With a sudden gasp, Zhao Lian's lungs filled with air that felt too thin, too light — as though she were breathing through glass. Her eyes snapped open, but there was no ceiling above her, no bed beneath her.
Instead, she floated — suspended in a boundless space of flickering blue light and flowing data streams that twisted and rippled like ribbons of electricity. Lines of code scrolled endlessly around her in translucent layers, each one moving faster than lightning, vanishing into the infinite dark.
For a long heartbeat, she didn't move. Her fingers flexed in the emptiness, touching nothing, feeling nothing. Her body felt weightless, yet her heart pounded with a heaviness she couldn't name.
"What… the freak is this place?" she muttered, her voice trembling, then swallowed by the silence.
The sound echoed — once, twice — then dissolved, as if the world itself didn't have enough air to carry her voice.
She spun slowly, her hair drifting around her like black silk in water. All she could see were glowing lines of symbols, cascading faster and faster, forming strange geometries she didn't recognize. Some flickered in and out like broken pixels; others hummed faintly, their sound sharp enough to make her flinch.
She recognized some of them — fragments of command lines, data encryption tags, even debug strings. She had seen them once before when she had been coding late into the night back in her real world. But here, they weren't harmless words on a screen. They pulsed — alive — like veins under translucent skin.
Her breath caught.
This wasn't a dream.
This was inside the system.
She raised a trembling hand and watched her fingers pass through a curtain of blue light. It rippled at her touch, like disturbed water, sending tiny shards of luminescence scattering around her.
Her pulse raced. "No, no, no… this can't be real," she whispered.
But deep down, she knew it was. The air had that familiar sterile hum she remembered from when her computer booted up — the faint vibration of electricity and memory. Except now, she wasn't sitting before a monitor. She was in one.
Somewhere behind the flashing codes, she could almost make out faint voices — distorted, stretched thin through digital interference.
"Mei-mei, where are you?"
Her heart stuttered. That voice — she knew that voice.
Her eyes widened as she spun toward the sound, desperate. "Jie! I'm here! Can you see me? I'm here!" she shouted, waving her arms wildly.
Blue light splintered around her, shimmering like glass dust.
"Can't you see me? I'm right here!" she cried, her voice cracking.
But her sister's voice only grew fainter, fading into the static. The harder Zhao Lian tried to reach, the further it drifted, like a dream dissolving at dawn.
"Eh? Don't go— can't you hear me?!" she screamed, but her voice only bounced back to her, hollow and cold.
A tremor ran through her. Her fingers curled helplessly, nails biting into her palms. The edges of her vision blurred, and tears — if they could be called that — floated from her eyes as tiny glowing orbs, evaporating into the void.
And then—
The lights dimmed. The streams of code froze mid-flow.
The silence that followed was unbearable.
____
The silence after Zhao Mei's fading voice was so sharp, it pressed against Zhao Lian's eardrums.
It wasn't the kind of quiet that came from peace — it was hollow, devouring, the kind that swallowed every sound and left you gasping for the memory of noise.
The blue codes that had once flowed like rivers now hung frozen midair. Even the shimmering lights around her seemed to dim, as if the void itself were holding its breath.
Her heart pounded so violently she could feel the rhythm in her fingertips.
"Mei…?" she called again, this time softly, almost afraid to break the stillness.
No answer.
Then—
A faint vibration rippled through the space, like someone speaking from behind a glass wall. At first, it was only static — glitching tones and broken syllables. But then, from somewhere deep inside the silence, a voice began to form.
It was neither male nor female, neither human nor machine.
Just a low murmur, smooth as smoke and twice as cold.
"What a shame."
The words brushed past her like wind across the skin.
Zhao Lian froze.
Her mouth went dry as her gaze darted through the floating streams of frozen data. "Who's there?" she whispered, the sound trembling.
No answer.
The voice came again — this time softer, almost pitying. "What a shame."
She turned around, searching desperately. Her reflection appeared for a moment in one of the code walls — her face pale and flickering, her eyes wide with fear.
"What's a shame? What are you saying?" she demanded, trying to steady her tone.
Still nothing.
But she could hear movement — faint echoes of someone talking in the distance, the sound of machines whirring, and then… beeping.
Beeping like a heart monitor.
And voices — faint, muffled — as if coming from another world entirely.
"What are they saying?" she murmured, straining to listen.
The more she tried, the further the voices seemed to slip away. It was like trying to grasp fog — the moment she focused, it disappeared. She leaned forward, hands hovering beside her ears as if cupping them would help.
Then came fragments —
"…machine... stabilize…"
"…no brain activity…"
"…keep trying…"
"What?" Zhao Lian blinked rapidly, her voice shaking. "Machines? Bed? What are they talking about?"
The void didn't answer.
Her pulse spiked. "Hey! I'm talking to you!"
But her words fell flat, dead on arrival.
Then everything stopped again — completely.
The faint hums of electricity ceased. The data lines turned to mist and dissolved.
Even her heartbeat vanished from her ears.
It was like being buried alive in silence.
She couldn't hear anything — not even herself breathe.
The world — if this could still be called a world — had been muted.
Zhao Lian stood still, frozen, her chest rising and falling faster, panic rising in her throat. She tried to scream, but her voice came out soundless.
Her lips moved, her face contorted — yet not even an echo came back.
Terror crawled up her spine. Her limbs began to shake.
She wanted to run, but there was nowhere to go. The space stretched endlessly in every direction — a prison without walls.
And then, as though the universe had been waiting for her fear to peak, sound slammed back into existence.
Her voice tore through the void.
"System? System!!! What's this? Are you trying to play with me?!"
Her scream echoed, multiplying — thousands of her own voices overlapping, bouncing off the unseen walls.
"What the heck did I even do to you, huh? I had my miserable life, I was fine— just what?!" she shouted, her voice breaking mid-sentence.
But no reply came.
So she shouted again.
"Hey! System! SYSTEM!!!"
Her throat burned, and her voice splintered into hoarse fragments. Only the echo answered, cruel and empty.
Zhao Lian covered her face with trembling hands. "This is annoying," she muttered through gritted teeth. "This isn't fair…"
Her mind began to swirl — not with anger this time, but with memories.
Faces she thought she'd forgotten flashed before her eyes — her father's cold disapproval, her mother's taunting smile, and her sister Yue's confident, mocking laugh.
_____
When the echoes of her own shouts finally faded, what followed was not silence — but memory.
They came in waves, uninvited and unkind, each sharper than the last.
The first face she saw was her father's.
Cold. Perfectly composed. His lips curved in that faint expression of superiority he wore even when scolding her. "Zhao Lian," he had said once, "don't embarrass the family."
He had always said it so casually, like she was a burden that simply existed.
Then her mother — eyes lined with false tenderness, voice soaked in syrup and poison. "You'll come back, won't you?" she had said the day Lian packed her things. "You'll realize you can't survive without us."
Zhao Lian's heart clenched. She had heard that tone a thousand times — the mockery wrapped in love, the pity that never reached the eyes.
Her mother's voice was a melody of control. Sweet when others were watching, venomous when the doors closed.
And then Yue.
Beautiful, brilliant Yue.
The golden child.
Every compliment their parents never gave to Zhao Lian, they poured into Yue.
Even her laughter sounded like success.
Even her mistakes were painted as "potential."
It had always been that way.
When Lian came home crying from school — Yue got a hug.
When she achieved something on her own — Yue got praised for "inspiring her."
And when Zhao Lian finally decided to walk away, Yue only smiled — the kind of smile that said, you'll regret it.
And maybe, once upon a time, she did.
Because freedom came at a price.
A brutal, lonely one.
Her parents had the money, the name, the network. And when she defied them, they used every one of those things against her.
They made calls. They closed doors. They turned her name into a warning label in the industry.
She couldn't find a job.
Couldn't rent an apartment.
Couldn't even post under her own name without seeing waves of fake news or legal threats.
But somehow — she didn't stop.
Maybe it was the humiliation that hardened her.
Or maybe, it was the deep, ugly satisfaction of knowing that every day she survived, she proved them wrong.
She worked under fake aliases, took contracts from smaller firms, and built her way up in silence.
She learned to code, to design, to manage — not because she wanted to, but because she had to.
And when the company she works for was finally getting contracts— small, rough-edged, but her achievements— she felt something she hadn't in years: power.
A fragile, trembling kind of power, but real.
People who once ignored her now called her "Contractor Zhao."
Investors who once dismissed her now copied her models. Though still the pushover.
And Yue, for the first time, looked nervous.
Because Lian wasn't the shadow anymore.
And that was when it appeared.
That damned name.
"fit@up."
At first, she thought it was a client file or an internal test game. She almost deleted it.
But the name glowed on her screen — bright, pulsing, alive.
It drew her in like a whisper.
It looked harmless — a rough simulation. A fantasy role game with cultivation features. Something she had once pitched a game of her own, with the help of people that helped secretly.
Her idea.
Her dream.
So she'd thought, why not?
She named the prototype after the code file.
fit@up.
It sounded catchy. Futuristic. A little arrogant — just like something her boss would love if he'd listened. Or of she had dreamed to tell him.
But that night, when the first test build launched, something strange happened.
The screen flickered.
Her desk light dimmed.
Her heartbeat — she remembered this clearly — echoed like someone knocking from inside her chest.
And then she was falling.
Falling through colors, sounds, data streams — and when she opened her eyes, the familiar world was gone.
What remained were the same people she knew — the same names — but in another life. Another timeline.
Her family was there, but not as they were.
Her sister was Yue but there was Mei. She was Zhao Mei — calm, soft-spoken, loyal. The kind of sister she had always wished for.
The kind who defended her, stood by her, laughed with her.
For once, she had someone on her side.
That's why she couldn't hate the game — not entirely.
Because even if the system was cruel, even if the missions were mad, it had given her something her real world never did — a sense of belonging.
But now…
She was alone again.
The game had punished her.
The system had killed her first life.
And she didn't even understand why she was there in the first place.
Her fingers curled into fists, nails digging into her palms.
The tears came, hot and furious, cutting down her cheeks. "If I find you, System…" she whispered hoarsely, "I swear, I'll tear you apart."
Her voice cracked, her shoulders trembling.
And still, the void gave nothing back.
Until—
[System initializing:
Player Zhao Lian: username fit@up found.]
The familiar mechanical tone broke through the emptiness like sunlight through storm clouds.
Zhao Lian froze, her breath catching.
Then, slowly, her trembling lips curved.
For the first time in what felt like forever, she smiled.
Because no matter how cruel the system was, no matter how twisted this world became — at least, she wasn't forgotten.
And in that fractured moment, Zhao Lian realized:
The game wasn't done with her.
And neither was she.
___