Chapter 1 The Beginning

At dawn on May 1st, Si Yu and Bei Ling were not online, because they hadn't signed up for the competition and weren't in a hurry to level up, so they weren't going to join in the fun. This allowed Brother Jue and Little Tan to focus on the preliminaries.

However, when the midnight chimes rang, only Little Tan successfully queued into the preliminary channel, while Feng Bujue… received a system email.

The title of the email was: [Congratulations, you have been selected by the system as a specially invited player]

The content was also simple and clear: "Dear Mr. Feng Bujue, you have been recognized by the system as a seeded player for this Peak Tournament. You will directly enter the [Butterfly Battle] stage and participate in the '100 into 50' battle. Good luck!"

This email was sent at 12:01 AM. At the same minute, the list of ten specially invited players was announced on the official website.

They were: [Devouring Ghost Howl], [Drunkenly Lying in Sorrow], [Shiva], [Yama], [Knife-less Swordsman], [Good-for-nothing Uncle], [Xu Huai Shang], [Corpse Blade as King], [Matcha Crisp], [Feng Bujue].

About three minutes after the announcement, Feng Bujue was flooded with emails from strangers, friend requests, and duel invitations.

His mailbox was like it had been infected with a virus. The number of emails didn't increase one by one, or even in clumps, but page by page…

Before this, Feng Bujue didn't really know how many emails could be displayed on one page in his mailbox, because he always deleted them after reading them, and he had never received so many emails at once. Now he knew… a page in the inbox could display the titles of thirty emails, as well as the first line of each email.

Tonight, between twelve and one o'clock, Feng Bujue received more than a thousand pages of emails… the page numbers at the bottom displayed 1.2.3.4...999.999+... Last Page. If left unattended, it was estimated that it wouldn't be long before 1999+ would appear after the second ellipsis.

"This game's system is really powerful…" Feng Bujue muttered, standing in front of the touchscreen, "Electronic mailboxes applied for online usually only have a capacity of 2-3g; while virtual mailboxes in online games are often smaller, and there are even limits on the number of emails. But this one… already has over a thousand emails in it, and it's still receiving normally…"

Actually, this kind of thing happening was also reasonable. In fact, Feng Bujue was probably the most harassed of the ten specially invited players.

The reason was simple… before the list was announced, he was completely unknown.

Let's take a look at the current combat power rankings in the game: first place [Devouring Ghost Howl] (Order), second place [Anonymous] (after the list was announced, most players began to suspect that this mysterious riser was Brother Jue), third place [Shiva] (Deities), fourth place [Drunkenly Lying in Sorrow] (Order), fifth place [Good-for-nothing Uncle] (this is a freelance player without a studio background), sixth place [Laughing at the Azure Sky] (Jianghu), seventh place [Vishnu] (Deities), eighth place [Brahma] (Deities), ninth place [Wusicanxuan] (Order), tenth place [Knife-less Swordsman] (Jianghu), eleventh place [Sashimi] (Order), twelfth place [Yama] (Deities), thirteenth place [Dreaming of Zen] (Order), fourteenth place [Anonymous] (this anonymous person is Xu Huai Shang, one of the specially invited players), fifteenth place [Mad Track Sword Shadow] (Jianghu), sixteenth place [Seven Killings] (Blade's Edge), seventeenth place [Matcha Crisp] (Mountains and Rivers), eighteenth place [Corpse Blade as King] (Corpse Blade), nineteenth place [Not Afraid At All] (Jianghu), twentieth place [Pegasus Soaring Through the Sky] (Constellation).

After the cloak scramble, Brother Jue emerged out of nowhere with the boost brought by Soul Intent, causing [Shiva], [Wusicanxuan], and [Seven Killings] to drop one place in the rankings. And [Not Afraid At All], who was originally ranked twentieth, has now come to nineteenth, indicating that her strength has improved during this period. And [Zhao Ying Wang], who was originally ranked nineteenth, has now fallen out of the top twenty in the rankings.

Of course, the rankings on this list do not represent the outcome of these players' battles.

For example, let's say there are two players, one ranked fiftieth and the other ranked eightieth; and the player ranked eightieth, whose specialization or fighting style happens to restrain the player ranked fiftieth, then once the two fight, the one ranked eightieth will definitely have a very good chance of winning.

But this will not change the system's ranking, because the system's view is: even if you can win against a certain person countless times, it doesn't matter. The key is how many battles you can win in total out of the possible countless battles.

The system's method of evaluation is to take the data of these two players and compare it and do combat simulations in the entire database… to obtain the average win rate. Then, based on this, the ranking is carried out. Perhaps the person ranked eightieth can win every time in a hundred fights against the person ranked fiftieth, but that's useless. If they were each to participate in a hundred slaughter games, and duel with a hundred random players, the person ranked fiftieth would definitely win more in the end.

For the quantum computer, this is just a probability problem.

Let's go back and talk about Brother Jue's situation…

It's not hard to see that the other seeded players are all famous figures. Although [Xu Huai Shang] also chose to be anonymous on the combat power rankings, her situation is rather special. Even if she is not on any list, she is still a celebrity player. The reason will be explained later.

In short, among the specially invited players, only [Feng Bujue] is a Cheng Yaojin (unexpected hero) who came out of nowhere.

The doubts of the general public will naturally come like a tsunami…

If it were someone else, they would probably have clicked the "Clear All Mail from Strangers" option in their mailbox long ago. But Feng Bujue… yes, he has a reading addiction, but he's not to the point of reading the content of every harassing email… After reading about two hundred of them, he only skimmed the titles and beginnings.

Brother Jue summarized that, basically, these emails were divided into four types.

The first type: questioning. This type of email had the most number. The senders had never heard of the ID Feng Bujue, but after seeing the list of specially invited players, they had various speculations. So, they sent emails to ask questions, such as "Who are you?", "Brother, which guild are you from?", "Is the second place on the combat power rankings actually you?", "How did you get in?", "Are you so-and-so's alternate account?", etc., etc., all kinds of questions.

The second type: jealous. The number of these emails was slightly less. Some also had a questioning tone, mostly saying some sour things, like "Brother, are you a relative of the game company owner?", "Tycoon, how much does a spot cost?", or even "Heaven is watching what people do"… In short, all kinds of malicious slander and nonsense.

The third type: hooking up. The number was second only to the questioning type. The content was similar to the flirtatious emails that Order had sent these days, but the style was bizarre, with all kinds of oddballs… For example, someone attached a loose stick of chewing gum as an attachment in the email, and set the title as "Let's be friends"; or sent canned chewing gum, writing "Two are best together" in the title…

The fourth type: inexplicable. It is possible that the people who sent these emails believed that the player "Feng Bujue" did not exist at all, and was fabricated by the game company to occupy a spot. Therefore, they randomly typed a few characters and sent an email to see if they could successfully send it…

In addition, some emails contained "Hehe", "Fuck", "Spectating the Great God", "Professional Cheat Making", "Old Military Doctor Specializing in Athlete's Foot", etc… They can also be counted into the fourth type.

Feng Bujue faced this massive amount of emails, and there was only one word – delete.

He didn't bother to respond at all, and had no interest in responding. With the help of the batch deletion function, Brother Jue destroyed these emails at a rate of one page per minute. He also conveniently added the senders other than the "Questioning" type to the blacklist, so as not to encounter them in the script later…

From twelve o'clock to twelve thirty, Feng Bujue basically didn't do anything else, all he did was deal with emails. This was half an hour in the real world, but in the game world… it was a full five hours.

For these five hours, Brother Jue sat on the folding stool, browsing the email titles page by page with interest, deleting them page by page, feeling a bit like browsing a forum… but in reality, he was browsing his own mailbox…

He didn't know that on the real game forum, "Mysterious Player Feng Bujue" had become one of the hottest topics.

The "one of" must be added, because the players' focus was not entirely on Brother Jue, after all, there were other specially invited players, and many posts about the preliminary experience, as well as discussions about the competition system.

Various speculations about Feng Bujue's ID probably accounted for more than 20% of the total number of posts.

Players who revealed information were as numerous as the hairs on an ox. Among them, there were indeed people who had queued up for scripts with Brother Jue, such as [Missing You the Most When I'm Lonely], whom he met in the early stages of the game, as well as Corpse Blade's [Doomsday Assault], [Final Assault], and so on. Feng Bujue had leveled up all the way, and had come into contact with quite a few players. With his nature, others would naturally leave some impression of him…

However, those who had added Feng Bujue as a friend, as well as those well-known players, studios, etc., all remained silent about this.

Thus, a very strange situation arose. Because there were too many players who were recklessly revealing information and spreading rumors, some real news was also ignored… Brother Jue's identity became more and more mysterious, and the rumors became more and more exaggerated… Some people said he would eat people, some said he had eight arms, and some believed that he was a ghost residing in the game world… One had to admire the rich imagination of the vast number of netizens. Feng Bujue himself had not yet appeared in a public competition, but he had already become an urban legend…