The Protagonist

By November 2049, all ten floors inside the first factory had been completely filled. Supported by ten supercomputers, the virtual city—spanning more than fifty thousand square kilometers and accommodating five million people—had finally been completed.

The residents of Districts 1 through 10 had arrived as much as half a year apart. The latest arrivals had only one-sixth as many energy points as the earliest ones. Combined with their six-month experience gap, this gave the residents of District 1 an overwhelming advantage over those in the other districts.

In the real world, it was difficult to change who came first and who came later. But in the virtual world, Lin Li could easily even out the differences between players by adding a discount buff.

Everyone received a fixed number of energy points each day, but the later people entered the enormous virtual city, the cheaper things became for them. The last arrivals needed to pay only one-sixth the price for the same items. This discount would gradually disappear as the gap between the districts' total energy expenditures narrowed.

In other words, although Lin Li had set no level cap, he had given all new players an experience buff. This allowed the people in Districts 1 through 10 to have roughly equal strength and equipment.

As for the supposed difference in experience, there were no powerful organizations here to control most people's lives. Most ordinary residents came from poor backgrounds and were used to hardship. Now, they lived in the virtual city intending to play and enjoy themselves. The so-called experience of the early arrivals had become everyone's experience.

After six months, most residents had given up on competing for that far-off reward. Instead, they chose to stay home, watch the excitement, savor delicious food, and enjoy life. Waking up naturally each day was far more comfortable than miserably saving up points to buy weapons.

The remaining residents who enjoyed fighting had raised their levels to Strength 10 and Telekinesis 10. Each of them now possessed nearly a ton of physical strength and telekinetic abilities with a range of a hundred meters. They could fly through the air and wound people with flying swords with ease. In ancient legends, every one of them would have been a Sword Immortal, able to take someone's head from a hundred meters away.

But these weren't one or two recluses who roamed the mountains and rivers, free from worldly concerns, like characters in a story. There were more than a hundred thousand of them, all with worldly desires. With no worries about survival and no powerful organization to keep them in check, their comfortable lives and formidable strength left them needing an outlet for their power. The giant monsters in the forest made perfect targets.

In District 10, about a hundred kilometers into the primeval forest, an army of more than a thousand people had assembled. Their immense strength and telekinetic abilities let them carry large amounts of weapons and equipment without being hindered by the terrain.

They weren't armed with light weapons like rifles or grenades. Every resident carried two one-meter-long Individual Electromagnetic Cannons, while a huge carbon-fiber box floated behind them, packed with shells.

Conventional artillery and tanks weren't very useful in the forest. Missiles, meanwhile, were extremely expensive because they had propulsion and laser guidance systems. Compared with the residents themselves, who could respawn infinitely, those expendable weapons simply weren't worth the cost.

Over several months, the residents here had finally worked out a highly effective combat system based on their physical capabilities and the prices in the shop. They no longer used expensive, high-tech guided weapons. They bought only cheap electromagnetic cannon shells, charged straight up to the monsters, and hurled them at close range, relying on tens of thousands of shells and lives to overwhelm their targets.

At the front of the thousand-strong force floated a boy with short white hair that reached his ears. Unlike most of the other residents, who retained human appearances, his hands and feet were covered in scales, and a tail nearly two meters long extended from his rear. Thick plates of armor covered the area around his spine. He looked like a reptile with a human skull.

His name was Achilles Best. He was twelve years old and had been born with albinism. His irises and pupils were pale pink. When he was six, his biological parents abandoned him in a slum.

Afraid of the light, he couldn't do physical labor. He could only hide in the slum's drainage ditches and scavenge scraps to stay alive. By the time he was discovered, he was on the verge of death. A warlord faction serving Infinite Game Company sent him here for experiments.

In the virtual world, his frail body was no longer a burden. With his keen combat instincts and beastlike will to survive, Achilles quickly stood out among the residents who craved comfort. Apart from keeping his white-haired appearance, he gradually reshaped his body into a killing machine.

Most ordinary residents raised their Strength and Telekinesis together, often prioritizing this superpower that existed only in fictional worlds. The thrill of controlling objects hundreds or even thousands of meters away without using their hands or feet left them hopelessly addicted.

But Achilles discovered the ability's weakness. Telekinesis depended heavily on the user's powers of observation. Beyond a hundred meters, it was almost impossible to control anything precisely. The force spread across an area several meters wide, and even if it matched the user's physical strength, the distance made it weaker.

When its range extended to several thousand meters, so-called telekinesis became little more than an invisible bomb that could smash a large area at once. The imagined scene of one person controlling thousands of weapons and firing them was simply impossible.

Achilles had discovered the limitations of this world—or rather, the limitations of humans with ordinary brains. Their minds couldn't perfectly control forces hundreds or thousands of times stronger than themselves. This wasn't an ordinary online game where a skill could be automatically cast at the press of a button.

In fact, if Lin Li were the one controlling Strength and Telekinesis at level 100, he could kill the Little White Mouse one-on-one without any weapons, despite the creature's immense strength and lack of intelligence.

Lin Li's mind was capable of focusing all his strength into an area no larger than one square centimeter from several thousand meters away. His telekinetic power would attack continuously from different directions, like enormous, sharp spikes. The Little White Mouse wouldn't have any chance to fight back.

Ordinary people simply couldn't control their strength precisely from several thousand meters away. Even if they were ten times stronger, they were just empty shells, fundamentally no different from the little babies who controlled powerful monsters.

Achilles had escaped the trap of this seemingly wonderful superpower. He needed to save every bit of food and strength to survive, and he held on to this habit even in this world without hunger or illness.

He didn't know how to use firearms and could recognize only a few simple characters, so he chose to preserve his advantage and spent all his energy points strengthening his body.

During the process, he was delighted to discover that even though he had no tail in the real world, the fifth limb extending from his rear could be controlled just like his hands and feet. It could also help him keep his balance while running.

This modification didn't increase his strength, but his inhuman appearance let him use that strength more effectively. For example, he ran much faster on all fours than on two legs. His extra tail gave him another way to attack, and his scales let him withstand the giant beasts' claws without suffering tearing wounds.

Achilles's Telekinesis was still only level 1, but his Strength was fifty percent higher than that of others who had spent the same number of energy points.

The strongest people in each district now had around ten million energy points. Their two levels were roughly 5,000, giving them about five hundred tons of strength and a control range of around fifty kilometers.

Apart from the dozen or so super-creatures more than a thousand meters long and weighing hundreds of thousands of tons, their strength let them defeat most giant creatures from a great distance. These strongest residents were now able to approach the Sky-Piercing Tower at the heart of the region.

However, though these strongest residents were formidable, they had paid a steep price for their power.

Their overwhelming, uncontrollable strength made everyday life inconvenient. Aside from the invulnerable starting Safe House and its two intelligent servants, none of the ordinary objects could withstand their power. The virtual world, originally meant for enjoyment, had become a life of ascetic hardship.

They could just about bear it if that were all, comforting themselves with the thought that they were doing it for the huge benefits awaiting them in the real world.

But Achilles, the youngest and one of the last to arrive, had risen to become the strongest of them all. By putting all his points into Strength and relying on his beastlike instincts, he quickly rose to prominence in District 10, defeating all his rivals and attracting a large following of residents who loved violence and combat.

The strongest residents in the other districts couldn't accept this. In the end, they decided to join forces against him in the Sky-Piercing Tower.

Achilles's tail, which had been hanging down as he floated at the front of the formation, suddenly rose. His pale-pink eyes fixed on a giant creature in the middle of a low hill in the distance.

It was a Komodo dragon, about two hundred and thirty meters long and close to a hundred thousand tons in weight. It flicked out its long tongue to collect scent particles from the air, sensing the smells several kilometers away with its vomeronasal organ in the roof of its mouth.

The giant lizard had dug a huge burrow beneath the hill. Only its head remained outside, swaying as it identified the scent particles carried on the wind. It was less like a lizard than a giant dragon from myth and legend, one of the most powerful creatures in this primeval forest.

"Attack!"

At the command, the thousand people behind him floated in the air and formed a wall of bodies. Thousands of electromagnetic shells shot toward the huge creature at more than four times the speed of sound. In an instant, the dozens-of-meters-high hill was swallowed by the billowing dust. A low hiss came from within the haze. The creature had been enraged.

The earth began to tremble, and the creature smashed the hill to pieces with its immense strength. Its thick scales were enough to withstand conventional cruise missile strikes. Most of the 100-millimeter electromagnetic shells bounced off the hard scales, while the rest only penetrated the skin before losing their momentum.

After all, the shells were cheap. Ordinary ammunition simply wasn't powerful enough against the Komodo dragon's armor.

Achilles dropped from the sky and crouched on all fours. His savage tail swayed behind him as his pale-pink eyes watched the behemoth emerge from the dust. The people floating in the air behind him kept firing electromagnetic shells. At last, the creature's scales began to crack and fall away, and thin trickles of blood seeped from its skin.

"I'll kill you!"

Achilles leaped at the dragonlike creature with all his strength. He used telekinesis to keep the soil beneath his feet firm. The force of his 7,500-fold strength smashed the ground within a ten-meter radius into powder, like concrete struck by a steel hammer.

A white sonic boom cloud appeared around him. Achilles was now moving even faster than the electromagnetic shells. The white-haired boy, less than one and a half meters tall, slammed head-on into the hundred-thousand-ton behemoth. Their collision unleashed a tremendous roar, and visible, cloudlike shock waves surged outward. Even the sound of thousands of electromagnetic shells was drowned out.