Chapter 1. Lottery

“It should be here, right?”

Under the scorching sun, Li Yaolin, wearing a sun hat, a white T-shirt, and a pair of denim shorts, looked down at her phone, then looked up at the vast sea in front of her.

The midday sun was so dazzling that she could hardly open her eyes. Sweat soaked her clothes on her back and under her armpits. She felt like her back was attached to a small stove with her backpack on her back. It was so hot that she suspected that the meat on her back was already seven-tenths cooked.

She shook the travel brochure against her face, trying to cool herself down. However, the scorching summer wind mixed with the fishy sea breeze came and met the sweat on her forehead, nose and temples. As if some chemical reaction had occurred, her face suddenly felt like it was covered with a layer of glue, sticky, as if her facial features were about to melt.

Worried that she would faint if she was exposed to the sun for another second, Li Yaolin put her phone in her trouser pocket, fanned herself, and dragged the suitcase to find a shade to shelter from the sun.

Although the tent on top cannot insulate heat, it has saved Li Yaolin’s life. She took off her sun hat and wiped the sweat on her forehead, put it back on, and then took out her phone and opened an APP.

The desktop icon of the APP is very similar to the style of those mobile games in the application market. It only has four words “Poseidon Holiday”. This style and name match together, it is a mobile game. ——Although this APP still stubbornly told her that it is not a game.

After clicking on the APP, there was no loading screen or buffer time, and a minimalist window jumped out, occupying the entire mobile phone screen. Li Yaolin clicked on it and couldn’t help wondering: “I’m here, why haven’t I completed the task yet, it must be fake!”

Tsk, she was really confused, she actually had a little expectation for it.

Finally, she understood how those students who fell into pyramid schemes and campus loan fraud in the news were deceived. It turned out that the idiot was herself!

But…

The things in the file bag in the backpack are not fake. She looked down at the APP again, and saw a mailbox icon in the upper right corner of the blue ocean screen, with a red number ① flashing. She clicked it and saw the familiar lines of words on it:

【Task: Activate the island owner’s authority (unfinished)

Complete the task to get a million cash!

Warm reminder: reach the sea area shown on the map and find the target island. 】

Li Yaolin swallowed her saliva unconvincingly and moved her eyes away after her eyes stayed on the “million cash”. She thought about it and realized that she should have reached the Baoren Port sea area in Youshi as shown on the map, but she hadn’t found the target island yet, so the mission was not successful?

Anyway, she had already come here, so she would just ask where the target island was later. For now, she should buy a bottle of water to quench her thirst, otherwise she would really get heat stroke. Don’t go to see the so-called “sea god” before getting the money.

The tent was set up by a convenience store. Li Yaolin went in to get a bottle of water. When she turned around, she saw the store owner, shirtless and wearing only a pair of shorts, lying under a ceiling fan playing “Supreme Glory”. He didn’t even glance at her.

It was too hot for the eyes.

Li Yaolin looked away: “Boss, how much?”

The store owner spoke in authentic plastic Mandarin: “Two yuan!”

After scanning the code and paying the bill, Li Yaolin couldn’t wait to unscrew the bottle cap and drank a third of the bottle in one breath. She wanted to go out, but suddenly remembered something, and then asked the shop owner: “Excuse me, how can I go to Taipa Island?”

The shop owner was willing to take his eyes off his phone at this time, looked at her, and said after looking her up and down: “There are boats to the pier, but what are you doing there?”

It was extremely abrupt to ask where a stranger was going, but the shop owner’s next words also made Li Yaolin understand why he asked this question.

“That place has not been developed yet. I think you looks like a school girl. You doesn’t look like you’re going for team building and sea fishing. It’s very dangerous!”

Li Yaolin heard him speak Mandarin with difficulty, and she also had a hard time listening, so she just started speaking Cantonese.

She is from Lingnan, but she has been taught in Mandarin since she was young. The school does not allow students to speak Cantonese. Therefore, except for talking to family and friends, she uses Mandarin to communicate with others at other times, so that she will subconsciously use Mandarin when she speaks.

Li Yaolin lied calmly: “It’s not graduation season. Our class is going to hold a graduation trip. I want to find a place to camp. I saw a recommendation in the little green book that there is a Taipa Island here that is quite suitable, so I went to investigate it with my classmates.”

She is a college student who is about to graduate, but after experiencing family changes and the social beatings of an unscrupulous boss who owed internship wages and absconded with the money, she also knows when to use lies to add a protective color to herself.

I don’t know if the shop owner has heard any loopholes. Anyway, his mind is back on the game. He said in vernacular without looking up: “You might as well go to a park to camp there. You will get bitten by mosquitoes. It is safer in the park.”

Taipa Island aroused his desire to share, “Taipa Island is the largest island here. A few years ago, a boss from Qionghai said he wanted to rent it for development, but he couldn’t do it after only two years. He said it was too expensive and almost bankrupted, so the island is still deserted!”

Li Yaolin: “…”

She was really cheated? Wouldn’t the next step of this APP be to tell her that she was carrying a huge debt?

She was extremely uneasy and couldn’t help but recall the family changes she had experienced, such as “I went home for the holidays and found that the house had been sold, my parents divorced, my father ran away with Bai Yueguang, my mother found a second spring and had formed a new family, but she had no home to return to”, and the bad news that “the boss of the company where I interned for three months owed me wages on the grounds of lack of funds and disappeared. After calling the police, I learned that he had absconded with the money with his brother-in-law”.

The salary during the internship was originally low, and the unscrupulous company had a system of withholding one and a half months’ salary, so that after Li Yaolin suffered this double blow, she found that she had only more than 1,000 yuan left, which was not enough to pay the rent.

This more than 1,000 yuan was saved by her daily frugality.

Her university tuition and living expenses were collected by her part-time work and summer jobs during college. She thought that it would be better after finding an internship, because this internship had an internship salary of 3,500 yuan, but it had to be withheld for one and a half months, and the rent was also two deposits and one payment. The little savings she had during her studies were emptied out in an instant.

After finally getting through the three-month internship, on the 15th, when the salary was paid, she was eagerly looking forward to the salary appearing on her salary card, but from morning to night, from Monday to Friday, there was no money.

In the past, the company would delay for a few days, so no one felt something was wrong, until everyone found out that the boss and his brother-in-law, who was a project manager, had disappeared together, and then everyone panicked.

Then she was told that the company had gone bankrupt, and the unscrupulous boss had fled abroad with his brother-in-law and the remaining project funds.

First, she experienced her father and his white moonlight disappearing without a trace with the money from the sale of the house, and now she experienced her boss and his brother-in-law running away with the project funds. Li Yaolin couldn’t help but feel confused. Is it popular to abscond with money now?

The overdue salary was not going to be returned, and the boss’s office was left with a pile of lottery tickets that were originally for activities. Because the lottery tickets were in cooperation with a third party, just like a convenience store that went bankrupt but could still go to the manufacturer to redeem the prize with “Another bottle” engraved on the bottle cap of a beverage, the prizes on the lottery tickets can be redeemed, and the people in the company divided up these lottery tickets.

Li Yaolin was also given a stack of lottery tickets.

She planned to scratch these lottery tickets and then sell some valuable prizes to her colleagues, but she never expected that when she scratched them, the three words “Taipa Island” were written on them in black letters on a white background.

Li Yaolin: “…”

What the hell is this?

Is it a brand called “Taipa Island”?

Taipa Island what? The Maserati voucher scratched out by the colleague next door at least had the words 5 yuan, but this one had nothing, only the three words “Taipa Island” were clearly printed, it can’t be an island!

At this time, an APP called “Poseidon Holiday” quietly appeared on her phone, and as if afraid that she didn’t know, it made a “ding” sound and pushed a notification to her: Welcome new island owner to join!

Li Yaolin: ???

Did the background install junk apps for her without authorization?

She tried to delete the app and run antivirus, and even restored the factory settings, but the APP was still on the desktop.

Li Yaolin was numb. It seemed that even this broken old phone was laughing at her misery!

Since it can’t be uninstalled, let’s see what kind of rogue app this is!

【Island detected, loading…】

【Loading successful! 】

【Island bound, island information updated! 】

As these subtitles kept jumping on the APP interface, the fog on the interface dissipated, and slowly emerged a lonely boat-shaped island standing in the middle of the ocean.