Chapter 1
When Pei Sen stood bewildered at the crossroads, he saw a pothole-ridden street and a cluster of low-rise houses. It took several minutes before he realized those gazes were filled with ill intent.
This place felt somewhat unfamiliar yet strangely familiar. However, the clothes on his body and these fair, slender hands were undeniably recognizable to him.
A full-dive virtual reality game.
In Pei Sen’s era, this had long been something everyone anticipated, yet in reality, it was never expected to emerge so soon. Who could have guessed that an obscure company would quietly release a teaser for closed beta testing, followed by open beta, until it eventually swept across the globe?
No one could have imagined that during that era, someone would create a holographic game so incredibly realistic, with a map of unimaginable vastness and NPCs whose intelligence was so high they all seemed like real people in disguise.
Although the game initially suffered from countless issues, this did nothing to hinder its explosive popularity.
After all, it stood alone; other game companies tried to imitate it but simply couldn’t pull it off.
Its name was Bix Cube, a title that had been mocked for many years.
Pei Sen gazed at the towering spire at the end of the street; in the early days of the game, screenshots of this tower were quite common.
He himself was dressed in a standard Western formal suit: a white shirt, black vest, black trousers, and a suit jacket. This outfit had been released during the game’s sixth-anniversary event. Pei Sen’s main character had farmed an extra set; since it wasn’t expensive back then, he simply equipped it on his alternate account.
…Yes, Pei Sen opened his status panel again to confirm: this was undoubtedly his alternate character in Bix Cube, a level-one storage account.
However, one thing he could be certain of was that the scene before him didn’t resemble the usual login interface. Moreover, even this street and its towering spire exhibited subtle differences compared to when he logged into the game yesterday.
This holographic game claims to have over 95% realism, with many players boasting it reaches a full 100%. However, Pei Sen knows that at least in terms of pain perception, achieving 100% is impossible, as players simply couldn’t tolerate it.
And now, Pei Sen had just been struck by a pebble thrown by a child, and his hand still throbbed faintly.
“No way,” he murmured. Transmigrating into a game? That sort of thing only happens in novels, doesn’t it?
Moreover, as he gazed upon this boundless world and the people nearby who were staring at him, he felt they lacked any trace of being NPCs.
Here, compared to the game world, it feels more like a real alternate realm.
After hesitating for just a moment, he walked around the nearby area and, as expected, found no familiar guiding NPCs in places he knew well; of course, he didn’t spot a single player anywhere along the entire street.
Stopping in his tracks, Pei Sen decisively opened the forum page through his personal panel, intending to post a question asking whether today’s game had any special differences, or if perhaps he had unknowingly entered some unique dungeon.
Although he remembered that a mysterious power outage occurred when he logged into his alternate account, and after several minutes of darkness he inexplicably found himself standing on that very street, this game boasted an extremely high degree of freedom—so it was entirely possible he had somehow fallen into a hidden dungeon.
However, the forum was not the one he was familiar with.
The entire forum was completely empty, with only a single announcement posted.
“Bix Cube: The world’s only true holographic game, boasting over 95% realism. A free world awaits your exploration!
A role-playing RPG that will lead you through a complete otherworldly realm.
This game will begin its closed beta on July 9, 2019.
In just three short sentences, the message was written with extreme perfunctoriness, showing not a shred of sincerity.
The page background had no image—or rather, nothing at all. Below, there was only a comment box for registering to apply for closed beta access.
At this point in time, there were only a handful of comments: some saying “Just passing through; hello, scammer,” others wondering “What if it’s real?” and still others asking “A new scam? Could there be a virus?”…
In any case, almost no one truly believed it.
Pei Sen remained frozen for a long while, staring blankly at the appearance of this “forum” address.
This scene… Although he wasn’t a closed-beta player, there were always extremely enthusiastic players who kept screenshots of the game’s initial announcements to share later for everyone to examine together.
In his memory, among those screenshots, the very first one was exactly this absurdly crude image.
“Could it be that the server hasn’t even launched yet?” He glanced around. A small child with a face smeared in dirt was secretly watching him from the roadside; upon meeting his gaze, the child quickly turned and ran away.
That sense of liveliness and realism made Pei Sen certain this could not possibly be a game world.
Moreover, if a game hadn’t officially launched, what reason would there be for NPCs to act so convincingly? After all, players later universally agreed that the NPCs in this game were portrayed either by real people or artificial intelligence. There would be absolutely no need for such elaborate role-playing before the server even went live.
While feeling deeply unsettled in his heart, Pei Sen simultaneously recalled just how terrifying the place where he now stood truly was.
The initial server of the Bix Cube—Yali Continent—already had a poor reputation long before the era when cross-server interactions became commonplace.
Years later, it would become a haven for free-for-all PKers, where chaos and order coexisted, continents trembled with shifting regimes, and darkness and crime reigned as the dominant themes.
However, at the very launch of the game, Yali Continent wasn’t yet that extreme; even so, it was already teeming with scammers, rogues, and criminals.
The original Yali Continent was a mad land where prosperity and sin intertwined, so much so that even after twenty-seven servers had been opened and new players rarely chose Yali as their starting point, countless veterans from the earliest batch of players still looked back nostalgically on the first Yali.
However, now that Pei Sen himself stood on this street, he didn’t feel quite so enchanted anymore.
He was merely a level-one smurf character; even with a backpack and warehouse full of divine artifacts, he couldn’t use any of them. What made it even more bizarre was that although he had chosen the Mage class for this storage character and crafted a face deemed perfection—years later recognized as the most handsome male visage imaginable—his randomly generated initial attributes turned out to be “Strength 5, Agility 0, Intelligence 0, Willpower 0, Constitution 0.” Such an extreme Strength-focused attribute set was the dream of countless physical damage classes, yet unfortunately, this was a Mage character.
But since it was just a storage character anyway, Pei Sen found keeping these attributes rather amusing. Each character received two chances to reroll their attributes, effectively offering a choice among three options. His smurf character had initially rolled a full-Strength attribute set, and since he never intended to develop this character further, he simply selected it without hesitation.
A full-Strength Mage might indeed be useless, but as a storage character, what did it matter whether it was useless or not?
So much so that Pei Sen stared at his status panel in utter despair.
Even tearing open the magic scroll with the lowest requirement demanded at least 20 points of Intelligence. For a mage, even if one’s initial stats were less than ideal, reaching level five would typically ensure retaining at least 20 points of Intelligence. Yet Pei Sen, a full-strength mage… gained 5 points of Strength automatically per level-up, tied to his initial aptitude. As for other attributes, he could only gain the single fixed point awarded upon leveling up, with just one additional point available for free allocation. That meant he’d have to somehow reach at least level ten before possessing even a sliver of self-preservation capability.
But under current circumstances, there was no guiding NPC in sight, nor any of those NPCs rumored to issue beginner quests at the game’s launch. Surrounded by so many hostile gazes, he wasn’t even certain whether the so-called system protection before official server opening would activate, let alone know where to go to level up!
The next day, Pei Sen brushed non-existent dust off his suit. He could confirm one thing: the system protection had not triggered. Death allowed resurrection, but with 100% pain retention; he never wanted to experience that again in his life. Furthermore, if he couldn’t find somewhere to settle down soon, he might get sold off a second time. Whether he should continue feigning death then remained a pressing question.
At that moment, a massive carriage came into his view, its body adorned with intricate golden emblems; upon closer inspection, they formed the shape of a rose.
“Golden Rose… Manor.”
Pei Sen remembered this place. Glancing not far away, he spotted two young men dressed in formal attire, waiting nervously.
However, it was evident that neither of them came from particularly wealthy backgrounds; their formal suits fit poorly, were clearly not new, and appeared somewhat worn.
He calmly ran over and stood right beside them.
The two turned to look at Pei Sen, their gazes far from friendly.
Moments later, the carriage indeed came to a halt at this very spot. The door swung open, and a middle-aged man dressed in a shirt, trousers, and a short vest stepped down. A pair of chain-linked spectacles rested on the bridge of his nose; the corner of an impeccably folded white handkerchief peeked from his breast pocket. Holding a pocket watch, he casually glanced at the time before lifting his head to find three individuals standing neatly before him.
He seemed somewhat surprised. “Wasn’t it stated that there were only two applicants?” Why were there three people here?
After carefully sizing up the three of them, he didn’t seem particularly concerned. “Everyone, get in the carriage.”
The interior of the carriage was remarkably spacious. Pei Sen took a look around; including himself and the refined-looking middle-aged man, there were six people seated inside. Most of them, like the two young men he had just seen, wore semi-worn formal attire and appeared visibly nervous. Moreover, Pei Sen noticed something: the people here on the continent of Yali weren’t particularly handsome by appearance standards, differing somewhat from modern Westerners. Perhaps due to mild malnutrition, their complexions were mostly sallow, with numerous dull spots marring their faces. Yet these individuals before him mostly had well-proportioned features; even those with poor complexions were at least not bad-looking.
Of course, even if they all used beauty cameras and photo-editing apps like Meitu Xiuxiu, Pei Sen could still utterly outshine every single one of them, eighteen times over.
Thus, the middle-aged man’s gaze rested predominantly on Pei Sen, while the others appeared completely dimmed in comparison.
“Let me make a few things clear upfront: Golden Rose Manor does not care about your origins or backgrounds, nor do we fear causing trouble for anyone. However, there is one condition: if you upset the young master and get expelled from the manor, the manor will neither resolve any troubles you face nor allow you to return to cause further disturbance to the young master.”
“Your duty is simply to take care of the young master; his needs always come first.”
“Within our Golden Rose Manor, the young master’s word is the law.”
“…”
As the carriage continued along its path, Pei Sen realized he had infiltrated the group recruited by Golden Rose Manor for butlers. Listening further, he understood that so-called “butler recruitment” was never truly about hiring butlers at all—it was actually about finding personal male attendants for the young master of Golden Rose Manor.
He knew of the Golden Rose Manor, and also of its famously notorious young master. Some players had once received quests related to him, labeling him the world’s number one brat who replaced his male servants every month or two.
There were even terrifying rumors of abuse associated with this manor.
Half an hour later, Pei Sen met Eagle Langno, a breathtakingly beautiful youth with golden hair and azure eyes that seemed like a divine gift. Learning that the boy was merely fourteen years old, Pei Sen found his handsome yet youthful face and those gem-like eyes so captivating that they seemed capable of making anyone forgive any wrongdoing he might commit. Even Pei Sen, a modern man well-versed in all sorts of situations, felt a momentary daze; his worries vanished instantly, and his heart softened somewhat.
In any case, he was indeed still just a half-grown child, yet not quite a little kid either; no matter how unreasonable his tantrums might be, there had to be limits. Even if his temper proved difficult to handle, looking at that face made it easy to forgive him.
The world is always more lenient toward the beautiful.
Yet… Pei Sen realized, in the shortest span of time imaginable, that he was mistaken.