Liǔ Cháoquè was a woman with a mild case of social anxiety—the kind where she preferred to avoid socializing whenever possible, yet if someone actually initiated a conversation with her, she would hold her end.
In confined spaces with more than three strangers, she would feel profoundly uneasy.
Still, none of this caused any major disruptions in her life.
Back in high school, she had a crush on a boy: crisp white shirt, glasses, upright features, red lips and white teeth. They sat in adjacent rows, front and back. Whenever the boy tried to talk to her, her heart would pound wildly with panic and fear, and in the end, the two of them simply drifted apart, leaving things unresolved.
That was her first love. Ever since then, she had spent her time searching for traces of him in other people. When she finally thought she found someone similar, a twinge of guilt would wash over her, as if she were treating the person merely as a substitute.
In reality, she had one or two friends—guys she had managed to befriend strictly platonically, completely devoid of any romantic undertones, almost ascetic in their interactions.
After graduating from high school, she chose to major in Chinese Language and Literature, a field populated almost entirely by girls. Her interactions with boys dropped practically to zero.
By the time she graduated from college, she had no ambitions of becoming a teacher. Instead, she took an office job at a company, drafting documents for the executives and occasionally writing New Year addresses. She gritted her teeth and survived three years there, her severe social anxiety nearly transforming her into an all-out social butterfly.
Through sheer determination, she saved up enough money to buy a home near her family and, with their assistance, built a three-story house.
After working for one more year, she was hit by sudden layoffs. She retreated home to lie flat and became a web novel author.
Once, to get a feel for a lawyer's daily life and add some basic grounding to a legal romance she was writing, she picked up five thick volumes of legal codes. She ended up dizzy and cross-eyed, only realizing the importance of lifelong learning when she finally incorporated those details into her story.
In the end, she failed to pass the bar exam, but instead stumbled upon an otome game themed around a law firm. It was the very first otome game she had ever played.
Among the five main male leads in the game, the first was a top-tier attorney who wore gold-rimmed glasses. He was unimaginably mesmerizing when immersed in work, yet possessed a tenderness baked into his very bones in everyday life.
The second lead was a powerful corporate CEO—originally a painter, but thrust into heavy responsibilities due to a sudden family tragedy, forcing him to shoulder the burden.
The third lead was a police officer and the female protagonist's childhood sweetheart, who charged headfirst into the front lines to investigate his parents' deaths.
The fourth lead was a millennium-old fox spirit who worked as a history teacher in the human world. Because he had personally lived through all the historical events he taught about, he often spoke with such casual eloquence that his students mistook him for a grand fraud.
The fifth lead was a public affairs journalist who frequently went undercover in various shops to dig up firsthand scoops; you could find him literally anywhere.
Liǔ Cháoquè's absolute favorite was that top-tier attorney, *hehe*.
A cultured scoundrel—she couldn't possibly love him more.
However, aside from otome games, she also played management games and even trendy, action-heavy shooting games. Though she was genuinely terrible at them and frequently cursed out by other players, as long as she kept her microphone muted and used a male username, she didn't let it bother her.
Strangers were strangers anyway; let them rant all they liked.
She had even made a "sworn brother" in a massive romance-oriented MMORPG, who stubbornly believed she was a guy and often consulted her for advice on how to win over a girl. Hearing his raspy, broken voice, Liǔ Cháoquè would silently offer a three-minute moment of silence for his doomed romantic endeavors.
Today was the launch day of *Starry Sky Covenant*, a brand-new otome game. As someone whose inspiration was running dangerously dry, Liǔ Cháoquè felt she had no choice but to dive into this otome game whether she wanted to or not.
"Little Que, have you logged into *Starry Sky Covenant* yet?" Wáng Qígē called her via video chat.
Liǔ Cháoquè looked at the sluggishly spinning icon on her screen. "Not yet. It's 2 gigabytes—isn't that way too huge? I thought this was supposed to be an otome game?"
"I think it's weird too. Didn't the official announcement promise HD graphics, massive scene transitions, mystery-solving plots, and not even a fixed male lead? Maybe it's not an otome game in the traditional sense. Oh, hey, I'm in! This thing even has different servers, it feels so much like an RPG. Let me see... there are five servers available right now. Should we head to the Stars Shift Server?"
"Stars Shift Server? Sure, whatever." Liǔ Cháoquè watched the download progress bar freeze at 99%. After a painfully long minute, it finally hit 100%. She tapped the icon, only to find yet another loading bar inside the game. Liǔ Cháoquè officially ran out of patience.
She watched the opening cinematic: A handsome, delicate youth holding a book walked toward the viewer under pear blossoms.
An extreme sports enthusiast climbed a steep cliff face, shouting triumphantly with mountains spread out beneath his feet and clouds swirling around him.
A pilot wearing protective goggles maneuvered a fighter jet through the clouds to safeguard the skies.
Inside a room filled with rows of oil paintings, an artist sketched his vision onto a canvas, a painting of sunflowers gradually taking shape.
In the blink of an eye, a smiling girl stood beneath the sunflowers as a camera shutter froze her joyful expression. The camera cut to a scene of billowing smoke and collapsed walls; a man held his camera, capturing the exact split-second of a bomb detonation.
Finally, the screen settled on the silhouettes of five high-spirited youths and a young woman standing beneath a golden-scented osmanthus tree.
"Starry Sky Covenant."
Liǔ Cháoquè tapped on the Stars Shift Server.
Another cinematic played, focusing this time on the female protagonist.
The heroine's pure white soul stood upon a staircase that seemed to stretch infinitely upward, surrounded by glittering stars, with the Big Dipper shining most prominently. The moment she stepped onto those stairs, the starlit skies on either side transformed into a gallery of time, chronicling her life from birth all the way through her college graduation. With a flash of white light, the heroine found herself standing right outside a university gate bearing the name Chenlong University.
After naming her character "smile" and tapping start, a massive supernova explosion burst forth, and she officially entered the game interface.
"This game really goes all out; it's a little creepy," Liǔ Cháoquè murmured, touching her chest and chuckling as she looked at the heroine's avatar on screen.
"I know, right? But everything inside is totally normal, and every single card looks gorgeous!" Wáng Qígē exclaimed excitedly.
Liǔ Cháoquè's level was too low, so she couldn't open the gacha banner yet.
She had no idea how she had managed to blaze through to level 10 in just these past few minutes.
Following a brief round of beginner tutorials, greeted by Xiao Chen's parting words—"Enjoy your journey, Artist Miss"—she tapped open Chapter One:
*New Moon*
On September 2, 2056, a piece of news shocked the entire nation: an elite graduate of Chenlong University had died a bizarre death inside their own home. This marked the third such incident this year.
The police conducted a neighborhood canvass and narrowed down three suspects: a neighbor who rarely left home and spent all day painting behind closed doors; a delivery worker who had dropped off a package that day; and a department manager who had quarreled with the victim two days prior.
"Miss smile, please tell us what happened at the time!" A handsome police officer sat across the desk, and Liǔ Cháoquè watched her character reply: "That day, I was cooking dinner at home. The noise of the range hood drowned out most sounds, until I heard a very heavy thud on the floor. I thought the neighbor upstairs had taken a fall."
"I didn't think anything was abnormal, and then I heard a few quick footsteps heading downstairs. It wasn't until I finished making my scrambled eggs with tomatoes that I found out someone had died upstairs."
"Sigh, I really should have gone up to check back then. Maybe I could have saved them."
"The perpetrator had a knife. If you had gone up unprepared, it might have been another murder case," the officer replied. He then asked, "Do you know roughly what time that noise occurred?"
"Around five o'clock. My alarm happened to be going off right then," the heroine answered with certainty.
"Alright. If there's anything else we need to ask, we'll notify you. Stay safe recently, keep your windows tightly locked at night, and be careful since the culprit hasn't been caught yet," the police officer instructed.
The scene shifted, and the heroine was back home.
WeChat Interface
Liǔ Cháoquè: "So intense! The heroine gets hauled to the police station right at the very start?"
Wáng Qígē: "The even more intense stuff is yet to come."
Liǔ Cháoquè: "Don't tell me the heroine is going to get attacked by the killer."
Wáng Qígē: "Mhm."
Liǔ Cháoquè: "......"