It was still early in the morning. The sun was barely out, the wind was chilly. Wu Xiaoming got his usual morning coffee and a chocolate croissant from the coffee shop around the corner. The morning drizzle seemed like it was about to stop when the sun was about to rise.
It should be a good day today. Wu Xiaoming thought to himself. The manager promised that the whole team would be taking a break after wrapping up the basic framework of the game - "Secret Mythos Project" they called it for now, its official name was still TBD.
Working for a video game development company was quite far from what he expected when he came into the industry. But at least he was lucky enough to work on a game he liked. When the basic framework was done, he would get more opportunities to play test, if they were lucky, maybe the market would respond well to their efforts. Maybe, the players would even enjoy a few features HE designed.
If the managers really treated the entire company to a celebratory dinner tonight, he could probably finally get the chance to ask Lu Yu, the designer on his team, to be his girlfriend.
The keypad reader chimed as he swiped his key. His company owned the whole building, and his cubicle was just on the ground floor.
Tires screeched when a cat ran through the streets. A speeding truck transporting dirt and construction debris in the road lost control and turned its head at Wu Xiaoming. The glass door and wall exploded into thousands of pieces. Wu Xiaoming was thrown into a wall. His clothes were torn and ripped, blood dripped from dozens of wounds on his body.
"Wu Xiaoming!" Lu Yu's cries caught the attention of Wu Xiaoming's shocked, fading mind: "Please! Please listen to my voice! Don't - "
Wu Xiaoming never got to hear what Lu Yu pleaded him not to do, for his sight darkened and each one of his senses left him, one after another.
An unknown period of time passed, Wu Xiaoming finally regained his consciousness. His eyelids were heavier than they had ever been. He tried to open his eyes two times, both attempts failed. He had to take a breather - his lungs were weak and sore; his entire body ached, as if ants were crawling all over his muscles and bones, biting and eating him. He endured for another grueling while before attempting to open his eyes again. But at this time, all the pain, exhaustion and unease seemed to have been diminished to a barely recognizable degree, and he was able to see his surroundings without any trouble.
Only, everything he saw contributed only to more confusion.
He was in a strange street, with English street signs on the poles, slightly dirty roads, houses that were at most four or five storeys high. What stunned him the most, however, was that the sky was almost entirely grey, with traces of orange light coming from a dim sun with several dark marks on its surface.
Did he die already, or was he dreaming? Wu Xiaoming pinched himself. It hurt, and he did not wake up at all. So was this how it was for him after he had died? He'd never thought he would end up like this, that truck must have really hit him hard.
He walked along the empty street, looking left and right. Everything was so strange yet familiar. He was definitely nowhere in China, for there would be no place in China with as many street signs in English.
As he walked by what looked like an abandoned small roadside store, an old, raspy voice caught his attention: "Blood… breaths… give me!" Before Wu Xiaoming could make out what it meant, and for what reason he understood the English language so smoothly without a hurdle, a gray old man in ragged clothes burst from behind the doors with his arms flailing in the air, long, sharp nails glistening under the dark orange sunlight. Two hollow black holes were where his eyes should be, as were his nostrils. If it weren't for the fact that this gray old man had lips and wrinkles, Wu Xiaoming would have mistaken him for a skeleton.
"Shit!" Wu Xiaoming cursed, in English no less, as he dodged to the side to get away from this old man. His left leg did not move out of the way in time, and the old man tripped over his left foot.
Chills shot up his leg from his left foot, as if a block of ice just rolled over his leg. The gray old man fell right onto the ground, his face crashing against the road.
"Bang! Crack!" Some bones in the old man's neck and chest broke, even when Wu Xiaoming was behind the old man he could clearly tell the old man's neck was in a strange crooked angle and his chest caved in.
"Give me … your blood!" The old man pushed his body up using his gray slender arms. His head turned almost 180 degrees to bark at Wu Xiaoming. Broken bones stuck out of his neck, dark red blood gushed everywhere, small pieces of skin raptured from the old man's face and stuck onto the ground.
Chills spread through Wu Xiaoming's entire body. This was surely not his usual place. Hell, it may not be his usual - realm. This old man was definitely not human - even though he was no hardcore horror fan, he had watched enough horror movies to come to the realization instantly.
His legs gave out as the old man crawled towards him, barking for his blood and his breaths. His BLOOD and his BREATHS - he realized something, he might not be as dead as he thought. At least, not yet. Right this moment, grudge, bitterness and anger bubbled up in his chest, and the will to live reignited in his head. He retracted his right leg, then launched a kick right at the old man's face with his full force.
The sole of his right foot caved the old man's face in, crushing his head completely. The same kind of chills invaded his foot again, and this time more intense.
A gurgling scream leaked from the old man's broken neck, his body stopped moving, and dark flames began spreading through his entire body, turning him into ashes.
A few symbols flashed before his eyes - quite familiar ones as well. He tried to get a good look at them, but ended up missing everything. His effort was not for naught though, for a semi-transparent panel manifested before his eyes, detailing all kinds of clear yet strange information, in a UI that was also familiar to him. Maybe that was a wrong expression - he was very familiar, one could even say frustratingly and tiringly familiar with the UI. Because to put it simply, before the truck hit him, he had been working on the video game with this UI for years.
He found the "Character Information", "Inventory", "Skill Trees" panels without any hassle. In the Character Information panel, he first focused on a rough ink painting of himself. Right under that Character Information panel, laid a horizontal yellow progress bar - that was the experience/level bar. In the Inventory panel, he found the empty boxes representing his stash, and a human shape with boxes on the head, chest, arms, legs, hands and the neck, all of which represented a character's equipment slots. Just as one would expect, right now he was basically running naked, with no equipment whatsoever. What he had was a very small amount of currencies - currencies he helped narrow down and design: Spirit Fragments and Vision Slivers.
In the game, Spirit Fragments were a general use currency for the character for most common use, from buying, selling common goods to enhancing equipments, even the home base; Vision Slivers, on the other hand, were a special currency used to "bless" equipments and enter into special realms, more of an endgame currency. At this moment, he had 108 Spirit Fragments and 8 Vision Slivers. Good for him, maybe, but there was no way for him to spend them.
"Blood! Blood!" A high-pitched screech broke Wu Xiaoming out of his thoughts. He closed the panel and rolled on the ground, away from the creature that ambushed him.
A long, crooked cold blade left a giant bleeding gash on his left waist. The creature was a tall, bloody woman with a contorted body, a muscular, crooked and ulcer-covered right arm with long sharp nails, and a slender left arm holding a bone blade.
"Shit!" Wu Xiaoming screamed, he had absolutely no intention of fighting this creature, so all he could do was run. The only place he could find was the shop beside him, where the old man charged from.
The grotesque woman burst through the simple wooden building closely following Wu Xiaoming's tail. Her right claw cleaved through a metal shelf and a few waterless pipes, almost completely tearing down the stairs through which Wu Xiaoming ran to the second level.
"Blood!" The grotesque woman screamed again, trying to climb on the walls to the second level. But the structure of the shop was simply too weak to support her weight. The walls crumbled, and so did the entire shop. Wu Xiaoming was captured by the sudden weightlessness of his body, and fell towards the first floor, the gash on his waist gushing dark red blood.
The floorboard on the first floor collapsed from Wu Xiaoming's weight and impact. He landed on cold hard concrete ground, countless wood splinters embedded in his back. Under the current circumstances, it was strange that he had not passed out from the pain. It could very well be the numbness spreading through the gash on his waist.
On the ground, several dozens of glass and clay jars were around him, even under his body sprinkled the broken shards of one or two jars. Alarms blared in his mind, he kicked the ground and rolled to the side, knocking a few jars on the ground, cracking two, breaking one. And out from the newly broken jar, leaked light brow liquid with a pungent alcoholic smell.
The woman landed where he was, then her slender left arm thrust the crooked bone blade at Wu Xiaoming. Out of energy already, he could only watch hopelessly as the blade entered and pulled from his chest.
Darkness overtook, but only for a brief moment. The excruciating pain all over his body returned, accompanied by dizziness and the sensation of a tube in his nose.
"Mr. Wu? Mr. Wu? Can you hear me?" A hand in latex gloves gently pried open his left eye and pointed a small light at his eyes, asking him in English: "Mr. Wu? Blink twice if you can hear me."
Wu Xiaoming blinked twice, before the bedplate under his chest was lifted up, holding his upper body in an angle. He opened his eyes after a few tries, and found himself in a hospital room, surrounded by a doctor and two nurses.
"Zen me - What - what happened?" Wu Xiaoming asked with a mixture of Mandarin and English.
"You suffered an overdose, of opioid and mixed with other narcotics. You are in the Los Angeles Memorial Hospital." The doctor was a tall Asian man with a handsome face and muscular arms: "You've been in the hospital for almost a day. "