Chapter Text
There was a dead thing in the hospital bed.
Specifically, Shen Yuan.
*
Shen Yuan died without much fanfare. He slipped away between one breath and the next, attracting no notice as he went. It was embarrassing to admit, but as he died he wasn’t thinking any particularly filial thoughts about his parents or his siblings. No - sadly, as he died, he was thinking about the trash stallion novel Proud Immortal Demon’s Way.
Oh well, he thought as he closed his eyes. He’d almost made it to the end. He’d held out hope week after week that plot arcs might be resolved with something other than gratuitous and frankly improbable papapa. (Shen Yuan had spent his life a sickly virgin, but even he could tell that Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky’s practical experience with romance began and ended with his right hand.) One way or another, he had been doomed to be disappointed. At least this way he could lie to himself and pretend that he hadn’t devoted years of his life to following a poorly written YY novel churned out to pay the bills.
Shen Yuan was too tired to be indignant, but the idea of Luo Binghe, stallion protagonist, master of a thousand beauties, never truly finding happiness or peace -
It was such a waste!!
His dying thoughts were neither graceful nor profound, but what did he look like, a languishing beauty? Shen Yuan had never managed to do much in his life except survive, from one day to the next. He had watched as his parents put off their retirement, citing every reason but the truth - that Shen Yuan’s hospital bills made it impossible. His younger brother had just finished medical school, determined to command a salary that could support his failure of an elder brother, while their sister flung herself into her studies with an obsessive determination that spoke less of her ambition and more of her desire to do the same. Shen Yuan had spent his life a leech and a parasite, unable to help the people he loved most, and even if they had given up their lives out of love, that didn’t lessen the guilt.
He wished he could have died knowing he had done something good with his life, but that had never been an option. Thinking about his family only made his heart hurt in a way that had nothing to do with illness. It was much easier to think about Proud Immortal Demon’s Way and Luo Binghe’s wasted life as he waited to die.
And waited.
...And waited.
It occurred to him that he may have gotten ahead of himself. Maybe he wasn’t dying. Maybe the tightness in his chest was heartburn.
He opened his eyes and sat up. Or...something sat up, anyway.
When Shen Yuan looked down, he saw a pasty, underfed corpse in a hospital gown. The embarrassment of seeing himself was outweighed by the realization that whatever he was using to look at his own body with, it was not his eyeballs.
“What the fuck,” Shen Yuan blurted out. After some consideration, he thought that as far as first (last?) words go, they were pretty appropriate.
The hospital room began to fade into white. That was more like it, Shen Yuan thought. Afterlife, here he comes!
...The afterlife looked a little unfinished, which was a polite way of saying that once the hospital room (and his corpse!) had vanished, absolutely nothing took its place. Or maybe the afterlife was like a sandbox simulator and he could design it to his heart’s content, which being honest did sound like fun.
Maybe the afterlife had a copy of Proud Immortal Demon’s Way that actually lived up to the potential of those early chapters. Shen Yuan brightened up at the prospect.
[Congratulations, congratulations, congratulations! Good things must be said three times!]
[User profile PEERLESS CUCUMBER created!]
[PEERLESS CUCUMBER, please say “open inventory” and access “So You Want To Be A System.”]
“What the fuck,” Shen Yuan repeated. “...can I change my username?”
[“What the fuck” is not the correct phrase! Please say, “open inventory” and--]
“I got it, I got it,” he said hastily. “Open inventory.”
[Passcode accepted!]
In the empty space before him, a screen opened up. It looked...well, it looked like every inventory space in every video game he had ever seen. Zero points for creativity, he thought as he poked at the row of empty boxes. Only one box held anything - a book. He touched it gingerly and it fell into his hands.
No weird words appeared in the air. For lack of any better options, Shen Yuan settled down and began to read.