August 30th.
Arc City, Old District, inside a rented room.
The shot opens on a trash bin.
This is not some Wong Kar-wai art-film metaphor shot.
This is a genuine, honest-to-goodness plastic trash bin stuffed with six instant-noodle cups.
The congealed broth around the rims has hardened into a dull yellow film. The fork in the topmost cup is still stuck upright where it was left, like a white flag announcing surrender to a cruel world.
Cheap pink soundproofing foam covers the walls. Three panels have peeled at the corners and hang limp.
A shower curtain clipped over the window serves as drapes, in the kind of floral print that ships free for nine-ninety-nine.
A home-built PC squats on the cheapest desk IKEA sells, the case's side panel held on with tape, the fan wheezing like an asthmatic old cat.
In front of the computer, sprawled across a gaming chair missing three patches of upholstery and possessing no dignity whatsoever, is a white-haired girl in twin tails.
She's wearing a JK uniform, the sailor collar's ribbon knocked sideways toward her collarbone, the pleated skirt a mass of wrinkles.
Fuzzy slippers on her feet. The left one is missing a bunny ear.
Her name is Sparks.
If her original body — that "Sparkle" over in the Star Rail universe — could reach across the dimensional wall and witness her in this state, she'd probably pull out a quantum bomb and put her down on the spot, purely as an act of mercy.
On the monitor, a streaming client's backend interface sits open. In the data panel in the upper right, a few emaciated numbers glow faint green in the sickly light.
[Current Viewers: 43]
Forty-three people.
Forty of whom are bot followers she'd scraped two hundred yuan out of her food budget to buy last month.
These cyber-ghosts do exactly one thing: loop "streamer so pretty" and "666" in the chat like broken tape recorders.
The remaining three are real humans:
One is asking, bewildered, "how did I even click into this stream."
One is tirelessly spamming links to illegal gambling sites. And the last one, whose ID is aggressively obnoxious, goes by "I'm Your Daddy."
Sparks stares at the screen, her immaculately made-up face wearing an expression somewhere between "nothing left to live for" and "just end the world already."
She is a mask of the Masked Fools.
Sounds impressive, doesn't it?
Masked Fool, Sparkle.
The most devout believer of the Path of Elation, the single most productive fun-generating machine in the service of the Aeon Aha.
The top-tier drama queen who once pulled off a world-shaking con on Penacony, the interstellar fugitive even the Company couldn't do anything about!
And then?
Three years ago, a screwed-up spacetime turbulence nobody saw coming swept her into this godforsaken parallel world.
No Honkai energy here. No Stellarons. No Voidrangers of the Antimatter Legion. No abominations of Abundance. No Emanators of Destruction.
Not even an Astral Express to set off fireworks with.
No Grey Hair, no streamer dreams, no Dual-Vector Paradise. None of it.
Only peace.
Peace so thorough it makes you want to yawn every single day.
Peace so thorough that a believer of Elation, who feeds on manufactured chaos and harvested emotion, nearly starved to death in this ten-square-meter rental.
But that isn't even the worst part.
The worst part is the half-dead [Mask Terminal] in her skull, which handed down its final directive with a price tag attached.
If she wants to reopen the Imaginary passage connecting back to her original universe and return to the Dual-Vector Paradise, she has to collect a colossal quantity of Emotion Points in this world — Emotion Points tied to "Elation."
On this junk heap of a planet, all it takes is for some intelligent being to feel "morbid curiosity, amusement, schadenfreude" because of her — or even the total emotional collapse that comes after getting conned.
The System converts it straight into pure "Elation Emotion Points."
Emotion Points are the only fare that will take her home.
And to scrape together a fare that costs about as much as a star destroyer, this believer of Elation — who once amused herself by throwing the galaxy into chaos — has been forced to bow her head to cruel reality, hole up in this ten-square-meter room, and take up the trade of livestreaming.
Sparks slowly drags her gaze off the stream panel and over to the folder list on her desktop.
Two dense columns of Word documents, each filename more unhinged than the last — a veritable hall of fame of contemporary internet sob-story pandering:
"Persona 1: Gambling Addict Dad, Sick Mom, Broken Me"
"Persona 2: Just Turned Eighteen, Forced to Stream to Feed Eight Left-Behind Younger Siblings"
"Persona 3: Grey-Haired Ex Ran Off With The Money, Brave Girl Shoulders A Million In Debt Alone"
"Persona 7: I Was Trafficked Into The Mountains And Chewed Through The Ropes To Escape"
"Persona 12 (Ultimate Trump Card Edition): I'm Actually An Alien, Stranded On Earth, Can't Get Home, Please Send Money"
That last one happens to be the closest to her damnable truth.
Unfortunately, nobody believes it.
In this world, the person telling the truth is the clown.
Just as she idly clicks open "Persona 12," the three precious flesh-and-blood viewers in her stream become two.
The one with the ID "I'm Your Daddy" leaves behind a single line — "streamer, time to take your meds" — and exits with a flourish.
The corner of Sparks's mouth spasms violently.
Three years.
Three whole years!
She'd assumed that with her interstellar-grade con-artistry and a higher-dimensional being's Outclassed by None advantage, wringing a few tears out of the natives of this low-magic world and harvesting some Elation would be trivial. A total Outclassed by None, right?
Instead, Earth's internet taught her some humility. Pinned her to the floor and sanded her face flat.
These Earthlings were terrifying. And the competition was insane.
Last night she'd meticulously staged a tearjerker: "Buried Under A Million In Loan-Shark Debt, Selling Handmade Hairclips On Stream To Pay It Back."
At the emotional climax she'd even squeezed out three genuine tears through sheer force of will. She'd nearly moved herself.
And the result?
Over in the next streaming category, a two-hundred-pound bruiser with a full beard performed a segment titled "Terminally Ill Man Uproots A Weeping Willow Bare-Handed."
The guy roared as he tore the tree out of the ground, sobbing his tragic life story at the top of his lungs the entire time.
After finishing, he casually took a chainsaw to the root ball and carved it into a lifelike statue of the Child-Granting Guanyin.
He gained fifty thousand followers on the spot, gifts flooding the screen.
And Sparks's carefully prepared "Brave Girl With A Million In Debt"?
Likes: 7.
Five of which came from the bot followers she'd paid for.
Her misery-peddling, set against the hardcore stunt work of her Earth colleagues, didn't even rise to the level of a kindergarten recital.
At least at a kindergarten recital the parents clap.
Sparks grabs a fistful of her white twin tails in irritation, nails scratching aimlessly at her scalp a couple of times.
Her other hand gropes across the desk and closes around a disposable lighter.
Not for cigarettes.
She doesn't smoke.
She stares at the cheap plastic thing in her hand, thumb resting on the spark wheel without pressing down.
"Three years…"
Her voice comes out muffled and thick with congestion, like a sulking puppy.
"Three years. Am I really going to have to bite through a lighter live on stream today just to scrape up that pathetic fare home?"
Crack! She slams the lighter down on the desk, tips her head back, and knocks the back of her skull hard against the split upholstery of the gaming chair.
Aimed at the flickering fluorescent tube on the ceiling with its buzzing electrical hum, she lets out a wail of pure existential despair:
"O Aha, God of Fun, hear me!!!"
Her voice ricochets a few times between the four mildewed walls of the cramped room and shakes a bit of paint loose.
"Sparks, third-rate streamer, trapped in this garbage world… has she already become the single biggest joke in your almighty eyes?!"
Is the greatest joke available to a joker becoming the joke herself?
Now that's funny. Genuinely hilarious.
Unfortunately, nobody answers her.
Nothing but the silence of the divine.
Right on schedule, the sound of the auntie next door chopping meat filling on her cutting board comes through the wall.
Rhythmic. Thud, thud, thud, thud. Full of the vulgar, dependable warmth of human life on Earth.
Sparks goes completely limp in the chair.
The hem of her pleated skirt is pushed open by the way she's slouching, bunched in wrinkles at the top of her thighs.
Two slender legs stretch out from under it, laid straight against the floor.
From months of never leaving the apartment or seeing sunlight, her skin has gone excessively pale; faint bluish veins are just visible along her calves.
And right as she draws a deep breath and reaches out to pick the lighter back up — to give serious thought to the physical feasibility of the "bite through a lighter" project —
Her phone screen lights up.
The vibration buzzes against the desktop. The case is a clear soft-shell she bought off a street stall for fifteen yuan, the corners already yellowed.
Caller ID: [Sister Zhou (MCN)]
Sparks's eyelid twitches.
Sister Zhou.
The agent at the third-rate MCN agency she'd signed with.
Her usual attitude toward Sparks was roughly what you'd extend to a lump of non-burnable garbage.
Forget opportunities — the woman hadn't lined up a single sponsorship for her in three straight months, not even a hundred-yuan one.
The last time she'd reached out on her own initiative was to hound Sparks about the overdue agency management fee.
The phone buzzes three times. Sparks doesn't pick up.
Then the voice messages start carpet-bombing.
Frowning, she taps the first one.
"Sparks! Oh my precious little princess, are you there or not? Stop sleeping and rise from the grave already!"
Sister Zhou's voice detonates out of the phone speaker with that particular manic pitch people get when they've spotted a payday.
"Don't go saying ol' Zhou never looks out for you! There's a mystery new anime-style game that's been dumping an absolutely insane amount of money into promo lately — Honkai Impact 3rd! That one, the one everybody's screaming about!"
"Open beta hits every platform tomorrow! The backers are carpet-bombing the market right now, casting a net across the whole damn world looking for streamers to do day-one gameplay promos!"
Sparks's hand, halfway to the lighter, stops in midair.
"Your numbers may be as burnt as the bottom of a wok, but at least you've got that all-natural white-haired pretty-girl look going. Doesn't even need level-ten beauty filters."
"The backers must be blind… ahem, the backers have an eye for hidden gems, and they picked you off our list of cannon fodder!"
Naturally, neither Sparks nor Sister Zhou had any idea that this particular streamer list was another one of Su Yu's little flourishes — he'd taken Pardofelis out for a meal, then let her "pick her generals at random."
Sister Zhou's voice climbs higher and higher.
"Day-one gameplay stream, only requirement is a full two hours! Guaranteed promo fee! After tax! Five thousand yuan! You in or not?!"
Five thousand yuan.
Sparks's pupils dilate.
Five thousand yuan!
The balance in her pitiful bank card right now is precisely three hundred forty-seven yuan and sixty-two cents.
She still owes the landlady half of last month's rent.
Her fridge contains two packs of expired frozen shepherd's-purse-and-pork dumplings and half a jar of Lao Gan Ma that's about to grow fur. Nothing else.
Five thousand yuan is enough to order takeout like a Queen for a solid month!
Five thousand yuan is enough to swap the asthmatic fan in that wheezing tower for a high-spec model with RGB running lights!
What can you do.
Money makes the world go round, and in this world — peaceful past the point of parody — a girl stripped of the power of her Path is, at most, one pitiful, spectacularly unlucky pretty girl.
Believer of Elation, Masked Fool, whatever. A girl's still gotta eat.
Sparks swallows hard, sucks in a breath, and prepares to belt out an impassioned "Sister Zhou, you are my true blood sister from another mother and another father."
But zero point zero one seconds before the words leave her mouth —
Her brain slams on the emergency brake at highway speed.
Rewind.
Play it again.
"…called Honkai Impact 3rd…"
Honkai.
The word cuts out of Sister Zhou's noisy stream of chatter like a bullet and lands dead center on a region of Sparks's brain that has been asleep for three years.
The lollipop in her mouth drops with a clack onto the keyboard.
It rolls across the space bar, slides into a gap between the keys, and jams there.
Sparks doesn't touch it.
Her eyes go wide.
Those mismatched pupils contract sharply in the monitor's glow, like two radar dishes suddenly receiving a signal.
Honkai.
She remembers.
Fragments of memory surge up from a depth sealed off for three years, carrying the dust of interstellar travel.
Her original body — that Masked Fool, Sparkle, running amok across the sea of stars — had once visited that world.
The world eroded by Honkai energy, crawling with Herrschers and Valkyries, dangerous and chaotic.
Her original body had even made a fake-BFF over there. A woman named Vita.
When the two of them were together, nobody smiled sweeter. When they knifed each other behind the back, nobody cut deeper.
Sparks's mind even dredges up, unbidden, the plush toy her original body had made.
"Ultra Firepower — One-Shot Starfarer!"
And then, flashing through memory, the face of Grey Hair — the one who could always kick up an enormous mess at the critical moment.
That ultimate freak aboard the Astral Express.
Sparkle had rubbed her face raw trying to leech off that guy's top-tier clout.
But none of that matters right now!
What matters is —
This world.
This world that doesn't even know what the hell "Honkai energy" is. This world so peaceful it makes you want to yawn every day. This world without a single Voidranger of the Antimatter Legion, not even the lowest-grade one. This busted-up parallel Earth.
How could anyone here, how could anyone possibly, produce a game named — with pinpoint precision — Honkai Impact 3rd?!
Something is off.
Something is very, very off.
Sparks's brain kicks into high gear, chains of reasoning toppling one after another like dominoes.
Possibility one: pure coincidence.
Some Earth native with too much time on his hands picked a chuunibyou name at random and it happened to be "Honkai."
No. Absolutely impossible.
"3rd."
The third one. The third time.
That numeric suffix is too precise, too heavy with destiny.
It isn't some brain-dead "Honkai Adventure," or "Honkai Awakening Online." It's "3rd."
It's practically an arrogant announcement to the entire universe: here, there exist a first, a second, and a third version of the Honkai crisis!
Possibility two: there's a colleague.
Another higher-dimensional being from the stars, trapped the same way in this low-dimensional swamp.
And that being is using "games" — a vessel Earthlings can just barely comprehend — to broadcast some kind of distress call into the void. Or… some kind of extremely dangerous signal.
Possibility three: an Aeon's prank.
Some unnameable Aeon buried a hidden easter egg in this world.
Or… the muscles in Sparks's previously lifeless face twitch beyond her control.
The corner of her mouth peels slowly upward into an excited curve.
Is it Aha?
After watching her stay stranded for three years, dead broke, sunk so low she was considering biting a lighter for engagement — witnessing her darkest hour —
had he finally taken pity and dropped into her dry little beggar's bowl a world-ending, absolutely spectacular joke?!
Sparks stands quietly in front of the computer desk.
Her bare pale feet press against the cold wooden floor, the dim glow of the phone screen lighting her delicate face from below.
Whichever possibility it is.
Sparks lowers her head and looks at her own face reflected in the blacked-out phone screen.
Her eyes are shining.
It's the instinctive reaction of an apex predator who's been soaking in a swamp for three solid years, claws going rusty, and has just caught a thick whiff of prey blood on the air.
If there's a vast conspiracy hiding behind this, it could absolutely be squeezed for an unimaginable ocean of "Elation Emotion Points"!
Way faster than streaming herself uprooting willow trees!
She snatches up the phone and holds down the voice key.
"I'll take the job! Even if you want me to wash my hair upside down on stream, I'm one hundred percent on board!"
She releases the key without waiting for a reply.
The phone gets tossed back onto the desk.
Sparks turns slowly and faces the screen of that wheezing tower that looks ready to explode at any moment.
On it, the stream backend's viewer count has dropped to a pathetic 39.
The bot that had been dutifully spamming gambling links finally got banned and left.
She opens a browser and types one name into the search box.
"Honkai Impact 3rd."
Enter.
Search results pour out in an avalanche.
Promotional PVs, pre-registration pages, player communities, early reviews from UP-loaders, marketing materials.
All of it points to the same thing: tomorrow, September 1st, open beta on every platform.
Sparks stares at the game's logo on the results page.
"Interesting."
She murmurs to herself, the words slightly slurred by the candy in her mouth.
The white plastic stick of the lollipop juts cockily from the corner of her curled lip.
"So very interesting."
"Three years soaking in this stinking dead water, and at last — I've caught the smell of blood on a joke worth chasing."
She scrolls the page down.
[Executive Producer: Su Yu.]
[Developer: miHoYo Studio.]
She doesn't linger long on the name the entire internet has been praising.
As an apex hunter, she knows it isn't time yet to dig into the prey's background.
Sparks switches to the calendar app in the lower right corner of her screen, her gaze locking onto the date marked in red: [September 1st].
Less than twenty-four hours until this carnival called open beta.
She closes the stream backend without ceremony.
The viewer count that represented three years of her humiliation freezes for the last time at a pitiful 37.
The rented room goes quiet again.
The auntie next door has stopped chopping meat; now there's the sizzle of vegetables hitting a hot wok, and the smell of cheap cooking oil and soy sauce drifts lazily in through the gap in the shower curtain.
Sparks stands at the window, having pulled the curtain open a crack.
She lifts her head, looks out at the view, and draws a deep breath.
Outside lies the crowded, decaying Old District of Arc City. And at the far end of the Old District, the glass curtain wall of the Arc City Tower rises into the clouds, throwing back the setting sun in blinding gold.
Sparks has no way of knowing that on the top floor of that tower, a pack of lunatics carrying the fate of humanity on their backs are pouring out their last drops of blood in a final sprint toward tomorrow's launch.
Nor does she know that the "joke" she's about to step into for five thousand yuan is far larger — and far more terrifying — than that Elation-soaked brain of hers can imagine.
She's certain of only one thing.
Tomorrow, she is going to come face to face with an unknown monster named Honkai Impact 3rd.
And along the way… harvest a brutal haul of Emotion Points off these Earth natives and earn enough for a ticket home!
Beat up her original body, steal Grey Hair away, and then become an interstellar mega-streamer! Now that is the fulfilling life she deserves!
"So let's have a look, then."
The lollipop spins gleefully across her tongue, clicking crisply against her teeth.
In her eyes glitters a fanaticism that goes by the name of chaos.
"Just what class of joke is this, exactly."
____
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