Starting from a Murder Mystery Game Shop

Jiang Qi is a twenty-three-year-old recent college graduate who failed his postgraduate entrance exam and remains unemployed. His life is dominated by his older sister, Jiang Bing, an illustrator with a chronic pattern of opening and failing businesses. Jiang Bing tricks him into managing her latest venture, a Murder Mystery Game store called Galaxy Theater Club, which is hidden in a confusing old town alley. Jiang Qi possesses a mysterious system that has been inactive for four years, merely listing his sister's numerous closed stores. Upon arriving at the shop, he meets Liu Lan, a college student working as the store's only Game Master. Jiang Bing leaves abruptly for a six-month trip, leaving Jiang Qi in charge with no pay, only the promise of keeping any profits.

While exploring the store to activate the system, Jiang Qi discovers a script titled Mask Club, an Exclusive Edition Emotional Script he had not seen before. As he reads the character script for John, a man with a tragic past involving an abusive mother and an estranged, eccentric father, Jiang Qi is suddenly pulled into the world of the story. He witnesses John's memories, including a Christmas Eve conversation where John learns his father has died of pancreatic cancer after refusing treatment for months. This supernatural experience triggers the system, officially activating the Murder Mystery Game Store and granting Jiang Qi a tutorial reward: a one-star Character Card for John Survival, who is revealed to be John's father, Old John.

Jiang Qi summons Old John, a living entity who retains only the memories and skills written in the script. Old John is a professional cleaner with low material desires, seeking only to live in an affluent neighborhood. Jiang Qi hires him as the store's janitor and arranges for him to stay in a cheap rental apartment owned by their neighbor, Uncle Cao. To explain Old John's presence to Jiang Qi's enthusiastic but intrusive extended family, Jiang Qi fabricates a story that Old John is a foreign university professor researching locally. Old John proves to be an exceptionally efficient worker, cleaning the entire store in under three hours and earning the admiration of Liu Lan.

The core conflict emerges as Jiang Qi must manage the failing store while navigating the rules of his new system. The main quest requires him to increase the store's satisfaction rating to one, offering a reward of five hundred yuan. Jiang Qi realizes that the system operates through cards that can be upgraded using reputation points gained from customers. He plans to use Old John's ability to perform scenes from the Mask Club script to attract players, hoping to boost the store's profile. The narrative establishes a blend of slice-of-life management and supernatural card-collecting mechanics, as Jiang Qi begins to understand that the stories within the scripts are real worlds he can interact with and utilize for his business.

As the story progresses, Jiang Qi delves deeper into the Mask Club script, learning that it involves a mysterious club where guests trade their most precious possessions for wishes. The script reveals that Mina, John's wife, also has a tragic backstory and made similar deals. Jiang Qi recognizes that the emotional impact of the script relies heavily on live performances, which Liu Lan had previously noted were missing from standard playthroughs. He decides to rehearse the performance segments with Old John, leveraging his own background in university drama clubs to direct the acting. This sets the stage for Jiang Qi to transform the nearly bankrupt store into a unique experience venue, using the summoned characters to create immersive storytelling events that could generate the reputation and revenue needed to upgrade his cards and save the business.