When Your Time Is Up, Even a Signboard Will Kill You
“Ah, you psychotic cultivator bastard.”
Bloody red lettering glared against the pitch-black monitor. Staring at the screen with a thoroughly exhausted heart, Kim Seon-ju clicked New Game.
Biseungdo: Island of Ascension was a hardcore xianxia MMORPG. Player versus player combat was entirely unrestricted, and a single death meant game over—your character was wiped from existence, forcing you to start completely from scratch. As his fresh lobby loaded, a sparse trickle of messages drifted down the broadcast chat window.
“Haaah.”
Slam!!
Seon-ju’s fist crashed down on the desk in a textbook desk-slam shotgun. His mouse and keyboard rattled in collective protest.
“How much spiritual qi could you even siphon off a fresh account anyway? Why go out of your way to butcher someone minding their own business?”
Shaking his head in utter bewilderment, Seon-ju clicked over to Paprika TV to check the top-ranked broadcast in the gaming category: a virtual streamer.
As expected of the platform's undisputed number one streamer, the chat scroll raced past like a raging torrent.
The cultivation realms in Biseungdo were divided into five distinct stages: Qi Condensation, Foundation Establishment, Core Formation, Nascent Soul, and Soul Formation. Each realm was subdivided from Layer 1 up to the peak of Layer 4 Great Perfection.
In League of Legends terms, reaching the Soul Formation realm was practically equivalent to Challenger rank. At that pinnacle, cultivators wielded personalized Dharma Treasures, high-ranking magical artifacts, and dozens of devastating divine arts, capable of obliterating rivals in single-click player-killing duels. The game had been live for three full years, yet the top streamer was still only at Core Formation Layer 4 Great Perfection—a stark testament to how punishingly difficult advancement truly was. While a handful of antisocial veteran hermits who never streamed had reportedly crawled their way to Nascent Soul Layer 4, not a single soul had breached the Soul Formation realm yet. Rumors on the game's official website teased that realms beyond Soul Formation existed, but nobody had ever seen them.
I really thought I found a viable niche market... Seon-ju lamented silently.
He was never built for competitive player-killing. Rather than chasing the adrenaline rush of brutal combat and glorious victories, his stream focused entirely on peaceful agrarian pursuits: cultivating spiritual herbs, concocting pills through alchemy, and peddling his wares on the auction house. In his head, a relaxing, craft-heavy broadcast in a hyper-violent game seemed like the perfect untapped niche. In reality, it was a ghost town. His viewer count hadn't budged by a single person in three solid months.
“Maybe I should debut as a Vtuber too,” he muttered to the empty room. “Though male Vtubers never get anywhere.”
He convinced himself that his lack of an audience was simply the unfair byproduct of being a boring guy. The number one streamer, Hoshino, was an independent Vtuber. While her meteoric rise over corporate agencies was partly fueled by an exceptionally gorgeous Live2D model, the jarring gap between her delicate appearance and her foul-mouthed, bloodthirsty personality did the heavy lifting. She was, quite literally, a virtual streamer optimized for slaughter.
“They say rigging a decent virtual avatar costs over five thousand dollars, though.”
It wasn't that he couldn't afford it, but dropping that kind of money felt absurdly wasteful. Swallowing a wave of gloom, Seon-ju closed the broadcast tab and glanced back at his own stream dashboard. Still zero viewers.
Consistency will conquer all. It’s only been three months, after all.
Seon-ju firmly believed that relentless consistency was the ultimate virtue. No matter how mundane or dry a broadcast was, as long as he poured honest, daily effort into it, he was certain he would eventually become an official partner streamer. Deep down, he still stubbornly clung to the delusion that farming herbs and brewing medicine was an untapped goldmine.
Cracking his knuckles, he opened up the character creation screen.
“If I make a female character drop-dead gorgeous, wouldn't that bring in at least a few stray clicks?”
First, the chest—crank the slider all the way up. Next, the facial structure: a classic, refined East Asian beauty with porcelain skin and delicate contours. Long, lustrous black hair falling over slender shoulders. And finally, a fragile, willowy physique that made you want to wrap a protective arm around her waist.
As for the name...
Cheon Cho-young.
Satisfied with his craftsmanship, Seon-ju finalized the character and clicked Enter World. As the loading screen displayed the sprawling parchment map of Biseungdo against a dark backdrop, he cleared his throat and addressed the vacant chatroom.
“Alright brothers, this run we're going with a Black Moon Ginseng start. I scouted a pristine natural colony earlier. If we turn those into pills and sell them on the market, the payout is crazy good. I'll make sure to cut the farming route into a Short later for you guys.”
The screen dissolved from black into the vibrant rendering of the game world. His character, Cheon Cho-young, had spawned inside a cavern secluded deep within a tranquil mountain forest. Given the game’s randomized spawn mechanics, this was a fantastic roll; dense forests meant an abundance of wild spiritual herbs. Better yet, the cave was situated relatively close to Mount Ascension.
Just as he touched his keys to take his first step, a luminous system window materialized across the center of his monitor.
O Cultivator undaunted by thousands of deaths.
The Gate of Ascension event—said to open once every millennium—will soon commence. Will you survive the ruthless law of the jungle across Biseungdo, pass through the Gate of Ascension, and cross over into a new world?
Seon-ju’s hand moved on pure gamer muscle memory, his cursor flicking toward the corner of the window. Just as his finger clicked the close button, the words “Gate of Ascension event—said to open once every millennium” registered in his peripheral vision. He tried to pull his hand back to read the text properly, but the red X was already pressed. The popup vanished without a trace.
“An event? There was nothing about an event on the developer notice board. Brothers, do any of you know what this event is about?”
Naturally, the dead chat window remained stone-silent. He scrambled through the in-game menus, checking the event tabs and system log, but found no record of the notice he had just dismissed. He opened a browser tab and searched the forum databases, but found zero matching results. Was it an unannounced update that accidentally leaked through a client-side glitch?
“What was that? Did I just hallucinate? If anyone in chat knows, drop a comment.”
Shrugging it off, Seon-ju steered his character out of the cavern toward Mount Ascension. Right at that moment—
Thump, thump, thump!
“Young man Seon-ju! Are you in there?”
The muffled voice belonged to the elderly grandmother living next door.
“Ah, hold on a second, brothers.”
Seon-ju hit pause, saved his game state to the cloud, and hurried to the front entryway. When he yanked open the heavy door, a ferocious gale of wind and rain whipped into the entryway, stinging his cheeks. Huddled beneath the awning was the stooped grandmother clad in a clear vinyl raincoat, clutching the hand of a small eight-year-old girl wrapped in oversized wet-weather gear.
It was Ha-yul, the grandmother’s granddaughter.
“Hello, Uncle!” the little girl piped up cheerfully despite the roaring squall.
“Hey there, Ha-yul. Grandma! What are you doing out here in the middle of a typhoon? It’s far too dangerous!”
“Aigoo, the plastic greenhouse behind our house caught a gust and tore loose! It flew straight over and collapsed right on top of your pepper patch, knocking down all your stakes. I feel so awful about it, what on earth are we going to do?”
Seon-ju had once been an ordinary urbanite before turning his back on city life. After his beloved grandmother passed away in the wake of the pandemic, he had inherited her modest plot of rural land and made the quiet retreat to the countryside. He had never adapted well to corporate life—the relentless workplace harassment and cutthroat politics had ground his spirit down to dust. By contrast, tending to small-scale agriculture and selling his organic harvest directly to consumers online suited his reclusive nature perfectly.
“Your entire greenhouse blew away?” he asked, alarmed.
“Aye! We tied the anchors down tight as an iron drum, but that cursed wind ripped it right out of the soil!”
“Do you need me to go help you set it back up?”
“Set it up? It’s already tumbling halfway across the valley by now! Ah, this typhoon is being downright wicked.”
That was a serious problem.
“Understood. Let me head out and check the damage to the crops first.”
“Shall I come along and lend a hand?”
“No, Grandma, absolutely not. The wind is ferocious out there. Please take Ha-yul and head straight back inside.”
“Aigoo, I’m so sorry, Seon-ju...”
“It’s the weather’s fault, not yours. Go on inside now.”
Seon-ju rushed back to his computer desk, leaning over the microphone.
“Brothers, an emergency came up with my real-life farming work. I’ll have to wrap up the stream early today.”
Clicking the broadcast termination button, Seon-ju grabbed his heavy-duty waterproof slicker, pulled his boots on, and charged outside toward his field.
Whoooooosh!
Flap-flap-flap-flump!
The tempest slammed into him like a solid wall, snapping the vinyl hem of his raincoat into a frenzied blur. Down the road, a stray sheet of plastic caught on a utility pole whipped hysterically in the squall. Typhoon Anteater was making official landfall—a monstrous, record-shattering storm projected to scour the southern coastline.
Shielding his eyes against the stinging rain, Seon-ju waded into his vast pepper patch. Just as the old woman had warned, several support stakes had snapped under the wreckage, though the majority of the rows were miraculously still standing.
Well, I was overdue for some pruning anyway. Might as well take care of it now.
Holding back a grimace, he sheared away the snapped stalks beyond saving and cleanly stripped off the smaller fractured branches. Once he cleared the debris and set the fallen stakes upright, the field looked reasonably manageable again.
Phew. It's sweltering under this gear.
Looking over toward the neighbor's property, the plot where their plastic greenhouse had stood was now totally bare. Seon-ju’s own small vinyl tunnel shook precariously under the onslaught, but the structural ribs were holding firm. He hauled several heavy stones over, wedging them tightly against the foundation skirts to weigh them down, before dusting his muddy gloves against his thighs.
“That should do it.”
Just as he turned on his heel to sprint back to the shelter of his house—
WHUUUURRRRRRR!!
An explosive updraft slammed through the valley with terrifying force. Seon-ju lost his footing on the slick clay and tumbled sideways into the mud, his pants instantly soaked through.
Damn it all...
He planted his hands to push himself upright when a sharp, discordant screech echoed through the howling gale.
CLACK! CLANG! SKRRRRRRK!!
A horrifying racket tore through the air. It was the metal-framed advertising sign belonging to the commercial greenhouse two plots over. Heavy, jagged, and battered by the storm, the metal sign broke free from its concrete moorings, skipping violently across the pavement before catching the monstrous tailwind and hurtling into the sky—straight toward Seon-ju.
Wait, no—!
He scrambled to dive aside, but the careening slab of iron locked onto him with the uncanny precision of a guided missile.
“Wait, wait—!!”
CRACK!!
“Uggghh...”
Clutching a skull that felt as though it had been cleaved in two by a sledgehammer, Seon-ju slowly dragged his upper body off the earth.
Haah... Am I alive?
The deafening roar of the typhoon was gone. The violent sheets of freezing rain had vanished. Seon-ju let his weight fall back against the ground, his chest heaving. Through the lush green canopy of ancient trees towering above him, he could see a tranquil, pristine blue sky.
Just how long was I knocked out? The storm passed, and the trees grew a full set of leaves?
Sprawled flat on his back, his bewildered eyes traced the strange foliage swaying gently in the breeze.
Hold on... Were there ever trees like this anywhere near my pepper patch?
A cold prickle of dread ran down his spine. Seon-ju whipped his head left and right.
What?
A deep, primeval forest. Solid, moss-covered stone beneath him. And nowhere in sight was his familiar pepper field, his vinyl tunnel, or his home.
“Wh-what is this?”
The surreal transformation of his surroundings was staggering enough, but the sound that had just tumbled from his lips made him freeze in sheer terror.
“...Ah? Ah, ah.”
Why was his voice so airy? So delicate, soft, and impossibly high?
“Ah!!”
A crystal-clear, melodic soprano spilled effortlessly from his throat. Panicking, Seon-ju looked down at his own chest and torso.
“These clothes are...”
They looked terribly familiar. In fact, he had seen them hundreds of times before. It was the plain, flowing novice Daoist robe provided to every newly minted character at the start of Biseungdo.
Heart hammering against his ribs, Seon-ju scrambled to his feet and searched for water. Tracing the layout of the terrain from memory, he pushed through a thicket of luminous ferns—and sure enough, a crystal-clear mountain lake spread out before him.
Telling himself this had to be an absurdly vivid fever dream, he dropped to his knees at the water's edge and stared down at the glassy surface.
The reflection looking back left him completely paralyzed.
“Cheon Cho-young...?”
Trying to protect his pepper patch from a storm, only to be struck dead on the spot by a flying signboard. And now, opening his eyes within Biseungdo—the proving ground that mortal cultivators traversed before ascending to the Immortal Realm.
Kim Seon-ju had turned into a woman.
Specifically, the custom character he had just designed: Cheon Cho-young.