[The sixth round of the game is about to begin. The number of players is insufficient. One million people will be randomly selected to enter the game!]
[Take this seriously—failure means death for the player!]
[Welcome, Ye Shu, to the game. This is your fifth successful entry. As a reward, you gain an extra chance to draw a card!]
Ye Shu pressed her hand against the translucent screen before her.
[Confirm Draw!]
[Strength +2, Constitution +3.]
[Received: Mystery Egg x1. Effect: Open the Mystery Egg to summon a dragon... or perhaps an eight-legged lizard.]
[Received: Everlasting Green Plant Seed. Contractable. Grade: Unknown. Effect: Absorbs any gas in the air and emits oxygen humans need within a 3-meter radius. Breathe easy!]
[Received: Camping Tent x1. Effect: Just an ordinary tent.]
Her vision swam.
Ye Shu was transported into the game world.
Barely had she opened her eyes when she realized she was underwater, wearing a wetsuit and regulator in her mouth. Distant beds of green kelp and darting little fish swam about in the dusky, uncertain environment.
Ye Shu surfaced, pulling off her oxygen mask. With a thought, she summoned the holographic panel.
[Player: Ye Shu]
[Game ID: 10096]
[Current players alive: 1,000,000/1,000,000]
[Starter Items: Mobile Phone x1; Funds: 2000; Personal ID.]
[Game Introduction: Planet E's Great Crisis—The Human Cleansing Scheme...]
[Game Quest: Survive for twenty days.]
The minimal description filled Ye Shu with foreboding.
What exactly... is the 'Human Cleansing Scheme'?!
Planet E had developed much like Blue Star, with a population in the tens of billions—hardly something easy to wipe out.
To wipe out humanity completely... the scope could only mean the entire planet.
Could this be planetary war? Nuclear fallout? Ye Shu couldn't be sure.
She’d arrived right at 12:07 a.m.
It had only been minutes since she climbed out of the water.
Stars were sparse overhead, a few bats flitting through the night. Ye Shu sensed no immediate threat.
She stowed her diving gear into her storage space without a second thought.
Driving away from the deserted shore, she headed toward the city.
In the car, the back seats were packed with oxygen tanks. The original Ye Xiaoshu had loved wild swimming, and though her family was of modest means, she'd spent a fortune on this diving gear.
She turned on the radio for the latest news. The stretch of coastline was deserted; her drive into the city went unhindered.
"This is Storyteller Xiao Piao. Tonight I'll share... The First High School of the South Sea..."
At the first hint of a horror story, Ye Shu immediately switched the channel.
"Multiple 5.1-magnitude earthquakes have struck Z City; as yet, no casualties. Stay tuned for follow-up coverage."
"Welcome to our station... One hour ago on Planet E, a thunderous boom was heard across the sky—many residents reported it..."
Ye Shu’s fingers froze.
One hour ago—that was midnight.
The exact moment players had been transferred in.
Sky, thunderous boom... Was the main stage of this game in the heavens themselves?!
Within the game, Ye Xiaoshu played the role of a makeup artist. Life was unexpectedly decent; she’d rented a townhouse in this backwater city, conducting both business and daily living within its walls.
She returned to her bedroom on the second floor, pulling out her phone to start searching.
Most news feeds were tabloid scandals about celebrities, but soon enough a trending headline caught her eye—"Skyward Booms, Suspected Alien Invasion."
She opened a video: amid the murky night, a streak of black-violet lightning arced across the sky, illuminating everything with blinding brilliance—then came the earth-trembling roar.
Beneath, the comments spilled in:
[Are special effects this realistic these days?]
[It’s not CGI. My aunt saw it too—scared my cousin to tears.]
[Fear not, fellow Daoists, I was just ascending my tribulation—send me 50 yuan to see what happens next!]
[Scammer, get lost already...]
[Those thunderbolts... That’s divine power, shattering the heavens and the earth... unheard-of!]
[Stop spreading rumors. Where’s this alien invasion? Officials have already denied it—said electromagnetic anomalies caused a magnetic storm, nothing more.]
[I’ve never seen lightning like that. After it struck, I thought I saw a giant shadow in the sky.]
That last comment quickly disappeared into obscurity.
Ye Shu replayed the video multiple times, searching for the user who'd mentioned seeing a shadow. Suddenly, the webpage died—404. The video had been taken down.
Not just that one. All similar videos and news reports were scrubbed from the net.
No evidence of the incident remained.
Only an official post about a solar storm and magnetic disturbance persisted.
Ye Shu, for one, wasn’t convinced. Solar storms happened in outer space; while they might cause malfunctions on E Planet, they had little to do with lightning like that.
The more the authorities tried to cover it, the more nervous they seemed.
Whoever was in charge must already know something but keeps it from the public, perhaps for fear of chaos.
Players were abuzz with theories—was it alien invasion, a cataclysmic natural disaster like a second great flood?
Many of these newbies had read the Survival Game Handbook compiled by Huaxia, giving them a sharper edge than most locals of Planet E.
[Human Cleansing Scheme!! Damn it, are they going to wipe us players too?]
[Come on, the survival game is just player-culling with a pretty name. If it weren’t hard, it’d be called Baby Bus or some such nonsense.]
[Reporting in as a new player! Anyone got inside info on the game core? I’ve already found a place to hide—if it’s aliens, I’m holed up in an air-raid shelter with food and water stocked. Here’s hoping I survive and see my parents again!]
[Could it be a biological warfare arc? They’ve never run one like that before.]
[Possible. Survival games usually don’t repeat previous instances.]
[Surely the authorities in E Country know more than they let on? Feels like this game is all about the sky.]
[Old advice for rookies—never reveal any supernatural ability to NPCs or think you can cling to the game officials. My own sister died in a lab; I barely escaped with an invisibility talisman.]
Ye Shu scrolled through the endless comments, but not a single clue turned up.
Midnight sleepiness caught up with her; not one to fuss, she washed up and went to bed.
Meanwhile, in the bustling metropolis of Jinghua, a man slowly opened his eyes.
He looked down at his own body, relief washing over him—at least this round, he was human, not some monster!
“Find a woman named Ye Xiaoshu,” he commanded.
His bodyguard stared in shock. The boss, waking after lying unconscious for half a day, exuded a completely different aura!
Back in her own rental's beanbag chair, Ye Shu jolted awake midway through the night—startled, half-asleep, she summoned something strange from her contract space and drifted back to sleep, eyes barely open.