Nobody really understands Zhou Wen anymore.
A few years ago, his name was brought up whenever people talked about talented young cultivators. Teachers praised him, students compared themselves to him, and many believed he would eventually become one of the leading figures of his generation. Then something happened, a defeat so public that it seemed to erase years of achievement overnight. Since then, the opinions around him have changed dramatically.
These days, most people see a boy who has lost his drive.
He sleeps during class, avoids unnecessary attention, and spends an unhealthy amount of time staring at his phone screen. From a distance, he looks less like a former prodigy and more like someone who has quietly given up. Even those who once supported him have started lowering their expectations.
The strange part is that Zhou Wen rarely bothers correcting them.
The world he lives in is not the Earth recorded in old history books. Dimensional storms changed everything long ago, leaving behind countless dangerous zones scattered across the planet. Some contain creatures that resemble ancient monsters from myths, others house beings so bizarre that nobody can properly explain them. Entering these places has become one of the main ways people gain power, wealth, and status, though plenty never return after stepping inside.
For most explorers, every expedition comes with real consequences. A wrong decision can leave someone crippled, bankrupt, or dead.
Zhou Wen’s situation is… different.
Hidden inside his phone is a game that should not exist. The locations found within dimensional zones appear inside it as playable stages, the monsters roaming those deadly realms can be fought through a blood-colored character under his control, and victories somehow produce rewards that don’t stay confined to a screen.
At first, even Zhou Wen struggles to understand what he has stumbled across. The more he experiments, however, the harder it becomes to dismiss the connection between the game and reality. Resources that others risk their lives pursuing can sometimes be earned through patience, repeated attempts, and enough persistence to keep going after failure.
That doesn’t mean everything becomes easy. If anything, the mystery surrounding the game only grows larger as Zhou Wen digs deeper into it.
While classmates assume he is wasting his future on mobile games, Zhou Wen is quietly spending his nights doing something far more dangerous, exploring a second version of the world that exists behind a screen, chasing secrets hidden inside dimensional realms, and gradually discovering that the game may know far more about the future of humanity than it should.
