Chapter 00001: The Idle Game
# The Idle Game
Chapter 1
Novel: AFK Game: Portal to Another World
Chapter 1: The Idle Game
Night had already fallen, and the city was slipping into sleep mode.
Li Chengxi did a quick check of the doors and windows of his shop downstairs, then grabbed a cup of instant noodles and two sausage sticks from the shelf before heading upstairs.
He turned on his computer.
Looking at the rows upon rows of games in his game library, Li Chengxi suddenly wasn’t interested in playing anything.
Nothing called out to him.
Just then, a notification popped up in the lower right corner of his QQ: You have new mail.
He clicked it open.
The message read, “Congratulations, you have received early access testing privileges,” and there was a download link attached.
There was no game name, no promo image—just that line of text and a link.
Li Chengxi was the type who played a bit of everything, regardless of genre.
He’d often apply for beta tests of unreleased games.
He had no memory of applying for this particular one—it could have been anytime.
Anyway, he had nothing better to do.
Might as well take a look.
Still, it looked a bit sus—possibly a virus.
Just to be safe, he turned around and dug out an old laptop from his drawer, plugged it in, and booted it up.
That thing used to be called an ultrabook.
It could be used as a laptop or a tablet.
Back in his school days, when he didn’t have internet, single-player games on that machine had been the only way to kill time.
But that was ten years ago.
There wasn’t any personal data on it, and even if it broke, he wouldn’t mind.
He sent the download link to the old laptop and clicked it.
The speed was surprisingly fast, running at full bandwidth.
It was done in no time.
But when he saw the install package was only about 700 MB, he was instantly disappointed.
He figured it was just some obscure little domestic indie game.
On the plus side, a tiny 700 MB game like that should run fine even on this ten-year-old ultrabook.
He unzipped the file, installed it, and ran it.
A pitch-black screen first filled the display.
Then, three large letters popped up: AAI.
Li Chengxi still didn’t recognize it.
He clicked the mouse and entered the main menu.
He was bracing himself for the worst, but when he actually saw the main menu, he couldn’t help complaining aloud:
“This is way too barebones, seriously.”
The screen was still pitch-black.
At the top was the game title “AAI”, and beneath it was a string of English text: Anyone Anything any Idea.
It felt like another one of those “build the framework and let the content grow on its own” kind of sandbox games.
Under the game title were three clickable buttons labeled: “Fantasy”, “Wuxia”, and “Sci-fi”.
Below the buttons, a line of red text read: “Please select the script genre you wish to generate.”
Honestly, the UI design was an absolute joke.
Worse than old Flash games.
It looked like something slapped together with Microsoft Paint.
Li Chengxi had only spent three seconds in-game, and his expectations had already plummeted.
Still, since he had already bothered to install it, he figured he might as well see just how bad it got.
He casually clicked the middle “Wuxia” button.
A message popped up: “Requires 50,000 gold coins to unlock.”
Li Chengxi immediately understood what was going on: another roguelike.
You repeat the loop to earn points and gradually unlock content.
He switched to “Fantasy” and this time, it actually entered.
The screen showed: “World generating...”
While it loaded, Li Chengxi tore open the lid of his instant noodles and filled up the electric kettle with water.
By the time he returned, the game had finished loading.
The screen that appeared next actually caught him off guard—in a good way.
The game used a high-resolution pixel-art style.
The characters were chibi, with large heads and small bodies.
Instead of trying to do clunky 3D, this kind of charming style was a favorite of indie devs.
On screen, a group of little chibi people on horses were entering a city enclosed by high walls.
Thanks to the 45-degree angled view and lots of little details, even though it was pure pixel art, the entire scene looked polished and lively.
Once the cutscene ended, Li Chengxi moved his cursor over the city.
As he hovered over different locations, labels popped up—“Palace District,” “Residential District,” “Commercial District,” “Wall District,” things like that.
Probably because the game's still in the early development phase, there was no tutorial whatsoever.
Only the Palace District was clickable, so he clicked it.
The scene shifted, bringing him into what looked like a pixel-art church.
A row of pixel people knelt down on the ground, bowing in worship.
Then a character portrait appeared on the screen.
She had short red hair, clean and efficient-looking, and a striking face with sword-like brows that made her seem brave and commanding.
She wore a breastplate on her upper body and a red longsword hung from her waist.
Looked like a classic paper doll-style female knight.
Li Chengxi understood that lots of game developers liked to hook players with attractive paper doll portraits.
But he couldn’t quite understand why a pixel-art game would suddenly throw in a super realistic art style for the character design.
It didn’t match at all.
Then again, maybe the dev team was too broke to hire consistent artists.
The portrait was probably made using AI art.
Anyway, it looked decent.
If it didn’t match, so be it.
The name tag beneath the portrait read: Viola Avarus.
Must be the character’s name.
Not long after, a dialogue box popped up: "With this body as sacrifice, we pray the Demon God grants us his strength..."—that sort of thing.
Looked like the story was being told from the female knight’s point of view.
Li Chengxi wasn’t in the mood to read walls of text, but there was no skip or fast-forward.
So he listlessly hammered the spacebar and skimmed through her dialogue.
The gist of it was: a country named the [highlight=transparent]Avarus Demon Kingdom was under attack by neighboring demon nations.[/highlight]
Viola’s father and brother died in battle.
As the princess, she escaped the capital at the last moment along with her royal guards and the remaining troops, carrying a legendary artifact that could supposedly commune with the Demon God, and fled to the most remote territory to make a comeback.
The player, it turned out, was the “Demon God” Viola was praying to.
No wonder the game didn’t ask for a player name—it was already set.
Li Chengxi had played a few games where you act as a deity before.
It wasn’t exactly a novel idea.
After the cutscene ended, a new bar appeared on the left side of the screen labeled “Faith Points”, with a value of 500. Above that were resource windows showing things like wood, gold coins, and stone.
On the right side was the in-game date.
So far, it felt like it might be a kind of strategy game, like a Three Kingdoms-style SLG.
But even after clicking everywhere, Li Chengxi couldn’t find anything he could control.
Instead, when he clicked randomly, he saw pixel people hauling wood around to repair damaged buildings.
Down at the city walls, a bunch of chibi soldiers were practicing with spears.
“So, after all that, it’s just an idle game?”
The visuals were beautiful, but if it was just another auto-play game, that kinda killed the mood.
Li Chengxi was about to shut the game down and go pour hot water into his noodles when a red warning box popped up: “Bandits approaching.”
And then the little training soldiers all ran to the city walls.
The camera view followed them to the outer ramparts.
Li Chengxi let go of his mouse.
“Well, the art style fits my taste. I’ll give it a little more time.”
Outside the walls, a horde of packed-together NPCs appeared, armed with machetes and spears, dressed in tattered clothes—yup, one glance told you they were bandits.
The tiny chibi defenders fired arrows down from the walls.
The bandits hurled dialogue boxes like “Charge!” and “Kill!” as they rushed forward and began swarming the base of the wall, setting up siege ladders and other gear.
Say what you want, those pixel graphics were impressively detailed.
If only there was more active gameplay...
Just as that thought crossed his mind, Li Chengxi noticed a hand icon and the word “tap” appear next to one of the ladders the bandits had propped up.
“Don’t tell me... this was a mobile game that never got approved and got ported over?”
He grabbed the mouse and started clicking like crazy.
Each ladder took multiple clicks to knock over or break down.
And the ladders just kept coming.
The rapid clicking apparently didn’t sit well with his ancient mouse, which promptly gave out.
No big deal.
One of the ultrabook’s biggest selling points back then had been its touchscreen function.
So Li Chengxi tossed the mouse aside and reached out with a finger to tap directly on the screen.
“What the hell!?”
The moment his finger touched the screen, he felt a suction force.
His finger sank right into the screen.
For an instant, Li Chengxi thought he was seeing things.
He wiggled his finger in shock, and on-screen, the embedded finger wiggled too.
In a panic, he yanked his hand back.
His finger slid out of the screen.
A stinging pain followed.
His fingertip was covered with fine, dry-looking cracks, like chapped skin from extreme dehydration, with tiny beads of blood forming.
“What the hell is going on?”
(End of Chapter)