Chapter 1: Suddenly Able to Enter the Game!

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Chapter 1: Suddenly Able to Enter the Game!

Reality can be a beautiful, soft girl who lets you experience all the good things in life, or it can be a fat, domineering shrew who crushes the breath out of you. It all depends on how much money you have in your account.

…

The scorching August sun stirred a restlessness in the heart.

Youcheng County.

A godforsaken place where average salaries hovered around three or four thousand yuan and average housing prices sat at twelve thousand per square meter.

Inside a modest fruit and vegetable shop, Qin Lin wore a smile plastered across his face as he handed a bundle of vegetables to a middle-aged woman. "Here you are, auntie. Thank you, and please come again."

After seeing the customer off, he found himself confronted by several aggravating flies and had no choice but to pick up the swatter and drive them off. After a brief skirmish, a few corpses lay on the battlefield.

Qin Lin settled back behind the register and picked up his phone to open a newly released retro-style game called Story of Seasons.

It was a farming and cultivation game with a high degree of openness that required no particular skill — just the sort of thing to pass the time while minding the shop.

A year since graduation, and still nothing to show for it. A tourism management degree, and here he was selling fruits and vegetables. But reality had a way of leaving a person without choices.

His family had been working-class for three generations. A few years back, his grandfather had fallen ill, and before the old man passed, his father had kept the fruit shop going from dawn to dusk just to cover the medical bills and household expenses.

Fate seemed to enjoy playing cruel jokes on their family. After his grandfather died, his father, worn down by years of relentless labor, was diagnosed with cancer.

His mother struggled to keep the tiny shop afloat. Even after selling the house and swallowing her pride to borrow several hundred thousand yuan from relatives and acquaintances, she still could not save his father.

His mother's own health had deteriorated from the strain. Her test results across the board were poor, and she needed someone to look after her.

So when he graduated, even though he'd had the chance to stay on at a large company, he had no choice but to come home — to care for his mother, to inherit this little fruit shop, and to take on the family's debts.

If most people started life at zero, he had started at negative several hundred thousand.

Life had nothing fair to offer.

It wasn't as though he hadn't thought about looking for opportunities while minding the shop. But for a fresh graduate, he lacked not only real-world experience but also capital.

The shop's income barely covered daily expenses and his mother's nutritional needs, with a little left over each month to chip away at the debt. His bank balance had not yet reached four thousand five hundred yuan.

He couldn't even afford to see a doctor for a common cold.

He certainly couldn't replicate what those short-video influencers claimed to do — pulling in a hundred thousand or even a million a month from a thirty-square-meter fruit stall. That platform existed in a magical realm where the average person was worth a hundred million.

Until his mother recovered enough not to need constant care, he was trapped inside this little shop, simply surviving.

He let out a sigh, then directed his game character out the door. Ahead lay six plots of land planted with watermelons. He hadn't been playing long, and those six plots were all he had cultivated.

Weeding. Watering.

After a short while, the watermelons across all six plots rippled with notifications of ripeness. Time always moved differently in games — watermelons that took months in reality could mature in just over ten hours here.

Each plot yielded roughly fifteen to twenty watermelons.

Just as Qin Lin was about to direct his character to harvest them, a surge of electricity crackled from his phone and shot through his body, paralyzing him in an instant.

A short circuit?

His first instinct was to curse.

This wasn't even a Samsung phone — how could a simple short circuit pack this kind of punch?

"Ding! Special game channel activating. Locking onto game: Story of Seasons. Please stand by…"

"???" Qin Lin shook his head.

He'd gotten electrocuted and was now hallucinating?

"Ding! Special game channel link successful. Connected to game: Story of Seasons. Is this the host's first time entering the game?"

At the same moment, a vivid and dreamlike image surfaced in his mind — a ranch, and six plots of land where ripe watermelons lay scattered across the soil.

Was this a scene from Story of Seasons?

His game character was still standing before the watermelon field, positioned exactly where he'd directed it moments ago, ready to harvest.

Even more astonishing — with a single thought, the character stepped forward and plucked a watermelon from the vine.

He was playing the game with his mind?

Then, above the image in his consciousness, Qin Lin noticed a special prompt option: Enter?

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"Yes."

Connecting the prompt to what had come before, Qin Lin found it all unbelievable, yet he made his choice.

A strange pulling sensation arose, and almost instantaneously, the scene before him changed.

He was looking out over a lush, green expanse of watermelon fields.

The air carried the distinct, sweet fragrance of watermelon, and he found himself holding one in his arms — as though he had stepped into the role of the game character.

"This isn't a hallucination?" Qin Lin stared in disbelief. The watermelon in his hands felt startlingly real. Above it floated a line of information:

[Seedless Watermelon: Quality 1]

[Note: Though not a special variety, this is a product of the game, and its flavor is the finest among ordinary watermelons.
Deliciousness +1, Sweetness +1, Texture +1.]

In Story of Seasons, harvested produce was graded by quality — the higher the quality, the more delicious the fruit and the higher its selling price.

But this note was different from the in-game descriptions. It actually showed attribute bonuses.

Qin Lin set the watermelon down and picked a few more. Each one carried the same floating information, the same note: Deliciousness +1, Sweetness +1, Texture +1.

He looked around. A windmill-topped building, a storage shed, fences…

Everything matched the game's scenery.

The one difference was that the land stretching before him was genuinely vast, blanketed in watermelons — not the small, modular grid squares of the game where produce was represented by numbers.

He checked the time on his phone. Since entering, the flow of time in the game had returned to normal.

Then something occurred to him, and he quickly looked back at the image in his mind.

He was afraid he might not be able to return. What would his mother do?

But the image in his mind had shifted — it now showed the interior of the fruit shop, and the prompt had changed: Exit?

Clearly, he could come and go freely.

Qin Lin silently chose to exit. That same strange pulling sensation returned, and in an instant he was back in the shop — with a watermelon still cradled in his arms.

To confirm it was real, he picked up a knife, set the watermelon on the cutting board, and split it cleanly in two. Red flesh was revealed, but not a single seed in sight.

This was a real watermelon.

He cut one half into several wedges and lifted a piece to his lips — then hesitated. He was almost afraid to eat it. After all, this watermelon had appeared under the most inexplicable of circumstances.

He walked to the shop entrance. A grimy black dog was nosing around a nearby rubbish bin. Market Street attracted strays easily; the relevant authorities would catch one, and before long another would appear. There were simply too many people who impulsively adopted dogs without any means to care for them.

Qin Lin tossed a wedge of watermelon toward the dog. The animal pounced on it immediately, pinned it under one paw, glanced left and right out of habit, then lowered its head and devoured it eagerly.

After watching for a while and seeing no ill effects on the dog, Qin Lin finally picked up a wedge and took a bite.

His eyes lit up.

Now he understood precisely what the note had meant.

Incomparably sweet, delicious and juicy, extraordinarily refreshing, and wonderfully crisp.

This watermelon was leagues better than anything he normally stocked.

Was this the effect of Deliciousness +1, Sweetness +1, Texture +1?

Being in the trade, he knew perfectly well that watermelons of this caliber might appear once in a hundred, if you were lucky. In the game, every single one was like this.

He finished the first wedge and found himself reaching for a second without thinking.

The profit margins on watermelons weren't particularly high. Never mind that prices had climbed to two yuan per jin — after accounting for the farmers' costs, labor, transport, and the wholesaler's markup, a small shop like his was already paying one-and-a-half yuan per jin at wholesale. There was almost nothing left in it.

But what if the watermelons had no cost at all? What if every one sold was pure profit?

Qin Lin looked out at the vast field of watermelons in the game, and his eyes grew brighter still.

One watermelon at ten jin, two yuan per jin — that was twenty yuan each. Ten watermelons was two hundred yuan, all profit.

If he sold twenty watermelons a day, that was twelve thousand yuan a month — more than he made grinding away at the shop for an entire month.

And the game had over a hundred watermelons ready to go, with the plots able to be replanted again and again. They matured in just over ten hours.

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"Woof! Woof!"

Lost in his thoughts, Qin Lin was jolted by a bark right beside him. The black dog had parked itself at the shop entrance and was staring fixedly at the watermelon wedges in his hand.

Pushing its luck, was it?

He was in too good a mood to mind. He tossed the dog another wedge, then pulled the rolling shutter down over the shop front.

That way, no one outside could see what was happening inside.

He grabbed one of the large wicker baskets used for receiving deliveries, focused his thoughts, and stepped back into the ranch.

Before him again stretched the sea of watermelons. Qin Lin wasted no time — he began lifting watermelons one by one into the basket. Fifteen watermelons filled it to the brim, and he grabbed hold of the basket and returned to the shop.

He stared at the heaping basket and felt a surge of excitement rise through him.

Fortune was on its way.

He glanced back at the luminous image in his mind. In the game display, one of the plots now showed zero watermelons remaining, the vines withered. A system prompt indicated it could be cleared and replanted.

In the game, crops could only be harvested once — they didn't regrow after picking, the way they might in real life.

Seeing the prompt, something else occurred to him. He immediately used the game display in his mind to control his character and harvest the remaining plots.

In moments, all the plots were cleared.

Qin Lin entered the game again. The fields were bare — nothing left but lonely, trailing vines.

He walked toward the storage shed beside the farmhouse and opened the door. Inside, over a hundred watermelons were piled in storage.

He could have just brought the basket in here and loaded up directly. He'd been going about it the hard way before.

A small sign stood at the front of the pile:

Seedless Watermelon: 90 (Quality 1)

Ninety watermelons — and by their size, each one easily exceeded ten jin. That pile was worth at least seventeen hundred yuan.

The thought had barely formed before Qin Lin was back in the shop, basket in hand, stepping into the game again to load up.

He also discovered that as long as he was touching the basket when he willed himself to exit the game, the basket — and everything in it — came back with him to the shop.

He made trip after trip until the entire stockpile had been moved out, piled high in one corner of the shop.

Combined with the first basketful, he now had a hundred and five watermelons.

When he finished, he looked back at the game image in his mind. The fields showed only bare vines, and the prompt confirmed they were ready to be cleared and replanted.

He cleared the vines at once and sowed new watermelon seeds.

In just over ten hours, another batch would be ready.

For now, the task at hand was selling these watermelons.

Qin Lin rolled the shutter back up. The black dog was still sprawled by the door. It raised its head to look at him, then shifted into a more comfortable position and went back to licking its paw.

The dog still hadn't left?

He had no time to worry about that. He arranged the first basket of watermelons on the display stand and looked at the price sign: two yuan per jin.

That was his standard retail price for stock bought at normal wholesale cost — and even so, the shop only managed to sell a few watermelons on any given day.

Looking at the watermelons he'd brought out of the game, he changed the sign to one-and-a-half yuan per jin — the wholesale rate. These had cost him nothing, so selling them cheaper was only better.

But things didn't go as he'd imagined. The afternoon was nearly gone, and he'd only moved a handful. It wasn't that the watermelons were poor quality — it was simply that of all the customers who came to his shop that day, only a few had any need for watermelons.

He thought it over, then smacked himself on the forehead. He'd been targeting the wrong market. If he was already pricing at one-fifty per jin — wholesale — there was no need to sell them one by one to walk-in customers.

He pulled out his phone and opened a WeChat group.

It was a group for fruit and vegetable shop owners in Youcheng — no one quite remembered who had started it, but the idea had been to band together, keep tabs on market prices, and avoid getting cheated by wholesalers. Most of the time, aside from a few members who liked to keep the chat alive, there wasn't much interaction.

Qin Lin opened the group and typed a message:

My maternal grandmother's nephew's uncle's son has grown a batch of seedless watermelons. Sweet, juicy, and delicious. Now available wholesale at 1.5 yuan per jin, delivered to your door. Anyone interested is welcome to try a sample.

(End of Chapter)