【You’re awake! Your current identity is Master of Hama Valley.
Go repair the hot springs and build your home! The villagers and spirit beasts are waiting for you!】
Xiang Yu stared silently at the app on her desktop—an app that couldn’t be deleted or uninstalled.
A week ago, with the help of a truck, Xiang Yu had been reborn into this world line, only to become haunted by this tenacious app.
After checking the news and current affairs online, she found that although there were some minor differences, this was indeed another world.
She was still herself, and still spectacularly poor. Xihai University remained the same: a long-term bottom-ranked, policy-supported, regional-care 211 university of the lowest tier. The campus had been built in the suburbs, dozens of kilometers from the national highway. Open the windows, and you could see snow-capped mountains.
Only geology and surveying students—and pangolins—crouched all over the mountains. They had truly managed to send children from the mountains deep into the mountains.
As graduation season approached, the unemployed heroes still surged like carp crossing a river. It was also time for the counselor to pressure everyone into signing their employment agreements. If a student signed up for a job shoveling manure for fifty yuan a day, paid in cash, the counselor would praise them for having “spirit,” as though he were bound to a system that would electrocute him if any student failed to find work.
The person who was actually bound to a system was Xiang Yu herself. She had swiped through the employment notice issued by that busted app and discovered that it wanted to give her a mountain, allowing her to manage Hama Village through the Hama Green app.
The app’s mailbox now contained an employment agreement, a labor contract, and a job appointment notice, all so realistic they could have been genuine.
Her roommate, studying outside, messaged her to say that they had run into Old Hao on the way. He had asked them to find out whether Xiang Yu still wanted to graduate.
Xiang Yu pondered for a moment, then opened Penguin.
Her chat with her counselor still stopped three days ago.
Counselor: Graduation season is here. You don’t come to meetings, and you haven’t signed your employment agreement. What exactly are you trying to do?!
At the time, Xiang Yu had chosen to ignore him, caught between making a pathetic apology and throwing a small tantrum. When she stuffed her phone back into her pocket, she had accidentally tapped [I Want to Become Penguin Couple with You], and there was no way to retract it.
The counselor hadn’t dared contact her for three days. Perhaps he was afraid of ruining his reputation in his later years and had asked her roommate to pass along the message instead.
After all, having a job at a university wasn’t easy these days.
Now that the balance of power had shifted, Xiang Yu ate her braised chicken and rice while casually flipping through the app’s mailbox. She downloaded a few files and sent them to her counselor.
That evening, she went to her part-time job unloading cargo for Cainiao. Afterward, she helped a classmate make campus deliveries. Life continued as usual.
Before bed, she received a series of payments. And just like that, she put the strange app out of her mind and fell asleep, tired but fulfilled.
The next day, her counselor called her seven times without getting through, then sent her more than ten long voice messages.
When she opened them, every one was booming with energy.
“Hey, Xiang! You always seemed so quiet and unassuming, but you’ve gone and started a tourism company! Who would’ve thought our graduating class would produce an entrepreneur? Maybe you’ll even be able to solve some of our juniors’ employment problems!”
“Our university will definitely help wherever we can. You know that Xihai’s startup guarantee loan has a maximum personal limit of two hundred thousand yuan, right? Come to my office later. I’ll watch you fill out the application.”
“I discussed your proposal with my colleagues all morning. Well… I have to say, the difficulties are pretty serious. Do you know where Hama Village is? One of your seniors is doing poverty-alleviation work there.”
“It’s run-down, the roads are steep and terrible, and the village ranks at the bottom every year. Developing it is going to be difficult. Don’t panic. I’ve already submitted your materials to the department, and even the Party secretary is helping think of a solution.”
Utterly unable to understand what he was talking about, Xiang Yu played the counselor’s final voice message again.
“Your onboarding…”
“Your personnel file…”
“It’s all been taken care of.”
Had her counselor finally lost his mind?
Xiang Yu sucked in a breath. She went back over everything she had done since yesterday’s campus deliveries and huge chicken leg, but couldn’t find anything that might have caused this. In the end, she opened the Hama Green app with reluctant suspicion.
The instant she entered, a cheerful background tune blasted at her. Then a line of text slowly appeared, growing from far away to close-up, from tiny to enormous:
【Please proceed to Hama Village to complete the beginner’s mission】
The box spun, jumped, grew and shrank, flickered in and out, and seemed determined to use every free animation effect in the PowerPoint library against her, all while playing festive music.
The homepage switched to navigation mode, urging her to reach her destination as soon as possible. Another pop-up window appeared.
【The Hama Green Project is an innovative entrepreneurial initiative centered on the transformation of ecological value. It encourages immortals, spirit beasts, and mortal entrepreneurs from the Three Pure Ones and Four Realms to seize strategic opportunities and employment opportunities. Under the strict principles of “innovation-led development and green development,” and while observing ecological red lines, it will fully open channels for the flow of resources among the Three Realms.
Party B was reborn into the K2IE world line after dying in a traffic accident and acquiring the identity of “Scenic Area Operator.”
Basic lifespan: 30 days
Current remaining lifespan: 28 days
As the exclusive operator of the Tianbai Snow Mountain Hama Valley Glacier Park, Party B may exchange positive-lifespan points for favorable visitor evaluations. Major errors, such as visitor fatalities, will deduct 50% of the remaining lifespan.
Refusal to carry out operational instructions will trigger a death rewind, forcing Party B to repeatedly experience the process of dying in the traffic accident.
If the lifespan reaches zero, Party B will return to the scene of the traffic accident and complete the death. The system will automatically terminate the contract.】
“…”
Sweat turned Xiang Yu’s back clammy despite the sweltering weather.
Unwilling to believe it, she immediately pulled the SIM card from her phone and inserted it into a backup handset. Then she dug out a hammer and screwdriver and made a show of trying to physically destroy the thing.
At that moment, her head suddenly went dizzy and everything before her eyes went black. A vision abruptly surfaced in her mind: a fully insured, hundred-ton semitrailer hurtling toward her at ground-skimming speed.
A rumbling soundtrack thundered in her ears: “We’re all doing our best to stay alive.”
After several voices saying, “I don’t know! I thought that was a speed bump,” and, “Take it up with my insurance company,” Xiang Yu heard, at the very end, the coroner sigh:
“After all that, turns out they had to piece her together themselves.”
…What?
That was the thing about people. They might say every day that they didn’t want to live anymore, but when death really came for them, they were still rather afraid of ending up impossible to reassemble.
Ever since arriving in this world that did not belong to her, Xiang Yu had been living in a daze. Yet after triggering the punishment, she felt oddly grounded.
Looking at the balance of twenty-eight days, she suddenly understood the preciousness of life. Her anxiety about work vanished. Now she had a guaranteed job—one signed with her lifespan.
After reflecting painfully on her situation, the first thing Xiang Yu did was spend her remaining savings on accident and transportation insurance.
The insurance agent’s face practically split with delight. Though she had no idea why a fresh graduate was buying so much insurance, the agent quickly completed the paperwork. Xiang Yu listed the welfare home where she had grown up as the beneficiary, using its unified social credit code.
She had originally planned to return home often after becoming successful. Now, if that ridiculous Hama Valley couldn’t be developed, she would probably have to trade cold, distant companionship for warm, tangible money.
The map showed that Hama Valley lay dozens of kilometers beyond the suburbs. From Xihai University’s campus, one had to continue another ten kilometers into the mountains. The national highway ended at the school gate. Beyond that, there were only winding mountain roads through the countryside.
It wasn’t that no one with a head for business had ever tried to develop the area. Xiang Yu found traces of several promotional campaigns online, all of which abruptly ended after a news report titled “Dispute Over the Development of Tianbai Snow Mountain Hot Springs.”
She searched the court documents. In essence, the previous hot-spring contractor had lost everything, then fled with the money.
Natural hot springs were Hama Valley’s most heavily promoted attraction. Developing the snow-covered mountains would cost money, but when it came to hot springs, all you needed was a hole in the ground to soak in.
The good news was that Hama Valley’s geology was rich in natural sulfur, which supposedly had therapeutic benefits.
The bad news was that most of the valley’s hot springs were high-temperature springs, ranging from roughly 75 to 96 degrees Celsius. Their main function was sterilization and disinfection—basically, making sure everyone came out thoroughly cooked.
The few pools with temperatures suitable for actual bathing, rather than boiling hotpot-style, had therefore received special attention from the previous contractor. Because sulfide deposits had turned the area around the natural pools pitch-black, they had absolutely nothing to do with the current trends of being “Instagrammable” or “photogenic.”
The developers knew it looked shabby. They laid bright-red, nonslip plastic mats—the kind used in restaurant kitchens—across the ground and tiled the edges of the pools.
The tiles made the place even more extraordinary. Before, it had merely resembled a filthy pond; afterward, it looked almost exactly like a public toilet. They even dug a channel to divert the spring water into the pools and introduced some sort of hot-spring version of “floating wine cups along a winding stream.” The resulting promotional images were, to put it mildly, difficult to describe.
One had to wonder whether the officials had ever inspected the trench-style toilets at the village primary school. Sulfur hot-spring water was naturally murkier than other types, and it came with the smell of rotten eggs from the sulfides. In the promotional photo, two groups of people crouched on either side of a tiled, murky ditch, looking as though they were relieving themselves together in the wilderness—except that each of them was holding a wineglass and sneaking bites of food.
Apart from this half-finished disaster, the only other time Hama Valley ever appeared in the public eye was in government-sponsored poverty-alleviation advertisements. Its local specialties were crammed into links alongside apricots, plums, Chinese yams, potatoes, and mountain cucumbers, and the valley was allotted perhaps ten seconds of screen time.
Within that limited window, the person filming stuck a straw into a peach and sucked out the flesh as if drinking fruit juice, leaving behind nothing but the skin.
The price alone was enough to put people off. Soft peaches were expensive to transport and required refrigerated shipping, so the cost of spoilage was factored into the price. By the time they appeared on the poverty-alleviation platform, they were selling for fifteen yuan apiece.
Wild mushrooms were even more outrageous, at 208 yuan per half-kilogram. Even the livestream host didn’t have the nerve to put them on the little product cart.
Rich people, huh? Even a poverty-alleviation campaign has to be this extravagant.
