"Expedition is getting a classic server."
"Seriously?"
"Yeah. The game's almost ten years old. It's about time they released a classic server and milked those old-timers for their gold."
"Boring. MMORPGs get duller than a day job in the late game. You can only farm some gold when the servers first open, work like a slave for two days, and earn a little private cash."
"Probably no chance this time. The reservation requirement for the classic server is level 200 on the official server, and I heard that once you reserve a spot, your character data on the official server gets deleted."
"Looks like you can't cancel after reserving. Group chat, don't go clicking it with itchy fingers."
"?"
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Blue Star, Jinghai City, inside an apartment.
After joining the crowd of parrots in sending a question mark, Qian Peng closed the "Small Streamers Huddling for Warmth Group," opened the official page for "Despair Expedition OL," and stared blankly at the words "Reservation Successful."
The moment he learned that "Despair Expedition OL" was getting a classic server, he had immediately clicked the reservation button.
Who the hell knew it would be such a scam?
What the hell was this about deleting character data from the official account after a successful reservation?
And it couldn't even be canceled!
His account still had equipment and items worth over three million in total!
Qian Peng might have said he had quit the game, but his level 200 Time Palace Knight, with its instant, no-windup time stop, had completely fused with the Duel Arena and become part of its underlying logic.
He still logged in now and then to play a few rounds of PVP and have some fun.
But as a streamer for a single-player game channel, Qian Peng's fans did not like "Despair Expedition OL."
After all, "Expedition" had terrible graphics. Its characters were basically moving blocky little people. Worse still, it was a holographic game—without a helmet, you could only watch it at triple speed.
But there was nothing anyone could do about that. The Holographic Simulation Helmet had not originally been designed for gamers.
Its primary use was office work. It let programmers finish three hours of work in one hour, making it a cybernetic torture device for capitalists to exploit workers.
At that thought, Qian Peng picked up the helmet on his desk, his expression full of both love and hate.
Before "Despair Expedition OL" burst onto the scene, Holographic Simulation Helmets had remained outrageously expensive, and only major companies generally provided them to programmers.
But after "Expedition" entered open beta and raked in tens of billions within a year, holographic simulation games of wildly varying quality sprang up one after another like mushrooms after rain.
That, in turn, forced Holographic Simulation Helmets fully into the mass market.
Today's Holographic Simulation Helmets required neither surgery nor tubes. You could enter cyberspace just by putting one on, and they were quite affordable at less than two thousand yuan.
The price was atrocious performance.
As veteran gamers put it, even the very best holographic games of this era only barely approached the visual quality of "Greasy Senior Sister."
That was because Holographic Helmets not only had to read the player's real-time brain data, but also calculate the Brain Domain acceleration effect at triple speed.
The computing resources left for the game itself could only be squeezed again and again.
As a result, even the slightest improvement in graphics represented an exponential technological gap.
A "dead game" like "Despair Expedition OL," played only by old fossils, had long since lost its appeal for young people of the new era.
In any case, since he could not cancel the reservation, the urgent task was to hand his valuable equipment over to friends he could trust.
It would be a damn joke if he got picked himself!
After adjusting the helmet's settings, Qian Peng took a deep breath and logged into the game...
Iris scan complete. Amulet Owl, welcome to the world of "Despair Expedition OL."
Loading data...
You have successfully reserved early access to "Glory Expedition OL." Your account data has been reset. Please log in again after 71:31:21.
Jinghai City, High-Tech Industrial Zone, inside an office building's work area.
Lunch break.
Scooting over in his office chair, Little Wang came to Little Zhou's desk and lowered his voice mysteriously. "Baldy just got called away by the boss. Do you think he's getting fired?"
Little Zhou immediately perked up. "Something that good happened? What did Baldy do?"
"You don't know?" Little Wang froze.
"Know what?" Little Zhou asked in bewilderment.
Seeing that Little Zhou did not seem to be playing dumb, Little Wang looked around before giving him a hint.
"A classic server suddenly appeared, and our department didn't get a single word about it. That counts as serious negligence, right?"
"Oh, you mean that." Little Zhou waved a hand. "He'll get chewed out, and that'll be it."
"How is that possible?!" Little Wang cried in shock. "This is 'Expedition'!"
Little Zhou shrugged, pulled out the folding bed under his desk, and said, "You need to understand, the classic server was suddenly made by the AI. Our department is just taking the blame."
"What the hell do you mean, taking the blame? Are you saying AI can make decisions for the company now?"
"That's just how this crappy company works. It doesn't even have a single R&D position. All the content for every game is generated independently by AI."
"That's technically impossible!" Little Wang objected. "AI can only generate assets of inconsistent quality. The finished product of a game has to be assembled by people!"
Little Zhou yawned.
"I know, I know. You mean our company keeps cheap outsourced labor somewhere outside... Anyway, my salary is on par with the big tech companies."
Little Wang said with certainty, "This classic server that suddenly showed up was definitely made by outsourced workers at some executive's orders, and headquarters wasn't told a thing. They went straight to action first and reported it afterward."
"Bro, don't talk nonsense when you're not sure." Little Zhou patted his folding bed, practically issuing an eviction notice.
"Who changed my recruitment letter?"
With dark circles beneath his eyes, Li Li sat in the warehouse he had rented not long ago. During a break, he checked the information inside the "mirror."
Earlier, he had modified the website within the mirror and written a recruitment letter on it.
The message was simple: he was recruiting heroes from another world and asking them to help clear the pollution from this world.
In return, after people from the other world died, he would copy their souls and allow them to be reborn in this world.
Although the copied souls came with the minor philosophical issue of the Ship of Theseus... the two sides were separated by an entire world, so this was already the best offer he could make.
Yet his heartfelt recruitment letter had only drawn a few thousand souls.
Until the official staff of the game's website changed his letter recruiting heroes into a classic-server reservation for a game called "Despair Expedition OL."
In less than a few hours, more than one hundred thousand souls had left soul imprints on the website.
For Li Li, it was a happy kind of trouble.
He had seriously considered whether he should disguise his world as a game.
If he did that, the souls he summoned would be free of moral restraints, and their destructive potential would rise by several levels.
But nobody was an idiot.
Could a real world and an artificially designed game world truly be the same in every detail?
Li Li intended to purify the entire world, and the process might last for decades.
Perhaps he could fool the people of Blue Star in the short term, but the truth would be exposed someday.
When that day came, and the people of Blue Star discovered that the slaughter they had caused in the game had not merely changed a few lines of code, but had created real tragedies instead...
What would they think of him?
So rather than plant a ticking trust bomb that was destined to explode in the future,
Li Li chose to be honest from the start and let himself and the people of Blue Star choose each other both ways.
Advertising itself as a pretty-girl game, then filling it with nothing but Shorts Kid after the servers opened—Li Li could never do something like that!
"Forget it. I'll explain it again after they arrive," Li Li muttered to himself.
Before the website had been altered, he had already selected the ten brightest soul imprints and arranged to summon them ten days later.
At least these first arrivals had left their soul imprints on the website after reading his recruitment letter. They probably would not mistake this place for a game world.
"One day remains until the agreed time..."
"The bodies I created can already react to projections, but the responsiveness of their joints still needs adjustment..."
Li Li yawned and resumed his work modifying the Divine Army.
The rent for this warehouse, along with its other supporting facilities, had all been sponsored by Aer.
In less than a week, he had drained the savings of his own saintess dry.
That put enormous pressure on Li Li.
There was no change in Aer's little face, but her red-and-dark-striped tail was no longer wagging much.
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