Gu Wujiu’s first thought when he opened his eyes was: Did someone beat me up?
No. He remembered going to collect a debt. Old Wang owed Third Brother eighty thousand bucks and had been dragging it out for six months, so Third Brother sent him over to “have a little chat.” He rode his electric scooter to the entrance of an alley in the urban village and saw a little kid squatting outside Old Wang’s door. Four or five years old, runny-nosed, hugging a bag of spicy strips.
And then—
A truck.
The kid stood in the middle of the road.
His body moved. Before his brain could react, his hand had already shoved the little brat out of the way.
He didn’t remember much of what happened after that. There had been a tremendous crash, someone shouting, and the feeling that every bone in his body had shattered. But he remembered his final thought with perfect clarity—
Fuck, what a terrible investment.
“…So I died?”
He stared at the ceiling overhead. It wasn’t the white fluorescent lighting of a hospital, but a dingy stone ceiling, something between a cave and a cellar. The air smelled damp and rotten, mixed with some indescribable fragrance, like the cheap incense burned in temples.
He tried moving his fingers. They moved. He tried turning his head. It turned. His neck gave a creak like a rusty door hinge.
He lowered his head and looked at his hands—thin, pale, with prominent knuckles and neatly trimmed nails.
These weren’t his hands.
Chen Hao’s hands had been rough as sandpaper. His right index finger bore a scar from when a beer bottle had cut him during a fight at fifteen. These hands, on the other hand, were so soft they looked like they’d never done a day’s work.
He abruptly sat up, and a wave of dizziness washed over him. Once it passed, he surveyed his surroundings—stone walls, a wooden bed, a table propped up with a stone where one of its legs was missing, and an oil lamp on the tabletop whose flame flickered feebly. A few gray robes lay piled in the corner.
“What the hell is this place…?”
Ding—
A voice exploded directly inside his head. He hadn’t heard it through his ears; it had emerged from his brain, like someone jabbing a needle into his temples.
“Congratulations, Host. You’ve successfully died once.”
Gu Wujiu froze for two seconds.
“…Who?”
“The Merit System, at your service.” The voice paused, its tone chilly, like a draft blowing down the back of his neck in winter. “Though given your character, Host, there’s really nothing about you worth serving.”
“What did you say?”
“I said”—the voice drawled leisurely—“in your twenty-four years alive, you got into more than three hundred fights, committed an unspecified number of extortion offenses, and issued too many threats to count. Your one and only good deed was shoving a child out of the way before you died. You only did it once, and you still got yourself killed in the process. Your return on investment is negative infinity.”
Gu Wujiu opened and closed his mouth.
He wanted to argue, but he found he didn’t really have anything to argue with.
“So what?” He decided to skip the moral judgment and get straight to the point. “What the hell are you? And where am I?”
“You are currently in the disciple dormitory of the Heart-Eater Sect’s outer branch. The Heart-Eater Sect is one of the evil-path sects in the cultivation world. The body you now occupy originally belonged to someone also named Gu Wujiu. He was at the first level of Qi Condensation and died suddenly for unknown reasons three days ago.”
“Cultivation?”
“Yes, cultivation. The kind where you fly through the sky, burrow through the earth, and live forever.” The system’s tone held a trace of impatience, like it was explaining that one plus one equaled two to someone with questionable comprehension. “Unfortunately, with your current cultivation, flying through the sky and burrowing through the earth have nothing to do with you. Your current level is roughly equivalent to… Hmm, let me think of an apt comparison—a weed by the side of the road.”
“Specifically, one that’s about to be trampled to death.”
Gu Wujiu drew a deep breath.
He, Chen Hao, had been running with the wrong crowd for years. What kind of snide, sarcastic people had he not met? The guy under Third Brother nicknamed Sharp-Tongued Zhang was already vicious enough with his words. But compared with the thing in his head, Sharp-Tongued Zhang was practically a gentle little angel.
“Fine,” he said through gritted teeth. “Cultivation is cultivation, and an evil sect is an evil sect. Why are you attached to me?”
“The Merit System, as the name suggests, accumulates merit. Host, you need to do good deeds and build merit to obtain Merit Points. Merit Points can be exchanged for cultivation resources, cultivation techniques, cultivation pills, and so on.”
“Wait.” Gu Wujiu seized on the key point. “You’re saying I’m in an evil sect?”
“Yes.”
“An evil sect disciple.”
“Correct.”
“And you want me to do good deeds and build merit.”
“Your comprehension has finally come online. How heartwarming.”
Gu Wujiu fell silent for three seconds.
“Are you fucking crazy?”
“Friendly reminder: Insulting the system will not deduct Merit Points, but it will not earn you any benefits either. It’s purely a waste of the Host’s already limited brain cells.”
He closed his eyes, then opened them again. The stone walls were still there, the oil lamp was still there, and that irritating voice in his head was still there.
This wasn’t a dream.
He had really died, really world-hopped, really become a rookie disciple of an evil sect, and then had a system even more foul-mouthed than he was stuffed into his head, ordering him to be a good person in an evil sect.
“Oh, right.” The system’s voice sounded again, suddenly a little more cheerful. That cheerfulness sent a chill down Gu Wujiu’s back. “I almost forgot to tell the Host one small thing.”
“…What small thing?”
“When your Merit Points reach zero or become negative, you will die.”
“You really will die. I’m not speaking metaphorically.”
“You fucking—”
“Your first quest has been issued.” The system’s voice was as calm as a weather forecast. “Please complete it within twelve hours. Failure to complete by the deadline will deduct all Merit Points. Sincerely, your Merit System.”
A line of semitransparent text appeared before Gu Wujiu’s eyes, like a quest panel from a video game. But it was crooked and wobbly, like a grade-schooler’s homework:
Quest: Help a Heart-Eater Sect disciple overcome a difficulty. Reward: Merit Points +10, fragment of a Qi Condensation cultivation method ×1. Note: A Heart-Eater Sect disciple’s difficulties typically include, but are not limited to—being beaten up, robbed, threatened, poisoned, or ambushed. Good luck, Host :)
He stared at that smiley face for a long time.
“Helping people in an evil sect.” He muttered to himself, rolling the words around in his mouth. Every single one of them reeked of absurdity. “Helping people in an evil sect.”
A shrill scream came from outside the window. It was impossible to tell who was beating whom.
Gu Wujiu sat on that broken wooden bed in an ill-fitting gray robe, wearing an unfamiliar face and listening as the quest notification from the system, whose sarcasm ran bone-deep, gradually faded away.
He suddenly missed the days of collecting debts.
At least when he was collecting debts, he was the one screwing other people over.