Winlu was a short, but competent man in modern society. He was a proud hard-worker type. He put himself through school, got his degree, paid off his student loans, and now he finally started his own LLC for contractor work. He was a good man, but he didn't really have any other hobbies except work. Sometimes he would read a few cultivation novels recommended by friends, but he would give them up by the 10th chapter.
'His friends just liked different things than him.' He would often tell himself.
'I just need to put in the time now, and I can enjoy myself in my retirement at 32 years old!' This was the motivational encouragement he would tell himself every morning and evening.
But now he felt that his life was truly a joke. Hard work and retire early? I'm different from other people because I am diligent? NO!
He had just gone to sleep last night after completing another big contract through his self-made software development provider LLC. He was ecstatic over finally receiving the funding released for the last milestone of the job, adding another 12,000$ USD into his bank account. This was a BIG contract and he had spent years building his reputation in order to even have the opportunity to take such a big contract alone.
But now, he was in the center of some strange cave! He was laying on a slightly wet floor and plants grew all around him of shapes and sizes he had never seen before. In the center of the cave, was a beautiful black lotus flower that shone, surrounded by hundreds of bright illuminating white lotuses. There were large fruit trees that had somehow grown deep underground here, ripe with weirdly shaped fruits pictured with strange patterns.
"So... " Winlu pinched himself hard, but he didn't wake up.
"I guess I'm not in my bed anymore." He ground his teeth in slight anger.
He had no clue what was happening, but he had a suspicion that he might not even be on earth anymore. The fruits and the environment around him were filled with a strange energy that passed through everything. Of course, he had heard of transmigration. But he thought it was a dumb plot tool for authors to write themselves into their own stories filled with delusions of power fantasies.
But now that he was here... he couldn't jump to any conclusions yet! Perhaps this was just some strange illusion and he was still in his room. But suddenly, as if the situation had just heard his final attempt to keep his delusion of being in an illusion, a familiar systematic screen appeared deep inside his mind.
<< Docker Container started... >>
<< Private key found.. >>
<< Console loaded >>
<< SDK Loaded >>
<
The final text was glitching and hard to read for a few moments before it stabilized and he could read it. It was the familiar startup message for his work's remote desktop! Now he was absolutely certain, that this was either a dream or he definitely transmigrated. He pinched himself again, but he still didn't wake up.
"Ha haha " Winlu slumped down and curled up into a ball on the cave floor. He rocked back and forth staring blankly ahead of him. He felt a little overwhelmed right now and he needed a moment to take all this in. He was just a normal civilian hard-working man. He had no training to survive, nor handle an abrupt situation change like the protagonists in cultivation novels. Wait, could he have transmigrated to a cultivation world?
"Ha haa haa" Winlu started to have a panic attack and breathed roughly. If he was really in a world like described in those chapters he read from his friends... were people killed over a slight offensive statement or they could wipe out mountains with a sneeze.
"I don't want it... I don't want any of this... I was a good citizen... I paid my taxes... why me?" Winlu rocked back and forth while clutching his legs tightly. He was wearing a pair of nice sweatpants and a sweatshirt from when he fell asleep and it kept him warm even in the cold cave.
An hour passed this way until his panic attack subsided and he finally accepted his situation to some extent. The hunger from his stomach demanded that he should find some food soon, or he would starve. He looked back at the strange cave tree fruits he saw earlier and dragged himself over.
The fruits drew in the energy in the surroundings and it was impossible not to know that these fruits were somewhat special. Winlu didn't care about that and just wanted anything that looked edible. The fruits were here, and he couldn't care less if they were poisoned. If he were to die from this, he would have died anyway.
He climbed the cave tree slowly and grabbed a glistening ruby-red fruit. It made one drool just thinking about a luscious and bountiful red fruit. It was plump and looked like a large cherry that fit in his hand. He pulled and pulled, but he realized he couldn't break off the stem from the tree no matter how hard he pulled.
He even shifted his entire weight onto the giant cherry, but couldn't pull it down. He couldn't even remove the fruit from the tree!
"I'll be damned if I let this stop me!!!" Winlu felt complete embarrassment from this. He positioned himself to be as close as he could to the cherry fruit and stuck his mouth out to eat it where it was. He held it firmly and bit into the fruit.
The juices exploded inside his mouth and he quickly ate the entire fruit until it was just the stem left hanging from the tree. At this moment, his work remote desktop in his consciousness lit up with a new message and he was attracted to it.
<< New file has been airdropped in the downloads folder >>
Winlu's hunger was satiated and he climbed down from the cave tree. He was curious about this virtual desktop he had now. He mentally commanded it to move to the downloads directory to view the 'new file'. He was pleased to see that it was working as if he was normally using it at home, all he needed to do was visualize a keyboard and mouse, and it would appear to work fine.
The keyboard typed as the screen opened the downloads folder. Inside there was a new zip file named: "Red Blood Heaven Cherry".
'Was this the name of the fruit I ate?' Winlu questioned in his heart.
But the question didn't remain for long as he unzipped the file it showed all the contents. Inside was a short description text file of the effects and the name of the fruit was described there as 'assigned' randomly in order to better categorize unknown objects. It stated that it pulled these random naming conventions from his memories of cherries and cultivation novel naming standards.
Winlu nodded to himself as he finished perusing the file entirely. He looked at the other content that was packaged alongside the description file: DDK (0.1). Winlu was astonished because he recognized this file type to be a standard Development Kit format for programming.
He hurriedly booted up his IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and loaded it into the DDK package. With a development kit, you get access to a programming language's features and development tools. They are quite standard in the software development industry and Winlu had worked with lots of languages in the past.
After the DDK was loaded, Winlu opened up a new project and tried typing out a few commands. But as he was about to start, he realized this DDK was so bare-bones! It had almost no programming basic features. Where were the If statements, the for loops, the while loops, the objects, functions, and methods?
"This language is so trash!" Winlu cursed silently. He knew his stuff when it came to computers. People make call him short, unattractive, or even workaholic. But he was an expert when it came to programming! What he had here was a language that had long faded out since the 1990s.
It was even worse than some of the worse languages he knew of. He vowed that if he were going to make something with this kit he would have to build his own development kit off of it.
He read through the notes and noticed there were 14 set variables he could mess with and perform operations on. Each of these variables was: fire, water, earth, air, thunder, metal, man, blood, beast, plant, art, yin, yang, or void.
And there was a special token bar that had the 'Red Blood Heaven Cherry' there.
'I guess this language doesn't follow conventional mathematics and seems to be some system I don't fully understand. For now, let me just add all of these types and use the special token as the container like it mentions.' Winlu thought to himself.
He fiddled around inside his consciousness for more than 4 hours, enjoying himself until finally, he managed to connect the 12 variables in a set manner, which didn't provide him any errors in his IDE. The code-based the compiler, so perhaps it could work if he truly tried it out.
He clicked run in his IDE and the code ran. In his mental space, a new cherry condensed. But it was filled with a myriad of colors from black, to purple, to white. The simulated area showed it sucking in a significant amount of energy from the surroundings until it failed and the code crashed.
<
"Hmm..." Winlu frowned slightly. He didn't know enough about the energy requirements before this. Could it act similar to knowing a program runs out of memory sometimes?
'Perhaps I can gather more information on this energy from the surroundings first.' Winlu said in his mind.
He glanced around and would occasionally feel a warm energy pass by his cheek, when he felt that, he immediately breathed in deeply, trying to capture that energy within his stomach. The warm current of energy entered his mouth and flew down into his stomach.
<< New file has been airdropped in the downloads folder >>
As expected, a new file had appeared on his virtual desktop just like before. He navigated to the downloads folder and opened the zip file: Spirit Qi. It showed the short description file of the energy and its effects on his body alongside another DDK file, except this one was tagged as version 0.2!
'A minor patch to the DDK?' he hummed lightly before switching it out with the previous version in his IDE.
He quickly learned that the IDE now recognized 'Spirit Qi' as a valid parameter and would check his code for approximate compile-time errors, before running. This was exactly the kind of improvement Winlu had hoped for! He could now see an approximate number showing the number of Spirit Qi strings needed to run the code. He glanced at the number for his current code file which said: 100,000.
'Is that a little or a lot?' Winlu said to himself in slight mockery.
Thankfully, the new DDK was updated and could now simulate that environment easily. He ran the code again and it condensed into a brightly rainbow-colored cherry, shining with a metallic aura.
'Wow!' Winlu looked at the rainbow cherry in anticipation. Now that he had run the code, he wanted to see if he could export his code just like how he had received the DDK. He quickly packaged and exported the code after saving it. He saved the file as '14 Variable Heavenly Cherry'.
The file was placed on his desktop and put inside a spirit fruits folder created by it. Just as he was trying to export the file, he realized that there was no valid 'installation' location.
<< No Install Sources found >>
'Install sources... could it really be the cherries?' Winlu glanced at the dangling cherry pit he had left hanging on the tree earlier connected to the stem. He hurriedly climbed back up the cherry tree and held the Red Blood Heaven Cherry seed at the end of the stem in his palms and once again checked the installation sources. Sure enough, when he held the cherry seed in his palm it showed a new installation source on the installation menu on his desktop.
<< Red Blood Heaven Cherry installation source >>
He selected it in the menu and confirmed the installation.
*Wooosh*
The surrounding Spirit Qi swirled and condensed into the cherry seed in his hand. The entire Cherry Tree Forest seemed to have all the life sucked out of it as it poured all its spirit qi into the new seed. Thankfully, the chaos brought by the installation stopped after only 30 seconds and only half the cherry trees in the underground tree forest were wiped out.
<< Successfully installed program: 14 Variable Heavenly Cherry >>