She lives in this city like a shadow in someone else’s memory. Even the lights of the subway station shining on her face seem to be a plot laid out for others. She is just passing by.
Let’s call her “Ye Qiu”, the name carries the coolness of the season.
She gets off work at 7 o’clock every night, buys a half-price lunch box at 8 o’clock, and returns to the rental house at 8:30. This house has no windows, and the light is hanging by a yellow and dirty light bulb, like a firefly that is about to go out.
After taking a shower, she opened her notebook, and the startup screen of “Mingchao” jumped out on the screen, like a virtual curtain, opening another world for her.
She chose Xiakong.
A girl who can fly, with a soft skirt and sharp eyes, is completely different from her. She is not like her, always replying “received” a beat slower in the company group; unlike her, she is cautious every time she speaks; and unlike her, she wears a black T-shirt that has been washed for two years and jeans bought at a 50% discount.
Xia Kong needs a breakthrough.
Breakthrough requires materials.
Materials come from monsters, from quest rewards, and from the repetitive, long, and annoying “drop rate”. She calls this “luck”.
She doesn’t have much luck in real life, so she wants to fight for some in the game.
She checked on the strategy website how many Tidal Sail Cores, Burning Phosphorus Bones, Crystallized Phlogiston, High Purity, Full Frequency, etc. are needed for each breakthrough… She made a list in Excel, like the quarterly KPI assigned by her boss, ticking one by one, and every time she ticked one, she felt a little more at ease.
It’s not that she doesn’t know what she is doing. At the age of 29, she hesitated for ten minutes before ordering a takeaway, but she killed monsters like flying in the game, just for a piece of material. She knew that these were just virtual numbers, but she just needed them – they were the only things she could control.
She couldn’t control it in the company, the person she liked was already married, and even last month she only won a laundry ball in the lottery.
“You are nothing in reality.” She sometimes thought to herself like this.
“Then be a character in the game.” She thought again.
She changed Xia Kong’s special weapon and saved up “Golden Fleece” to buy on Treabar. She didn’t trust the platform, but compared with the “intimate” of the customer service, she was more willing to believe the words of the community. She hung out in the discussion area of those card drawers to see how they broke through and formed teams – there was a kind of stranger’s enthusiasm, which was warmer than the intimacy in reality.
She slowly saved materials. Sometimes it took twenty times to kill a monster, but only one bone was dropped, but she didn’t get angry. She convinced herself that this was like life – others took a straight road, and you took a detour, but it was not a waste of time.
She also cooked in the game. Make “Stuffed Meat Tofu” to increase the drop rate; make “Resonator’s Feast” to increase critical hits; even take screenshots of each recipe and save them, and create an album. In reality, she almost never cooks. The pot is rented, the range hood is broken, and the gas meter is secretly used by the neighbor for two cubic meters.
Sometimes she is confused. Is she avoiding something by being so persistent in the game? Or perhaps, she has long regarded the game as a simulation of reality, and only in this simulation can she have the opportunity to become stronger.
On the night when Xia Kong finally broke through the sixth level, she bought a piece of strawberry cake, which was a half-price item that was about to expire at the convenience store downstairs. She lit the candles, turned off the lights, and sang “Happy Birthday” alone.
It was not her birthday, nor was it Xia Kong’s birthday.
But she wanted to celebrate: she completed a task, from beginning to end, without giving up or asking for help.
She took out a screenshot and posted it on WeChat Moments, with only four words: “I did it.”
There were only two people who liked it, one of whom was her cousin and the other was a colleague, who probably just liked it.
But she didn’t care.
She finished the cream on the cake, sat in the chair, and felt a subtle warmth in her stomach. She suddenly remembered the words she wrote in her diary when she was seventeen:
“When I have the ability, I will become a person like the wind.”
That year, she didn’t know “Xiakong”, nor did she understand the terms “Tidal Sail Core”, “Phosphorus Burning Bone”, and “Full Frequency Phlogiston”, but she knew that she wanted to be the one who could be three feet above the ground and not trapped by the world.
Now, she is still on the ground, still wiping the computer screen in a daze late at night, but her fingers are no longer shaking, and her heartbeat has begun to have a rhythm.
She no longer wants to rely on others. She wants to rely on herself, even if it is just in a virtual world, relying on killing monsters to collect breakthrough materials, relying on a logical and transparent cultivation system, and relying on a little bit of decent “intensity” to accomplish something.
She will continue to play.
But not to escape, but to return to reality and tell herself one sentence:
“Look, you can still do it.”