[”Options…”]

“What… did you do?”

It was hard to pin down the exact tone of Mei’s voice. Was it awe? Bafflement? Or just sheer, unfiltered disbelief? Probably a mix of all three. I couldn’t blame her. If I had to guess, kicking down ceilings with pinpoint accuracy wasn’t standard practice, even in this twisted world.

That left another question creeping in the back of my mind.

“Say,” I coughed, trying to clear the dust clogging my throat. The air was thick with it, still swirling in the firelight. Flames licked hungrily at the walls from where the rubble had crashed down, and the chaos we’d briefly forgotten during the fight came rushing back in—the screams, the clash of battle, the haunting stench of death pressing closer. Even so, I had to ask, “You don’t… see anything above our heads, do you?”

Mei threw a quick glance upward, her expression hesitant. “A ceiling…?” she said uncertainly, though her frown spoke volumes.

No glowing red skull, then. Not for her.

It seemed that this world’s more game-like mechanics were mine and mine alone. A private show of glowing markers, combat prompts, and grim reminders hanging in the air, visible only to me.

I couldn’t decide if that made me special or just especially cursed. I was the one left to juggle invisible timers, ticking down with a weight that made my stomach churn.

00:46:06…

00:25:52…

Twenty-five minutes left as a walking target, forty-six to find Nao.

It also left me with the burden of deciding our next move.

If survival was all I cared about, the path was simple—cut and run. A clean break into the night, leave the building behind and this mess with it. But survival wasn’t enough. It never had been. Not in Dao of the Divine. Not here.

Even as another screen flickered before me, tempting me with its simplicity, I barely considered it.

Alternative Objective.

Reach the Gonghe River and escape the Resplendent Harmony Festival alive.

Warning! Any Objectives still active within the town will be forfeited.

I drew a few deep breaths. Was I being ridiculous?

I hadn’t really thought things through since waking up here. All I knew was that, beating this game—really beating it—meant no room for failed quests. No unraveling threads left behind.

Somewhere ahead was an entire plotline I’d completely missed, and my perfect ending didn’t involve abandoning it this early. But was that what mattered? A “perfect” ending? Shouldn’t I value survival more? I always had as Victor, that was for certain. Never living life to its fullest. Never taking chances, always going for the easy way out…

I looked down at my unsteady hand, clenching it into a fist.

This was my chance to be someone new. Someone without regrets…

“We need to find her,” I said.

Mei blinked at me, her expression a cocktail of disbelief and exhaustion. “What?”

“Nao,” I clarified, stepping toward the jagged hole, left in the wall by the thing’s dramatic entrance. Through it, the narrow alley outside came into view, its shadows deep and shifting in the flicker of firelight. “We need to find Nao.”

The alley looked quiet enough, at least compared to the chaos we were leaving behind. The kind of quiet that feels less like safety and more like a cat, crouched and ready to pounce. Even the general mayhem of the night—screams, distant clashes of steel, the crackle of flames—seemed muted here, as if waiting for us to make the first mistake.

“Well?” I asked, glancing back at Mei. “Are you coming?”

“I understood the ‘finding Nao’ part by context,” Mei said, her frown tightening. There was a kind of quiet defiance to it. Above and behind us, the building was still creaking, blades were still clashing, and people were dying. “My confusion was more about what ‘we’ you’re talking about. I’m not leaving my people behind to fend for themselves, and you’re not running away on your own.”

The glint of a blade caught the firelight, sharp and steady. Its edge leveled with me.

How many knives did this girl carry? And more to the point, how many of them were meant for me?

“And what do you hope to achieve by staying here?” I asked, surprised by how dismissive it sounded. Was it the heat, the smoke, or just the sheer ridiculousness of it all? Or was it the voice of Liang, seeping too deep in my thoughts. “Are you planning to get buried under a burning building in a sign of solidarity? Or maybe you’d prefer to let one of those soldiers take your head off for a neater grave? Either way, ‘your people’ are going to thank you for it. They’re dying to protect you, Mei. They would prefer it if you ran away in the night, never looking back.”

The knife wavered, but only slightly. Mei’s jaw clenched, and for a moment, I thought she might actually use it. But as I stepped out into the alley, where the air was marginally less suffocating, though still choked with smoke and the acrid tang of burning wood, only her voice followed.

“And how do you think you’re going to find Nao?” Mei called after me, her voice sharp and rising over the distant roar of flames. “She could be anywhere by now.”

“I’m going to let fate lead the way,” I said, glancing once left, then right, weighing the shadows and their secrets. The right seemed marginally less murderous, so I went that way.

I’d barely taken two steps when a burning chunk of roof came crashing down in front of me, splitting the air with a deafening crack. The ground quaked beneath my feet, and another wave of heat and dust rolled over us, stinging my eyes and lungs.

Mei didn’t have to say it, but I could feel her glare burning into my back. “Great plan,” she muttered.

I coughed, waving away the smoke. “Fate’s a work in progress,” I said, and without missing a beat, I spun on my heel, pivoting 180 degrees like some half-drunk dancer as I started walking the other direction. “Which is clearly pointing me to the left,” I said, finishing my thought aloud as if the universe needed to hear it.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Mei stared at me like I’d finally gone mad. Maybe she wasn’t entirely wrong.

Every fiber in me was buzzing, vibrating with a deep, inexplicable certainty: this was the way forward. It didn’t matter how nonsensical it seemed. I’d already made peace with the absurdity of this world, with its glowing red skulls and eerily game-like mechanics. I’d resigned myself to the guidance of the invisible tutorial.

If a hole in the wall conveniently opened up, I’d dive through it without question. If a building tried to fall on me, I’d take it as a nudge to change direction. Did it make sense? Absolutely not. But neither did the fact that I was walking around in a world where death marks hovered like neon signs above our heads.

Sense was something I’d left behind the moment I died.

She followed after me. Of course she did. Mei Faolang might have had a streak of youthful righteousness that bordered on recklessness, but she wasn’t stupid. Nor was she suicidal. If I had to guess, she was also curious—burning to know what I knew, what drove me forward, who I was.

She must’ve known something about Liang Feng. The man had a reputation. But whatever she’d heard, none could’ve lined up with what she was now seeing. Eerie knowledge, a strange calm in the face of death, and the ability to kick down ceilings at a whim. Little did she realize, the real Liang—who was, for the record, still very much alive in my head—was currently chuckling smugly about the proud brat trailing us, despite her earlier protests.

Me? I didn’t have the energy to be smug. My attention was too fixed on the crimson skull hovering above my head.

Some fifteen minutes of restless walking, and I’d learned a few things about it.

It had a peculiar habit, that mark. The closer an enemy was, the brighter it burned. Not exactly subtle, but useful in its own grim way. It made hiding pointless—ducking into a building and hoping to outwait the timer was a death sentence. But with enough nerve and a convenient indicator for enemy aggro ranges, zig-zagging through danger zones was surprisingly plausible.

And so, I found myself conflicted as the death mark’s timer kept ticking down.

00:09:44…

Should I have felt relived? Maybe. Every second gone meant one less second to screw up, but it also meant one less second to maneuver. So far, our progress had been steady, if erratic, thanks to the mark.

Should it suddenly flare up out of nowhere as we were streaking through a dim alley? Then a left turn, through a half-collapsed building that smelled like soot and despair, would keep us safe as several snarling figures rushed by outside. Then, as we came to a crossroad, it would point us to the right—my mark glowing fainter than Mei’s where I positioned myself like a dowsing rod.

Every route chosen was done so on the whim of a glowing skull, or my own overactive sense of self-preservation. For even if the mark didn’t warn me, I wasn’t about to head into a burning building or walk anywhere near those loudest clashes of battle.

Now, it was also thanks to the mark we found ourselves hunkered down behind an overturned cart on a desolate street. The worst of the destruction had already swept through here, leaving the buildings around us charred, hollowed-out shells. A strange silence hung in the air, broken only by the distant cries of the living and the dying.

This place was a graveyard—its people either evacuated or lying lifeless in the streets.

Not that I trusted the pile of corpses ahead of us one bit. The skull above my head pulsed ominously.

We’d seen too many of those things rise from the ground already, and they’d scared the hell out of me every time. I wasn’t keen on finding out if this particular heap was as lifeless as it looked or if—

And then, a first twitch up ahead.

Fucking knew it…

“What are those… things?” Mei asked quietly, her voice barely audible over the crackling remnants of the chaos around us. She crouched beside me, her small form tense, like a bowstring drawn too tight.

Ever since we left the burning pavilion, Mei had grown quieter. Not out of fear, I thought, but from something colder—shock, maybe. Even to someone like her, steeped in the half-truths of folklore and the stories of this world, the things we’d seen tonight defied imagination.

Even to me, who’d played Dao of the Divine for thousands of hours, it had taken a while to accept what these things were.

“I suspect you already know,” I replied, my eyes fixed on the pile of corpses ahead. It was beginning to stir for real, and the sight sent an uncomfortable ripple down my spine. Computer graphics really doesn’t do the live experience justice… An arm jerked loose, spasming like a half-strung puppet. A leg twitched, testing its weight against the cobblestones.

I stole a glance at the crimson skull still burning above my head. Then at a draining timer.

00:08:59…

“Jiangshi?” she ventured, her voice hesitant, uncertain. She said the word like it might summon them closer.

I didn’t answer right away, and she took my silence as tacit agreement.

“But… that’s impossible?” she whispered, though the rising pitch of her voice made it a question. Impossible. The word hung there, heavy with disbelief. Should’ve been impossible. Yet here we were.

Dao of the Divine had always walked a fine line, a xianxia masquerading as wuxia. The wulin and their superhuman feats were common knowledge, feats Mei herself could likely recite as easily as nursery rhymes. But in the darker corners of the world, away from the bright lanterns of civilization, things like this crawled.

And over the coming years, if my calender wasn’t completely off, things would only get worse.

Still, I didn’t answer. My focus was split between the pile of corpses, the ominous skulls above our heads, and the timer steadily counting down.

So far, there had been no dead ends in our journey forward. Whenever our path seemed blocked, there had always been an alternative. A burning building barring the way could be bypassed by clambering over a pile of crates that just happened to lead over a nearby wall. A street teeming with shrieking and fleeing crowds—pursued by more of the undead—could be dodged by darting down a narrow alley. And if an armored soldier stood silent and watchful on a rooftop, a half-open window likely offered an escape.

There had been, up until now, a sense of deliberate narrative pulling us forward. A thread of fate weaving through the chaos, guiding us toward some predetermined goal. But as I crouched there beside Mei, the thread began to feel dangerously thin.

Her breath hitched as one of the corpses in the pile rose to its feet, a grotesque parody of life. She clutched her knife tightly, but didn’t move.

“Keep quiet,” I murmured, my voice barely more than a breath.

The street ahead of us stretched long and desolate, but it was losing the latter distinction with every passing moment. More corpses, which had been satisfyingly inert just minutes ago, were starting to shift. An arm jerked here, a head twisted there, and the air began to thrum with that dreadful anticipation of things going terribly, terribly wrong.

Even so, the tutorial I’d been betting my life on seemed intent on pointing us straight through this mess.

00:28:17

00:08:03

Two timers, ticking down independently.

There were options.

Option one: We could turn back, retrace our steps, and hope to find another way forward. But something told me that once we abandoned this path lain out for us, it would unravel completely. And with it, any hope of finding Nao in time.

Option two: We could wait. Let the death mark tick down to zero and hope that, without it, the Jiangshi would ignore us. But there was a second timer to worry about, the one counting down toward… something. Something bad. I didn’t know how much slack that clock had, and spending eight minutes sitting still felt like an indulgence we couldn’t afford.

Option three: We could fight our way through. Brute force. High risk, high reward. We might die. But—

I could still recall those screens flashing across my vision as I brought down the ceiling on the first Jiangshi we’d encountered. Combat Essence increased.

It was a sinister way to grow stronger, but it was a way to grow stronger. And having already succeeded once… Well, I couldn’t deny the lure of it. Had I been watching this through my phone screen, I would’ve been salivating at all the potential EXP that lay before me. The one difference being, this wasn’t a game. There was no reset button if I fucked up. Only death.

Even so, in the back of my mind, Dao of the Divine one iron rule kept echoing on repeat: the greater the risk, the greater the reward…

I let my gaze wander. First, to the barrels scattered near the overturned wagon we were hiding behind. They looked flammable—possibly explosive. Then, to the surrounding buildings, their walls charred and brittle, sagging like old men under the weight of their own history. A sharp gust of wind—or the right shove—might bring them down. Finally, I looked at the street ahead.

So many undead, sluggishly dragging themselves upright. Juicy clumps of experience.

Even before I’d consciously made the decision, I could tell I was going to regret everything that I was about to do. Still, I’d already decided to go for a better ending in my second attempt at life. My plans couldn’t end with just getting through this night. I needed to take whatever boosts in strength I could get, and terrifying as they were to normal people, to a Dao of the Divine veteran, Jiangshi were just bottom-of-the-barrel mobs.

Bottom-of-the-barrel mobs that could rip you apart if you got careless.

I could feel my heart thump faster.

This is a profoundly stupid idea, isn’t it?