At twenty-three fifty-nine on a wet Thursday, Lin Yu stared at the red figure on his laptop: 418. It was his fourth failure in a month. The classroom was empty except for him, a broken clock, and a pale poster that promised, “Success belongs to those who persist.” He had persisted. He had also forgotten the difference between principal and principle, confused economic with economical, and selected an answer about agriculture in a passage about astronomy. Even the automatic feedback sounded tired.

Outside, rain struck the window like impatient fingers. Lin Yu closed the textbook, rubbed his forehead, and considered the most attractive option of all: abandon the exam, find an ordinary occupation, and pretend that English had never existed. His confidence was below average, his energy was nearly zero, and his roommate had already sent him a cheerful message: “Bro, if vocabulary were a monster, it would die of hunger after eating your memory.”

Then the screen went black.

A peculiar silver sentence appeared: THE LAST CANDIDATE HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED.

Lin Yu checked the cable. The battery was empty, yet the laptop continued to glow. A second line emerged: ENTER WORD CITY. MASTER THE LANGUAGE. CHANGE YOUR RESULT. Below it waited two buttons—ACCEPT and ESCAPE.

“This is either a miracle or a virus,” he whispered.

The classroom door locked by itself. The poster on the wall changed. The smiling graduate vanished; in his place stood a masked examiner holding a sword made of blue light. Lin Yu’s frustration gave way to fear, then to the reckless curiosity that had caused most of his childhood accidents. He did not hesitate for long. If the programme wanted a candidate, it had chosen the worst possible one.

He clicked ACCEPT.

The floor became fluid. His chair sank. For a moment he could neither breathe nor shout. Words flew around him—absolute, absorb, abstract, abundant—each bright as a falling star. Somewhere in the darkness, a calm female voice announced, “Vocabulary is not a list. It is a world. Welcome to the entrance examination.”

Lin Yu fell through the word entrance and landed on a railway platform beneath a purple sky.