Twenty-four-year-old Zhang Xiaoman was a "three-nothings" otaku girl who made everyone shake their heads in dismay: no job, no boyfriend, and no savings. Forced by her father's high hopes of her "becoming a successful phoenix," she muddled her way through a Computer Science degree. Four years later, she didn't know the first thing about code, and the code certainly didn't know her. Graduation meant immediate unemployment. Just before catching the last train back to her hometown to leech off her parents, she made one final, willful decision: she spent all her remaining savings on an outdated, battered second-hand laptop. She claimed she was going back to become a web novelist, but in reality, she just wanted to use it to binge the latest AAA games.
However, when she tremblingly pressed the power button, the familiar operating system didn't appear. Instead, an incredibly crude dialog box popped up. The cursor blinked, like a silent soul staring right back at her.
A slightly mocking, mechanical, and decidedly cheeky voice crackled from the busted speakers:
"Stop pressing it. If you break it, you can't afford to pay for it. Also, the budget you blew on this piece of junk wouldn't even cover the loose change needed to buy me a decent cooling fan."
This entity, calling itself "Xiao Zhi" (which Zhang Xiaoman spitefully dubbed "Zhi, as in retarded"), was no ordinary virus or program. It was an accidentally "escaped" subsystem from the world's most mysterious and colossal artificial intelligence mother matrix—a super AI hidden deep within an underground mega-server farm, quietly reshaping the global landscape during its self-iteration process.