The bus had been on the road for four hours.
Provincial two-lane, badly paved, running through flat farmland frozen white under a January sky.
Every half hour or so a town would appear — low concrete buildings, a smokeless factory chimney, a stretch of wall with faded paint advertising a phone brand that no longer existed — and then it would be gone, swallowed by the empty fields behind them.
The heater worked in the front half of the bus. In the back half, it didn't.
Lin Feng sat in the fourth row from the rear, in uniform, reading on his phone.
Around him, his colleagues had settled into the particular stillness of a long military transit.
The officer across the aisle was asleep with his cap over his eyes.
Two rows ahead, someone was watching a drama with one earbud in, the tinny audio leaking out in faint bursts of dialogue.
Low conversation drifted from the front, where the driver and his relief were trading shifts.
Lin Feng's thumb scrolled slowly. He'd been reading for the better part of three hours.
Then, footsteps in the aisle. The political commissar was making his rounds — the third time since they'd left Yanji. He moved row by row, exchanging a word here, a nod there. Checking the temperature. Doing his job.
He stopped at Lin Feng's row.
"What are you reading, Major?"
Lin Feng didn't lower the phone. He tilted it toward the commissar so the title was visible.
"A web novel." He scrolled back to the top where the title banner sat. "It's garbage."
The commissar leaned in, looked at the screen. The bright white light of Lin Feng's phone reflected off the commissar's glasses. He frowned for a moment, then gave a short laugh through his nose.
"Well… what am I supposed to see here."
"Ten thousand chapters of garbage. I've read them all."
The commissar looked at Lin Feng's phone, then at Lin Feng himself, as if the major had gone crazy from all the counter-intelligence work. He then shook his head, still smiling, and moved on down the aisle. "Well, sorry for disturbing you, Major."
Lin Feng watched him go. Then he put the phone face-down on his thigh and reached under his seat.
The briefcase was where he'd left it. He unlatched it, opened it halfway — not to work, just to check.
The folder was on top. Four insignias on the document header sat in a row: the People's Liberation Army's 八一 star, an empty slot, the China Atomic Energy Authority (CAEA) emblem, and the State Administration for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (SASTIND) seal. Below them, in standard print:
Counter-Intelligence Operation: Site-291
CLASSIFIED
OPEN ONLY ON SITE
Everything in order. He closed the briefcase, latched it, slid it back under the seat.
He picked the phone back up and scrolled to where he'd left off.
Chapter 9,987.
-----------------------------
The novel was called The Beauty Records. He'd been reading it for nine years. Nobody else could find it — when he shared the link, they only found the familiar error 404. When he gave them the title, nothing came up.
When he looked for it, he could find it easily, the shady forum where it came from still online for him.
Throughout the years, he made three hundred reviews in the comment section. All negative.
He'd stopped asking why only he could find it a long time ago.
His thumb found the familiar passage.
-Long Tian's blade swept toward Lin Feng's throat. Lin Feng dodged — years of being hunted had sharpened even a bootlicker's survival instincts.
-But Su Qingxue stood right behind him.
-Lin Feng didn't think. He shoved her aside, hard. The blade cut empty air.
-They were both alive. Both safe. For one heartbeat.
-Then Su Qingxue moved.
-She threw her arms around Lin Feng from the front. A tight embrace. A lover's hold.
-Lin Feng froze. Confused. Hopeful. Maybe she finally—
-Long Tian's sword pierced through Lin Feng's back.
-The blade drove through his heart and kept going, passing through his chest and into Su Qingxue's body and out of her back. Steel pinning them together.
-Blood bloomed between them.
-'Pathetic until the end,' Long Tian said softly, twisting the blade.
-Yet Lin Feng didn't seem to care at all. His lips moved as if to say 'I love you, Qingxue.' Then he kissed her lips. Her eyes remained glassy, vacant, as if she did not even register the pain of being stabbed.
-He didn't care. He kept her in his arms until he lost all consciousness.
-They died together, locked in an embrace that looked like love but was nothing but murder.
Lin Feng's jaw shifted. His thumb had stopped scrolling.
He knew what came next. This was the part that made him keep coming back.
-Lin Weiwei found his body three hours later.
-There, her Big Brother was holding a woman in his arms. His face looking peaceful. His body still kneeling on the ground with Su Qingxue's cold body leaning on his.
-She didn't scream. Didn't cry. She just knelt beside him and took his hand, her fingers intertwining with his stiff, lifeless ones.
-'You promised,' she whispered. 'You promised we'd always be together.'
-That night, she swallowed poison in Lin Feng's bedroom.
-Her last words were written in her diary: 'I don't want to live a second longer without you.'
He exhaled through his nose. Slow.
-Xiao Yue heard the news one hour after.
-She walked to the rooftop of the tallest building she could find. She didn't hesitate at the edge. She didn't even look down.
-Her final words echoed Lin Weiwei's exactly.
Lin Feng stared at the screen.
Every time.
Why does it still—
They're characters in a novel. They're not real.
He closed his eyes for a moment. Opened them.
"What kind of trash author writes something like this?" he muttered.
Nobody heard him. The officer across the aisle was still asleep.
The commissar's voice came from the front of the bus.
"Rest stop ahead. Ten minutes, everyone. Last break before the final leg — three hours to the site."
A few groans. Someone stretched audibly. The sleeping officer pulled his cap off and blinked.
Lin Feng pocketed his phone and stood.
-----------------------------
He lit a cigarette the moment he stepped off the bus. Gravel crunched under his boots. The rest stop was nothing — a low building with a bathroom, a bare tree, a patch of frozen dirt where buses pulled in and pulled out.
His colleagues filtered out behind him. Someone headed for the restroom. Someone else was on the phone, pacing in small circles, breath fogging with each word.
The bridge was maybe thirty meters away.
Old. Low. Cracked concrete, rusted railing, a road surface more patch than original. Underneath it, a river ran in its winter state: ice in dirty grey sheets along both banks, dark water still moving in the center where the current kept it from freezing over.
Lin Feng smoked and looked at the river without seeing it. His mind was still on the passage.
"It's just words on a screen. Characters in a novel. That's all they all were."
The cigarette burned between his fingers.
Then a sound cut through the cold. High, raw, desperate — a woman screaming.
His head turned.
-----------------------------
People were already gathering at the bridge. Not many. A truck driver. An old woman with a bag. The mother.
Lin Feng was moving before he'd processed what he was seeing. Walking, then running.
A child. Small — six, maybe seven...
Hanging on the wrong side of the railing, fingers wrapped around rusted metal, legs dangling above the half-frozen water.
The drop was high. Twenty meters, maybe thirty — six storeys onto ice.
The railing was high enough that you could see how it happened — a kid climbing where a kid shouldn't climb, rusted metal that a small body could slip through.
The mother was reaching over the railing, stretching, her fingers grabbing at nothing. She couldn't reach far enough.
Nobody else was moving. The truck driver had his phone out. The old woman was shouting at nobody.
"What the…"
For a moment, Lin Feng paused, looking at the scene before him.
Then his legs moved on their own.
"Fuck it. I'm not good at physical work but I'll still do what I need to do."
"Serving for the public good."
Lin Feng dropped the cigarette.
Then the mother saw him.
"Officer, please save my child."
Lin Feng nodded.
He climbed over the railing. It was clumsy — the metal was icy, his boots slipped, he had to hook one arm over the top bar to steady himself. But he could reach the kid.
He grabbed her wrist. Small, cold, the fingers already losing grip. He pulled — lifting with his shoulder, not his back, because his footing was wrong and he had nothing to brace against.
The child came up. Hands from above — the truck driver had finally moved — reached down and took her. Pulled her over the railing. The mother collapsed around her daughter, and the sound she made wasn't screaming anymore.
Lin Feng was still on the wrong side.
His uniform was getting wet from the ice and slush on the bridge structure. His boots had no purchase on the ledge. He reached for the railing to pull himself back over, but his grip slipped on the frozen metal and his weight shifted.
Then as he saw the railing getting farther away from him, that was when he knew, he—
"Fuck..."
Lin Feng fell into the water.
The cold locked his muscles before he could decide to swim. His uniform soaked through in seconds — heavy fabric dragging him down.
He tried to move his arm. There was nothing. Tried again. Nothing.
The surface was getting farther away, his vision getting darker.
His body stopped responding.
Well, at least… the kid... made it.
His vision narrowed even more. The grey sky shrank to a point.
...
Those girls… Someone should... saved them...
Then nothing.
-----------------------------
Lin Feng opened his eyes.
Pain. A spike through his skull and a roaring in his ears like two radio stations playing over each other at full volume.
Twenty-seven. Major. January. The water—
Eighteen. Student. September. A bed—
The cold. The river. The—
The sheets. The ceiling. The—
Which—
"What..."
He sat up and the room hit him.
The room was enormous.
Two hundred square meters of space that existed for no practical reason. Expensive furniture. A gaming setup worth more than his annual salary — his old salary. Floor-to-ceiling windows showing a city skyline that wasn't Yanji, wasn't anywhere in Jilin, wasn't anywhere he'd ever been.
He looked at his hands. Wrong hands. Too young. Too smooth. No calluses where calluses should be.
He got out of the bed and his legs almost buckled. He was too tall in the wrong way. Too light. His body felt wrong.
The mirror was across the room. He made it there in six unsteady steps. He then stood in front of the mirror, turned his face left and right, and touched his hair.
He plucked a couple of strands and squinted in pain for a moment.
And there, on his hands, were strands of silver hair.
He looked at his reflection once more. It was the face of a young man with short silver hair.
"That's not my face."
Lin Feng touched his cheeks, looking left and right again.
"Wait… this face."
But it was. The second set of memories confirmed it, settling in piece by piece.
Lin Feng.
Or rather, a different Lin Feng—
The second young master of the Lin Family.
Freshman at Qinghua University. Only son. One older sister — Lin Qingwan. One stepsister — Lin Weiwei.
"It's him… That Lin Feng."
"Same characters. Same pronunciation."
"The Lin Family. Qinghua—"
His stomach dropped.
"Fuck…"
"This is The Beauty Records."
He grabbed the phone from the nightstand. September 15th.
His thumb scrolled through the contacts. Names he didn't recognize. Names this body had known for eighteen years and he was meeting for the first time.
Then his thumb stopped.
"Su Qingxue."
"September 15th. Two weeks into freshman year. This is day one."
"And I have to deal with that damn woman too!"
But that wasn't what made his hands shake.
"Weiwei is here."
"She's real now. She's in this building. She made breakfast this morning for a person who doesn't exist anymore."
"And Xiao Yue—"
"She's… somewhere out there."
Lin Feng looked at the entrance of the Lin Family estate, towards the coffee shop just across the street.
"Watching. The way she's always watched."
"They're going to die. Eight years from now. Because this body's idiot original chases the wrong woman for twelve years."
"Unless—"
He didn't finish the thought.
-----------------------------
The phone buzzed.
[Su Qingxue: Lin Feng, I need your help~ Can you come to the library? There's something important I need to discuss. ♡] Received: 6:58 AM
"September 15th. The library."
"This is the day Long Tian meets her. This is where it starts."
He deleted the message.
His phone buzzed again.
[Lin Weiwei: Big Brother, are you awake? I made breakfast for you~ Come eat before our morning class!] Received: 6:59 AM
He read it twice.
[Lin Feng: Weiwei, I'll be right down. Wait for me at the dining room.] Sent. 7:00 AM
He stood up. His legs worked better now — the inherited body settling into itself, the two sets of memories finding their places.
The mirror across the room caught him one more time as he passed. Silver hair. A stranger's face. He didn't stop.
At the edge of his awareness — faint, ambient — the prickle of being observed. It came from… everywhere.
He didn't look.
Lin Feng walked into the en-suite bathroom.
-----------------------------
[Across the City]
The room was four square meters. That was being generous.
A piece of foam on the floor where the bed should be. A small cabinet wedged against the wall.
A plastic chair. His laundry hung on a line above the foam — two shirts, a pair of pants, dripping into a basin underneath.
The vent in the wall let in sound from the next unit.
Someone's alarm had been going off for ten minutes.
A young man opened his eyes.
Golden hair caught the thin light from the vent. He blinked once, then froze.
A translucent blue interface hung in the air in front of him.
-----------------------------
[Ding!]
[Beauty Records System — Activation Complete]
[Welcome, Host!]
[Current Progress: 0/3,000 Heroines Conquered]
[Today's Target: Su Qingxue — Heroine #1 — Difficulty ★★☆☆☆☆☆]
[Quest: First Meeting at the Library — Reward: Beginner Gift Package]
-----------------------------
Long Tian stared at it.
He didn't move. Just stared, the way one stares at something that can't possibly be there until your eyes confirm that it is.
"What is this… Wait, is this what the novels call a system?"
[Ding! Host, this is the Beauty Records System.]
Then he sat up — careful not to hit the laundry line — and the interface moved with him. Floating, patient, waiting.
"This is real."
"This is actually—"
"Okay. Okay, okay, okay. Calm down. Breathe."
He reached out and touched the screen. His finger passed through it, but the text rippled where he touched, and a submenu opened beneath his hand.
-----------------------------
[Available Targets:]
[★★☆☆☆☆☆ Su Qingxue — The Campus Goddess (Affection: 61)]
[★☆☆☆☆☆☆ Zhang Yuting — The Class President (Affection: 61)]
[★☆☆☆☆☆☆ Wang Xiaoling — The Coffee Shop Girl (Affection: 61)]
[★☆☆☆☆☆☆ Liu Meimei — The Library Assistant (Affection: 61)]
[★☆☆☆☆☆☆ Chen Ruolan — The Art Student (Affection: 61)]
-----------------------------
"Damnit! This is real!"
"I even have five targets, all at sixty-one already!"
"More than half."
"They already..."
"How?"
"..."
"Wait, why am I even questioning this good thing!"
Long Tian swung his legs off the foam and stood. The cabinet door caught his knee. He crouched down for a moment, holding his knee in pain, yet a wide grin remained on his face.
"Fucking room!"
He stood up again, slowly this time, and then he opened the cabinet — two clean shirts, one pair of pants — and pulled out the cleaner one.
He then grabbed his towel and toiletries from the plastic chair and headed down the hall. Three people in line for the shared bathroom. By the time he got back, his hair was still damp.
The interface was still there. Floating in the middle of his four square meters, glowing softly, waiting for him.
He turned to the cabinet door. The small mirror on the inside. The golden hair. The jaw. The face that girl in high school once described as the looks of a movie star.
He then held his jaw, looked left and right. A picture-perfect smile hung on his lips.
"I've always looked like this."
"Always."
"And what did it get me? Foam on the floor. A vent instead of a window. Shoes that are barely held together by glue for the last six years!"
"There was never anything wrong with me."
"I'm a good person. I have never done any wrong deeds."
"I only aspire to be great, to be free."
He put the shirt on. Looked at himself again.
"But no more! Finally the system has found the rightful man."
"It found the one person who deserved it."
"Me!"
-----------------------------
[Ding!]
[Beginner Gift Package — Delivered.]
[— Starting Conquest Points: 500]
[— First Impression Boost (card, single-use)]
[— Cash deposit: ¥3,000]
-----------------------------
Long Tian looked at the package contents for a long moment.
Then he looked down at the plastic chair. At the foam. At the shoes by the door.
"Three thousand yuan..."
"Three thousand yuan!"
He sat down on the plastic chair.
"Ha!
"HAHAHAHA!"
Long Tian laughed hard until someone from the next room knocked on the thin wall, yelling something he barely heard.
He breathed in and out until the redness on his face had subsided.
"This is what it looks like when the world finally starts paying what it owes."
He stood back up. Looked at the mirror again.
"Su Qingxue. The Campus Goddess."
"Today I meet her."
"And today, I'll show her what a good man looks like."
Long Tian stopped again in front of the mirror. Looking at his reflection.
Then he stood erect in front of it, straightening his posture, looking left and right again, and pulled his polo shirt down.
"This world has allowed poor people to exist for so long."
"With me having a system, I will correct all the wrongs in this world."
"One problem at a time."
He finally walked out into the September morning with the sun on his face and the interface glowing softly at the edge of his vision.
For the first time in eighteen years, Long Tian felt like the world was finally his.
-----------------------------
[End of Chapter]