001 Can I Extract Skills from the Game?

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“Grandmaster of National Martial Arts” skill extraction progress: 99%

On the long-distance bus heading back to his hometown, Du Ruo stared blankly at the interface that only he could see before his eyes. The recent series of upheavals had left him feeling as though he were living in a dream.

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It was about twenty days ago that Du Ruo lost his job. The economic downturn had swept through the country, consumer habits shifted to austerity, and his company’s business dwindled sharply. Predictably, layoffs followed, and so Du Ruo found himself unemployed.

Losing his job wasn’t the terrifying part—what truly unsettled him was his sudden realization that he might not be able to find work again, something he had never experienced before.

He used to believe that, no matter how badly things went, he could at least rely on the iron triangle of deliveryman, food courier, or ride-share driver to support himself.

Only after losing his job did he discover that everyone else had thought the same.

Still, Du Ruo hadn’t spent ten years drifting in Guangdong Province without gaining anything. Six years ago, he was dating a woman who, thinking ahead to marriage, pressured him into buying an apartment in the city center of Dongguan.

He scraped together the five thousand yuan he’d saved after four years of hard work, added the 175,000 yuan his parents gave him, and bought a ninety-square-meter secondhand apartment in the city center.

Six years had passed. Du Ruo could barely remember why he and his girlfriend had eventually broken up, but he remained grateful to her, because the apartment that had been worth less than half a million yuan had now risen to 1.8 million.

Of course, the apartment was originally for his own use; its value was never much on his mind, and he had no intention of selling it.

But during those days after losing his job and failing to find another, simply to pass the time, Du Ruo decided to play a little mobile game. Whether the game was fun didn’t matter—he just wanted to relieve some stress.

The game was called “Grandmaster of National Martial Arts.” In the beginning, there was only an interface and a tiny character. Du Ruo had to randomly select a basic martial art, then tap the character on the screen to make it practice and gain experience. If he didn’t tap, the character would just sit on the ground in a daze.

So all Du Ruo had to do was keep tapping the screen to make the character practice martial arts and gain experience.

Of course, if he grew tired of tapping, he could choose to watch an ad, and the character would then automatically train for three minutes.

As skills leveled up, the character’s appearance would change, attributes would grow, and the animations became more dazzling. Upon reaching certain levels, the character could unlock new skills and continue training in more advanced martial arts routines.

This simple tap-tap game kept Du Ruo up almost all night. He grew weary of tapping and nearly sick of watching the endless ads.

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“Congratulations, your character has reached the maximum level. Would you like to extract the skills?”

Finger still tapping the screen, dazed in the middle of the night, Du Ruo saw the prompt and, out of habit, pressed “Yes.”

Immediately, the screen froze, and the mini-game vanished in a flash.

“Huh? What a lousy game—wasted my time. Whatever, time to sleep.”

Du Ruo stared at the seemingly crashed phone interface for a moment, then glanced at the time—it was already half past three in the morning.

Too exhausted to dwell on it, Du Ruo didn’t give another thought to the glitzy little game, its character clad in ornate garb, surrounded by halos, performing flamboyant moves, and a skill bar packed with martial arts abilities.

At any rate, the negative emotions he’d accumulated recently had nearly dissipated. Half-awake, he put his phone aside and drifted off to sleep.

Who would have guessed that, when he awoke the next morning, a small icon and a progress bar would appear before his eyes? The icon was a little character in plain clothes, practicing martial arts—the very same as the one from the game he’d played the night before.

At first, Du Ruo was startled, then overjoyed. He knew this was the legendary “golden finger.”

Unfortunately, all he had was a progress bar with little information. Still, the icon was identical to the game from last night.

He hadn’t bothered with the story or mechanics—he was just looking to unwind. By the time he’d played half the night, he’d forgotten what skills the character had ultimately unlocked.

No matter how he searched, Du Ruo could no longer find that little game. Since he couldn’t find it, so be it.

“With a golden finger, why would I look for another job? I’ll go home—even if I get scolded or pushed into blind dates, it doesn’t matter.”

Thanks to the game icon’s appearance, Du Ruo made a decision: to sell his apartment and return to his hometown, even though he still had no idea what kind of “golden finger” the extraction progress bar represented.

The apartment, worth over 1.8 million on the market, he listed at 1.75 million. Promising a big bonus to the agent if it sold, the property was off his hands in half a month. He walked away with 1.45 million, plus the three thousand yuan he’d saved in ten years of work. Now, Du Ruo had the means to return home and study his golden finger in peace.

(In reality, selling an apartment in today’s market wouldn’t be so quick.)

Unfortunately, whether due to the memory size or poor signal, the extraction progress crawled at a snail’s pace. Nearly twenty days had passed, yet the last one percent stubbornly refused to complete.

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“We’ve arrived. Gather your things and get ready to get off.”

The bus rolled into Tangkou Town at the foot of Mount Huangshan. Du Ruo slung his backpack over his shoulder and stepped off. June in Huangshan was still quite hot, but thirty-degree weather did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of tourists. The streets bustled with young travelers.

The phrase, “Youth is priceless, and Huangshan is at your feet,” had lured countless young adventurers.

“I haven’t really spent time exploring Huangshan in over a decade. Maybe I should make time to climb it again,” Du Ruo mused, glancing at the majestic mountain beneath the azure sky. Without lingering, he hailed a taxi, gave the driver his address, and the car quickly sped away from the lively town center.

As they drove on, the traffic thinned, houses grew sparser, and vast stretches of farmland appeared. Fifteen minutes later, the taxi stopped at the entrance of a village, and Du Ruo got out.

The village houses were white-walled with gray-tiled horse-head roofs—classic Huizhou architecture, clearly the product of unified planning and pleasing to the eye. Lush fields sprawled before the village, with a winding stream flowing through them.

On one side, tea gardens and vegetable patches bordered the village; behind it towered Huangshan, the most revered of China’s three great mountains.

Beneath the blue sky and over the green earth, it was a picturesque rural landscape.

“Why did I never realize how beautiful our village was before?” Du Ruo wondered, a smile unconsciously blooming on his face.

He hadn’t been back in over two years, and even then, his visits had been hurried—just home for the New Year, never taking time to appreciate the scenery. Now, free from work worries, seeing the sights he’d once grown tired of as a child, Du Ruo finally felt at ease, the oppressive anxiety of city life melting away.

He slung his backpack and walked into the village.

Passing the entrance, he saw several elderly men sitting by the little bridge, chatting and fanning themselves. As Du Ruo approached, they began to murmur among themselves.