The System Mistook Me for a Cat

Zhizhi gave in quickly.

She wanted to see what fun parts this learning game had to offer after removing the AR feature!

After completing the download and registration process, she logged into her account, and sure enough, the little "baka" appeared on the screen, looking even clearer than the tiny version in the *Yuan Tang* game. Zhizhi opted to activate the AR mode immediately. The camera captured her room as she turned around a couple of times, searching the floor but finding nothing... until her phone swayed and finally caught the image of a kitten crouching on the table.

The kitten looked at her with a melancholic gaze, as if staring at a fool.

Zhizhi: "=="

She reached out to "pet" the cat, fully aware that she wouldn’t actually feel anything. But just as her hand was about to pass through the virtual image, the kitten tilted its head to dodge her, then jumped off the table and started grooming itself, leaving Zhizhi staring at her palm in disbelief...

Honestly, even though it must have been an illusion, she felt like she had touched the cat’s fur.

She must have been dreaming about owning a cat for too long, she thought.

Zhizhi set the cat aside and continued with the tutorial. She thought the next step would be matching with other players (as the internet had suggested), but instead, a *Yuan Tang*-themed quiz popped up.

Oh ho!

The quiz explained that she would be placed into one of five tiers based on her performance in these ten questions, and then matched with players of similar knowledge levels.

Zhizhi: Oh ho!

This meant the questions would be within her expertise, and the players would be familiar to her. It wasn’t the kind of obscure, difficult trivia she had imagined. She could just play casually.

She quickly answered the ten questions, getting three wrong. Then the matching began, and the kitten joined the battle.

Zhizhi: "Go bite—scratch—it!"

Use your invincible paws, baka-chan! Even though you’re still a baby cat, I’m really trying to answer questions to give you buffs! Oh no, I got one wrong!

Zhizhi was shouting and making a ruckus in her room, continuing to match while looking up answers on her computer. Despite being a ten-year veteran of *Yuan Tang*, she realized there were so many details and skills she didn’t know. Most of her correct answers were based on memes players loved!

The matching was fast-paced, and the cat fight animations were incredibly realistic. She even noticed that the skills assigned to the cats required strategic thinking, adding another layer of depth to the game... Oh, and she also had to feed the kitten.

Time to go out for a walk!

Zhizhi hurriedly got dressed to leave, completely forgetting about her plan to finish the daily rewards in *Yuan Tang*. She didn’t even bother switching back to *Yuan Tang* to redeem the exclusive rewards she had earned in this game.

After all, the rewards wouldn’t disappear, but if the kitten missed a meal, it might really starve! Mom thinks it’s hungry!

---

While Zhizhi was gradually getting hooked, some people who had just received beta access were streaming the AR game.

Ji Ming, a professional *Yuan Tang* player, was one of them. He hadn’t even taken any sponsorships; he was just a well-known fan promoting the game.

"I finally got the third beta access... During the wait, I’ve already redesigned my cat’s appearance seven times!"

And now, he was about to have his very own cyber cat!

The biggest difference between the third and second beta tests was the number of cities. Players could only represent their chosen city in battles, but with Hua Country being so vast, even with one city per province, there were still places like Su Province, which was practically a collection of independent cities.

The third beta was essentially a process of gradually adding new cities and unlocking the map. By the time the third beta started, there were already 95 cities available, but that still wasn’t enough.

According to the company’s standards, for every city available online, there had to be at least four virtual battle zones offline. If the game were purely online, it could have instantly covered all IP regions, but Chu Tingwu believed that would make the immersion too shallow.

AR games were meant to be played offline, and if the players were too scattered, the company had to step in and organize them to ensure they fully experienced the game.

Every virtual battle zone in a bustling area represented the players’ loyalty and sense of pride.

Ji Ming really wanted to go offline and battle, or even visit other cities to challenge their players—someone had recently discovered an Easter egg where players who changed their represented city after the second beta would see a "[Challenging]" tag next to their ID when they visited local virtual zones.

But he had registered while on the road.

He had been a fan during the cloud gaming phase, so he couldn’t pass up the chance to visit Shanwan Ranch offline to grab some merch, especially since it was a great opportunity to promote *Yuan Tang*.

So the ranch gave him free tickets, and in return, he started streaming from the car, satisfying his own excitement while also promoting the game.

[Congratulations on fulfilling your dream... but I don’t think you need to promote it anymore... After all your hype, who in this stream hasn’t downloaded it yet?]

[Anyone matching? The chance of matching with someone of the same level is pretty high!]

[I checked the number of online players in the *Yuan Tang* section of the game. Wow, so many people have downloaded it!]

Could there be players who were already fans of the game and also played *Yuan Tang*?

Chu Tingwu: "Yes."

Although she was still a newbie in *Yuan Tang*, she occasionally logged in to check things out.

Right now, she was sitting on the exposed steel beams at the top of the hotel area, swinging her legs while playing the game.

Chu Tingwu: The view here is great, the breeze is refreshing, and the game interface looks even clearer.

Sometimes, she would hook her legs around the steel beams and hang upside down, causing the cat battle projection in mid-air to flip as well. Whenever this happened, her friends below knew—

Zhou Qiang: "She lost again."

Chu Xiao: "Does this posture help with thinking?"

Shao Lingwu: "Maybe it has some special effect we don’t know about?"

After all, that’s Chu Tingwu for you.

They had all seen the quiz questions before, since the game could only generate so many. But Chu Tingwu didn’t have a photographic memory.

Meanwhile, Ji Ming: "Piece of cake, folks. I almost feel bad for this newbie on the other side. Let’s level up quickly so we can move to the next tier. Maybe we’ll even run into someone we know!"

Ji Ming could tell his opponent was a newcomer, someone who hadn’t been playing *Yuan Tang* for long. They struggled with some game mechanics and trivia but excelled at history questions. Their cat avatar was also pretty basic, without any flashy accessories or outfits, suggesting they might be older in real life.

For the sake of entertainment, Ji Ming decided to submit blank answers for the first ten questions, planning to show his fans how to climb from the fifth tier to the first.

Of course, *Yuan Tang* players could always jump into regular matches instead of sticking to the quiz pool, but Ji Ming wanted to dominate the quiz ladder before diving into the full game experience.

After his kitten defeated the purple kitten, he sent a message to encourage the newbie:

"Your history knowledge is solid. I only have the advantage because I’ve been playing longer. Keep it up!"

The opponent replied: "Ah..."

"You’re Ji Ming, right? Someone recommended your beginner tutorial videos to me."

Ji Ming: "Oh..."

The opponent: "Want to play another round? You know a lot of obscure game trivia. I’ll call a friend to test the quiz pool’s effectiveness."

Ji Ming: Probably calling a friend for backup, huh? That’s normal. It’s likely someone who’s been playing *Yuan Tang* for a while, acting as a mentor for the newbie—basically, the biggest cheat they could find.

He checked with his viewers and agreed to the match.

The ​​‌‌​‌‌​​​‌‌​‌‌‌​​‌‌‌​​‌​​‌‌​​‌‌​​‌‌​​​​​‌‌​​​‌​​​‌‌​‌‌​​​‌‌‌​​‌​​‌‌​‌​‌​​‌‌​​‌‌​​‌‌‌​​‌​​‌‌​​​‌​​‌‌​‌​​​​‌‌​‌‌‌​​‌‌​‌​​​​‌‌​‌‌‌​​‌‌​‌​‌​​‌‌​​‌‌​​‌‌​‌​‌​​‌‌‌​​‌​​‌‌‌​​​​‌‌​​‌​​​​‌‌​​​​​​‌‌​​‌​‍opponent said they needed a moment, but Ji Ming didn’t realize that "a moment" meant the time it took to climb down from the sixth-floor rooftop steel beams, bypassing the stairs and elevator, and descending the building’s exterior to the ground floor.

Chu Tingwu grabbed her three friends, who were respectively bathing a horse, playing music for a horse, and standing far away holding a horse’s reins.

Zhou Qiang: "If you keep standing so far away with that disgusted look on your face, I’m going to spray your butt with my water gun—"

Chu Xiao: "If you keep talking like that, I’m going to kill myself."

When someone doesn’t care about having their butt sprayed with a water gun, they are invincible.

Shao Lingwu tightened his wrist and immediately started playing *Ambush from Ten Sides* on a children’s electronic keyboard.

Horse: "Neigh!"

Chu Tingwu came to save her nephew’s butt, and her friends saved her, but they completely shattered Ji Ming’s worldview.

Ji Ming, known as the "Yuan Tang Encyclopedia": What?!

No way!

Isn’t your cheat a bit too overpowered?!

And the questions are getting harder as we go, but why are you answering faster and faster?! Ji Ming wasn’t angry about losing, but he was genuinely curious. However, Chu Tingwu logged off right after winning and didn’t reply to his private messages, leaving Ji Ming scratching his head in frustration—

Why did she stop playing?

Is it because she feels invincible and lonely?

Ji Ming absentmindedly leveled up to lv5, still unable to encounter that player with the pink-purple cat avatar again. Even his livestream viewers tried to help him match with her, but they never found Chu Tingwu.

[Maybe she’s not in Yuan Tang’s event zone and is playing normal matches instead?]

[Then the chances of finding her are even slimmer. By the way, her ID doesn’t seem to be in the top 100 of Fallen Phoenix City, so we can’t even leave a message on the leaderboard.]

Just as the fans were lamenting, the car Ji Ming was riding in slowly came to a stop in front of Shanwan Ranch. He had arrived as a guest who could enter the venue early.

But at that very moment, he matched with… that familiar purple cat again!

Ji Ming: "!"

Ji Ming: Let’s fight first and talk later!

Wait, what kind of question pool does she have? His default question pool was related to *Yuan Tang* and esports knowledge, so he should still have some advantage, right?

Five minutes later, Ji Ming was silent.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

He was completely overwhelmed by a set of competition and extreme sports questions, and the history questions he expected to see never appeared.

Ji Ming: "Do you have backup help this time too?"

WU: "Nope."

WU: "This time it’s my area of expertise, so I’m handling it myself."

WU: "You really couldn’t answer a single one, huh?"

Ji Ming: "=="

Sorry, not only did I not know a single answer, but even my fans in the chat couldn’t solve any of them either.

I’m so sorry for being this bad, dammit!