【Dear Player, congratulations on earning access to the open beta of the large-scale real-life game *Island Survival*. The system has automatically logged you in.】

【The game guidelines are now playing. Please listen carefully:

1.    This game solemnly promises that its content is 100% real. If a player dies in the game, they cannot be revived. Please accept this reality with grace.

2.  Once logged in, you cannot log out. You can no longer return to Earth. Please abandon any unrealistic fantasies.

That is all.】

【The system sincerely wishes all players a pleasant gaming experience!】 

Splash… splash…

The sea breeze stirs the waves, sending up white foam that slowly crashes against the coastal rocks, wave after wave. The sky is overcast, and the sea surface appears a deep, inky blue, while the salty, fishy smell keeps wafting into his nostrils.

Nan Liujing gazed at the endless ocean before him, then looked up but couldn’t find the sun among the dark clouds. The sky was a murky gray, and the sea breeze sent shivers down his arms. Finally, he looked around. As he watched a wave crash over the rocks and splash at his feet, he instinctively pulled his legs in, his posture growing more tense, like an out-of-place giant mushroom.

The mushroom lowered his head and let out a heavy sigh. 

“Well, since things have come to this, there’s no use blaming heaven or others.” Nan Liujing patted his butt and stood up. As he rose, something suddenly tugged at him from behind. His head jerked backward, and he nearly lost his balance.

“What the hell?”

Frowning, he reached behind him and felt around, confirming that someone had slipped something into the hood of his sweatshirt. Who put it there? Most likely the game system.

There wasn’t a soul within eight hundred li of here.

Nan Liujing yanked the hood back, and the object inside nearly took a parabolic trajectory into the sea—but before it could, he acted with lightning-fast reflexes, reaching out to snatch it firmly into his hand.

“Nice! As expected of me.” Praising himself with practiced ease, Nan Liujing fixed his gaze on the book-like object in his hand.

It looked like a leather-bound notebook, its surface adorned with intricate, exquisite patterns outlined in gold thread, surrounding three large words in the center— the player handbook.

Judging by its appearance, could it possibly be a magic book inside?

Nan Liujing’s eyes widened, and he unconsciously held his breath in anticipation. He slowly flipped open the cover… then let out a deep sigh of disappointment. Damn.

A tablet.

So that fancy leather cover on the outside was just a protective case. Nan Liujing rolled his eyes and raised his hand to turn on the screen.

There was no lock screen; the home screen popped up immediately. Against the built-in blue sky and white clouds background were just a few app icons, with the current time displayed in the top-left corner: 6:00 a.m.

There was also a line of small print below.

【Day 1 Survival Tutorial】

There’s no battery indicator, and no charging port on the tablet—so does this thing not need charging? That does make it seem a bit magical.

Nan Liujing felt a little better and calmly looked at the app icons.

【My Account】

【Tasks】

【Backpack】

【Construction】

【Forum】

【Store】

There weren’t that many features to begin with, so Nan Liujing decided to click through them one by one from left to right.

He tapped on 【My Account】, and as expected, Nan Liujing’s personal information screen popped up.

In the top right corner was a headshot of him. He had no idea when the system had snapped it, but in the photo, Nan Liujing stared expressionlessly into the camera—with thick eyebrows, handsome eyes, striking features, and a chiseled face—looking like an emotionless, handsome shark-man criminal having his mugshot taken.

Nan Liujing felt a bit uneasy, so he glanced at it once and then looked away, turning his attention to the text beside it. Is this really just a game? Even his entire profile had been quantified into numbers.

【Name: Nan Liujing】

【Talent: Unlocked】

【Class: None】

【Health: 10/10】

【Stamina: 100/100】

【Stamina: 150/150】

【Strength: 7】

【Agility: 5】

【Spirit: 15】

【Skills: None】

【Island: Unnamed】

Nan Liujing noticed that some entries had a small, translucent plus sign next to them; clicking on it brought up a related explanation. Through these explanations, Nan Liujing learned the following:

Health Points (HP) represent the character’s health in the game; once depleted, the character dies.

Performing physical labor consumes stamina. When stamina drops below 50, the player enters a fatigued state; below 30, movement becomes slow and laborious; and if it drops to 0, the player faints immediately.

Certain activities consume stamina, and the stamina cap is directly linked to the player’s Mental attribute. As the Mental stat increases, so does the stamina cap.

The average Strength, Agility, and Spirit attributes for an ordinary adult on Earth are 5. His stats were average, except for his Spirit, which was unusually high. Nan Liujing wasn’t quite sure why this was the case. But since it was a good thing, he didn’t dwell on it.

The Talent, Class, and Skills sections were all empty, but the Island section allowed him to rename the island, so Nan Liujing casually typed in “Unknown Island.”

Haha, a pun.

There was no further information on this page, so Nan Liujing closed the pop-up and clicked “Next.”

The 【Quests】 page has three main categories: 【Main Story】, 【Side Quests】, and 【Daily】.

There is only one entry under the Main Story category.

【Survival!】

【Mission Objective: Survive the first day.】

【Mission Reward: Talent Unlock.】

【Note: Day 1 of Survival is set as a tutorial day. During the tutorial, the weather is fixed as “Sunny and Breezy,” survival pressure is reduced by 30%, the probability of resource respawn is increased by 30%, and players will not be attacked.】

The side and daily quests are all empty.

Nan Liujing pondered the main quest for two seconds: “In other words… just stay alive?” The quest-issuing system is surprisingly straightforward.

In any case, “Tutorial Day” is advantageous for players, and the buffs provided are quite practical. But whether players can seize the opportunity depends entirely on them.

【Backpack】 

There’s not much to say about it—it’s the standard type found in games, with 10 slots. The small plus sign next to it explains that you can stack the same type of item in a single slot, up to a maximum of 99. 

Since Nan Liujing had nothing on him at the moment, he didn’t try it.

Next was 【Construction】. When he tapped it, what appeared was a bird’s-eye view of the island where Nan Liujing was located. This really piqued his interest, and he immediately began examining it intently.

Since the game had made it clear from the very beginning that this was a game, Nan Liujing actually had some expectations about his surroundings. No game would hand players a luxurious resort island right at the start. If the environment were comfortable, resources abundant, and everything were readily available, where would the survival elements of the game be?

If you’re not poor at the start, what’s the motivation for players to grind through the game?

…That was the theory, at least. Nan Liujing stared at the image on the tablet, then turned around to look at the island behind him with disbelief, and then shut his eyes tightly.

“This is way too barren…”

In the image, his “Unknown Island” was a somewhat irregular circle with a diameter of about 50 meters; by calculation, the entire island’s land area was less than 2,000 square meters. As far as the eye could see, the island was completely barren, covered only by a layer of brownish-yellow soil. The soil in the center was slightly higher, creating a barely noticeable slope—to Nan Liujing, it looked exactly like his future grave.

The soil was sparse and compacted, devoid of even a blade of grass; a place so desolate that not even insects were willing to make it their permanent home.

The only feature worth mentioning was the shoreline encircling the island, extending outward by 10 to 20 meters and divided into two distinct ecosystems.

To the south lies a gentle sandy beach, while to the north, the coast is dotted with reefs. This is where Nan Liujing was spawned.

“It seems the main resource points are in these two areas.”

Glancing up, he saw a large patch of barnacles clinging to the dark, jagged rocks, along with a few oysters and a string of purple mussels.

While resources on land are scarce, the coast is quite abundant. He figured he might also find small seafood washed ashore on the southern beach.

“I’ve always watched others go shellfishing online—well, now it’s my turn.” Nan Liujing smiled wryly.

However, providing an island map isn’t the main function of 【Construction】; its true purpose is to create blueprints and place facilities. Unfortunately, Nan Liujing didn’t have a single blueprint on hand, so he couldn’t try it out for himself.

Finally, he reached the 【Forum】, the feature Nan Liujing had been looking forward to most. Judging by the name, this was most likely a channel for player communication. If, from now on, every player was confined to their own island—and given that the island was such a godforsaken place—a prolonged lack of interaction would drive anyone mad.

Clicking on the Forum brought up a standard forum interface, just as expected. No registration was required; players were logged in by default using the format “Island Name-Real Name.” The forum was divided into two main sections: the Chit-Chat Zone and the Trading Zone.

In the Chit-Chat Zone, each user can post one thread per day, with no limit on replies. The Trading Zone, however, has no restrictions whatsoever.

It had been less than five minutes since Nan Liujing launched the forum, yet it was already flooded with posts. Nan Liujing scrolled through a few times but couldn’t even see the end of the thread.

“Wow, just how many people did the system pull in all at once?”

No sooner had Nan Liujing uttered this exclamation than he noticed two lines of small text in the upper right corner of the forum.

【Forum ID:】

【Current Online Users:】

“A five-digit number… 100,000 people?” Nan Liujing’s eyes widened. “Did they just pull all over the entire Earth here? They’re really going all out!”

But ultimately, none of this had anything to do with Nan Liujing. He couldn’t do anything about it, nor did he want to, so he simply let out a sigh and shifted his attention elsewhere.

At that moment, the forum was flooded with a massive amount of meaningless spam posts, mostly venting negative emotions. Nan Liujing scrolled through them for a while, then closed the forum with little enthusiasm.

The last feature was the 【Store】. To Nan Liujing’s disappointment, the store was completely empty. The bare page displayed only a single line of text: “Not yet open.”

“If it’s not open, it’s not open. I don’t have any money to buy anything anyway,” Nan Liujing thought, taking it in stride.

Having now gone through all the features on the tablet, Nan Liujing had to figure out what to do next.

“Today’s main quest is actually pretty easy—just stay alive. A healthy adult can go three days without food or water. So I could totally sit here, holding the tablet and scrolling through the forum all day, just coasting through this quest.” Nan Liujing chuckled to himself as he thought this through. “But if I did that, I’d completely waste the tutorial day’s buff and miss out on a safe chance to get familiar with the game. Sigh, I guess you really can’t be too much of a slacker in life.”

Nan Liujing stuffed the tablet into the large pocket on the front of his hoodie and turned on his heel. “You should live like a seagull. Anyway, I’m heading to the pier to grab some fries first.”

Oh, to be precise, he was going to the beach to grab some clams.

From the northernmost tip of the island to the southernmost, the straight-line distance was no more than 50 meters—literally just a couple of steps away.

Thanks to the barren land, Nan Liujing had an unobstructed view, and the golden sandy beach was visible at a glance. The waves washed endlessly against the shore, their force quite fierce.

The tide hadn’t gone out yet, so getting close to the beach was a bit dangerous.

Nan Liujing pulled out his tablet and checked the time—it was 7:00 a.m. He’d spent quite a bit of time browsing forums. He decided to wait another two hours to see how things developed.

Technically, he could head back to the reef area now, but Nan Liujing didn’t have any tools on him. And trying to pry shellfish off the rocks with his bare hands was simply too dangerous. Whether it was oysters, barnacles, or even the purple mussels—commonly known as “haihong” in Nan Liujing’s hometown—they all had incredibly sharp shells. If you touched them with your bare hands, even the slightest carelessness could result in several deep cuts.

Bleeding and pain were the least of his worries; Nan Liujing feared bacterial infections, inflammation, and excessive blood loss even more. 

So, unless absolutely necessary, he wasn’t keen on taking on the challenge. At eight o’clock, the tide suddenly receded without warning.

The waves retreated silently, leaving behind many gifts from the sea on the beach.

Nan Liujing spotted several small fish, floundering desperately like office drones who’d missed the last train. A few crabs, unwilling to surrender, were frantically burying themselves in the sand, hoping the moist sand would help them hold out until high tide, when they could return to the sea.

They were actually quite slow, though; the shellfish had already buried themselves, leaving only a few tiny breathing holes on the sand. More conspicuous than these lively little sea creatures was a pile of things that could easily be called marine debris.

Nan Liujing spotted several wooden crates and oak barrels—these were among the more intact items—as well as planks with jagged edges, torn canvas, a stainless-steel basin dented with a large dent, and tattered plastic buckets…

Some of these items had been carried away by the receding tide, while others hadn’t made it and were forced to remain stranded on the beach.

The trash returning to the sea felt no shame; on the contrary, it took pride in floating boldly on the water’s surface, moving at a breathtaking speed. One second, they were just a few meters away; Nan Liujing blinked, and they had already drifted back more than ten meters. By the time Nan Liujing had laboriously equated this pile of marine debris with supplies, the trash and supplies had already departed his small island in a massive procession, drifting away.

Only a dozen or so of the old, weak, and infirm—those who hadn’t managed to catch up—lay pitifully scattered across the beach.

Nan Liujing glanced out at the sea; the supplies had shrunk to a cluster of black dots. He sighed with deep regret. But when he looked back at what remained on the beach, a smile returned to his face.

“So that’s it—the ‘supply reorganization probability’ mentioned in the mission notes refers to this.”

When he clicked on the forum, sure enough, the homepage was flooded with posts containing keywords like “low tide,” “beachcombing,” “marine life,” “trash,” and “treasure chests.”

There really were a lot of people on their server; no matter when Nan Liujing logged in, there were always tons of people posting and bumping threads.

However, Nan Liujing was a lurker. After confirming that the low tide event affected all players and occurred at 8:00 a.m. every day, he put his tablet away.

Rubbing his hands together, it’s time for some fun trash-picking!

━━ 🐈‍⬛ ━━

Translator’s Note: This is an ongoing story, not a completed one, and sometimes authors go back to previously published chapters and change some terms, so there may be times when the translation gets outdated. No worries, most authors do alert when they change a term, and usually, it happens during the first fifty or twenty chapters, but sometimes, there will be minor revisions we don’t spot. If you read direct from JJWXC like we do, feel free to point them out. Thanks, as always, for your support!