“He, all by himself… didn’t even fear provoking those factions with millions of players? Isn’t that laying it on a bit thick?” Doraemon B said hesitantly. Anyone hearing a rumor like this for the first time would find it incredible. The virtual gaming world had always held to a relative fairness — everyone started from the same point, everyone existed in the same world. Even if gaps in strength opened up due to level, gear, and the like, just how large could such a gap really get? This was a game world bound by rules, not some fantasy novel with a demon-god who could take on ten thousand foes single-handed.
“I knew you’d say that. If I were you, I’d probably think the same. But as for that name — the Undefeated Evil Emperor… let me just rattle off a few of the things he’s done for you…”
“Every player has a class they love and that suits them best. Even when they switch games, their class usually won’t change — especially the top experts chasing the peak of power; they’ll always pick the one class that fits them best… But Tian Moxie is an exception, and that’s one facet of his wickedness. Three years ago, in the game called Skyreach, the class he chose was an Assassin — and it was in Skyreach that his name moved the whole world. The great deeds he pulled off there are too many to count. One time, the guild master of an alliance called the Blood Wolf Pact clashed with Tian Moxie and got cut down by him in under five seconds. A sensible man would have let the matter end there, but that guild master, consumed by resentment, sent several hundred of his alliance’s top experts a few days later to gang up on Tian Moxie… Those several hundred players ultimately couldn’t do a thing to him — instead a full half of them died. And after that day, that guild master was assassinated by Tian Moxie a grand total of seventy-two times. No matter the hour, no matter where he fled, no matter how many people surrounded him, so long as he was online he never once escaped Tian Moxie’s blade. In under half a month, he was flat-out assassinated all the way below Level 10, forcibly sent back to the novice village by the system. But it still wasn’t over — the instant that guild master set so much as one foot out of the novice village, Tian Moxie would immediately kill him right back in. In the end, that guild master never appeared in Skyreach again, and the Blood Wolf Pact dissolved completely.”
“Two years ago, Skyholder took the whole world by storm, and the class Tian Moxie chose in this game was the Shield Warrior. The Shield Warrior is the textbook high-defense, low-attack type — but his attack power and defensive power were equally formidable. What’s more terrifying is that the Shield Warrior’s mobility is plainly the weakest of all classes, yet his mobility was far and away stronger than even an Assassin’s. When powerful attack, defense, and agility are all concentrated in one person, Tian Moxie was called a Bug-like existence by every Skyholder player of the day… Let me give you an example. Around half a year after Skyholder launched, two of the ten great powers at the time — the Red Leaf Pact and the War Soul Hall — were locked in a large-scale siege battle. The Red Leaf Pact, on the defending side, was at a clear disadvantage, and just then Tian Moxie happened to be passing by… merely passing by. Then he raised sword and shield and joined the city’s defenders. His entry instantly threw the greater part of the War Soul Hall’s forces into utter chaos; their original advantage gradually turned into a disadvantage, the pressing front line was beaten into a steady retreat, and in the end they lost all heart for the fight and withdrew empty-handed. Tian Moxie, one man alone, completely reversed the tide of battle… and that siege had a player count of a full twenty thousand! Afterward, he only told the Red Leaf Pact’s guild master, coldly, that the reason he’d stepped in was that he found the name ‘Red Leaf Pact’ rather pleasing to the eye — nothing more.”
“And after that, the War Soul Hall was smart enough never to come looking to make trouble for Tian Moxie. His temperament is famously bizarre and wicked; he never needs a reason to do anything. His helping the Red Leaf Pact absolutely wasn’t out of any friendship with them, nor out of any grudge against the War Soul Hall — chances are by the next day he’d have forgotten the whole thing clean. But if the War Soul Hall had gone and provoked Tian Moxie, that would have meant truly making a grudge with him — and people or factions with a grudge against him get to spend every day living in… uh, sheer misery.”
“And in this game, Slaying Gods, Tian Moxie took yet another class — the Ranger. Six months ago, a huge swarm of monsters attacked a small town called Luoyan. Tian Moxie, one man with one bow, held the entire eastern side of the town and didn’t let a single monster set foot inside. Three months ago, a Lord-tier BOSS appeared in the Sunblaze Forest to the north, and three hundred players from the same battle company were locked in a grueling battle of wits and courage against it — but as their rotten luck would have it, Tian Moxie happened to pass by. Word is he stood off to the side and watched for a good long while, then made his move, and with a single bow he wrenched the ownership rights to that BOSS away from several hundred players. Then, as those players gaped in stunned silence, he scooped up every last piece of gear the BOSS dropped and swaggered off. That melee was recorded in full by one player and set off an enormous, long-running sensation. In the footage, Tian Moxie’s lightning-quick footwork and astonishing judgment had people crying out that the God of Archery had possessed him — through that whole melee, he never let the Lord BOSS touch him even once. And those several hundred players, under his flawlessly precise baiting and calculation, became mobile meat shields absorbing the BOSS’s attacks…”
“His many legends are too numerous to list, but just like Bloodfiend Moon, to this very day no one knows what he looks like, or what his identity is in real life. Even the major powers with their dense intelligence networks couldn’t dig up the faintest clue.”
Doraemon B listened to Doraemon A’s account with his mouth hanging open, dumbstruck, as if hearing some unreal mythic tale.
……
……
Eleven o’clock on the dot.
Ye Tianxie pulled open a very large can of fruit, tipped his head back and poured it down, dumping it straight into his stomach almost without chewing at all. Then he flung the tin can away with a casual toss; it flew off in a distinctly unlovely arc and landed on the floor with a clang — and the area around it was already littered with a scatter of assorted empty bottles and cans, the air gone strangely foul because of them.
This was how Ye Tianxie ate lunch. His room was a mess; the blanket had never once been folded, and the living room was more like a garbage dump. No one would ever imagine that the interior of that supremely lavish villa had been trashed into such a sorry state. Ye Tianxie had long since gotten used to it all. To him this was nothing more than a place to perch — dirty and cluttered or not, did it really matter…?
A press of the remote, and the TV switched on. If he remembered right, the hour before Fate opened would feature the final press conference from the game’s operator, the Skyward Group — and he didn’t want to miss it.
On the screen appeared that white-haired old man already familiar to the whole world. By all appearances he was past eighty, his expression gentle, his brows kindly and his face benevolent. This was Prometheus, president of the Skyward Group, and the chief developer of Fate… and a fact that shocked the entire world was that Fate had only two developers in total — one being him, the other named Alpha — with everyone else involved having merely handled the manufacture, transport, and distribution of the game devices.
And an even more astonishing fact: Alpha was an alien. An out-and-out extraterrestrial. His identity had been confirmed and verified by every nation in the world. This identity was one of the reasons Fate could cause so enormous a sensation — but only one of them. Even though Fate‘s promotion spelled out that this was alien technology seven hundred years ahead of Earth’s, countless people were still reeling over just what method Prometheus had used to expand the game’s influence to such a terrifying degree… The joint backing of the world’s ten largest banks, all seven of the world’s major virtual gaming companies declaring they were changing industries, every nation on Earth throwing its full weight behind it with governments taking the lead… each one an honor no game of the past had ever received.
(End of Chapter 5)