Here, the Three Kingdoms generals are all like immortals, surrounded by the aura of the General Star. Hoping to win them over just by showing off a few lines of the Longzhong Plan is simply impossible. But if you build a good relationship, you can obtain their incarnations—General Tokens! These are dazzling cards that orbit around the player, transforming into human form to fight as soon as battle begins. There are also Soldier Tokens, which summon a group of soldiers to fight alongside you.

Both General Tokens and Soldier Tokens can be upgraded and expanded by completing related quests or defeating powerful monsters in the wild to collect General Star Shards and Soldier Soul Shards—a classic card mobile game model.

However, at present, the vast majority of players have combat power below that of ordinary people in this world, so they have to honestly weave mats, sell shoes, push carts, and sell dates to get by.

Big Charles is a sub-healthy, middle-aged homebody who gets out of breath after running just a few steps and can’t do anything without a computer. Yongchang City is not only wild and barren but also suffering from drought, with almost no other means of making a living. He can only join other equally clueless players in the safe zone outside the city, carrying firewood and gathering herbs just to barely get by, and has to spend half his money on witch doctors to treat all sorts of injuries, bites, and diarrhea. The pain and reflection during this period are hard to describe.

However, just like in a class full of underachievers there are always one or two top students, here too, among hundreds of thousands of people, there are outstanding players who stand out.

A group of players with silk bands tied around their arms poured out of the teahouse, making Big Charles's heart sink.

The Divine Pheasant Gang!

This is a guild founded by a player in this city named “Chicken Bro.” The silk bands are modeled after Gan Ning’s brocade sail pirates to show gang membership. Unlike most transmigrators who are out of touch with reality, Chicken Bro is a professional free-range chicken farmer. Cockfighting has been popular in Yunnan and Guizhou since ancient times, and Xishuangbanna cockfighting is one of the four great cockfights. With his expertise in chicken behavior, he quickly won his first pot of gold through cockfighting bets, then used the modern “crowdfunding and lending” model to build the guild, rapidly snowballing to over a thousand members. Chicken Bro thus rose into the top 50 players.

Basically, every main city has a superstar player who leaves everyone else in the dust.

Big Charles is independent and values his freedom, and he absolutely despises crowdfunding and lending schemes, so he would never join their gang.

At this moment, a familiar guild member came over to greet him, enthusiastic yet a bit awkward: “Big Charles! Congrats on getting a cart!”

Big Charles was quite helpless. This Scott Bolton is a photo editor who loves tigers, and in this world, he doesn’t have much ability either—barely counts as one of Big Charles’s few friends.

Scott Bolton started persuading: “At first, we all thought we were the main characters, but it turns out we’re not even side characters—just extras here for the boxed lunch. Some people went into the mountains and got eaten by tigers, and they themselves became the boxed lunch! Face reality, you and I are both starting from scratch, but those who know how to raise chickens and pigs, fight, embroider, cook, practice herbal medicine, play chess, or mine coal have already become big shots. Will they give you or me a chance?”

Big Charles stubbornly said, “As long as you persist, there will always be opportunities.”

Scott Bolton laughed, “Trying to be like the number one player Gavin Clark and become a live-in son-in-law to a rich family?”

Big Charles replied irritably, “How could that be possible?”

It has to be said, Big Charles really underestimated Luoyang at the start. In Big Charles’s stereotypical impression, He Jin was one of the biggest fools of the Three Kingdoms, the Luoyang Basin looked like a natural fortress but was actually a prison, and Dong Zhuo didn’t think much of it either—he burned and looted it before moving the capital to Chang’an. No matter what, Luoyang shouldn’t have been the starting city.

But as it turns out, Luoyang in this world is relatively intact and is still the “center of the world” where powerful clans and wealthy merchants gather. He Jin came from a butcher’s family and rose to power through his sister, the empress, and his grandson He Yan was the most famous and dashing live-in son-in-law, so Luoyang is especially popular for its “meteoric rise” model, with the trend of becoming a live-in son-in-law in full swing. And He Jin’s foolishness is actually his brightest advantage—he’s easy to get along with and make connections!

The top player Gavin Clark is great at calligraphy and won the favor of Zhong Yao, the “founder of regular script,” successfully marrying into the family. It’s said his overall strength surpasses the combined total of players ranked 5th to 50th, and that’s just the assets the Zhong family gave him to practice with—not to mention the capital he snowballed by leveraging the Zhong family’s credit to pioneer player crowdfunding. But—

This isn’t the fantasy of a dragon king or a ruthless “soft rice king,” but because his wife is said to be even more capable than Huang Yueying, and he doesn’t even dare take a concubine! What’s the point in that?

Scott Bolton sighed, “Unless you carry wine and meat everywhere, searching the whole map for a chess-playing dungeon?”

Big Charles was speechless.

Since this is a real-life version of an online game, of course there are dungeons—various fairylands, demon realms, and secret places. In the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the divine strategist Guan Lu revealed heavenly secrets, telling his seriously ill neighbor to prepare wine and meat to serve the immortals of the Southern and Northern Dippers and play chess to extend his life. Here, a group of herb-gathering players really did stumble into a fairyland and met two immortals, one old and one young, playing chess. But none of them brought wine or meat, and they were noisy and disturbed the immortals, so they got kicked out—what a waste of such a great opportunity!

But how many players can even afford wine and meat right now? Food is precious in the Three Kingdoms, and many places have alcohol bans—wine is extremely expensive. Not to mention that chess-playing fairylands appear randomly, so you can’t count on them.

Scott Bolton sighed again, “Unless you run into Liu Bei or Lü Bu? Only two players in the whole country have met them, and there’s no way they’d come to a backwater like Yongchang, right?”