"The horse-drawn carriage clatters softly along a narrow, winding path, flanked by towering trees whose dense canopy filters the sunlight into gentle beams that dance upon the forest floor. The carriage, a sturdy wooden vehicle with polished brass fittings, creaks with each turn of its large wooden wheels, while the horses' hooves thud rhythmically against the packed earth." A young man was waxing a narrative of his journey through a forest as he stared outside the window of the carriage.
"Why are you narrating out loud?" A young woman, who sat opposite the young man, scrunched her brows and asked him in an annoyed manner, her beautiful silvery voice tinged with irritation.
"I was?" The young man tilted his head and glanced at the young woman.
"Yes, you've been talking to yourself for the last 15 minutes."
"Hm, okay." The young man went back to looking out the window.
He might be insane; no, actually, he is insane. The young woman thought to herself.
The young man suddenly turned and stared at the young woman, causing her to yelp in surprise. Did he hear my thoughts!? She couldn't help but wonder, as she had just bad-mouthed him in her head.
"What's your name?" he asked after staring at her for a few seconds.
"Chen Li Li!" She normally wouldn't answer that question, but she was so flustered she ended up answering honestly.
"That's a cute name."
"What!? I don't want to hear that from a weirdo like you!" she said, but he could tell that she secretly liked hearing the compliment. He prided himself on being able to read people's emotions; after all, he was thousands of years old. In reality, though, he had spent those thousands of years mainly in solitude, not meeting any other people.
"What is your name?" she asked him back a moment later.
He pointed above his head at the floating letters.
"Not your nickname; I mean your real name."
"It's Liang Wu."
"That's an ugly name."
"Hehehe!" She bent over, clutching her stomach, laughing as Liang Wu's face was covered with a stupefied expression.
"Hmph!" He huffed and turned back to looking outside while trying to ignore the little beauty laughing hysterically beside him.
After Chen Li Li laughed for a few minutes, she looked up and stuck her tongue out at the back of Liang Wu's head.
"Why are you traveling to the city? Are you also going to join a sect for your tutorial quest?" he asked now that she had stopped laughing.
"Ow!"
Liang Wu turned his head around to see what had happened. He saw Chen Li Li with small beads of tears in the corner of her eyes, her tongue slightly peeking out of her mouth with a little droplet of blood at the end. She cried out in pain, as she'd just bitten her tongue.
"Are you alright?"
"I'm phine." Her words were partially slurred due to her trying not to move her tongue.
She took a couple of minutes to get over the pain, then looked at Liang Wu in confusion. "Did you just say tutorial quest? Those were discontinued two years ago. I heard that everyone complained to the System about being forced to join a sect, so now everyone can cultivate without joining a sect."
"What!? That can't be right. I made this clone only three years ago, then I assigned some gods to work as the AI for the System. If the tutorial quest was canceled, then why didn't I get a notification?"
Chen Li Li was aghast as she watched Liang Wu rambling some nonsense about clones, gods, and creating the System that had changed the world a few years ago. She shifted as far into the opposite corner of the carriage as she could fit, and continued watching as he started to have a conversation with an imaginary person.
As for Liang Wu he had opened his settings menu and was fiddling with the settings.
Settings
Display Name: OFF
Display Nickname: ON
System Helper Voice: OFF (Comments will be set to ON while Voice OFF)
System Helper Comments: ON
Expand For Advanced Options >
He clicked the option "System Helper Voice" to turn it to ON. "Helper, activate Admin Mode."
A mechanical voice responded. "Code required."
"SGE#1."
"Code accep— Cough! Talking in that fake voice really hurts my throat." The mechanical voice suddenly coughed and changed to a normal male voice.
"You are a wandering soul that I turned into the assistant for my system; you don't have a throat."
"Anyways, Code Accepted, activating Admin Mode."
"Connect to the Quest Giver Voice Channel, and bring in the Quest Givers."
"Connection Established, sending messages to the Quest Givers to join."
Liang Wu, being the one to create the System, obviously held the administrator privileges. He used those privileges to call in the AI he had assigned to oversee quests. He called them AI; however, they were, in actuality, souls of dead gods that he had pulled from the underworld to watch over the systems governing the alterations that he had forced upon the world. The ones he was calling now were in charge of overseeing the creation of quests.
After waiting what felt like an eternity for the restless Liang Wu, the Quest Givers finally started to join the voice call.
"How are– Why di– Not this bast– Ugh, I ha– Shit, which–" There were multiple voices all talking at once; it was unclear what they were all saying.
"Did one of you just curse at me?" Liang Wu asked as the voices quieted down.
"..." Nothing but a heavy silence answered him.
"Whatever, I don't care about that now. What I want to know right now is, why do I have a tutorial quest, yet no one else in this world has the same quest? From what I've heard, the tutorial quests were canceled. Was it one of you that was messing with me by forcing a quest on me?"
Chen Li Li was getting worried at this point. At first, she thought that this young man was funny, for the nickname he had chosen. However, it seems that he wasn't trying to be funny; he was just a raving lunatic who actually believed that he was some kind of god.