A Guide to Doomsday Preperation by Shen Jiu

Prologue: The Butterfly's Cocoon

Thwack!

  Shang Qinghua jolts awake. He frantically scans his surroundings while he blinks the blurriness out of his eyes. He stops at a collapsed heap of papers. It's sprawled on the ground after being bullied out of its rightful spot by a slipping arm. “Ah,” he thinks, rubbing his temple, “I need to stop falling asleep at my desk.” 

  He starts lethargically gathering the papers, sorting them into their proper piles. In his dozing, he had knocked over two loosely organized stacks. One was mission documents meant for Qing Jing Peak. The other was documents from the archive of already-finished missions. 

  Usually, those older documents were left to gather dust in the maze of shelves in the An Ding archives. But Shang Qinghua had been slowly working through them, looking to see if he could find anything related to or near plot events that he knew the protagonist would encounter later. He’s been bringing them to his room to take notes, then sneaking them back after he finished.

  Originally this was to steal some of the protagonist’s future treasure for himself, sharing is caring and Luo Binghe could spare a few. But after receiving a harsh warning from his stick-in-the-mud system, he resigned to gathering the information that would help Luo Binghe when the time came. Being useful and getting on the protagonist’s good side never hurt anyone.

  Distracted by his sleepy musings, he doesn't notice the paper stubbornly sticking to the underside of one of its brethren, accidentally putting it in the wrong stack.

  Oh well, what consequence could this carelessness have? It’s not as if this small filing mistake would seriously affect the future…right?

_______________________________

  Shen Jiu ran a giddy hand across the yellowed paper. "This is it! My first solo mission out of the sect!" It’s been a year since he first joined Cang Qiong, and he got his sword Xiu Ya a month ago. During that month he had rigorously worked to master sword flight so he would finally be allowed off the damn mountain without a chaperone. Now, all those blood sweat and tears are finally paying off!

 He looks over the mission details. It was a simple mission, some monsters were sighted in a cave out in the middle of nowhere. It had given a poor passing hunter quite the fright. Normally such trivial things would be ignored by Cang Qiong, but it just so happens that the hunter was heir to an influential noble family who enjoys hunting for sport. Scared out of his mind, the spoiled young master refused to go out into the woods again, complaining to his father all the while. So though Cang Qiong certainly had better things to do than console a whiny brat, nepotism allowed an exception.

  Shen Jiu's mood dampens a little as he reaches the end of the text. These types of missions were the kind he hates the most, completely useless and for the sole purpose of sucking up to those pampered rich kids. But alas his first solo mission was bound to be boring, and he would at least be paid handsomely. With that thought, he grabs his sword and sets off into the sky.

  It had taken a whole day and a half to get to the village where the client lives. Shen Jiu isn’t accustomed to flying long distances on a sword, so he had to take multiple breaks to recuperate. He steps into the residential area where the client is written to be. “Hmm…that’s strange” , he thinks scanning the area, “there isn’t anything that looks like a noble's estate around here. Just a bunch of normal houses that look like they belong to the lower middle class at best…”