"Are you bored of your life? Do you want to experience amazing adventures?"
Xi Zirui stops in his tracks, as these words flash annoyingly on a screen in the storefront ahead of him. He's on his way home from work. He's an intern on a social media company, which means he goes from department to department running errands for everyone who lays eyes on him.
Bored is an understatement. Xi Zirui is going insane with boredom. The days run into each other at such a speed that he can't even tell what month it is.
He doesn't have to debate himself for a long time before going inside the store.
He's blasted with cold air as soon as he walks in. The dingy air-conditioning unit mounted over the counter doing its best to offer some relief from the oppressive Chongqing heat, but ultimately, falling short.
The sales clerk's head springs up as soon as the annoying electrical chime announcing his presence goes off.
"Uh, hi, I saw the ad in the front?" he says, pointing towards the screen mounted in the window.
"Of course, of course, please come in," she says in a bubbly voice, motioning him towards the counter.
Now that he's here, Xi Zirui feels a little silly. Honestly what can this hole in the wall of a shop do for him? Maybe they sell drugs? Have drugs become legal? He's so out of the loop and burned out that that is a definite possibility.
Honestly, if they have, he wouldn't say no to them.
"I'm bored," he tells the girl, once he reaches the counter.
She's wearing some kind of contact lenses that make her eyes enormous, and her fake eyelashes almost touch the the frames of her aviator glasses.
"We have just the thing, follow me," she says, and pops her bubble gum loudly at him.
She comes away from the counter, and walks towards an open doorway hidden from view by a tacky crystal bead curtain.
Now Xi Zirui thinks he's about to get his organs stolen.
That would still be the most exciting thing to happen to him the entire year, so he follows after her.
His suspicions of organ harvesting, are only heightened, when behind the curtain he finds what looks like a futuristic sleeping pod, for lack of a better description.
There's a narrow, padded leather bed, and encasing all of it, a sleek black mechanism with a touch screen and thousands of flashing colors.
"Please lay down," the girl says motioning towards the pod.
"What is this?" Xi Zirui asks, less certain now, about his willingness to be a victim of back-alley surgery.
"This is the Transmigrator 4000!" she walks towards the pod, and slaps the curved surface excitedly.
"The what?"
"The name is a work in progress."
That's not exactly what has Xi Zirui confused. "Okay, but what does it do?"
"It sends you on amazing adventures, where you can find, love, power, fame, or all of the above." It sounds suspiciously like she's reading him a sales pitch.
He sighs. "Can't you just give me drugs?"
She blinks at him. "Recreational drugs are illegal," she frowns at him, looking as if she's passing judgement, before she breaks into a huge smile. "But in the Transmigrator 4000 you can take so many drugs, you'll forget your own name."
"Then the Transmigrator 4000 is illegal too?"
"It's not illegal," she says, her sales smile seems to have become stuck in place.
"But is it legal?" Xi Zirui asks.
"It's not illegal," she insists. "Why do you care? You wanted to buy illegal drugs from me."
He's embarrassed to admit he thought drugs might have become legal while he wasn't paying attention, so he just says nothing.
The girl takes him by the arm, and pulls him towards the pod. "Please lay down."
"How much will this cost?" he asks, laying down on the bed with a feeling of impending doom.
"The Transmigrator 4000 is a prototype, so we're letting the first ten customers enjoy the experience for free."
That doesn't reassure him in the least. He tries to get up, but the girl taps a button on a side panel, and two metal restraints spring from the sides of the bed, trapping him in place.
"Uhm, can you let me go? I just remembered I have to run some errands for my grandma," he says, struggling against the restraints.
"I'm afraid the system has already initiated," she says, tapping some more buttons.
"I can see you booting it up!" he shouts as the machinery stars whirring.
"Well, now it's on, and you can't turn it off until the end of the journey," she says, smiling widely.
Xi Zirui sighs. He supposes he only has himself to blame. He looks up at the screen above the bed, and sees his own reflection. The upturned corners of his eyes look reddened, the way they always do when he feels vexed. His mother used to tease him that he had the kind of face that looked the best when he was angry or sad.
Maybe that's why he always finds himself in this kind of situation. People must think he's easy to take advantage of.
"Either get me off this damn machine, or I'll call the police," he says, struggling harder in an attempt of free himself of the restraints. "I'm a customer, if I want to leave, you let me go."
"What are you going to tell the police?" she asks with a snort. "That I didn't sell you the drugs you were looking for?"
Xi Zirui curses. He really shouldn't have admitted that.
The girl continues to press buttons on the machine, until the screen lights up, and a sort of scanner starts running over his body. He closes his eyes against the bright glare.
A message on the screen flashes: biometric reading complete.
"Good, now lets start tailoring the experience to your tastes," she says, completely ignoring his complaints.
A wall of text shows up on the screen, but Xi Zirui barely has any time to read it before the girl is clicking accept.
"Yes, yes, you agree with the terms and conditions."
"No I don't, you didn't let me read!"
"It's just boring legalese anyway," she pops her bubblegum again. "Ok, so, interested in finding love?"
At some point during this whole procedure, there must be some way for him to get out of this. So he decides to just speed his way through the entire process.
"Sure, why not?" he says rolling his eyes. He's half-convinced that he's been chained to the bed, because this girl is going to force him to play the world's most boring dating simulator.
"Great!" She taps some more things on the screen, and another question pops up. "Romantic preferences? Men, women, gender neutral?"
Does he have to answer that? He just met this girl.
"Listen you have to choose something, since you picked the romantic path," the girl says with a sigh.
"Men," he says, biting out the word.
"That wasn't so bad, was it?" she says rolling her eyes and tapping the screen some more. "Ok, nearly there, now, setting. Historical, fantasy, sci-fi, contemporary?"
Fuck him, he's really going to be forced to play a dating simulator. He can already imagine the terrible dialogue choices.
He lets out a long-suffering sigh. "Anything is fine."
This is what he gets for complaining about life.
"I'll just select random, then," the girl says, pressing one last button and then stepping away from the machine. "All set, please enjoy your journey!"
The machine lights up all at once and Xi Zirui is blinded by the flashing lights. He can feel a prickling sensation over his skin, like fire ants biting him, except it seems like his body is dissolving.
When the pain reaches unbearable levels, he falls unconscious.
---
Awareness comes slowly, he can hear something beeping near his face. He levers himself off the floor with a pained groan.
He looks down at himself, and notices he's wearing daoist robes. He feels a weight on his head, and realizes he has absurdly long hair, almost down to his hips. So, is this fantasy then? Is he in a cultivation novel? That would explain why despite the daoist cut of his robes, they look so lavish that not even an emperor would be able to afford them, and why he's almost choking on his own hair.
Is long hair really supposed to be this heavy and itchy, though? He scratches his head and his entire scalp moves.
Uh, why is he wearing a wig?
His mind is still fuzzy, but he looks around and comes to a startling realization. He's inside some sort of cramped trailer. In fact, he's the only non-contemporary thing in sight.
He's walking towards the vanity ahead of him, to take a closer look at his own appearance, when his eyes land on thick booklet opened and underlined under the mirror.
On closer inspection, it seems to be a script.
He closes the script and reads: "'Demonic sect leader, I'll make you fall in love with me!' produced by HuaHua and based on the original novel by LotusBloomsinMud"
Wait? Is he an actor? And why is this dating simulator so realistic? Even VR shouldn't allow him to experience things so vividly.
He takes a look at himself in the mirror. His face looks the same, except heavily made up. The same phoenix eyes, the same full upper lip, arching over the soft pillow of a straight bottom lip, above the point of a sharp chin. He even has the same mole at the corner of his left eye.
Whoever did his makeup wanted to give him a dark, edgy look, but not too much, because his lips are tacky with a subtle reddish lip tint. What kind of character is he playing?
He turns back to the script and runs his eyes over the underlined lines. He's apparently playing Hai Yaomei, the demonic sect leader.
Wait a minute, that name, it sounds like...Did the author really make the character's name sound like "Evil Sexy"?
He gives himself an incredulous look in the mirror, and then something chimes, near his wrist.
It's the source of the annoying beeping he's been hearing since he regained consciousness.
He rolls the impossibly wide sleeve back, and finds a thin metal bracelet fastened around his wrist, beeping and chiming like a smartwatch, even though there is no screen in sight.
Xi Zirui brings it to his face, for closer inspection, searches it with his fingers, looking for a clasp that will let him unfasten it.
Suddenly, a transparent screen springs up from one of the light sources in the bracelet.
Text starts flashing rapidly across it, so fast that Xi Zirui can't even read a sentence before a new one replaces it.
"Welcome, host, to the Transmigrator 4000!," a voice says, coming from the bracelet apparently. "I'm Ni Ni and I'll be your system while you experience amazing adventures in this world!"
Her voice is oddly familiar. "Wait, are you the girl from the store?"
"Ni Ni is Ni Ni, she doesn't understand what host means," she says, but Xi Zirui can almost hear the sound of bubblegum popping behind her mechanic voice.
"How do I turn you off?" He taps the screen, trying to find a settings button.
He clicks something that brings up a page with system information, many of which he can't make sense of. But, there's a setting called "personality". He sets the slider all the way down to 1.
When Ni Ni next speaks her voice is monotone, "World 1: Actor in a Live Action Adaption of a popular Danmei."
Ok, so he's an actor, Xi Zirui figured out as much. "Ok, and what am I supposed to do? Successfully finish shooting the drama?"
Ni Ni pings affirmatively. "Host tasks: Finish shooting the drama, and deliver a great performance. Don't fall in love with the Main Lead Actor."
Xi Zirui nods, ok, that's probably doable, it could be worse, right?
Wait a minute... "How come I can't fall in love? Didn't I choose the romantic path?"