Chapter 1: The Manager of Hama Village
[You are awake. Your current identity is Sect Master of Hama Valley.
Go repair the hot springs and build your homeland. The valley residents and spirit beasts are waiting for you.]
Xiang Yu silently stared at the app that couldn’t be deleted or uninstalled from her desktop.
A week ago, with the help of a truck, Xiang Yu was reborn into this world line and got entangled with this persistent, ghost-like app.
From the slightly different news and current events online, it was clearly another world.
Yet she was still herself—and still at the spectacularly poor Xihai University, a long-term bottom-ranked, policy-supported “211” university. The campus was built on the outskirts of the city beside a national highway dozens of kilometers away, and from the window you could see snow-capped mountains.
Only geology and surveying students—and pangolins—could be found scattered all over the mountains, truly achieving the effect of “children from the mountains going deeper into the mountains.”
Graduating students still struggled like fish in a river, unable to find jobs. Meanwhile, it was the season when academic advisors pressured students to sign employment agreements. The advisor was so desperate he’d even praise classmates for accepting a 50-yuan-per-day job picking up manure, as if he had been infected by a system that said: “Students who don’t find jobs will be electrocuted.”
And Xiang Yu, who truly was bound to a system, glanced at the shabby app’s job offer—it claimed it would give her an entire mountain, and that she would manage “Hama Village” through this “Hama Green App.”
Her system inbox was already full of employment agreements, labor contracts, and official appointment notices, all made to look completely legitimate.
Her roommate, who was studying in the self-study room, messaged her saying they ran into Advisor Old Hao on the way—he told her to ask if Xiang Yu still intended to graduate.
Xiang Yu paused for a moment, then opened QQ.
Her chat history with her academic advisor only went back three days.
Advisor: “It’s graduation season. You’re not attending meetings, not signing your tri-party agreement—what exactly do you think you’re doing?!”
At that time, Xiang Yu chose to ignore everything—somewhere between awkward apologizing and mild irritation. As she stuffed her phone back into her pocket, she accidentally tapped on a pop-up: [Want to become QQ lovers], and she couldn’t even undo it.
Her academic advisor hadn’t dared to contact her for three days since then. He’d only dared to ask through her roommate—probably worried about embarrassing himself beyond recovery.
After all, having a university job these days wasn’t easy.
Now that the power dynamic had shifted, Xiang Yu ate her braised chicken rice while casually scrolling through the app’s mailbox and forwarded a few files to her advisor.
At night, she went to work part-time unloading cargo at Cainiao, then helped a classmate run campus errands. Life went on as usual.
Before sleeping, she received a series of payments landing in her account. Just like that, she set the strange app aside and fell into a tired but fulfilling sleep.
——
The next day, her advisor called her seven times. When none of them went through, he sent over a dozen long voice messages.
Every single one was loud and full of energy:
“Hey, Xiao Yu, I never thought much of you before, turns out you’ve quietly started a tourism company! I didn’t expect our batch to produce an entrepreneur! Maybe you can even solve employment for your juniors and seniors!”
“Our school definitely supports entrepreneurship. Do you know about the Xihai Entrepreneurship Guarantee Loan? You can get up to 200,000 RMB personally. Come to my office later, I’ll help you fill it out myself.”
“I discussed your proposal with colleagues all morning. The situation is… quite difficult. Do you know Hama Village? You even have a senior there doing poverty alleviation work.”
“It’s remote, steep, and the roads are terrible. It’s rated bottom-tier every year. If you want to develop it, it won’t be easy—but don’t worry, I’ve already submitted your materials to the department. Even the Party Secretary is helping you think of solutions.”
Xiang Yu had no idea what any of this meant. She replayed the advisor’s last voice message again:
“Employment.”
“Files.”
“All processed.”
Had her advisor finally lost his mind?
Xiang Yu sucked in a sharp breath.
Starting from yesterday’s campus delivery run and that big chicken leg, she went through everything in her mind, but couldn’t find anything wrong. In the end, half-believing and half-doubting, she opened the “Hama Green” app again.
The moment she entered, she was hit by a burst of cheerful background music. Then, a line of text slowly popped up, growing larger and larger as it floated toward her:
[Please proceed to Hama Village to complete the beginner mission.]
The box spun, jumped, expanded and shrank, flickered on and off in the festive background music—like it was trying to use every free animation preset from a PowerPoint template pack.
The homepage switched into navigation mode, urging her to head to the destination immediately, while another pop-up appeared.
[The Hama Green Project is an innovative entrepreneurship initiative centered on ecological value transformation. It encourages immortals, spirit beasts across the Three Realms, and mortal entrepreneurs to seize strategic opportunities and employment possibilities. Under strict compliance with “innovation-driven development,” “green development,” and ecological protection red lines, the project fully opens cross-realm resource circulation channels.
Due to death-by-traffic accident, Host has been reborn as “Scenic Area Operator” in the k2ie world line.
Base lifespan: 30 days; remaining lifespan: 28 days.
As the exclusive operator of [Tianbai Snow Mountain Hama Valley Glacier Park], you may exchange tourist satisfaction ratings for lifespan. Major failures (e.g., tourist death incidents) will deduct 50% of remaining lifespan.
Refusing operational directives will trigger death rewind, forcing repeated experience of the near-death traffic accident.
If lifespan reaches zero, Host will return to the accident scene and complete death. System contract will be automatically terminated.]
“……”
In the middle of a hot summer day, cold sweat soaked Xiang Yu’s back.
She didn’t believe it. Without a word, she pulled out the SIM card, inserted it into a backup phone, and even grabbed a hammer and screwdriver, preparing to physically destroy the thing.
And then—
her mind went blank.
Her vision darkened.
A sudden image flooded her thoughts:
A fully insured, half-trailer, hundred-ton truck came roaring toward her at ground-level flight speed, plowing straight at her like a steel bulldozer.
A deafening roar filled her ears—like the BGM “Living with All Our Might” had been blasted at maximum volume.
The near-death experience even came with full situational simulation.
In between a few confused shouts like “I don’t know, I thought it was a speed bump,” and “Talk to my insurance,” the final thing Xiang Yu heard was a forensic examiner’s sigh-like conclusion:
“So it turns out… it was supposed to be assembled by yourself.”
“…?”
Humans are like that. Even though they say “I don’t want to live anymore” every day, when it actually comes to dying, they still panic a little—because it turns out you can’t just casually reassemble a person afterward.
After arriving in this world that didn’t belong to her, she had been living in a daze. But once the punishment system triggered, she strangely felt grounded.
Looking at the remaining 28 days on the counter, she suddenly felt a clear appreciation for life. Even her previous anxiety about work disappeared—now she had job assignment guaranteed, just paid in lifespan.
After careful consideration, Xiang Yu’s first move was to use her remaining savings to buy both accident insurance and traffic insurance.
The insurance agent was grinning so widely his face practically split open. Though he didn’t understand why a fresh graduate needed so many policies, the paperwork was quickly completed. The beneficiary was set as the credit code of the welfare home where Xiang Yu grew up.
She had once planned to return home often after success. Now, if that strange Hama Valley project failed, she would probably only be able to send back cold, impersonal money instead of her presence.
According to the map, Hama Valley was located dozens of kilometers beyond the outskirts near the Xihai University campus—then another ten kilometers deeper into the mountains. The national highway ended right at the school gate, and beyond that was only winding mountain roads.
It wasn’t that no one had ever tried to develop that area. Xiang Yu could even find traces of promotional materials from years ago online, all abruptly ending after a news report titled “Controversy Over the Tianbai Snow Mountain Hot Spring Development.”
She checked court documents: in short, the previous hot spring contractor had lost everything and fled.
Natural hot springs were Hama Valley’s strongest selling point. Despite being backed by snowy mountains, developing the glacier was expensive—but a hot spring was different: as long as there was a hole in the ground, you could sit in it and soak.
Good news: Hama Valley’s geology contains natural sulfur, which has real therapeutic effects.
Bad news: the hot springs in the valley are mostly high-temperature ones, ranging from 75–96°C. Their main “benefit” is sterilization and disinfection—you’ll basically come out fully cooked and thoroughly sanitized.
For the few pools that are actually at a comfortable temperature and don’t feel like boiling hotpot, the previous contractor had clearly put in extra effort. However, due to sulfur compound precipitation, the naturally formed pools were surrounded by dark, blackened edges, completely incompatible with the trendy “Instagrammable aesthetic.”
The developers also knew it looked shabby. So they laid down red, non-slip plastic mats—like those used in restaurant kitchens—and tiled the edges of the pools.
As for the tiles… well, originally it just looked like a dirty pond. After tiling, it looked closer to a public restroom. They even dug a channel to redirect spring water and created some kind of “flowing wine along winding streams—hot spring edition” activity.
The final result was hard to describe in polite terms.
No one knows whether any officials ever visited the village school’s trench-style toilets for reference, but the sulfur hot spring water was already murky compared to others, with a rotten-egg smell from hydrogen sulfide. In the promotional images, two groups of people crouched on either side of a tiled, murky water channel, looking like they were collectively squatting outdoors—each holding a wine cup and casually nibbling snacks.
If you squint, it almost resembles some eccentric Wei-Jin dynasty aesthetic… though it also suggests a certain detachment from reality.
Aside from this half-finished project, the only time Hama Valley appeared in public view was through government-led “agriculture support” ads. Its products were squeezed into a rotating list of links—apricots, plums, yams, potatoes, wild cucumbers—with barely ten seconds of screen time.
During those brief shots, the videographer even inserted a straw into a peach and sucked it dry like juice, leaving only the peel behind.
The pricing, however, was enough to make people hesitate. Soft peaches were expensive due to transportation losses and required cold-chain logistics, so those costs were bundled into the final price—resulting in a retail price of 15 RMB per peach on the platform.
Wild mushrooms were even worse: 208 RMB per jin, to the point that even livestream sellers were too embarrassed to put them on their carts.
Truly, what a “poverty alleviation” campaign… somehow turned into luxury goods.
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**TN
Hama Valley = Toad Valley
