The First Pig

“How many times have I said it? Writing a good presentation is more important than doing the task well.”

Li Zhenzhen, wearing straw sandals, walked with one foot deep and the other shallow along the desolate, bleak mountain path.

Behind her, a fluffy dog said coldly:

“Look at your title: ‘The Time-Space Administration Conducts Solid Reform Work on the Taqing Immortal Lord Instance’—the leadership just issued a directive telling us to innovate, and you insist on using ‘solid.’ Are you trying to oppose them?”

“And this word ‘reform’—reform implies there was a mistake. Are you using it to suggest the leadership made a mistake?”

Tree roots twisted and knotted through the snow, and abandoned hunting pits lay everywhere.

Each one was lined with sharpened stakes; one wrong step could pierce a person straight through.

Li Zhenzhen kept her nerves taut as she watched the path, barely listening to what the system was saying.

The system casually marked more than forty crosses on her presentation.

On Li Zhenzhen’s profile, the very first line labeled her as emotionally indifferent and poorly obedient, and under management style it noted suppression as the primary method.

“How hard can it be to write a document? Sometimes you should look for the problem in yourself. After all these years, has your ability improved at all? Have you even worked seriously?”

“In a few more years, when youth is no longer the protective layer covering you, think about what you’ll have left.”

Li Zhenzhen lifted her hand to check the time. “Smartness, courage, and strength?”

The system: “...”

-

Li Zhenzhen had spent ten years slaughtering pigs in a slaughterhouse. Her heart was as cold as her knife.

She met the system on her way home from work.

The Twelfth District was filthy, decayed, and chaotic, a famous land of exile.

Because no ability users were stationed there, public order was practically nonexistent. Corpses, filth, and starving destitute people were everywhere in the streets.

Carrying discounted vegetables, she returned to the basement room she rented for two hundred Alliance coins a month.

A cat that looked very expensive was sitting quietly by her door, utterly out of place amid the surrounding ruin.

Li Zhenzhen did not go closer.

She was allergic to cats, and could not get within even the slightest distance.

But then the world went black, and she fainted.

When she woke again, she found herself tied to a chair.

The chair was even a little rusty.

All around her were white walls.

Those white walls were even peeling.

In front of her stood a table, and on it was a tablet e-reader.

For the next week, she was forced to sit through automatic page-turning and recite an immortal cultivation romance novel more than a hundred times.

The novel was called Taqing.

The male lead, Immortal Lord Taqing, was peerlessly beautiful and beyond the ordinary world, born with immortal bones, the most gorgeous man in the Three Realms.

He had the equivalent of a Tang Monk meat buff: whether dual cultivating with him or consuming his flesh and blood, one could improve one’s cultivation. He was the kind of man all of the immortal realm wanted.

Because of the male lead’s terrifying strength, no one had dared target him.

Until five hundred years ago, when he was gravely wounded. At once, the sects of the immortal world pounced on the opportunity.

Betrayed by his own kin and besieged by his fellow disciples, he was drained of his spiritual veins and devoured in flesh and bone, trapped in the abyss to become an endless source of blood.

He endured torments beyond imagination, then forcibly shattered the seal and bathed half the immortal realm in blood.

At last, too gravely injured to continue, he fell into the mortal world.

At death’s door, he was taken home by the kind and stubborn little white-flower heroine.

During the time she cared for him, she fell deeply in love with him.

And then—

“And then there was no then.”

“The consciousness of the entire world was pushing the male lead to fall in love with the heroine, but he was completely unmoved. He skipped over all the angsty love-and-hate drama, turned dark in the third chapter, destroyed the world in the fourth, and committed suicide in the fifth.”

“The heroine is already over thirty and still raising pigs. If we don’t intervene soon, she’ll be opening her own pig farm.”

“Our task is to use every means possible to preserve the original plot and make the male lead fall in love with the heroine.”

The system closed the dossier. “The situation is extremely urgent this time, and the mission is exceptionally important. Let’s align our understanding and level out the waterline.”

It happened to be dinner time.

Li Zhenzhen rolled up her sleeves, took out her camping gear, and prepared to boil some noodles on the spot. “What waterline?”

The system was sick to death of these novices who didn’t even understand industry jargon. “It means you summarize the main points of what I just said.”

Li Zhenzhen sat on a rock, eyes lowered, and tore open a packet of instant noodle seasoning with her teeth.

“This male lead is sexually cold.”

“?”

“We have to make him become sexually obsessed with the heroine at any cost.”

The system: “...” It actually could not refute that.

Against such a hell-level male lead, the only task executor was an utterly hopeless loser.

What was there to do with this mission?

Might as well die.

Li Zhenzhen quickly finished the noodles, carefully scraped off the remaining oil, packed it away, and put the liquid fork back into the storage bag as well.

By then the sky had dimmed, the sunset hung low and heavy, and night was about to fall.

Li Zhenzhen’s feet were cold and painful.

The bones in her feet had been shattered by the people from the Enlightenment Bureau, and when they repaired them, they deliberately left a crack running through the top of the foot.

Because she had shown insufficient reverence for the organization, they had to give her a little “education.”

The crack was fixed with artificial bone pins. It would not bleed, and it would not widen, but every step felt like being cut by a blade.

In the original story, the heroine’s career arc was built on an extremely brutal setting.

For ten years there had been locust plagues, epidemics, floods, husbands eating their wives, wives eating their children—everywhere one looked. In some towns, people were even openly sold as food.

To avoid being turned into food, Li Zhenzhen had always taken the most desolate mountain paths, and in some places there wasn’t even a path.

The physical strain of the past few days had far exceeded her limit, and the bone pins had shifted a little.

Li Zhenzhen found a flat exposed rock and sat down to take off her shoes.

The temperature here was not much higher than the maddening winter in the far northeast, and the cold dulled the pain.

She casually broke off a wooden stick and bit down on it, grasped her ankle with her left hand and her toe with her right—

With a sharp click, the searing pain flashed past, and the pin was reset.

Cold sweat beaded on Li Zhenzhen’s forehead.

The system was curled up, eyes closed, resting. Disturbed by the noise, it lifted its eyes in displeasure, only to meet her cool, indifferent gaze.

Deep and shadowed, with faintly thin lines at the corners of her eyes.

The system felt a little irritated.

As a system, the people it usually dealt with were, at the very least, regional magnates or favored children of heaven.

Only she, Li Zhenzhen, looked like a professional trash collector, with disposable cups, disposable straws, and all sorts of odds and ends stuffed into the filthy military-grade backpack behind her.

No one knew how the main system’s big data analysis had worked out, choosing such a person for a mission.

Li Zhenzhen had no idea that in the short minute just now, the system’s mind had turned through so many thoughts.

She picked up the bag, stepped past the system, and kept walking.

-

Li Zhenzhen’s assigned role this time was a bit-part fisherwoman.

While fishing, she saw the wounded male lead unconscious. Because his injuries were too severe, she left him on shore and went home herself to fetch medicine.

But by the time the fisherwoman rushed back, the heroine had already beaten her to it, stripping off her clothes and embracing the male lead naked in the snow to warm him.

So the fisherwoman never mentioned her life-saving kindness again, and only supplied the heroine with food and medicine, helping her through the most difficult period.

Later, the heroine witnessed a terrifying human sacrifice ritual on the island, screamed, and collided with the priest. She was caught on the spot and thrown into the sea prison.

Unable to bear the thought of the heroine dying in prison, the fisherwoman secretly let her out at midnight.

Unexpectedly, on the road to escape, the heroine grew more and more aggrieved, turned back, burned the altar, and was caught again.

This time, before any punishment was used, the heroine was frightened into naming the fisherwoman.

In the end, the fisherwoman’s whole family was beaten to death by the islanders for colluding with outsiders and dumped in a mass grave.

But the heroine, at the last moment, was saved by the island lord and second male lead, Shen Que, escaping unscathed.

-

The prop department said they had prepared a boat for them, but it was really only a small sampan.

A few woven hats covered some miscellaneous fish in the stern, already frozen stiff. There were patches of urine left at the corner of the boat, and the smell shot straight to the heavens.

Fortunately, there was a simple rudder, at least enough to keep the direction under control.

The little boat sped across the vast, surging waves.

A lantern on the water cast a long shadow, layered clouds drifted apart, and the rolling mountains in the distance were revealed.

This island was called Wuhuan Island. Long isolated from the world, its islanders had intermarried for countless generations, giving rise to over a hundred tribes.

They worshipped demons as mountain gods and offered human sacrifices to the gods every month. In some villages, there was even the custom of cooking people alive.

It was precisely because the original heroine had seen such a horrifying scene of people being cooked alive that she had been terrified into that state.

Li Zhenzhen sat at the bow waiting for the main system’s mission prompt, one leg bent as she leaned back, her long lashes casting a dark shadow beneath her eyes.

Not long after, the boat rocked.

The plot-point indicator suddenly began flashing red madly.

On the mission panel visible only to Li Zhenzhen and the system, two lines of blood-red text appeared beneath a huge hourglass.

[Mission Issued] Rescue the male lead and ensure the male and female leads meet smoothly.

[Current Progress] 0%.

The system opened its super-strong night-vision function with complete doglike detachment. “The male lead is at the nine o’clock direction, 1.6 nautical miles from you.”

Dark clouds pressed low against the horizon, and the boat cut through a sea of floating ice fragments.

Li Zhenzhen lifted her eyes toward the broad, boundless sea.

On the cold winter night, the black water stretched silent and desolate like a graveyard.

A slender figure drifted with the waves, black hair winding and trailing, spreading out like seaweed, like a reflection in a mirror, like flower and moon in water.

Exquisite, cold, and gravely ill.

He was still wearing the palace robes of the former Lord of Taqing Palace, elaborate and heavy, layered in folds like a crimson petal amid a flood.

Holding a telescope, Li Zhenzhen’s gaze swept without pause over the male lead’s dense black lashes, fine as a fan.

Suppressing its nerves, the system commanded coldly, “Quickly, pull the male lead up.”

Li Zhenzhen lowered her eyes, wound the end of the fishing net around her wrist several times, then suddenly yanked forward.

The male lead was dragged hard enough to fall straight off the boat.

The system even heard a thud; it should have been the male lead’s forehead hitting the gunwale.

The system was so angry its head was buzzing.

Li Zhenzhen braced a foot against the side of the boat and, while reeling in the net, felt a little regret.

The Time-Space Administration’s punishment mechanism was triggered through a chip implanted in her body.

If the system did not punish her, she would be unable to find the chip’s exact location.

She hated being coerced in her life. After her body was forcibly implanted with the chip, the first thing she had thought of was digging it out.

All along this journey, she had been deliberately provoking the system.

Unfortunately, this system only knew how to talk tough. The moment it needed to act for real, it backed down, and did not seem very smart.

Its position sounded fairly high, but the way it put on a fierce front to hide weakness made it seem like a rookie.

She was almost angry on its behalf.

The island’s snow lay deep. Li Zhenzhen dragged the Immortal Lord forward in the net.

From a distance, it looked as though she were hauling a giant sack of rubbish.

Once ashore, she immediately flung the male lead, net and all, onto the beach.

Then she pitched forward and flopped face-down into the snow like a board-stiff duck.

The system: “...” With such poor stamina, who knew how she had ever slaughtered pigs before.

Li Zhenzhen’s face was buried in the snow as she exhaled a puff of cold breath. “How long until the heroine arrives?”

“No rush,” said the system. “We planned to sail at 1.2 nautical miles per hour, but the actual speed was 1.9 nautical miles per hour. The travel distance is 1.63 nautical miles, so according to delta t equals distance over velocity one minus distance over velocity two... the heroine still has half an hour.”

Li Zhenzhen glanced at her watch, expressionless. “...You calculated it wrong.”

“Impossible,” the system said confidently. “It’s a simple elementary-school physics problem.”

Li Zhenzhen said, “You didn’t calculate for current speed and wind speed.”

Before she finished speaking, a woman’s crying voice rang out from the shore.

The OA panel started flashing red like crazy, and a mechanical alert sounded: “Attention, your heroine has come online. Attention, your heroine has come online.”

The system: “...”

Li Zhenzhen: “...”

Oh dear.

The slap came too fast, like a tornado.