Chapter 2: The Night Shift
Chen Guo hired me in under ten minutes.
"You've got the look," she said, leading me past rows of glowing monitors toward a cramped back office. "Night shift's mostly babysitting anyway. Make sure nobody steals the keyboards, kick out anyone sleeping past 6 AM, handle the occasional drunk." She glanced over her shoulder. "You play Glory?"
"Some."
"Good. Customers like it when the staff can give tips." She pulled a set of keys from her pocket and dropped them on the desk. "Shift starts at eleven, ends at seven. Pay's nothing special but you get free play during dead hours. Room's upstairs if you need somewhere to crash."
Room's upstairs.
I knew that too. The cramped apartment where Ye Xiu had lived for a year, playing Glory on the café's computers between shifts, building his legend from scratch while the professional world forgot about him.
"Sounds good."
Chen Guo nodded, already distracted by something on her phone. "Great. Fill out the paperwork tonight, start tomorrow. You can leave your stuff in the storage closet for now."
She disappeared back into the café's main floor, leaving me alone with the cardboard box and the faint hum of computers through the walls.
I set the box on the desk and stared at it.
Okay.
What now?
The SOE's compass icon pulsed. No new notifications—the system was still locked in its Calibration Phase, waiting for me to actually play Glory before it would do anything useful. For now, I was on my own.
I opened the box.
A USB drive sat on top, unlabeled and worn. Beneath it: two packs of cigarettes (Zhongnanhai, blue box), a phone with a cracked screen protector, and at the bottom, a photograph.
I picked it up carefully.
Two teenagers stood in front of an internet café. Different café, different city, different decade. One of them was recognizably Ye Xiu—younger, softer around the edges, without the shadows under his eyes. The other—
Su Muqiu.
The name surfaced from memory like a drowned body rising to the surface. Su Mucheng's brother. Ye Xiu's best friend. The one who'd designed the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella before a car accident took him at eighteen.
The boy in the photo was grinning, one arm slung around young Ye Xiu's shoulders, holding up a gaming magazine like a trophy.
I turned the photo over. Someone had written on the back in faded pencil: Glory launch day. We're going to change the world.
My throat tightened.
I didn't know him.
I never knew him.
I'm just wearing his best friend's face.
I put the photo in my pocket. The USB drive went into my other pocket—the Umbrella's equipment editor data, if the source material was accurate. The cigarettes I left in the box. The phone...
I powered it on. The screen flickered to life, showing a lock screen with no password. The contacts list had exactly three entries: "Club Office" (presumably Excellent Era's main line), "Xiao Tang" (no idea), and "Mucheng."
Su Mucheng.
The girl who thought her brother's best friend was still alive. The girl who would join Happy eventually, after her contract expired, because she believed in the man who'd carried her brother's dream for a decade.
I stared at her contact entry for a long time.
I should call her.
I should tell her—
Tell her what?
The truth? That Ye Xiu was gone, replaced by some dying software developer from another world who'd watched her animated counterpart on a laptop screen while pumping himself full of painkillers?
I closed the phone and shoved it back in the box.
Later.
Everything later.
First, figure out if these hands can even play.
The café emptied out around 2 AM.
I sat at station three—corner spot, good sight lines, mechanical keyboard that felt expensive under my fingers—and logged into a Glory account someone had left open. Basic credentials, Level 30-something Blade Master, nothing special.
The game's interface loaded in first-person perspective. I knew the layout from countless hours of footage, but seeing it through my own eyes—his eyes—was different. Sharper. The colors more saturated than any screen I'd watched.
I navigated to the training arena and selected a basic combat drill. Level 10 mobs, slow attack patterns, nothing that should challenge anyone who'd touched a keyboard before.
Here we go.
I moved the character forward. The Blade Master responded—sluggishly, the input-to-action delay just perceptible enough to feel wrong. I pressed the basic attack key. The sword swung. Connected.
Okay.
That's okay.
I tried a combo. Three-hit sequence, standard bread-and-butter for any melee class. Left-click, shift-left-click, space-right-click.
The first hit landed. The second hit landed. The third hit—
My pinky slipped. The spacebar press came too late. The combo dropped, the damage multiplier vanished, and the training dummy's health bar showed the pathetic output of two disconnected attacks instead of one fluid chain.
[Motor desynchronization observed. Combo execution failure.]
The SOE's notification flickered and vanished.
I tried again. Same combo. Same slip on the third input.
Again. Better—the pinky found the key in time—but the timing was off, the damage window missed by a fraction of a second.
Again. And again. And again.
By 4 AM, my hands ached in patterns Ye Xiu's muscle memory didn't recognize. New calluses forming over old ones, the skin protesting movements it had never learned.
The SOE tracked everything silently. Failure rates. Input delays. The gap between what my brain wanted and what my fingers delivered.
[Calibration Phase analysis: Motor function adaptation timeline indeterminate.]
[Recommendation: Extensive practice required before competitive play.]
No shit.
I logged out of the borrowed account and leaned back in the chair. The café was empty now, the only sound the hum of sleeping computers and the distant rumble of early-morning traffic.
December 3rd.
The 10th Server launches in nine days.
Nine days to teach these hands how to play.
I looked down at the fingers splayed across the keyboard. Long. Callused. Still foreign.
The fingers that had built One Autumn Leaf. That had won four championships. That had made Excellent Era into a dynasty.
I'm not him.
I'll never be him.
But maybe I can be something else.
I pulled up the training drill again. Selected the same combo sequence.
And started over from the beginning.
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