Chapter 2: Scuttle Crab

"Man... This dude is a total schmuck..."

After counting out the bills in his wallet and checking the balance in his bank account with his phone, Bai Zhi gripped his temples between his finger and thumb like he had a headache, and let out a giant sigh.

His current net assets, including the balance in his bank account, amounted to a grand total of three hundred, twenty-eight dollars and twenty-five cents. Incidentally, the rental for the apartment he was staying in off-campus was a thousand dollars a month, and it was due in three days.

In other words, Bai Zhi was broke.

Of course, the other Bai Zhi had been counting on borrowing money from his ex-girlfriends to make ends meet...

There was a time when he had kept his expenses minimal, and with the money from his scholarships and a job with the work-study program, had never lacked for money. However, ever since he became addicted to video games, he had lost his scholarships due to his worsening grades, even as he poured money by the fistful into his games.

In the end, the counselor came round to try and talk sense into him so regularly that "Bai Zhi" ran away from the dorms, deciding to rent an apartment off-campus instead. Since then, things like being late for class, leaving early or skipping altogether became regular occurrences with him.

What Bai Zhi could not fathom was how such a loser who had completely given up on life to play video games all day had been able to date no less than seven women... Could it really be the result of having a pretty face and pretty thick skin?

Was the world truly so superficial?

There was something deep to think about there, Bai Zhi thought.

A quick glance at his phone told him the time, by which he estimated that the first class of the day was already mostly over. At that, Bai Zhi made the snap decision to skip the class.

After all, he was fresh off the boat as far as this world was concerned. Even though he had inherited the memories of the good-for-nothing who suffered a sudden death after overindulging in video games without a break, there was still much that Bai Zhi did not know about this world.

To be fair, based on "Bai Zhi's" unremarkable seventeen years of life here, there was nothing to indicate that the world was that much different, save minor differences in some historical events. Technologically, at least, the world seemed to be just as advanced, having recently entered the 5G era...

As he stood before the window looking out on the street lined by snack vendors, Bai Zhi stretched, and his expression was one of gratitude. "Getting a second lease of life feels pretty good..."

The time was 9:20 a.m., on a Monday, no less. That meant both the freshmen and sophomores had class, and except for the internet addicts who shuffled along with leaden feet, people like "Bai Zhi" who were clearly just leaving the internet cafés after an all-nighter spent gaming, the usually busy street stood quiet and cold.

"Hmm... I suppose I don't have to deal with making money to pay the rent just yet, what's important now is... huh?"

As his gaze landed on an intersection along the street, Bai Zhi was stunned for a moment by what he saw.

He had spotted what looked unmistakably like a creature from a video game, the Scuttle Crab that normally lurked in the river within the game, now large as life on the street, balanced on its many legs.

"Some sort of sculpture? Or... Fuck, it moved?!"

After rubbing his eyes in disbelief, Bai Zhi looked back in the same direction. He confirmed that, unless he was hallucinating right now, the strange creature swaying slightly in the middle of the street was none other than a Scuttle Crab.

What was stranger still was how, despite being in the presence of something which could not possibly exist in real life, the people around it seemed to treat it like a perfectly normal sight.

"Well well, so this is no ordinary wor—hold up."

Bai Zhi caught himself in the middle of rushing down to get a close-up view of the creature as something occurred to him. With his phone in his hands, he aimed the camera at the now-moving crab and snapped a shot in secret.

As he had expected, the image of the Scuttle Crab that actually showed up in his photo album turned out to depict nothing but a common alley-cat instead.

"Does that mean that everyone else sees the Scuttle Crab as just a kitty cat? That begs the question..."

Bai Zhi looked pensive as he flicked his eyes down at the photo in his hands, then back at the scuttling crab.

"...are my eyes playing tricks on me, or is there something strange going on with this world?"

The Scuttle Crab, properly known as the Freshwater Rift Scuttler, was a neutral mob in the popular MOBA game "League of Legends", and was not considered a Mythical creature.

An elusive mob incapable of attacking, killing it would spawn a Speed Shrine that would grant passing friendly units a speed buff, as well as granting visibility of the area while it lasted.

That was all Bai Zhi remembered of the Scuttle Crab.

He watched the crab disappear into the distance, then returned to the desk next to his bed and, booting up his PC, began searching for any relevant information on the web.

Half an hour later, he leaned back in his chair with a smirk and rubbed his hands together, muttering, "It seems that there is much more than meets the eye in this world..."

The bulk of what he found online consisted of urban legends. After tabulating all the information he had uncovered, he could tell that in the past three months, the internet had been flooded with reports of urban legends.

One such story told of a family who, upon visiting the grave of their grandparent a week after the burial, heard noises coming from below. Upon plucking up the courage to unearth and reopen the casket, they found the occupant playing mahjong!

Then there was the one about the boy who leapt off the 18th floor of a building but miraculously survived—doctors found that the boy had become made of rubber!

Another story, about the homeless vagrant whose corpse was found impaled on a utility pole like a corndog, led experts to warn against what they believed was some new method of suicide.

These absurd, unfunny and even tasteless stories were often deleted by moderators once they began to circulate. Such that Bai Zhi had discovered, which had somehow evaded censure, were invariably absurd in the extreme and treated as pure entertainment by the netizens, thus were never looked into.

If he had not witnessed that strange creature firsthand, Bai Zhi would also have considered these stories no more than copypasta, but he could not deny that a mere half-hour ago, he had seen a Scuttle Crab in the flesh, and this left him open-minded to the credibility of those urban legends.

In fact, reports of sightings of unidentified life forms abounded on the internet, such as one netizen who claimed that one night, they had seen something in the distance with a long and skinny body like a utility pole, but had two protrusions like satellite dishes growing out of its head. Another report of a daytime sighting claimed that they had seen a gigantic, fish-like animal swimming among the clouds...

Bai Zhi was sure that there was something weird about this world.