After they finished their drinks, Xue Hong grew uncharacteristically serious. “Have you noticed that you’ve lost your spark these past two years? You’re not interested in anything.”

Ji Changqing, on the receiving end of this diagnosis, looked baffled. “Haven’t I always been like this?”

Of course not.

Xue Hong rolled her eyes. “Ever since your last breakup, you’ve gotten more listless by the day. You run a company, so you should be busy, right? But you manage to make yourself seem even more idle than someone out of a job. You’re always cooped up at home, never socializing. Think about it—have you made a single new friend since you broke up?”

Ji Changqing blinked. “I deal with clients.”

Xue Hong snorted. It wasn’t like she didn’t know her. Ji Changqing was always this listless, keeping everyone at a distance. Her only saving grace was a certain enthusiasm for making money, so she was still very serious and dedicated to her work. The year she personally led the team and kept a close eye on things, many clients awarded them the “Best Partner Team” award for their projects.

Partner companies had a high opinion of her and her company.

The only problem was that outside of work, this girl found everything else boring and refused to budge. She would bring people along for business receptions and could liven up the atmosphere. But in non-business settings, with people she didn’t know well, she could remain silent to the very end.

She thought she was perfectly fine, just not very sociable at worst. But in Xue Hong’s eyes, it was infuriating. Every time she tried to drag this girl out to have some fun, meet new people, and find some enjoyment, she would go, but she’d stay silent from beginning to end. If someone took the initiative to talk to her, she’d make polite conversation for a minute or two. If no one talked to her, even better. She’d be perfectly content, quietly growing mushrooms in a corner.

She came off as incredibly aloof and gloomy.

It was enough to drive a person mad.

The reason she had given most of the company’s equity and dividends to the operations team and rarely involved herself in company affairs, aside from laziness, was that she found it all meaningless. She wasn’t willing to play along with others, claiming they had no “common language.”

To Xue Hong, that excuse was just hot air. Isn’t making money together a common language? You have to talk to people to find out if you have a common language. If you don’t even talk, what the hell is this “common language” crap?! Are you supposed to be telepathic?!

Screenwriting was the one thing she poured the most passion into. With a group of people who made a living by typing, she had plenty of common language, spending all day online exchanging brainwaves, discussing plot structures, and sharing thoughts on recent books.

But aside from writing scripts and conceptualizing stories, she had no interest in anything around her.

She was as pure-hearted and desireless as a monk, except she wasn’t a vegetarian and didn’t meditate or chant sutras.

Ji Changqing was unconcerned. This was perfectly normal. “Ever heard of Japan’s low-desire society?”

Xue Hong wanted to hit her!

Every time she was in a relationship, she was full of passion for life. The moment she wasn’t, she became incredibly listless. And now she was talking about some low-desire society? Give me a break!

Every day, Xue Hong suspected Ji Changqing was depressed, worrying that one day she’d come home to find the biggest news in the neighborhood was that this girl had committed suicide. While others wavered between love and not-love a million times, she agonized endlessly over whether or not Ji Changqing was depressed.

But this girl was completely oblivious to her friend’s frayed nerves.

Ji Changqing glanced at her and sighed heavily. “There are many ways to live in this world. You like to party and flirt with girls, and I’m happy to live a simple, reclusive life. Neither is strange. You know, every time you suspect I’m depressed and get that look like you’re itching to send me to a psychologist, you’re exactly like those parents who think their gay children are perverts and force them to see a psychiatrist.”

Xue Hong wanted to flip the table!

She hated those kinds of parents more than anything. For Ji Changqing to use that comparison—it hit her right where it hurt.

They paid the bill and left. Xue Hong went back to work, while Ji Changqing figured that since she was already in the city, she might as well drop by the company, chat a bit, and treat everyone to bubble tea to foster some goodwill.

It wasn’t that she didn’t understand these things; she was just tired of playing the game. Although it’s said that old tricks win hearts, wouldn’t it be better if people could live more authentically and freely, with fewer games? She often felt that if she put the energy and time spent on schmoozing into her actual work, she could definitely achieve even better results.

Some things she had only slowly figured out after starting her own business. Human emotions are complex and ever-changing; it’s better to just focus on solving the problem at hand. If every time someone said something, you had to wonder what they meant, if they were unhappy with you, and spin a whole workplace drama out of a single sentence, and then react to your own imagined scenario, no one would ever get any work done. You’d be too busy overthinking!

Therefore, whenever she listened to people’s opinions, she never reacted to their attitude, wording, or tone. She would listen calmly, then analyze and solve the problem.

The first six months had been extremely difficult. There were only thirty to fifty people, but listening to all the speculation, clique-forming, and backstabbing, you’d think her company had three to five thousand employees. She decisively established clear assessment criteria and corresponding salaries. It was all transparent: your value was directly proportional to your effort. After more than half a year, morale finally stabilized, and the company’s size tripled.

She understood all of Xue Hong’s worries. What she understood even better was why she felt so lazy and uninterested in so many things. If it wasn’t challenging or stimulating enough, she would feel a sense of burnout. Why was she always so passionate about creating stories and writing scripts? Because every story was brand new, requiring her to build it from scratch, stroke by stroke, and bring it to life.

Sometimes she suspected that the reason none of her relationships lasted past the two-year mark might have more to do with herself. Even though she always felt she was full of love and passion for her girlfriends, every single one of them had broken up with her, and always before the two-year mark. Any normal person would have to seriously reflect on themselves.

Was there a problem with how she handled relationships, or with the criteria she used to choose a partner?

After making an appearance at the company, she went to the boxing gym for a fight. Discovering she could now take on two opponents at once, she returned home in high spirits to her reclusive life—ready to redouble her efforts in the game to train her physique and see if she could achieve the goal of taking on ten.

When she was in elementary school, obsessed with the works of Jin Yong, Gu Long, and Liang Yusheng, she dreamed of being a wandering hero in fine clothes on a fast horse, living freely. And to live freely, taking on ten opponents was the basic starting point.

Frustrated that she had never been discovered by a wandering master with a discerning eye, she had never been able to meet this basic requirement. Now that she had the chance, of course she had to go all out.

She just wanted to do her best at whatever she set her mind to. When she wanted to start a business, she threw herself into expanding it, personally recruiting the right people for her team, and spending every day thinking about how to get everyone to work together and how to balance the distribution of profits. For nearly a year, she couldn’t get to sleep before two or three in the morning, even suffering from insomnia due to the immense pressure. When cash flow was tight, she took on over a million in debt to pay salaries…

When she wanted to break into screenwriting, she read book after book, distilling and summarizing from others’ stories, studying, learning, and imitating. Then she started posting novel after novel online to hone her craft, rewriting and writing scripts for others for free, fully committed without expecting anything in return. Now, she had achieved some small success.

And now, of course, she was fully committed to physique training. Undaunted by hardship or fatigue, she seized every opportunity, hoping to realize her dream of becoming a martial arts master.

Full of anticipation, Ji Changqing eagerly logged back into the game, only to have her spirits promptly crushed by The First.

Although the four of them had taken different paths, they had teamed up to cross the forest. So, while they emerged from the bootleg ascension pool at slightly different times, they all landed in the same city upon logging back in.

The First, an academic god but a combat dud, had gotten out early. After exploring the entire city, she found a library filled with all sorts of strange and wonderful books and promptly became addicted to studying, unable to tear herself away.

She spent so much time in the library that she actually triggered an NPC prompt suggesting that, in addition to diligently training her physique, a combat weakling like her could also cultivate mental power, which in turn could further optimize her constitution.

When Ji Changqing logged in, she happened to run into The First, who was about to do her daily mental power training—to put it vividly, it was like playing a dodge-the-ball game with her mind. Seeing a familiar face, she naturally invited her to join in. And so, Ji Changqing was utterly demolished.

Out of a perfect score of 1000, The First could already reach over 600, while Ji Changqing, giving it her all, couldn’t even break 100. The First casually comforted her, “It’s fine. It’s normal to get a low score the first time since you’re not used to it. When I first started, I only got less than 300.”

Ji Changqing clutched her chest. Why did that sound so wrong? Was that comfort or a stab to the heart?!

The First paid no mind to whether she had shattered her fragile heart. After finishing her mental power training, she dragged Ji Changqing along to practice physique. Afterward, their roles were completely reversed. The First collapsed to the ground, a boneless heap, and had to be dragged away by Ji Changqing.

Now that they were in the city, they realized how unfriendly the game was. In the novice village, they were assigned work and training. It was tiring and tough, but at least room and board were covered. In the city, they keenly felt that passing through the forest was like a coming-of-age ceremony. From now on, they had to fend for themselves for every little thing.

Currently, their only in-game currency was the contribution points awarded by the game’s store after they turned in the quest for crossing the forest.

The two of them didn’t deliberately try to coordinate their schedules, but they still ran into each other eight times out of ten. By the time Ji Changqing successfully passed the first level of the mental power game, they noticed that more and more people were showing up to train their mental power.

The First watched the growing queue for the training rooms, a thoughtful look on her face. “It seems there are easter eggs scattered everywhere in the game.” And they probably weren’t that hard to find. Their good old days of not having to wait in line were gone for good.

Ji Changqing smiled. “Then I’m just basking in your glory.” She had been able to run into The First right after logging in, wasting no time hunting for easter eggs herself.

The First turned to her. “Looks like the second stage of the game is about to begin. The first stage had everyone do manual labor and train their physique, basically getting through with brute force. Now we’re training mental power. Can the second stage be dominated by IQ?” As if struck by an idea, her eyes lit up. “This is probably the learning model of an interstellar civilization, right? The whole game is just to get you to keep learning. Edutainment?”

Ji Changqing silently rolled her eyes. Mental power training wasn’t exactly equivalent to IQ, though there was some connection.

It was highly likely that the game was meant to slowly introduce Blue Star’s country bumpkins to some interstellar common sense and basic knowledge, that much was true. But “edutainment” was a bit of a stretch. She refused to believe that an interstellar civilization would have let an institution like school disappear into the river of time. It was just that Blue Star humans were like country bumpkins in this regard. Children, like blank slates, would probably learn slowly through conventional channels like schools. But for adults, who were no longer blank slates and might even feel their futures were already set in stone, this was more like a screening process.

Only those who could keep up and seize the opportunities would have a chance to start a different kind of life.

Ji Changqing, the country bumpkin, felt like she was back on the battlefield of the college entrance exams—a poor, weak, and helpless high school senior dominated by the fear of endless practice questions and scores, with the motto: “As long as studying doesn’t kill you, study to death.”

And yet, Ji Changqing, the middle-aged woman, felt a faint thrill of excitement. This excitement was by no means on the level of “finding a new village beyond the dark willows and bright flowers.” It was at least on the level of “starting up in shock from one’s deathbed,” only to discover she had returned to her youth—brash, young, and full of life.

It was an excitement on the level of regaining one’s youth.

To have the wealth she had accumulated by middle age and live it up like a rich heir—how wonderful was that?

Lost in their own wild speculations, the two of them were overcome with delight.

Just then, the game screen changed, and a command appeared before every player currently online:

“One million people have completed the first stage. The second stage is about to begin. All who have received the invitation to the second stage, please prepare. The second stage will commence in 12 hours, real-world time.”

Meanwhile, in the Galactic Interstellar Alliance’s Blue Star base, the backend monitoring data fluctuated violently before stabilizing. The arrow indicating the direction of evolution drew infinitely close to “ABO.”