The Giveaway

To put it bluntly, as a die-hard, old-school wuxia purist, So Rihwa had never in her life read a novel with a world setting like this.

What Rihwa despised most was fusion wuxia. She considered such nonsense heretical trash that butchered the sanctity and noble pedigree of true martial arts. Cyberpunk mixed with Jianghu? Wuxia smashed together with high fantasy? Contemporary urban fantasy cross-pollinated with internal cultivation? In her past life, Rihwa wouldn't have touched that sort of hodgepodge with a ten-foot pole.

Which meant she had no clue whether she had transmigrated into a web novel or somewhere else entirely. All she knew for certain was that this world wasn't based on any story she had ever consumed.

Judging solely from the letter left behind in the cavern, it had seemed like an ordinary Murim world. Putting the pieces together, it was clear far more time had elapsed than anticipated while she lay frozen in slumber after consuming the Ten-Thousand-Year Ice Crystal. The martial arts she had inherited were undeniably real, and watching fugitives leap across rooftops with lightness kung fu proved internal qi existed here. Yet this was in no way an era where one could freely flaunt their martial prowess and roam the land dispensing chivalric justice.

“……”

Left on merely as background noise to fill her dreary, silent room, the television blared that very public service announcement. The blasted Dantian Abolishment Campaign. It was broadcast day in and day out without fail.

The logic of this rotten world was simple enough: in a sophisticated modern society ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠where people no longer settled disputes by crossing blades, everyone ought to just excise their dantians. Merely possessing internal energy and an intact dantian branded a person as a potential violent criminal.

“What kind of wuxia world is this?”

A Murim where the government rallied the populace to abolish their dantians en masse? Disappointment didn't even ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠begin to cover it.

By modern law, unleashing internal energy in public spaces was strictly prohibited. Anyone possessing internal qi above a regulated threshold was fitted with an Inner Qi Restraint Ankle Monitor. Under such suffocating conditions, the martial arts Rihwa had spent years painstakingly cultivating had been rendered utterly useless. Where would she even flex her internal cultivation? All she would earn for her trouble was a gaudy electronic ankle monitor. Why bother practicing martial arts at all?

Besides, no matter how rigorously a martial artist cultivated their body and qi, a bullet to the head still spelled death. Before a firearm, a transcendent grandmaster and a third-rate thug were delightfully equal—both dropped dead in a single shot.

Just recently, a short clip had gone viral on BigTube featuring an arrogant martial artist showing off his internal arts in the street, only to catch a taser dart and violently flop like a freshly hooked carp on the pavement. That, at least, had provided some genuine entertainment.

“Pfft, ahaha. Straight-up deadeye.”

Rihwa rolled across her worn mattress, replaying the saved clip on her smartphone. No matter how many times she watched it, the guy's spastic electrocution dance was sheer comedic perfection.

Then, without warning, Rihwa's own body seized up, shuddering violently just like the man in the video.

“Ugh, dammit... not this crap again.”

The bone-chilling frost creeping upward through her meridians inflicted a hideous brand of agony. It felt as if a high-powered orthopedics shockwave therapy machine were hammering every square inch of her body all at once.

Trembling uncontrollably, Rihwa groped along the bedside nightstand for her pill bottle.

These intermittent seizures had plagued her ever since she woke up in this world. The cause was no mystery. The letter in the cave had explicitly stated she was afflicted with the fatal Nine Yin Severed Meridians.

Naturally, one of the first things Rihwa had done after stumbling out of that cavern was visit a hospital. The letter warned she had ten years to live at most, and she had spent at least five years frozen in that cave. If the letter's prognosis held true, she had less than five years left to live. Indeed, the attacks had grown steadily more frequent and excruciating by the month. Leaving aside any lingering regrets over her newfound martial body, the raw terror of death was very ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠real.

At first, the physician refused to believe her when she claimed to suffer from the Nine Yin Severed Meridians. Mandatory childhood inoculations for meridian blockages had been established half a century ago, the doctor had scoffed—how could an archaic condition like that still exist?

Dismissing her symptoms as ordinary poor circulation, he tried to kick her out of the clinic. Only after Rihwa stubbornly refused to leave did he reluctantly order a full meridian scan. The test results left the physician pale as a ghost: severe, late-stage Nine Yin Severed Meridians. It was a miracle she was still breathing.

Fortunately, the condition was no longer terminal in this modern age. Provided one had enough cash, it was fully curable. The catch was that the treatment cost a ruinous fortune. And for someone like Rihwa, who lacked basic government health insurance, the medical bills were utterly astronomical.

From that day forward, money became Rihwa's sole objective. She had been a wage slave back in South Korea, and now, stranded in this absurd excuse for the Central Plains, she was once again chained to the grind of capitalism. A truly pitiful life.

“Aughhh...”

Gulping down the pills with a mouthful of lukewarm water, Rihwa finally managed to exhale a ragged sigh. The medication was a potent prescription painkiller designed to numb the agony of freezing meridians. Naturally, in keeping with how thoroughly cursed this world was, such specialty drugs were classified as non-reimbursable out-of-pocket expenses. Not that it made a difference to an uninsured drifter anyway.

Suddenly gripped by existential dread, Rihwa dragged herself out of bed and stopped before the mirror. Though it was only an ordinary vanity mirror, her entire frame fit comfortably within its reflection.

She couldn't be taller than the mid-140s in centimeters. A petite stature perfectly matching a dainty, fragile frame. Silken, moonlit silver hair cascaded all the way down to her waist, framing an ethereal pair of vivid crimson eyes.

Worse still, her complexion was as pristine and luminous as freshly fired white porcelain, complemented by delicate, impossibly cute facial features that possessed enough lethal charm to instantly disarm any stranger's wariness.

Critiquing one's own appearance like this might reek of sheer narcissism, but it was an objective statement of fact. Whenever Rihwa walked down the street, she could physically feel the gazes of passersby swiveling in her direction.

“Does this body just refuse to grow?”

It had been several years since she tumbled off that cliff into this world, yet she hadn't grown a single millimeter since waking up.

This tiny body and deceptively adorable face had caused her nothing but endless misery. The only marketable skill she possessed was the martial arts she had learned in the mountains, but modern industries permitting the use of internal qi were strictly limited to hyper-masculine manual labor: construction sites, shipyards, and deep-pit mines.

Whenever someone with her appearance submitted a resume to those roughneck trades, she was rejected long before she could even reach the interview stage. Even when she tried to demonstrate that she possessed genuine internal qi, the foremen laughed in her face and thought she was pulling a prank.

Did these idiots not know the cardinal rule of the Jianghu? Always beware the elderly, women, and children! Her physical form was both a woman and a child, and factoring in the century she had spent frozen, her mental age was practically that of a senior citizen. By all rights, she was a triple-threat hazard to be feared and respected!

In the end, the only jobs open to her were repetitive, entry-level odd jobs. Gluing plastic eyes onto stuffed animals, or sitting on a stool pressing buttons on an industrial factory stamp. Yet even those menial gigs were hard to come by because of her alarmingly youthful looks.

She had managed to scrape together temporary shifts here and there by begging factory owners, but the moment inspectors or visitors spotted her working on the line, the managers panicked about child labor violations and promptly fired her.

Turning to the stock market had been an inevitability. If she couldn't secure normal, steady employment, she had to make her money work for her.

Curing the Nine Yin Severed Meridians required a mountain of silver, and she was on a ticking clock. The doctor had given her seven years at best—and that grace period existed solely thanks to modern medical advancements.

Initially, she made decent returns. Rihwa genuinely convinced herself that she was an investing prodigy. She skipped her occasional factory shifts altogether, spending her days parsing Shaolin Temple's audited financial balance sheets and attending Mount Hua Sect's investor relation conferences. She hadn't missed a single general shareholder meeting.

Then she fell hopelessly in love with Shaolin Temple's corporate stock. Blinded by misplaced conviction, she took out maximum margin leverage and went all-in.

And that was how she ended up like this.

“I'm going to lose my mind...”

Collapsing back onto her threadbare bed, Rihwa unlocked her phone and checked her brokerage portfolio. Her balance was a bruised, nauseating sea of deep blue, resembling the face of an ordinary civilian beaten senseless by Jon Jones. Two full years since stepping out of that cavern, and far from saving up for her medical treatment, a disastrous margin call had saddled her with an astounding debt of eighty million silver liang.

“I wonder what the water temperature is like in the Yangtze River right now...”

A chill draft slipping through the cracked windowpane caused the makeshift insulation blanket wedged into the ceiling to flutter. Not that it mattered. Even without that draft, the ceiling leaked whenever it rained.

“...Still, I have to survive.”

Giving up and dying like a stray dog was completely out of the question. Severely twisted though it was, this was still the Murim world she had longed for, and she had genuinely learned martial arts.

Yet no matter how hard she wracked her brain, she couldn't find a way out of this financial abyss. Just then, the phone clutched in her hand buzzed with a notification.

Jo Meohyeop. A variety streamer Rihwa occasionally watched. Since she followed his channel, the push alert popped up automatically.

“Sigh...”

Knowing full well she had far more pressing matters to attend to, Rihwa clicked the stream link in search of a quick hit of dopamine. If she couldn't find a solution to her problems, the next best strategy was drowning out her thoughts entirely.

“Testing, one, two. Hey, guys, can you hear me?”

When the feed loaded, Jo Meohyeop was busy adjusting his microphone levels.

The live chat scrolled at blistering speed. Jo Meohyeop was a titan on Ogogok, firmly cemented within the platform's top ten most followed creators.

“We've got sponsored homework today, so keep the chat clean and polite, all right?”

As expected of a massive channel, the viewership was a chaotic mixture of schoolchildren, trolls, and casual lurkers. One notable quirk of Jo Meohyeop's broadcasts was that, despite commanding tens of thousands of concurrent viewers, he never employed chat moderators. Consequently, raw, unfiltered banter spilled across the screen uninterrupted.

“Hey, stop whining about sponsored content! I'm telling you, this event is genuinely amazing for you guys too!”

The chat and donation feed had devolved into utter bedlam within minutes. Rihwa snickered into her pillow, thoroughly amused by the disaster unfolding on screen.

“All right, I'm disabling donations right now,” Jo Meohyeop snapped, adjusting his webcam with a mock scowl. “Once this promo is done, I'm going through chat logs and handing out bans. You all know once I ban someone, I rarely grant appeals, right?”

“...Ahem! Greetings, fellow chivalrous heroes! Today, I bring you an unbelievable event courtesy of Capsulerank, who generously provided massive sponsorship support for our stream!”

Troll comments continued to flood the screen, but as an experienced variety streamer, Jo Meohyeop smoothly ignored the noise and carried on with his presentation.

“We are giving away one brand-new, top-of-the-line virtual reality capsule—the Another V12—completely free to one lucky viewer through a raffle! All you have to do is fill out the survey form pinned in the channel notice board, and the winner will be drawn live on stream...”

The instant those words left his mouth, the atmosphere in the chat underwent a radical transformation. And for good reason. Even an entry-level virtual reality capsule retailed for around five million silver liang—a luxury item far out of reach for ordinary citizens. A flagship, top-tier model like the Another V12 easily cleared ten to fifteen million silver liang.

Rihwa let out a bitter chuckle. To be honest, she hadn't completely ruled out the idea of streaming herself; with an appearance as absurdly cute as this, she knew she had visual appeal. The insurmountable barrier, however, was the virtual reality capsule. Every hit title dominating the streaming sphere these days was built around full-dive virtual reality, making a high-end capsule an absolute necessity for content creation. For someone living hand-to-mouth on the verge of starvation, investing in such luxury equipment was an impossible fantasy.

“Man, imagine if I actually won...”

Rihwa pulled up the linked survey form pinned on the stream notice board, quickly typed in her responses, and submitted her raffle entry. With twenty thousand viewers currently watching the stream, even assuming only half entered, the odds were one in ten thousand. It was an astronomical long shot.

“All right, entries are closed! Let's spin the wheel right now...”

On screen, Jo Meohyeop initiated the automated raffle roulette. Thousands of usernames blurred past in a dizzying spin, gradually losing momentum as the wheel began to click toward a halt.

The moment the winner was locked in, the live chat erupted into complete pandemonium. Wadeulwadeul. An infamous attention-seeker whose entire existence in the channel consisted of dropping minimum donations and incessantly copy-pasting 'Bro, I'm cold. Hold me.' On any other broadcaster's channel, such unhinged behavior would have earned a permanent IP ban on day one.

“Are you kidding me? Of all the people to win, it's this guy?!” Jo Meohyeop burst out into a hollow laugh upon reading the handle on his screen. “Hey, hey, stop name-dropping the winner in chat! Anyone spamming the handle is getting banned right now!”

Shaking his head in disbelief, Jo Meohyeop pulled up a direct-message window with Wadeulwadeul on screen.

“Look, we still have to get the winner's acceptance speech. You better not pull that stupid routine here, man. If you do, you're not human. This capsule costs fifteen million silver liang!”

Rihwa sat frozen on her mattress, her jaw slack in sheer disbelief. Even so, her fingers moved with instinctive, lightning-fast precision.

A single line of text appeared in the direct message dialogue displayed to twenty thousand live viewers. In hindsight, it was the only possible conclusion.

“...Holy crap.”

Just like that, So Rihwa—known on the Ogogok platform under the handle Wadeulwadeul—out of nowhere came into possession of a luxury virtual reality capsule she could never have dared dream of affording.