The air in the fortified tavern still tasted of blood, smoke, and the sharp, clean scent of the antiseptic solution they had rationed to the point of uselessness. Harry Potter Michael stood amidst the aftermath, the weight of leadership a physical pressure on his shoulders. He had given his final, hushed-voiced instructions to the battered pillars of his fragile domain: to the hulking, bandage-swathed form of Zach the Ogre, whose breath still rattled with the trauma of his fight with Blackhand; to the grim-faced Onil, whose left arm now hung in a sling fashioned from a torn JK uniform; to Lynda, a purple bruise blooming across her brow like a malevolent flower; and to Jinx, whose presence was a silent, complicated truce, her amber eyes unreadable.
There was no grand farewell. Nodding to them, a gesture laden with unspoken promises and anxieties, he turned and climbed into the cab of the battered Wuling microvan. It was loaded not with treasure, but with the detritus of survival—bent weapons, scavenged machine parts, anything that might be transformed into a few precious yuan in his world. With a grinding of gears that sounded like a death rattle, he drove towards the lean-to that housed his secret. The journey between worlds was now a familiar, nauseating lurch, a tearing sensation in the fabric of his being.
When the disorientation cleared, he was back. The humid, petrol-tinged air of the Guangzhou warehouse district filled his lungs, a shocking contrast to the dry, blood-stained dust of Meili. The silence was profound, broken only by the distant, muffled hum of a city that never truly slept. According to the twisted chronology that governed his double life, he had been gone a little over two days in the Wasteland. Here, in the relentless progression of the modern era, only a handful of hours had slipped by.
Ordinarily, such a brief absence was a non-event. His life as a middling sales rep was one of quiet desperation, punctuated by the occasional shouted phone call from his supervisor, Zhang Zhong—calls that had, thankfully, grown less frequent as Michael's fabricated sales reports showed a miraculous, if entirely fictional, uptick. He expected to return to silence, to the dusty solitude of his rented room.
But this time was different. The moment the familiar surroundings of his sparse apartment solidified around him, he felt it—a strange, digital static in the air. His cheap smartphone, left charging on the crate he used as a bedside table, was having a seizure. It vibrated with a frantic, incessant energy, skittering towards the edge like a trapped insect. The screen, when he dared to look, was a solid cascade of notifications—a blinding waterfall of red dots from WeChat, text messages, and, most alarmingly, from the video app, 'DouSha'.
A cold knot tightened in his stomach. The videos.Before he'd left for this last, fateful trip, on a whim born of a strange mix of pride and a salesman's instinct, he'd uploaded a few short, grainy clips. They were nothing, just test shots. Footage of the wolf-girl Lynda and the fox-girl Faye, giggling as they practiced their awkward, pre-battle archery on the tavern roof. He'd thought their exotic features—the perky, realistic-looking ears, the expressive tails that twitched with a life of their own—might attract a curious glance or two. A handful of views, perhaps. A private joke.
He had, it seemed, catastrophically miscalculated.
In Beijing, in a subway car hurtling through the tunnels beneath the city, a man named Zhang Wei was experiencing a revelation. He had just executed his nightly ritual: a desperate, sweat-drenched sprint to catch the last train on Line 1, his substantial frame slamming into a plastic seat just as the doors hissed shut. At thirty-something, Zhang Wei was a team lead programmer, a veteran of the city's tech grind. His salary was respectable, but the cost was etched onto his body: a receding hairline, a waistline that expanded in direct proportion to his consumption of late-night delivery food, and a profound, aching loneliness.
His escape was his phone. As the train rattled through the darkness, he scrolled through 'DouSha', the endless parade of algorithmically-selected beauties with their choreographed dances and flawless filters a soothing balm to his reality. It was a harmless vice, a way to forget the looming pressure of a down payment on a shoebox apartment in the Fifth Ring Road.
Then he saw it. The video was poorly lit, shot with a shaky hand. The background was a jumble of crumbling concrete and rusty rebar. But the subjects… Zhang Wei's thumb froze mid-swipe. Two girls. Westerners, with hair the color of straw and corn silk, and eyes of a startling, crystalline blue. They were wearing cheap-looking JK sailor uniforms and black leggings, striking a clumsy, 'V-for-victory' pose that was decades out of style.
But it wasn't their attire or their poses that stole the air from Zhang Wei's lungs. It was the ears. Soft, grey-furred wolf ears perched atop one girl's head, twitching with a nervous energy. Sharp, russet-red fox ears adorned the other, swiveling towards a sound off-camera. Then, they turned, laughing, and the camera panned down. A bushy, grey wolf's tail and a sleek, red fox's tail swished behind them, the movement so fluid, so utterly real, that it bypassed Zhang Wei's programmer's brain entirely and spoke directly to a more primal core.
The special effects were… impossible. There were no glitches, no tell-tale pixels. The way the fox-girl's tail curled playfully around her friend's leg, the way the wolf-girl's ears flattened slightly as she grinned—it was seamless. It was perfect. It was the most captivating thing Zhang Wei had ever seen.
He did not scroll on. He stared. He tapped the profile name: 'Wasteland Curiosities'. There were four other videos. A longer clip of the same girls practicing with bows, their movements athletic and unpolished. A brief, dizzying shot from the top of a wall, looking down on a shantytown of incredible, gritty detail. A close-up of a grim-faced man with a minotaur's head—a magnificent bull, complete with a ring through its nose—sharpening an axe. The production values were consistently, bafflingly amateurish, but the creature designs were photorealism incarnate.
With a trembling finger, Zhang Wei hit 'like', 'follow', and 'share'. He then plunged into the comments section, a digital mob already forming. "Are these real?!" "What movie is this? The CGI is insane!" "Where can I get those costumes? The tailoring on that uniform is actually pretty accurate!" "I need to know their names! Are they actresses?" He added his own voice to the chorus: "PLEASE MORE! I WILL PAY FOR MORE!" He would have, too. If the platform had a tipping function, he'd have blown half his snack budget for the week without a second thought.
This scene was repeating itself, with minor variations, across the country. In a garment factory in Guangzhou, the owner, Master Luo, slammed his phone down on his cluttered desk, making a cup of cold tea jump. "Twenty times!" he bellowed at his cowering sales director. "I've watched it twenty times! That JK uniform—the cut of the collar, the cheap polyester blend—that's our factory's high-end replica! I'd bet my eyes on it! If we had a purchase link below that video, our warehouse would be empty by tomorrow! Find this account! Contact them! Offer them a deal—a good one! I want them shilling for us!"
In a small talent agency in Shanghai, a bald man in a tight-fitting suit was screaming at his handful of employees. "I don't care that they're not answering DMs! I want those two girls! Western faces are hot right now, but with this… this gimmick? It's a goldmine! Find the account holder! Get them under contract! If you can't manage it, pack your things!"
In Beijing, a key opinion leader with millions of followers was already drafting a direct message. "Hello, friend. Are you interested in selling this 'Wasteland Curiosities' account? We can offer a very competitive price. Serious inquiries only. Contact at…" The potential for monetization was blindingly obvious.
Even the platform itself, DouSha, took notice. The organic, explosive growth of the account's metrics triggered internal alerts. An algorithm flagged it for manual review. A junior content manager, sipping an oat milk latte, watched the videos, her professional detachment crumbling into sheer bewilderment. The VFX were beyond anything her company's own in-house tools could produce. They had the account holder's registered phone number. She tried it. Once. Twice. Ten times. Each time, the same automated, female voice replied with infuriating calm: "I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is not in service area. Please try again later."
Unbeknownst to her, and to the frantic garment factory owner, and the desperate talent agent, and the lovelorn programmer Zhang Wei, the object of their desire was not in a service area. He was, at that very moment, in another world entirely, leaning against the blood-slicked parapet of a town called Meili, a compound bow in his hand, staring down a horde of screaming raiders, completely unaware that the tiny, experimental spark he had cast into the digital ether of his home world had ignited a firestorm . The mundane concerns of viral fame and commercial offers were a universe away, separated by a dimensional barrier as solid as the stone walls he was preparing to defend to the death.