Chapter One: Gaining a Fantasy System

The dim streetlights cast a rough outline over the tattered road as Zhu Lan walked along its worn surface.

“Beat him! Damn it, how dare you freeload in my territory!”

Thud, thud, thud—

A burst of fighting echoed in Zhu Lan’s ears.

He frowned and halted, gazing ahead into the murky stretch. This was the only way back to his rented room, but the sounds unmistakably came from a brawl up ahead—when gods clash, mortals suffer.

Having lived here for over two years, Zhu Lan understood well: for thugs, identity meant nothing. If they took a dislike to you, beating you up was minor; sending you to the hospital for months was routine. After all, auxiliary police were their ringleaders—if you got assaulted, there was no one to seek justice for you.

After some thought, Zhu Lan waited at the intersection, not venturing in.

About ten minutes later, seven or eight men, bodies covered in tattoos, staggered out of the alley, reeking of alcohol so intensely that Zhu Lan dared not meet their gaze.

“Hmph, brothers, let’s keep the party going!” The leader snorted at Zhu Lan standing by the roadside, then waved his crew on.

This city was chaotic, but there was no help for it. The resident population barely topped fifty thousand, but the floating population ranged from one hundred twenty to one hundred forty thousand. Over fifteen thousand factories dotted the city, drawing workers from all over the country, and security became a massive issue. Thirteen years ago, when the reforms had just begun, tens of thousands of factories sprang up, and with little attention paid to public safety, serious injuries and deaths became daily occurrences. Back then, including the paramilitary police, the city had fewer than six hundred officers, and the ever-growing factory clusters strained the police force. Increasing their numbers was impossible—it would be a huge financial burden, as this wasn’t a major city, merely second-rate, its geography lending itself to becoming a manufacturing hub.

To deal with worsening security, auxiliary police were created. They usually operated in local precincts, their recruitment shifting from open calls to legitimizing local thugs.

It was the auxiliary police that improved safety. Though they weren’t friendly, their presence made the city, especially the factory districts, much safer. As the saying goes, the mountains may change, but nature does not. Auxiliary police, being thugs themselves, often bullied honest folk, though they knew people had limits and usually didn’t provoke anyone too much—at most, extorting a bit of money.

Watching the thugs disappear into the distance, Zhu Lan glanced once, then turned into the alley.

Passing the garbage heap, Zhu Lan paused. In the dim light, he saw a figure lying motionless in the alley, uncertain if dead or alive.

He merely glanced, saying nothing, and walked on. Such things happened every few days; thugs were ruthless but rarely killed—after all, in this country, murder investigations were relentless, impossible to suppress unless you had enough pull to order the police to drop the case. Usually, they just beat someone half to death, at most sending them to the hospital for six months.

Exiting the alley, Zhu Lan suddenly stopped and looked back into the dim passage. A strange feeling pressed him to return.

He couldn’t tell where the feeling came from, but it grew stronger, as if turning back was a matter of lifelong regret.

His expression shifted. This sensation had appeared before, most recently four years ago when he entered university. That time, he rescued a senior student, which led to a happy college life. Now, the feeling was stronger than ever.

“I must see what this is!” Zhu Lan gritted his teeth and returned to the alley. It was already past eleven at night, and this city’s inner village was deserted at this hour.

Back in the alley, not yet at the garbage heap, Zhu Lan saw a faint, flickering light and quickened his pace. Peering inside, he froze.

A white orb of light floated slowly in midair above the motionless figure, who seemed unaware of anything. Around the orb, visible distortions rippled.

The feeling in Zhu Lan’s chest grew stronger.

Just then, the white orb began to descend toward the prone man.

Snapping to attention, Zhu Lan—though unsure of the feeling’s origin—realized the orb was something extraordinary. Determined, he lunged forward and grabbed the orb.

The alley wasn’t deep, just a garbage dump; within a second, Zhu Lan had the orb in hand.

It struggled fiercely, radiating intense heat. The burning sensation on his hand made him desperate; he bit down fiercely, feeling nothing but the pain. From the moment he seized the orb, the strange feeling vanished completely.

Clutching the struggling orb with both hands, Zhu Lan glanced at the man on the ground. Under the dim light, the face was clear—“It’s him!” Zhu Lan exclaimed, but the orb’s struggle pulled him back.

He cast a long look at the man, then ran off gripping the orb.

His rented room was not far from the alley—five minutes’ sprint. Fortunately, he lived on the second floor, with no fancy security locks.

Inside, Zhu Lan grabbed a glass and pressed the orb onto the table. Only then did he realize his hand was almost entirely burned, the agony making him grit his teeth as he rummaged for medicine.

As Zhu Lan pressed the orb down, he failed to see its struggle weakening. Up close, he noticed red streaks covering the orb; its heat and writhing had burned Zhu Lan’s hands raw, and though most blood evaporated, some stuck to the surface.

Just as he finished applying the medicine, Zhu Lan turned around—before he could react, a white beam shot straight at him. Startled, he tried to dodge, but it was too fast. The light struck his head, and he clung to the wall, unable to act as a wave of pain knocked him to the floor, where he quickly lost consciousness.

He awoke groggily, clutching his head as a torrent of information flooded into his mind.

Slowly, Zhu Lan was stunned.

From the transmitted data, he learned that the orb he had seized was a product from a fantasy star system countless light years away. From the sparse information, he had acquired a fantasy system—such systems were ordinary in that star system, but inexplicably, this one had arrived in the Milky Way, landing on Earth.

The fantasy star system was highly advanced. There, technology was not about production, but ‘taking’—drawing what one needed directly from imagined worlds. If one wanted something, they simply created a fictional realm, and through the system, extracted what they required. In other words, if you needed something, you could write or film a complete fantasy story, and the system would allow you to retrieve items from that world.

Unfortunately, what Zhu Lan obtained was only a civilian model, able to fetch basic things like technological items; martial arts and the like were beyond its reach, available only in more advanced versions. His was a mass-produced product, and even that amazed him.

He spent most of the day understanding the system, gradually grasping what he had acquired.

Suddenly, a thought struck him and Zhu Lan smiled: “Does this mean I’ve saved the world?” Considering who the system had initially chosen, a sense of relief washed over him.

The man beaten last night was someone Zhu Lan knew—infamous in this Sunset District’s inner village.

His notoriety was not for good deeds, but evil. The man’s name was Yu Tiansheng, a figure everyone hated. Calling him a beast was not exaggeration; hooked on drugs, he’d sold everything, including the old family house, driving his parents to their deaths and becoming an orphan. But worse still, three years ago, for money, he drugged his own sister and sold her to a remote village as a wife. The scandal eventually broke, and Yu Tiansheng received a five-year sentence, suspended for three. He was, in every sense, a complete scoundrel.

If he had obtained the system, who knows what horrors might have ensued.

“Why was he chosen?” Zhu Lan was puzzled. Yu Tiansheng, by any measure, was an unlikely candidate for such a golden opportunity. Though the fantasy system came from a distant star system, choosing him seemed impossible—among the world’s seven billion people, why him?

No matter how Zhu Lan pondered, he found no answer.

His stomach growled, so he abandoned the question and went downstairs to a nearby diner to treat himself.

“Have you heard? Yu Tiansheng is dead. It was horrific—they say he was sliced into a dozen pieces by power lines, and even the people who came to collect his body vomited at the sight.” No sooner had Zhu Lan sat down than he overheard this conversation.

He was shocked—dead? How could that be? Last night, he’d only seen superficial injuries, but now Yu Tiansheng was dead?

Was it the abandonment of fate? Zhu Lan suddenly recalled theories about destiny: by seizing Yu Tiansheng’s fate, his thread had shortened, and with it, the world discarded him—just like in the film “Final Destination,” where death arrives by accident.