Chapter One: The Upright Big Charles

——Immortal-Demon Three Kingdoms System: When a nation is about to fall, monsters will appear. Natural disasters and plagues, rampaging demon beasts. Warlords carve up the land, legendary generals gather... Welcome to the Immortal-Demon Three Kingdoms! Please choose a starting main city power for your development:

Luoyang (He Jin’s faction), Chang’an (Dong Zhuo), Chenliu (Cao Cao), Ye (Zhang Jiao), Nanpi (Yuan Shao), Beiping (Gongsun Zan), Wuwei (Ma Teng), Chengdu (Liu Yan), Xiangyang (Liu Biao), Shouchun (Yuan Shu)... Yongchang (Meng Huo).

——Note: In this world, all civil and military officials renowned in history are incarnations of fallen stars, all gathered and appearing together. Liu Bei and Lü Bu are wandering generals without a main city and cannot be directly joined. Other related information can be explored in city teahouses, taverns, official posts, private schools, dojos, markets, etc.

——Warning: It is forbidden to spread poetry or historical information beyond the Three Kingdoms era.

……

On the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, the Dragon Boat Festival, Yongchang City bustles with drums and a sea of carriages and horses.

Today there are holiday discounts. After half a year of hardship, Big Charles finally saved enough copper coins and points to joyfully acquire a cargo wheelbarrow, officially bidding farewell to carrying baskets and joining the ranks of those with vehicles. With a cart, his load capacity for hauling firewood and gathering herbs increases five or six times. And the Dragon Boat Festival is the peak of yang energy for the year; even the rarely-trodden demon beast zones become temporarily safe, sure to have many high-quality, expensive herbs waiting to be picked. This marks the true beginning of Big Charles’s journey with his little cart.

Ahead is the Immortal-Demon notice board outside the teahouse, with a nationwide networked forum function similar to a computer. The most eye-catching feature is the player power rankings from all regions.

At Big Charles’s level, there’s no need to care about his own ranking, but since he’s made some progress, he might as well take a glance in passing. Rankings are like the college entrance exam: one more point knocks out tens of thousands of people. He doesn’t ask for much—just moving up a thousand or eight hundred places is enough to comfort himself. The new cart player sneaking a peek at the notice board ahead is probably thinking the same thing.

But the players ahead are all stunned and in an uproar, giving Big Charles a bad feeling.

——Immortal-Demon Three Kingdoms Player Comprehensive Power Rankings (Top 50 receive a prestige bonus, with the top three awarded the title “Three Lords,” followed by the titles Eight Steeds, Eight Advisors, Eight Achievers, Eight Chefs):

No. 1: Gavin Clark (Luoyang, He Jin’s faction, prestige title “Three Lords.”)

No. 2: Edward Kent (Kuaiji, Wang Lang’s faction, Three Lords.)

No. 3: Ethan Frost (Chengdu, Liu Yan’s faction, Three Lords.)

No. 4: Brian Marshall (Wuwei, Ma Teng’s faction, Eight Steeds.)

No. 5: Logan Bennett (Ye, Zhang Jiao’s faction, Eight Steeds.)

No. 6: Henry Thompson (Xiangyang, Liu Biao’s faction, Eight Steeds.)

……

No. 13: Derek Warren (Nanpi, Yuan Shao’s faction, Eight Advisors)

No. 35: Harvey Payne (Wu, Yan Baihu’s faction, Eight Chefs)

No. 43: Chicken Bro (Yongchang, Meng Huo’s faction)

No. 50: Walter Simmons (Henei, Wang Kuang’s faction)

Note: Your current comprehensive ranking is 540,000th, down by 30,000+

……

Big Charles was stunned! Dropped by 30,000 places?! The one who got knocked down is me!

Now I get it—today is all about holiday discounts. I made a small step forward, but others made a giant leap!

Big Charles’s mood instantly plummeted. If you don’t work hard, you really don’t know how big the gap is between yourself and others! It’s too hard—this is nothing like the Three Kingdoms I wanted to transmigrate to...

Big Charles is an operations staff member at a Three Kingdoms game company, 33 years old, upright and independent, not getting along well with superiors or colleagues. Still a single dog who only knows to “drink more hot water.” He often feels unappreciated and desperately longs to transmigrate to the Three Kingdoms like in the novels and build a grand enterprise.

That night, after a late shift, he was struck by lightning on his way home. The whole world turned white, and a noisy prompt sounded from his phone. In a daze, he casually chose the southwesternmost Yongchang as his starting point.

Because when Big Charles plays Three Kingdoms, he likes to quietly build up his fortune in a corner. Yongchang has unique elephant soldiers and rattan-armored troops, and later the Wudang Flying Army reorganized by Zhuge Liang. There are rich copper mines for minting coins, Lady Zhurong, and the weak yet wealthy Shu region as a neighbor. As long as he develops well in Yongchang, Shu will be in his pocket, and then he can follow the Qin and Han route to unify the world.

But he never expected that he would actually transmigrate!

But before he could rejoice, he discovered that he wasn’t the only transmigrator. Just Yongchang alone had over a thousand transmigrators. Chenliu, where Cao Cao is, was even more popular, with tens of thousands—so many that people could barely get enough to eat. With dozens of main cities nationwide, that’s tens of thousands of people. Where’s the sense of superiority in transmigration? This is basically a real-life online game in another world with a Three Kingdoms skin—maybe even one where you only get one life!