Virtual Battle Platform's New Version CG

Upon returning from the Dead Spirit Lake, Bai Xiaowen's experience points had climbed to level 5, 58%. Although the special Treasure Ground Space prevented him from exploring side quests, Bai Xiaowen had defeated many bosses, resulting in a substantial amount of combat experience.

Bai Xiaowen estimated that after one or two more adventures in the Spirit Realm, he would be able to reach level 6. His leveling speed was two to three times that of college students of the same age. Many outstanding Hero Class students only reached level 6 in their junior or senior year.

Bai Xiaowen is not in a hurry to venture into the Spirit Realm. After returning from the Dead Spirit Lake, he plans to rest for a while.

Of course, resting here doesn't mean sleeping all day, nor does it mean chasing girls and indulging in frivolous pursuits. Rather, it means settling down, consolidating one's foundation, and preparing for the next exploration of the Spirit Realm.

The so-called foundation refers to strength beyond attributes, skills, and equipment, mainly referring to Battle Specialty, but also including skill levels.

With Telepathy abilities, Bai Xiaowen can share the Battle Specialty memories of summoned creatures, and his Battle Specialty are quite good. However, his skill levels are lagging behind. Currently, at the level of a Level 5 Awakener, most of his skills are only at LV3, only reaching LV4 thanks to the bonus from his title of "Ultimate Academic Ace," which is rather low.

Only by clearly recognizing his shortcomings can he improve. After that, Bai Xiaowen spent most of his time in the Psionic Training Ground, diligently practicing his skills. In his spare time, he would also practice close-combat routines from the Kusanagi-Style Ancient Martial Arts, exploring the combos that best suited him.

As Spirit Origin Era's Day of 1997 arrived, Bai Xiaowen's first semester at Jinghai University also came to an end.

The Virtual Battle Company sent Bai Xiaowen an invitation to film a promotional video for the Version 97 of the gaming platform. The director of the promotional video is named Bart Kyle, a well-known figure in the film industry and a China expert.

Originally, Director Kyle required Bai Xiaowen to have at least a week's time available—which was somewhat unbelievable for Bai Xiaowen, who only appeared for one second in the promotional CG. However, Director Kyle's reason was that Bai Xiaowen had never had any acting experience, and this week was mainly for Bai Xiaowen to catch up on her acting lessons.

Director Kyle is, after all, just an ordinary person. If it were an awakened individual, they would never have been so lacking in confidence in Bai Xiaowen.

In the Spirit Realm, it's all about role-playing. If you lack acting skills and can't move (or rather, deceive) the Spirit Realm, it's impossible to Class Change Hero Class and achieve such dazzling success. In other words, Bai Xiaowen's achievements in the Spirit Realm demonstrate that his acting skills are quite strong.

Bai Xiaowen did not argue with Kyle's dismissive attitude, but only made one request: to ask Director Kyle to take a look at his audition.

Ultimately, Bai Xiaowen was exempted from a week of acting lessons. Director Kyle, being quite straightforward, frankly stated:

"You are a natural actor, possessing both the looks of an idol and the inner qualities of a seasoned performer. If you were willing to dedicate yourself to the film industry, you would become a household Great Ming within three years."

Bai Xiaowen certainly wouldn't become an actor and enter the film industry, but Director Kyle's words did give him a wake-up call. If given the opportunity, playing a few distinctive film roles would likely be very helpful in increasing his World Fame.

In fact, many well-known Awakened Ones, especially those in Europe and America, quite enjoy acting in movies. For example, The Boulder, a regular Super Cup participant and a key player for the Rolling Stones Team, has even starred in a series of Hero Tier movies—of course, Mr. Boulder is an investor.

It's fair to say that half of The Boulder's A-Tier World Fame comes from the big screen.

This is probably one of the reasons why ordinary directors are respected by the awakened. With this in mind, Bai Xiaowen and director Kyle exchanged contact information.

Next was the creation of Bai Xiaowen's character template.

It should be noted that when creating a character template, equipment skills, equipment enhancement effects, and combat skills are not differentiated. Instead, all of them are presented as available skills for the character and appear uniformly in the character's "skill list".

Of course, experienced players can still identify which skills belong to the Awakened One's combat skills, which belong to equipment skills, and which belong to enhancement effects after obtaining a character template.

The simplest way to distinguish them is by looking at the cooldown time. Combat skills have the shortest cooldown time, with the longest being ten or twenty minutes, and some as short as one or two minutes or even ten seconds, while equipment skills often have cooldown times of 8 hours, 12 hours, or 24 hours.

In addition, combat skills upgraded to LV4 will have additional special effects, which are often longer and more powerful than the descriptions of equipment skills.

For example, Bai Xiaowen's Intimidation will be a separate skill; the Sharkskin Boots ' attached skill, Water Skimming, will also be a separate skill; the Sharkskin Boots ' +4 enhancement effect, Sprint, will also be a separate skill. All three will appear in the skill list, occupying one skill slot.

Upon seeing that the Intimidation skill had a cooldown of only 4 minutes and such a powerful effect, the player immediately recognized it as a combat skill.

The cooldown time for Water Skimming is 19 hours and 12 minutes, which makes it clear that this is an equipment-attached skill; the cooldown time for Sprint is 8 hours, which similarly rules out the possibility of it being a combat skill, and this effect usually appears in the enhancement effects of shoes, so it is not difficult to identify.

However, there are always exceptions. If we take Bai Xiaowen's Hero Class exclusive equipment Black Soul Stone's additional skill "Return of the Dead" as an example, it would be difficult for players to recognize it.

Bai Xiaowen has hidden the Black Soul Stone, so the Return of the Dead skill needs to be broken down into more smaller skills:

Summon Skeleton Sword-and-Shield Soldier #1, one skill.

Summon Skeleton Sword-and-Shield Soldier #2, second skill.

Summon Skeleton Sword-and-Shield Soldier #6, the sixth skill.

Next, there's the seventh skill: summoning Shadow Assassin.

Summon the Bone Warlock, the eighth skill -- Here Bone Warlock is the evolved version of the data, because Bai Xiaowen can no longer scan the Skeleton Mage's data. The character template customization is based on the real-time scan of the Psionic Camera. Bai Xiaowen can hide some information, but cannot tamper with it.

Following them are the Vampire Kitz and the Voodoo Stitched Monster Fatty. In other words, even after Bai Xiaowen concealed the newly added Vengeful Spirit and Skeleton Champion, as well as the Zombie Doctor waiting in the Kane Plane and other summoned creatures, his "Return of the Dead" skill was still broken down into a total of ten summoning skills with a 12-hour cooldown.

This is also why Bai Xiaowen was able to scan summoned creatures like Skeleton Sword-and-Shield Soldier when hiding the Black Soul Stone while scanning data on the Awakened Battle Platform —what was being scanned was not the Black Soul Stone, but the summoned creatures like Skeleton Sword-and-Shield Soldier.

The Psionic Camera will add "Summon XX" as a skill to Bai Xiaowen's skill list whenever it detects that Bai Xiaowen possesses a summoned creature. Furthermore, the Psionic Camera will automatically recognize that only "permanent" skill effects will be recorded. Creatures summoned by items or the buff status of items will not be recorded in the character template.

The 10 summoning skills split from "Return of the Dead" are somewhat difficult for players to distinguish between combat skills and equipment skills compared to the "Summon Angerclaw" skill, as they are all very powerful. This is because the Black Soul Stone, as an exclusive equipment for Hero Class, is exceptionally powerful, making it an exception.

In the end, including equipment-attached skills and equipment enhancement effects, Bai Xiaowen's skill list has a total of 32 skills! That's almost double that of other Intermediate Awakened Hero Class, and that's even with Bai Xiaowen holding back.

After successfully customizing the character template, winter break finally arrived.

The promotional CG for Virtual Battle Company (Chinese server) Version 97 was officially released a week before the Lunar New Year.

Bai Xiaowen was also very interested in the CG of her first appearance and went online to watch it.

The CG opens with a starry sky background, which instantly transforms into a deep eye. Then the camera pulls back, revealing a man whose hair covers half his face, leaving only a deep eye visible—the classic character from the Virtual Battle Platform, the "Star Mage".

The Star Mage spreads his palms out, a crystal ball rotating slightly above them. The camera then zooms in, revealing a scene of two women locked in fierce combat within the crystal ball. Beneath their robes, skin is faintly visible. The Frost Controller and the Ash Archmage, two surging spheres of energy, one of ice and one of fire, clash.

After a deafening explosion, black mist billowed out, and the scene quickly shifted to night. The camera panned upwards, revealing a bright moon hanging high in the sky. Three black dots seemed to leap out from the moon, growing larger and larger until they transformed into the figures of three black-clad Nightwalking stalkers—another classic character, the "Phantom Assassin." It appeared to be three people, but in reality, it was just him alone.

Several classic characters have been around for decades, the oldest of whom Star Mage, who is said to have appeared in the first version of the virtual battle game. Over the decades, the prototypes of these classic characters have become legends and rarely appear in public.

The Awakened characters that Virtual Battle Platform are now promoting are no longer the aforementioned ones. The reason these characters are still featured in the CG is to respect their historical status and increase players' recognition and enthusiasm for the new version.

Subsequently, one after another, the characters that were strongly promoted appeared.

A refined Young Noble, holding a glass of red wine; a muscular man whose vest nearly bursts out of his clothes, his face contorted in a grotesque display of Roaring Heavenly Lord; a slender, Glamorous Witch, veiled in black, her eyes like pools of autumn water...

Nearly ten key characters are presented in a well-organized manner. Each character is based on a Advanced Awakened and has at least two or three memorable entrances, each with either a dashing or masculine style.

The characters that appeared later were relatively simple, mostly several people in the same frame sharing a single shot. Of course, even with such scenes, the Awakened individuals involved in the filming still spent a considerable amount of time designing their looks, striving to highlight their own style and gain more attention during their precious screen time.

Bai Xiaowen almost laughed when he saw this. He was reminded of those obscure celebrities from the Common Era who "crashed" the red carpet... However, Bai Xiaowen thought of himself and quickly suppressed his smile. From his perspective, he didn't seem to have the right to laugh. Would the Awakened Ones go to such lengths if they weren't after World Fame?

After dozens of characters flashed by, the CG reached its later stages, and new characters began to appear.

"They're out!" Li Shuyi exclaimed excitedly from the side.

The scene abruptly shifts to a dark atmosphere. A solitary figure draped in a cloak sits atop a mountain of bones, with only a giant wolf nestled close beside him. Below the mountain, skeletons crawl out, their eye sockets burning with the Soul Fire, brandishing their swords and howling in fury! The camera quickly zooms out from a close-up to a distant view, flashing by Voodoo Stitched Monster and mysterious Bone Warlock, creating a sense of a vast, overwhelming army.

Although her screen time was only a brief second, it was enough to be stunning. Bai Xiaowen smiled and said, "Pretty good."

Li Shuyi, still somewhat unsatisfied, dragged the progress bar forward and carefully watched Bai Xiaowen's one-second entrance animation again before letting the CG finish playing. She commented with a smile, "This season's new characters, you're like a villainous demon king! The later newcomers all appear in groups, more like warriors teaming up to challenge the demon king..."

"This is all thanks to Sister Zheng's negotiation skills. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to enjoy the privilege of having my own one second of animation. I would have had to share the screen with other newcomers." Bai Xiaowen was very satisfied with the CG. The Virtual Battle Company had dutifully adhered to the contract terms.

This issue's list of new talent templates for signing with Virtual Battle Company includes strong CUAA league players like Lin Haoyang from Tsinghua and Ouyang Heng from Yanda University. They are already graduating, about to leave campus, sign formal contracts with major guilds, and don their jerseys to compete in Professional League. It's perfectly normal for such rising stars to receive signing invitations from Virtual Battle Company.

Qi Ruifeng was a bit unlucky. Based on his team's performance last year, which led them to the top four in the country, he could have easily received a contract offer from Virtual Battle Company. Unfortunately, he was utterly crushed by Bai Xiaowen in this year's qualifiers, and his popularity plummeted.

The fact that the Virtual Battle Company signed Bai Xiaowen can be seen as Bai Xiaowen Bai Xiaowen on Qi Ruifeng to quickly rise to the top. Being invited to sign a contract in his freshman year of college is definitely considered an "exception".

This newcomer, who was invited through an exceptional process, received more screen time in the promotional CG than other newcomers like Ouyang Heng. Sister Zheng deserves immense credit for Bai Xiaowen's treatment.

On the very day the promotional CG was released, Bai Xiaowen invited Sister Zheng to dinner.

Actually, it can't really be called a treat. Sister Zheng is a staunch advocate of singlehood, and after signing the agent contract, she has been living at Bai Xiaowen's house in Chihuo District for convenience.

After returning home for the holidays, Bai Xiaowen lived with Li Shuyi, Xiao Jun, and Sister Zheng. Their daily needs were taken care of by their assistant, He Zhiqing, and they ate together every day. The so-called dinner party was just Bai Xiaowen calling He Zhiqing to ask her to add a few more dishes that Sister Zheng liked so they could celebrate that evening.