"All achievements cleared, finally."
As the boss fell, Xu Yuan slowly leaned back into his gaming chair, his eyes bloodshot, while the production credits began scrolling across the monitor alongside the completion cutscene.
After more than a month of late-night grinding, he had finally cleared every worldline and unlocked every ending of Cangyuan, a title hailed as having the most intricate plot among domestic games.
For a 2.5D pixel-art game, Cangyuan's narrative was almost excessively rich.
Thousands of choices, twenty-five worldlines, and dozens of vastly different endings gave players an entirely fresh story experience with every playthrough.
"With current technology, maybe only a 2.5D pixel-art game could hold a narrative of this scale."
Only after watching every single cutscene to the end did Xu Yuan turn off the power with satisfaction. Fighting through his exhaustion, he went to the bathroom to wash up, climbed into bed, and habitually reflected on the game's story:
"It's finally over. Pity about the Prime Minister, though. In all dozen or so endings where he ended up as the final boss, he got killed off by the damn writers purely for the plot.
"Besides, once you run through it a few times and get used to the mechanics, the difficulty drops right off.
"Haah...
"So tired... Better stop thinking. Still have to help out at the old man's company tomorrow. Slacked off for over a month; he's probably going to chew me out tomorrow."
Muttering softly under his breath, sleepiness pulled Xu Yuan into a deep slumber.
Rumble—!
Amid flashes of lightning and rolls of thunder, torrential rain poured down.
Accompanied by the steady crackle of burning firewood, Xu Yuan opened his eyes in a haze of pain.
"Is it raining...? Tsk, my head hurts... Think there's still Fenbid at home."
The splitting headache made Xu Yuan instinctively try to get up in his daze and look in the medicine kit for a painkiller, but once his eyes fully focused, the dim surroundings before him made him freeze.
Where is this?
Where's my home?
The familiar ceiling was gone, replaced by an unfamiliar, abandoned Buddhist hall.
Aged, decaying rafters and wooden pillars.
A stone Buddha statue sitting upon a lotus pedestal, missing one arm.
A campfire flickering in the biting wind.
And,
A veiled woman in black quietly sitting beside the fire.
The pitter-patter of rain drifted in from outside the hall.
Everything was eerily quiet.
Silence for two seconds. He closed his eyes, then opened them again.
Nothing changed.
"..."
Xu Yuan tried to make sense of what was happening to him.
Yet after pondering for a while, he remained completely clueless.
The only thing he could confirm was that he seemed to have transmigrated.
However, the source of his headache just now was not the aftermath of fusing memories, but a literal, swollen lump bulging on the back of his head.
Transmigrating without any memories left Xu Yuan feeling utterly alienated from everything around him, his gaze sweeping across the dilapidated hall.
Pouring rain cascaded down from the eaves along aged roof tiles like a bead curtain, splashing ripples into puddles outside the temple. Beyond the campfire's glow, outside the entrance lay bottomless darkness.
Like most people, Xu Yuan had fantasized about transmigration, but it had only ever been an affection for what he could never truly embrace.
He had always possessed a clear understanding of himself: without cheats, in certain works of fiction he probably wouldn't survive past chapter three.
And the grim atmosphere before him looked distinctively like one of those works where he wouldn't last three chapters.
The winter rain was bitterly cold, sending wave after wave of chills surging through his heart.
By the faint light of the campfire, Xu Yuan's gaze wandered across the room again and again.
The temple hall was vast; now that its once-thriving incense had faded, the formerly majestic Buddha took on a bizarre air in the gloom.
After a sweep of the room, Xu Yuan's gaze finally settled on the only other living soul in the temple besides himself.
The woman in black sat cross-legged quietly beside the fire with her eyes closed, a sword resting beside her.
The flickering firelight illuminated skin as white as snow. A black veil concealed her face, and long, straight black hair spilled casually down her back like a waterfall. As the chilly wind blew, the black robe faintly traced her graceful curves.
A rainy night, a ruined temple deep in the mountains, a beautiful woman—putting these together made it hard for Xu Yuan not to think of bizarre tales.
Amid the dead silence, Xu Yuan slowly rose from the ground.
Helping out with the family business all these years, the old man had brought him along to see many people and things, whether aboveboard or shady.
Eerie as the surroundings were, once he faced reality, Xu Yuan knew very well he had to do something.
This body of his seemed injured, and he was thinly clad; at the very least, he needed to sit by the fire. The chill of the winter rain was already freezing him stiff.
Keeping his eyes on the woman, Xu Yuan walked toward her step by slow step.
The woman in black seemed not to hear his footsteps, remaining quiet beside the campfire, resting with her eyes closed.
The veil could not hide her demeanor, serene and captivating.
Just as he drew near, Xu Yuan's pupils suddenly constricted.
On the ground beside the woman, a colossal arm came starkly into view.
His footsteps halted, his heart violently skipping a beat before instantly easing.
Though lifelike, the arm was not human; it had the texture of stone.
He looked back at the giant one-armed Buddha statue he had seen earlier.
Presumably, it had broken off from it.
Using the stone arm as a bench, Xu Yuan sat down, staring at the woman's flawless profile beneath the veil.
Two seconds of silence passed in the bleak, chilly wind, and the woman in black slowly opened cold eyes as dark as ink, looking toward Xu Yuan.
Suddenly—
Rumble—!
A flash of lightning and crash of thunder tore through the pitch-black sky, illuminating everything inside and outside the ruined temple.
The flash came and went in an instant. As he locked eyes with the woman, Xu Yuan's peripheral vision caught sight of something outside the temple gate.
Corpses.
By the lightning that flashed during the thunderclap, he saw that the puddles in the open clearing outside the main entrance were filled with mutilated corpses, thick blood steadily spreading and flowing with the rainwater...
What remained of Xu Yuan's grogginess vanished in an instant. His heart began racing out of control, and his hands, hidden within his sleeves, trembled uncontrollably.
His family didn't run business in the Golden Triangle; the sight of a ground strewn with corpses was a bit beyond his threshold.
Biting the tip of his tongue hard, Xu Yuan fought to suppress his mounting panic, trying to analyze the situation with reason.
The sharp pain on his tongue finally brought him some calm. Forcing his breathing steady, he looked at the woman in black before him.
The lightning faded, and outside the temple entrance was swallowed once more by darkness, bleak and murky.
Yet the scene from moments ago was already etched into Xu Yuan's mind.
Every corpse outside held a weapon and wore identical clothing. Though their deaths differed, in death their toes were almost all pointed toward this ancient temple.
Which meant they came from the same place, and for some unknown purpose had wanted to storm this ancient temple.
That fleeting glimpse made Xu Yuan realize a great deal in an instant. Stiffly, he turned his gaze to the woman beside him.
He realized he seemed to have sat down next to someone terrifying.
There were only the two of them in this temple, and his current body was visibly frail. Those corpses outside trying to break in could only have been her doing.
Outside, thunder rolled endlessly across the black sky, and cold wind continually seeped through the battered temple door. A woman clad in ink-black and a young master dressed in fine silk sat around the fire, while outside lay a bloody shambles hidden in the shadows.
In the silence,
"You're in my way."
Her voice was cool as ice, calm and indifferent.
"..."
Hearing this, Xu Yuan blinked.
He was in her way?
Xu Yuan soon realized that the woman's gaze wasn't directed at him, but at what lay behind him.
Behind him?
Doubt rose in his mind.
He had checked earlier: large as the hall was, from this angle, there was nothing behind him except that colossal one-armed Buddha statue.
Perplexed, Xu Yuan looked back instinctively.
And with that single glance, a chill shot straight from his tailbone to his skull.
Xu Yuan saw a pair of legs.
Lower legs that stood as tall as his entire height.
Creeping upward inch by inch, his gaze followed the limbs.
Without making a sound, that colossal stone Buddha had stepped down from its lotus pedestal and was now standing right behind him.
Its cracked, sinister face lurked in the shadows beneath the roof, seemingly smiling as it looked down from on high at him and the woman beside him.
"..."
His mind went blank for a second.
The science he had always believed in couldn't explain the phenomenon before his eyes. Terror of the unknown detonated in Xu Yuan's heart, impossible to contain.
Xu Yuan's breathing accelerated uncontrollably. The eerie giant Buddha, seven to eight meters tall, loomed right before him, leaving his body stiff as if plunged into an icehouse.
After freezing for several seconds, Xu Yuan forced his rigid body into motion, shuffling aside.
He... he needed to get out of the way immediately.
His heart pounded so violently it felt ready to burst from his chest; this horrifying sight had completely surpassed his understanding and tolerance.
Just then, Xu Yuan's peripheral vision caught the woman in black.
Even with the giant Buddha bearing down, the veiled woman did not stand up. She remained seated quietly in place, not even reaching for the sword beside her. Not a single trace of change showed on her flawless, cool countenance; she simply looked up at the statue with an impassive stare.
Her calm ease slowly lent Xu Yuan a measure of reassurance.
Shrinking into a corner of the hall to steady his panic, he watched the Buddha and the woman at the center of the hall with utmost caution.
Thank goodness... this woman looks strong.
Xu Yuan thought of the ground covered in corpses outside.
What had frightened him moments ago now served as his anchor.
Xu Yuan couldn't imagine facing this bizarre "living Buddha" all by himself in this deep-mountain temple.
Woman and Buddha stood in silence for two seconds as a chilling, murderous aura slowly spread. Xu Yuan took the chance to creep back until he reached the corner of the ruined temple.
Suddenly, the bizarre "living Buddha" moved.
Its colossal size did not hinder its speed in the least. At a speed Xu Yuan could barely track, that gigantic palm smashed down.
Boom—!
The hall and the ground shuddered violently at once. As the massive palm struck, it snuffed out the campfire, the room's sole source of light.
Xu Yuan's vision plunged into pitch darkness in an instant.
With the light gone, sound became the only presence in the dark: wave after wave of tremors and roars joined together, rising and falling in succession.
Listening to the commotion nearby, Xu Yuan's heart hammered in his chest from his corner, his clenched fists digging fingernails into his palms without him even realizing it.
Abruptly—
Buzz—
A resounding sword hum rang throughout the temple.
A flash of blue sword light streaked through the dark and vanished,
and everything instantly fell silent.
Rumble—!
A roll of thunder and flash of lightning in the sky illuminated the entire hall once more.
By that light, Xu Yuan finally saw the scene over there.
The woman's black robes bore not a speck of dust as she calmly sheathed her sword. Across from her, the giant "living Buddha's" head was already gone.
While Xu Yuan stood in a daze—
Thud!
A dark silhouette crashed down in front of him. The dust it kicked up made him frown and step back.
It was the colossal head of the "living Buddha."
And the pair of benevolent eyes on that head were staring right at him with a ghostly glint.
At the sight, Xu Yuan instinctively wanted to retreat toward the woman in black; something this bizarre was far too dangerous.
After the thunder, everything returned to darkness.
Xu Yuan turned over his words in his mind, walking toward where the woman had been standing, planning to ask her a few things.
Just then,
from the darkness in front of him came a faint, weak murmur:
"Third Young Master..."
"Run."