.
Then a single hospital visit tore that fragile balance apart.
What he thought was a lingering injury turned out to be something far worse. Mid-stage cancer. The kind of illness that doesn’t just threaten your life, it empties your wallet before you even understand what is happening. The treatment alone was far beyond anything he could hope to afford.
Things unraveled quickly after that. His girlfriend left without much explanation. Friends who once filled his phone with messages slowly stopped calling. With no family to rely on and no money for treatment, Chen Huai’an made a quiet decision. He withdrew from university, rented a cheap apartment beside a quiet wetland park, and prepared himself for whatever time he had left.
After years of fighting to stay afloat, he finally stopped trying.
It was during those slow, empty days that a strange app appeared on his phone.
He never downloaded it. It simply showed up one night and refused to be deleted. The title was odd enough to make him pause—“Virtual Girlfriend.”
With little else to do, he opened it out of mild curiosity. The game displayed characters from different worlds, some clearly from science fiction settings, others from fantasy realms filled with cultivation and martial arts. Among them, one character stood out to him for reasons he couldn’t quite explain.
Her name was Li Qingran.
Unlike the heroic figures usually shown in games like this, the opening scene revealed something entirely different. She was lying in a ruined hut during a violent storm, her body weak, her cultivation crippled, and a strange poison slowly eating away at what little strength she had left. There was no dramatic rescue waiting for her. Without help, she would simply die there.
The game presented him with a choice.
Help her, or close the screen and let the story end.
At first it felt like any other mobile game. He could send resources through small purchases—food, clothing, repairs for the broken shelter. But Li Qingran’s reactions were… unusual. Every item that appeared around her was met with cautious disbelief, as though she truly sensed that someone beyond her world was interfering with her fate.
Bit by bit, her past surfaced as well. She had once been a promising disciple of the respected Qingyun Sect, until an incident turned the entire sect against her. Her cultivation was stripped away, her name disgraced, and she was abandoned in the wilderness to die.
Then the impossible happened.
One day, something he sent through the game appeared in his real apartment.
From that moment on, Chen Huai’an could no longer treat it as simple entertainment. Somehow, a dying college student on Earth and a fallen sword cultivator from another realm had become connected by a system neither of them understood.
While Li Qingran slowly begins to stand again with the help of an unseen benefactor, Chen Huai’an starts to realize that the strange game in his hands might be more than a distraction.
It might be the beginning of something neither world was prepared for.
