Longevity Begins with Poisonous Mushrooms
Lin Chen woke up in the half-dead body of a mine slave—starved, poisoned by the air, and still carrying the remnants of the toxic mushrooms that had killed the original owner of this body.
In this brutal world, he was forced to toil in a black iron ore mine. Mining came with constant danger: toxic mist kept seeping from the tunnel walls, and disgusting ore-rats—monstrous, rodent-like creatures—lurked in the darkness.
The mine was ruled by merciless regulations. Meet the ore quota—or face savage whippings. Fail badly enough and the rune on your neck would activate, torturing you until you passed out.
Every day was a gamble between choking down foul, ammonia-reeking slop or feeling the overseer’s whip tear open your skin. Here, a human life was worth far less than a single piece of black iron ore.
One day, Lin Chen found something valuable inside a rat burrow—but his discovery only earned him a brutal theft, a flurry of kicks, and a body left barely clinging to life.
An old miner, another slave, offered him the only flicker of warmth in those darkest moments: a scrap of food, some makeshift medicine, stories of the past, and a dream of freedom that tasted bitterly out of reach.
The only thing the old man left behind was a worn, faded wooden token and an unfinished final message.
That wooden token felt strangely warm in his hand, as though it carried a meaning he couldn’t yet grasp.
Lin Chen didn’t know what it was for, but he knew one thing for sure: it could never fall into the hands of the mine’s thugs.
Day after day, his body grew frailer. Pointless struggles, endless hunger, raging fevers, and poison steadily eating him from the inside.
His vision began to blur. The toxic air had rotted his lungs. With trembling hands, he reached for the last of the poisonous mushrooms—the same kind that had killed this body’s original owner. If death was coming anyway, at least he wouldn’t die with an empty stomach.
As his consciousness slowly faded, an unfamiliar interface suddenly appeared before his eyes—something that shouldn’t exist in this world.
Loading complete.
Black liquid began seeping out from his pores. His body was still weak, the poison still inside him, but he didn’t die.
In a freezing, ramshackle hut that night, Lin Chen stared at the mysterious panel floating in front of him. The eyes that had once been empty now held a faint glimmer.
Something had changed.
And for the first time, he felt… maybe—just maybe—there might be a way out.
