The year 2006 felt less like a new millennium and more like a slow, creaking machine grinding to a halt. In the cramped, damp room Wei Chen called home, the air was thick with the scent of cheap instant noodles and the metallic hum of his secondhand PC. Dust motes danced in the lone shaft of light from the window, illuminating a scene of quiet desperation. For a boy who was only 18, Wei Chen carried the weight of a far older man. He was an orphan, and the looming Gaokao exam was not just a test; it was the final, inescapable wall between him and a life of utter poverty. Every textbook, every late night, was a frantic, whispered prayer to a future he wasn't sure he deserved.
He wasn't a bad student, but he wasn't a good one either. He was simply average, a face in the crowd, a ghost in the classroom. His only true escape was his computer, a bulky beige tower with a cathode ray tube monitor that flickered and buzzed like a dying insect. It was a relic, but it was his. He spent his nights in a fantasy world, an old-school MMORPG where his character's strength was determined by his grinding, not his family name. He could be a hero in that world, a figure of respect, and for a few hours, he could forget the grime on his floor and the growl of his empty stomach.
Tonight, the low hum of the PC was joined by a frantic static hiss. The power strip under his desk, a frayed and ancient thing held together with electrical tape, decided it had had enough. A spark, bright and vicious, shot up the cord, arcing across the headphone wire and finding a direct path to Wei Chen's temple. Time seemed to warp and bend. A blinding white light filled his vision, a sound like a thousand angry wasps screaming in his ears, and a jolt of pure, raw electricity coursed through his brain. His body seized, a violent, uncontrollable spasm, and his world dissolved into a cacophony of light and noise.
Then, there was nothing. No light, no sound. For a long moment, he was suspended in a void of perfect silence. When consciousness returned, it was not with a jolt, but with a new, quiet hum. It was not in his ears, but inside his skull, a cool, logical presence. He lifted his head, a wave of nausea washing over him. The PC was dead. The room was dark. But in his mind's eye, a new reality was shimmering into existence. It was a perfect, crystalline structure, a complex lattice of light and code. It felt like a supercomputer, a monstrously powerful GPU with a thousand cooling fans humming in perfect synchrony. He reached for his temple, half expecting to find a burn mark, but there was nothing. The only evidence was the quiet, terrifying hum now resonating within his very being.