The days after Azeroth blurred into a strange double life.
By daylight, Lin Xiao was still the quiet assembly-line ghost: head bowed over circuit boards, shoulders hunched, answering Li Wei's barbed jokes with the same half-smile that never reached his eyes. By night, when the plant emptied and the city's neon bled through the windows, he would lean against a stack of pallets, press two fingers to the silver scar on his palm, and whisper the activation phrase the System had taught him.
"Open Mission Interface."
The world folded again, and again, and again.
Q-level missions came in rapid succession, each one a short, sharp needle of experience.
- A ruined corner of the *Mad Max* wasteland: retrieve a single intact turbocharger from a warboy convoy before the sandstorm swallowed everything.
- A flooded, half-sunken Rapture from *BioShock*: escort three Little Sisters past a single Big Daddy, extract one vial of raw ADAM.
- A quiet street in *Persona 5*'s Tokyo where a low-rank Shadow wearing the face of his old high-school math teacher begged for release. Lin Xiao gave mercy with a borrowed katana and harvested a sliver of cognitive essence.
Each time he returned, only minutes had passed in Shenzhen. His body carried faint souvenirs: a sunburn from the Fury Road desert, the copper-salt smell of Rapture's ocean clinging to his hair, a bruise shaped like a butterfly mask across his ribs. The System catalogued them clinically.
**[Host Adaptation Rate: 312% above baseline. Vitality: 108 → 115. Neural Elasticity: Expanding. Reward Accumulation: 7 Q-rank Essences. Tier-Q fully cleared. Tier-A unlocked.]**
He began to change in ways no one else noticed yet.
His hands, once clumsy with anything heavier than a soldering iron, now moved with a calm certainty. When a tray of motherboards slipped from a forklift and came crashing down toward a new worker, Lin Xiao's body moved before thought: one step, shoulder roll, palm strike against the falling edge. The tray flipped, landed upright, not a single board cracked.
The entire line froze.
Zhang Wei whistled low. "Damn, Xiao. When did you turn into Jackie Chan?"
Lin Xiao only rubbed the back of his neck, embarrassed. "Just lucky."
But Li Wei saw it too. From the supervisor's platform he stared down, eyes narrowed like a cat watching a mouse grow claws.
That evening, the canteen buzzed.
**Worker WeChat Group – "Foxconn Line 7 Night Owls"**
Zhang Wei:
yo did yall see lin xiao today??? caught a whole tray mid-air like some wuxia shit
Xiao Pang:
fake. must be edited video
Wang-jie:
i was right there. no edit. kid's got reflexes now fr
Li Wei 🐍:
Probably doped up on those energy drinks. Careful, cousin, company does random tests 😉
Lin Xiao read the messages on the metro ride home, face lit by the pale screen. He felt the System stir, cold and emotionless.
**[Detecting Social Aggression Vector. Recommendation: Neutralize or Ignore?]**
"Ignore," he muttered aloud. An old woman across the carriage glanced at him, then away.
For now.
At home, his mother noticed first.
"Xiao'er, your appetite…" She watched him demolish four bowls of rice and half a braised pomfret like a starving wolf. "Are you sick? Growing again at twenty?"
"Night shifts burn calories, Ma." He smiled, and for the first time in years it was a real one.
His father said nothing, only pushed the last piece of fish toward his bowl with chopsticks, eyes soft.
The seventh night after Azeroth, Lin Xiao sat alone on the apartment's tiny balcony, city lights glittering below like scattered cultivation pills. He pressed the scar.
"System. Show me Tier-A missions."
Blue glyphs blossomed in the air, visible only to him.
**[Tier-A Mission Pool – Randomized Selection Initiated…
Complete.
Plane Designation: Warhammer 40,000 – Cadia Sub-sector Fragment (Pre-13th Black Crusade)
Objective Primary: Prevent the total annihilation of Kasr Kraf Defense Bastion for 44 consecutive hours.
Objective Secondary (Optional): Extract one (1) functional Cadian-pattern lasgun power cell + one (1) pure sample of Chaos taint for analysis.
Difficulty: A
Estimated Host Mortality Risk: 41.7%
Reward: Permanent Pocket Universe Seed (Rank-1 Empty Realm, 10 km³ volume) + 3 free attribute points + random A-rank essence draw.
Time Compression Ratio: 44:1 (44 hours inside = 1 hour real world)
Warning: First A-rank mission carries elevated psychological strain. Rejection Penalty: None. Accept?]**
Lin Xiao's breath caught.
A pocket universe. His own world. Empty now, but his.
He thought of Li Wei's smirk. Of the cramped apartment. Of the way his mother's shoulders curved inward from decades of carrying more than her frame was built for.
He thought of the militia in Azeroth who had saluted him as they burned the plague mound, faces streaked with tears and gratitude.
"Accept."
The balcony dissolved.
He stood on a wall of black stone under a sky the color of bruised flesh.
Wind howled across the battlements of Kasr Kraf, carrying the stench of promethium, blood, and something worse—something that made the scar on his palm burn like ice. Below, an ocean of cultists surged against the walls, their chants a tide of gibberish that hurt to hear. Overhead, daemon engines screamed. Leman Russ tanks bellowed defiance, their battle cannons spitting fire into the horde.
A vox-unit crackled beside him. A woman's voice, clipped and furious:
"Unidentified auxiliary on Wall Section Gamma-9! Identify or be shot for cowardice!"
Lin Xiao looked down at himself: carapace armor painted Cadian blue, a rebreather mask, a lasgun slung across his chest that felt heavier than any sword. The System overlaid everything in cold, precise text.
**[Host Designation: Temporary Auxiliary Trooper "Lin-8814". Chain of Command Integration Complete. Current Commanding Officer: Captain Alia Varnius, 122nd Cadian Shock Troops.]**
He raised both hands slowly. "Lin Xiao, off-world volunteer. Reporting for duty, ma'am."
A woman in a long storm coat strode toward him along the parapet, officers and troopers parting like water. She was young—maybe twenty-five—scarred, beautiful in the way a bayonet is beautiful. One eye was augmetic, glowing red.
"Volunteer," she repeated, voice flat. "From where, exactly?"
"Somewhere the Emperor's light doesn't reach yet," he said, surprising himself with the calm. "But I'm here now."
She stared for a long second, then barked a humorless laugh. "We're all going to die here anyway. One more body changes nothing. You—Lin—was it? You're with my command squad. Try not to shoot any of us in the back."
She spun on her heel. "MOVE, CADIANS! THEY'RE BREACHING THE LOWER BAILEY!"
And the battle began in earnest.
The next forty-four hours were a red haze.
Lin Xiao learned the rhythm of Imperial warfare the way a drowning man learns water.
Wave. Repel. Reload. Wave. Repel. Fall back. Wave.
Cultists came with bombs strapped to their chests. Mutants with extra mouths screaming hymns to the Dark Gods. Traitor Guardsmen in flayed-skin tabards. Once, a Bloodletter of Khorne materialized inside the inner keep and took eight las-blasts and a chainsword to the neck before it dissolved.
He fought on the walls, in the streets, in the rubble of a cathedral whose spire had toppled hours ago. His lasgun grew hot enough to blister his gloves. He learned to aim for joints, for eye lenses, for the soft meat beneath ceramite.
Between waves, the Cadians talked the way soldiers everywhere do.
A grizzled sergeant named Hollux passed him a flask of recaf that tasted like battery acid and ash. "First time seeing the Archenemy, volunteer?"
"First time seeing anything like this," Lin Xiao admitted, coughing.
Hollux grunted. "You'll either break or harden. No third choice on Cadia."
A young trooper—couldn't be older than eighteen—sat nearby cleaning her lasgun with shaking hands. "They said the planet cracked weeks ago," she whispered. "That the pylons are failing. That we're just… buying time."
Captain Varnius overheard. "Then we buy it with their blood, Trooper Lane. Every minute we hold is a minute some other world doesn't burn today."
Lin Xiao felt the weight of that. Real people. Real deaths. Not NPCs. Not pixels.
At hour thirty-six, the big push came.
A Despoiler warlord in terminator plate—eight feet of brass-bound hate—teleported directly onto the primary bastion wall with a retinue of Chosen. The wall became a slaughter pen.
Varnius went down first, power sword snapped, chest carved open by a chainfist. She smiled blood at Lin Xiao as she fell. "Still… holding…"
Something inside him snapped—not in fear, but in clarity.
He had died in none of the Q-missions. He would not start now.
He reached inward, to the scar, to the System that had stayed silent since insertion.
"Emergency Protocol," he whispered in Mandarin. "Give me everything I've hoarded."
**[Acknowledged. Unleashing Q-rank Essence Reservoir. Temporary Overcharge Authorized.]**
Power flooded him like cold starlight.
His muscles sang. Vision sharpened to painful clarity. Time dilated.
The Chosen lunged.
Lin Xiao moved.
He sidestepped a power maul that pulverized ferrocrete, drove his combat knife—now glowing with stolen Holy Water essence—into the gap beneath a helmet. The traitor screamed as sanctified energy ate him from the inside.
Another Chosen swung a daemon-possessed bolter. Lin Xiao caught the barrel, twisted, felt bones in his wrist creak but not break. He ripped the weapon free and fired point-blank into the visor.
The warlord roared, a sound that cracked stone, and charged.
Lin Xiao met him head-on.
He did not win cleanly. He was thrown thirty meters, ribs cracking, blood in his mouth. But he rose. He always rose now.
Using every fragment of skill harvested across a dozen worlds—Mad Max drifts, Rapture plasmid reflexes, Persona evasion steps—he danced around the giant, carving runes of banishment into the air with a blade coated in mixed essences.
At the forty-third hour, as the warlord's daemon-axe descended for the final blow, Lin Xiao slammed his palm against the monster's breastplate and triggered the last trick the System had kept in reserve.
**[ADAM Essence + Holy Water Essence + Cognitive Shadow Essence → Improvised Exorcism Charge]**
Light—pure, blinding, impossible—erupted from his hand.
The warlord screamed as warp-flesh boiled away. The axe fell from melting fingers. When the light faded, only scorched armor remained, and inside it, a fist-sized shard of crystallized Chaos taint pulsing like a dying heart.
Lin Xiao collapsed to his knees amid the cheering Cadians—those still alive.
Captain Varnius, somehow clinging to life with one lung, gripped his arm. "Whatever you are… thank you."
He could only nod, tears cutting tracks through the soot on his face.
**[Primary Objective Complete. Secondary Objectives Complete. Extraction in 3… 2… 1…]**
The wall, the sky, the smell of blood—all folded away.
He was back on his balcony.
Exactly one hour had passed in Shenzhen. The night was still warm, still humming with distant traffic.
In his trembling hand floated a seed of liquid starlight the size of a peach pit—his pocket universe.
And in his mind, a new notification, quiet and almost respectful.
**[Pocket Universe Seed (Rank-1) Bound to Host Soul.
Interior Volume: 10 km³ stable void.
Atmospheric Generation: 12 hours.
Gravitational Constant: Adjustable.
Dimensional Anchor: Permanent.
Congratulations, Host. You now own a world.]**
Lin Xiao laughed until he cried, then cried until he laughed again, the sound echoing off the concrete of the tiny balcony while a billion people slept around him, unaware that one of their number had just become a god in miniature.
Far below, in the glow of a streetlamp, Li Wei looked up from his phone, frowning at the strange sound drifting down from the fifteenth floor.
He shrugged and walked on.
He had no idea the slapping was about to begin in earnest.