Song Tianyang paused for a moment. “Right now?”
The Emperor System didn’t respond to her.
Song Tianyang had no choice but to quickly leave the women’s quarters—
She had no idea what was inside the mysterious big gift pack. If it really sent her a military general—a woman would get plastered on the confession wall, digging up all the bizarre incidents of outsiders lodging on the third floor of the women’s quarters, and a man would be socially dead.
【Gift pack being delivered…】
【Please check your phone, Your Majesty.】
Phone?
Song Tianyang immediately opened her online banking app.
Seeing no change in her balance, she felt disappointed.
After some searching, she finally found on the third page a new app she had never downloaded before. The icon was a jade seal, and the app’s straightforward name was Deadman Cultivation Game.
Song Tianyang: “…”
Song Tianyang: “Can’t you just give me a ready-made account?”
Emperor System: 【Your Majesty, ready-made accounts are easy to recover. Please enjoy the fun of raising it yourself.】
She launched the game, and the first scene was a rundown mud hut.
The hut offered no protection from the cold in winter nor from rain in summer. A chibi-style little figure wearing coarse cloth clutched a bundle of firewood, then collapsed inside.
She was no stranger to this chibi art style.
She had played many mini-games on Douyin about a lonely mother and daughter patching up a broken house to survive winter.
They all had this style, and every time she clicked in, she’d end up playing match-three puzzles for half an hour without realizing it. If she had to play match-three here as well—
Song Tianyang clicked on the little figure, which had a question mark and was interactive, trying to help him up, at least onto the bed, then close the door.
Otherwise, the cold wind would keep blowing in, and before she could raise him, the account would be deleted.
She had only clicked once when a popup appeared—
Please read five minutes of Chronicles of the Grand Historian to rescue your deadman!
What followed was dense blocks of text.
“Ha.”
When people are utterly speechless, it’s true they laugh out loud.
Fortunately, the system detected her academic level and gave her the Baihua New Translation version.
Half stepping out of school, Song Tianyang returned to her dorm, lying on the bed playing with her phone, nurturing her future subordinate.
…
So cold, so tired.
Li Zhi, carrying firewood back to the hut, collapsed, and his consciousness seemed to detach from his small body, coldly watching himself from above. The white mist from his unconscious breath condensed and slowly drained the warmth from his body.
It seemed this time he was really going to die.
Since he was born and aware, Li Zhi had often skirted death—his mother was not the main wife but a Hu singing girl gifted to his father when he was rising in officialdom.
Although his mother’s Hu bloodline meant she was undervalued in the household, she had lived a decent life once pregnant, and the main wife even promised to elevate her to concubine status after the birth.
But when Li Zhi was born, his father was disgraced in court and demoted to this barren, mixed Hu and Han border region, rife with bandits.
His father disliked him greatly, believing his birth brought bad luck and vented all his frustrations on the young Li Zhi and his Hu mother. The mother and son lived in the darkest, dampest side rooms, eating leftovers and wearing tattered hemp clothes, constantly punished, either beaten or scolded.
More than once, Li Zhi thought he would be beaten to death.
His mother comforted him: Hu blood was lowly, but Hu people’s lives were tough; they wouldn’t die so easily.
Li Zhi believed it for ten years, until a cold took his mother’s life, and he tasted the crushing, silent despair for the first time.
His hands were so small, unable to hold anything, no one could save him.
Just when Li Zhi thought he was about to die in this bitter winter night, a warm, invisible force lifted him onto the bed and covered him with a thin quilt.
Who was it?
His father?
This thought was immediately dismissed.
Father never came here.
He could not think of who it might be.
Could it be his mother’s ghost?
A flicker of hope rose in Li Zhi’s heart, not to live, but to die—
If mother came to take him away, wouldn’t that be better?
…
Song Tianyang feared her hard-earned reward would suddenly vanish. Reading the Chronicles of the Grand Historian made her dizzy, eyes blurry. If only reading five minutes of a royal uncle instead would be so much better!
She patched the roof and broken windows for the little figure in the game, and stuffed new cotton into his quilt.
The game was very simple; the only difficulty was forcing her to read for five minutes. Without supervision, she struggled to keep attention on one thing for more than three minutes.
After she repaired the dilapidated hut, her phone suddenly went black and then displayed a line of text—
“You have saved him from freezing to death on a cold night. Since his mother’s passing, Li Zhi has experienced warmth from others. He thought it was a dream, but the new cotton in the quilt, the patched roof, and the newly nailed wooden boards on the windows remind him it’s no dream. Someone quietly came and then quietly left.”
Her phone quickly showed snapshots of Li Zhi’s childhood.
His father treated him like a servant; before dawn, he had to fetch water and chop wood, while even the dogs ate better than him.
When he was sixteen, fate’s hammer struck again—his half-brother got into a fight and accidentally killed a local powerful man’s son. To protect the eldest son, the father tied Li Zhi up and pushed him out to take the blame like livestock.
“The local lord wanted to execute him, but you have one chance to change his fate.”
“Will you send him to the border commandery as a soldier, or into the palace?”
Time in the game flowed differently from reality. Song Tianyang could only briefly intervene in his life.
The border military camp was harsh, with a higher mortality rate than the palace.
The two choices led to different branches.
“Famous General” “Powerful Eunuch”
No matter which path, Li Zhi would have to fight through life and death struggles and could rise to high status; only the scenery he would see differed.
A prompt on the right: “Choose the powerful eunuch path for Li Zhi to undergo structural transformation.”
The last time Song Tianyang encountered that term was in ideology class.
Like traditional energy turning into new energy, or an agricultural country becoming a manufacturing giant—that’s called structural transformation, breaking the current deadlock to achieve sustainable development.
This term was mostly used for industries or nations.
She had never seen it used for a living person.
Song Tianyang raised doubts, and the system answered: 【It refers to body structure.】
“Ah?”
A second later, she understood.
Song Tianyang suddenly felt immense pressure.
With a light tap, the little figure in the game was about to permanently sever brotherly relations with his second brother!
But on the other hand…
What if the other brother looked down on the second brother and just wanted to enter the palace to try his luck at wealth and power?
Song Tianyang decided to ask him personally.
“I’ll give him the choice.”
…
Tied up tight and locked in the water dungeon, Li Zhi’s whole body was freezing. His dark brown hair stuck wet to his forehead, and his green eyes, like stars, were hidden in the shadows of the cell as he lowered his gaze.
The icy river water chilled his bones; only the heavy shackles held his body up.
His shirt hung open, and with each heavy breath, his pale chest muscles rose and fell.
At that moment, Li Zhi remembered that night six years ago when someone came.
That person repaired the broken hut, carried him to bed, replaced his quilt’s cotton with warm new stuffing, but never left a name. That presence was a flickering candlelight in his lonely, painful life.
Li Zhi had suspected it was his mother’s ghost but felt she didn’t have such powers. Perhaps it was another deity.
Would that person come to save him again?
Li Zhi dared not hope but couldn’t stop yearning for Them.
Just as he thought he would faint, a beam of light suddenly appeared before him.
The dungeon door had not opened—where was the light from?
Unless…
Li Zhi summoned his last strength to lift his head and see the source of the light.
It was a scroll, floating in midair, unfurled—a King’s Edict.
“If you don’t want to die, I give you two choices.”
“Do you want to go to the border commandery as a soldier, or enter the palace as a eunuch?”
Song Tianyang was fully immersed in her Emperor role.
“Your Majesty?”
“Six years ago, was it you who saved me?”
His voice was hoarse; even the jet-black eyelashes could not hide the light blooming in his eyes.
“Yes, it was I.”
Dressed in splendid clothes at night, having read hundreds of tragic novels, Song Tianyang would never fall into such a cliché trap. She sent over her own profile picture, determined no thankless, melodramatic misunderstandings would happen.
Li Zhi finally saw his benefactor’s true face.
Their face was white and full, clearly from a wealthy family that had never suffered a day of hardship.
Hearing Them call Themself the emperor, could it really be so?
Li Zhi, badly injured and frozen to delirium, did not think about the logic. He only thought of being close to his benefactor.
Since the benefactor was the emperor, then naturally—
“I want to enter the palace to serve you.”
His thin lips lifted in a joyful smile, though his appearance was so pitiful he looked like an abused dog who had found a merciful master. He rushed forward desperately; the pulling chains clanged heavily, yanking him back and leaving deep blood marks on his wrists.
But Li Zhi didn’t care.
More than achieving merit and glory, he wanted to be his benefactor’s loyal hound!
At the same time, Song Tianyang was notified she had reached the message transmission limit.
“Uh…”
She looked up at the bottom board of the upper bunk.
Her future subordinate seemed to have misunderstood something.
If she had known she’d get so carried away playing the emperor, she might have felt sorry for his second brother and sighed deeply.
At that moment, she heard barking outside the corridor.
Some students secretly raised cats or dogs in the dorm. Every graduation season, a bunch would be abandoned.
Song Tianyang put down her phone and looked toward the corridor, seeing her neighbor carrying a cage and smiling apologetically, “Did I disturb you? Sorry, I just brought Dou Dou back from neutering. Once he recovers, I’ll take him home.”
“You took him to be neutered; will he hold a grudge against you?”
Song Tianyang asked.
Her classmate scratched her face, “I don’t think so! I did it for his health. It prevents many diseases and helps him live longer!”
Song Tianyang nodded along enthusiastically.