Chapter 1

Five in the afternoon. Chen Ying lifted the lid, found the congee nearly done, and put it back. She turned, picked up a basket of vegetables, and carried it to the sink to start on the stir-fry. Coming back from washing them, she caught sight of her eldest — who had been a bit dopey lately — sitting out on the kerb again, staring at nothing.

Dead of winter and she didn't even feel the cold. If that wasn't dopey, what was.

"Lanlan, what are you sitting there gawping at? Dinner's nearly ready. I'll fry two other dishes — go down to the crossroads and get two yuan of steamed buns."

Li Lan sat on the raised kerbstone with her chin in her hands, eyes apparently fixed on the middle distance. What she was actually looking at was the system shop that had appeared in front of her a few days ago.

She had been reborn three days back.

No disaster, no accident, no warning of any kind. She had just got through a hard year, the family had eaten New Year's Eve dinner together in good spirits, and then she shut her eyes and opened them and was somehow back on the fifteenth of the first lunar month, 2008.

She still remembered that morning — opening her eyes to the mosquito net and the ceiling she hadn't seen in years, and the blank feeling that came with it. At first she thought she was dreaming. Then a while passed and she found she could touch things, and a bad feeling started up in her.

Sure enough, a voice came from outside telling her to get up, and under the familiar voice she could just make out the radio playing the Olympics theme.

It took a whole day of keeping calm before she was certain. She had been reborn, and reborn into the spring of 2008.

She didn't sleep at all that night. At first she was excited — in novels, rebirth is the golden finger that takes you straight to the top. Then she calmed down and turned sad. If she was here, what had happened to the other her? If something had happened to that one, how much would her parents be grieving.

And being reborn meant starting school over. Exams. Job hunting. She could have wept.

Li Lan knew what she was capable of. A salted fish that flips over is still a salted fish. Her family were ordinary people. Going round again would mean a bit more money or a bit less, that was all, and there was no guarantee she'd do better than last time.

So it went, excited one moment and flat the next, back and forth all night without sleeping. But Li Lan was an optimist at heart, and by the end she was looking forward to the new life more than she was dreading it. Besides, it had already happened. Being upset about it wouldn't help. All she could do was get on with it.

Then, full of fight, she was ambushed the next morning by the system shop.

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The old place they lived in was a typical big country courtyard. The open ground in the middle was laid with bricks to walk on, a small vegetable patch was marked off on the right for the everyday greens, and right at the edge stood a potted flower nobody could name.

It started with that flower. Her father, Li Quan, had brought it back from one of his lorry runs. It smelt wonderful whenever it bloomed, but they threw it out when the house was done up, and since nobody knew what it was, Li Lan never saw one again. After a night of calming herself down she was in exactly the mood to feel wistful about everything around her, familiar and strange at once, and seeing the plant she couldn't help crouching down for a proper look.

It was winter, so there were no flowers, but the leaves were still a bright green. Her hand had barely touched one when a mechanical voice spoke in her head.

"Dicotyledon species detected — gardenia. Click for detailed information."

"Host has scanned a plant. Account points +10."

As the voice finished, a pop-up appeared out of nowhere in her field of vision. It held an illustrated article: a picture of a plant on the left, lines of text on the right, and a familiar little line in the bottom corner — click for more.

Li Lan stared, open-mouthed, at this thing hanging in mid-air that looked like an illegal advert off some backstreet website. For a moment she couldn't take it in. She forgot the voice entirely.

"Christ."

She held her breath and looked at it for a long time, then let it out slowly and produced that one word.

She'd already been reborn. One more inexplicable thing turning up wasn't that hard to accept, all things considered. Comforting herself along those lines, she reached out a finger and tapped the kind of line she would never in her life have clicked while browsing the internet:

Click for more.

Later, once she'd worked the thing out, she learned that a small movement of her finger was enough, and there was no need to jab away at empty air like an idiot. It was lucky she only ever opened the shop when nobody was watching. Anyone who saw her poking and swiping at nothing would have assumed something was wrong with her.

The pop-up expanded to fill her whole view. She read it carefully. The plant in the picture was, allowing for some differences, the same nameless flower she'd just touched — except the one in the picture looked far healthier. Tapping the image to see the detail showed leaves and stems arranged in perfect condition, a world away from the specimen in front of her.

She moved her eyes off the picture and onto the text. The first thing she saw was the name in large characters — gardenia — with a note beside it in brackets: also called zhizi, or yellow zhizi. Class Dicotyledoneae, family Rubiaceae, genus Gardenia. An evergreen shrub.

Below that came a fuller account: what it looked like, where it grew, how it was classified, its medicinal value, the compounds that could be extracted from it.

That was all the pop-up held. Having read it, Li Lan found it was simply an entry on gardenias — a very detailed one, but an entry. Her instinct said a thing that had appeared out of nowhere wouldn't stop at descriptions, and looking properly, she found a back button and an exit button in the top corner.

She tapped the cross, and the pop-up folded itself into a picture that shrank into a small cell. Underneath the cell were the words gardenia. Around it were a great many identical cells, all of them blank. She tapped a blank one; nothing happened. She tapped the gardenia; the entry opened again.

Having established that only cells with pictures could be opened, she looked above the grid, and found the gardenia page sat at the end of a row of labels: Plants — Angiosperms — Dicotyledons — Sympetalae — Rubiales — Rubiaceae — Gardenieae — Gardenia. Then the page she was looking at.

She studied the chain of labels, thinking. She tapped a few of the earlier ones at random, and sure enough they were all blank.

Higher up again were four broad categories: All Plants, Collected Plants, System Shop, Personal Information. She was in All Plants. The first two did nothing for her — what was there to get excited about in a list of plants — but at the words System Shop her heart began to beat faster. Surely—

She opened it full of hope, and the great expanse of blank space hit her like a bucket of cold water. The grin she hadn't realised she was wearing dropped off her face.

She looked at the shop, disappointed. Like the gardenia page, it was made of cells, except that only the first two rows were lit, and the second row had just one.

Starting from the top, the first five read:

[1 Stamina — 10 points] [1 Spirit — 10 points] [1 Focus — 10 points] [1 Memory — 10 points] [1 Comprehension — 10 points]

The single lit cell in the second row was that very familiar picture of a gardenia.

She tapped the first cell. Insufficient points. Cannot purchase Stamina. The other four gave the same answer.

Tapping the gardenia produced something different. Instead of the points warning, she got:

[Gardenia L1] [Gardenia L2] [Gardenia L3] [Gardenia L4] [Gardenia L5]

She opened Gardenia L1. It held only a handful of lines:

[Clears heat and draws out poison — 100 points] [Reduces inflammation, calms — 100 points] [Gardenia oil, extraction — 100 points]

[Gardenia L2] [Cough from lung heat — 100 points] [Swelling and pain of the nose and throat — 100 points] [Benzyl acetate, extraction — 100 points] [Linalyl acetate, extraction — 100 points]

[Gardenia L3] [Gardenin, extraction — 100 points] [Geniposide, extraction — 100 points]

L4 and L5 were blank.

Li Lan saw what came after the gardenia entries and didn't waste time opening them. She couldn't afford the fifty-point items at the front, never mind these at a hundred.

Looking down the list, she remembered that the entry had indeed described what gardenias were good for, without ever saying how. So the methods were all in the shop, and the shop wanted points.

But where did points come from? She turned to the last category — Personal Information.

Tapped it.

[Host: Li Lan] [Points (L1): 10 — convert to a higher grade?] [Stamina: 25] [Spirit: 20] [Focus: 10] [Memory: 20] [Comprehension: 15]

There was no explanation attached, but by this point Li Lan had the general shape of it. The thing was a shop built like an encyclopaedia of plants. Every piece of information about any plant could be found here and bought here. She could even change herself with it. All it took was points.

She tried tapping the points, and another window opened:

[Points (L1): 10 — convert to a higher grade?] [Yes] [No] [About points]

She opened About points:

[About points: used to raise the host's attributes, or to purchase the corresponding uses of a plant.]

[Earning points — first, plant collection. Each species collected earns 10 to 100 points. Note: the rate depends on the plant's rarity; the rarer the plant, the more points. Collection yields L1 points only.]

[Second, trading finished products. Products the host makes using a purchased method may be traded to the system shop. Each product sold earns 10 to 100 points. Note: the rate depends on the quality of the product; the higher the quality, the more points. However, for the same product at the same purity, the highest rate applies only to the first trade, and later trades earn progressively less. L1 products yield L1 points, L2 products yield L2 points, and so on to L5.]

[About conversion: L1 points may only be used to purchase L1 methods, and cannot be used for any other grade.]

[Conversion rates:] [100 L1 = 20 L2] [100 L1 = 10 L3] [100 L1 = 5 L4] [100 L1 = 1 L5]