Part 1. A Lucky Day (3)
Cheon Gyeongu had always hunted bosses by soloing.
Therefore, he needed even more meticulous preparation than others.
Before engaging in a boss fight, he would carefully gather advance information:
The monster’s temperament, attack patterns, defense mechanisms, minion composition, weaknesses, strengths, peculiarities, preferred prey, and so on.
It had been no different when he hunted the Sea Dragon Three Gods and the Inferno Imugi.
He had figured out everything there was to figure out!
He had been certain.
But now. The moment he received the voice call from China, that certainty was shattered.
There had been something he didn’t know. Something very, very important.
“Hello! This is CGTV in China. Might you be the user Ted?”
An exceptionally pretty voice was heard. The accent was slightly off—she seemed to be a Chinese person stumbling through Korean without a translator.
“Yes. This is Ted. What is it?”
CGTV.
It was China’s representative public broadcasting corporation and a management company for gaming video creators.
In terms of corporate scale, it ranked second among all companies in China.
In broadcasting, it was the best in the world.
It was a game channel with such immense influence that it operated as a comprehensive programming channel in over 120 countries.
The dream workplace for every video producer and individual broadcaster in the world!
“Ah, hello! I am Xiao Binghai, an employee of CGTV. I became a complete fan through your YouTube videos, so I am delighted to be making this call. The reason we at CGTV are calling an esteemed creator like yourself is…”
What she was saying was an offer for an exclusive creator contract.
In other words, the mega-corporation CGTV wanted a contract with Ted.
“…And so. We would like to meet right away. Would that be all right? We are ready to fly out on a private jet.”
“Ah, no. Right now is difficult. Tomorrow morning is good.”
Somehow hurriedly ending the call, Cheon Gyeongu hastily logged into the game.
He hastily headed to the
The Underground City.
The hideout of ugly, filthy black priests.
A place not anyone could enter, but Ted, a level-600 ranked player, had no trouble.
Ted sought out the dark sorcerer who used disassembly magic.
“Disassemble these two cores for me.”
What Ted held out to him were the cores of the two boss monsters he had recently hunted.
Cores worth 100 million won each were disassembled by the dark sorcerer’s hands.
In an instant, 200 million won vanished before his eyes, but to Ted, whose heart was pounding, 200 million won wasn’t even money.
The moment he checked the information inscribed on the disassembled core, Ted’s eyes nearly popped out of his head.
‘A Chinese company recruiting a Korean creator? Bullshit!’
The status window of a disassembled core shows the “Creator” information.
But on the two disassembled boss monster cores, the massive names of the Chinese mega-corporations
So that was it.
The two boss monsters had been pet monsters raised by the world’s strongest beings.
‘No wonder it felt off. These bastards… they were trying to kill me!’
A chill ran down Ted’s spine.
* * *
Humanity’s science had advanced with breakneck speed.
Around twenty years after smartphones were commercialized, virtual reality began to be commercialized.
And around that time, an event that shocked the world occurred:
Goggle and Pebuk. Blizzar, Stip. With those four companies at the forefront, the leading corporations of Silicon Valley participated in a single project.
The project’s name was—
A virtual reality game was what gathered those companies with such different business missions and corporate identities in one place.
Building human relationships through games.
Gathering global information through games.
Creating perfect cultural, artistic, and entertainment outlets through games.
They had wanted to create such a thing.
But up until then, virtual reality games hadn’t exactly been in the spotlight.
Realizing a new world in detail was no easy task. The number of engineers needed was in the tens of thousands—hundreds of thousands.
But that was no problem for VR Chronicle.
They received trillions of dollars in investment from across the world.
There was nothing money couldn’t do. They pushed forward a project bordering on impossible with massive capital.
When five years had passed in this manner.
A virtual reality game that shocked the world was born.
That very thing was
The game’s scale was vast. The relatively inexpensive capsules and devices sold like hotcakes, and at the present time, ten years later, its user base had reached 1.5 billion.
A game enjoyed by one-fifth of the world’s population.
The continent inside the game was as vast as Earth, and its hidden spaces were as large as the moon.
With such vast area and so many people, the money rolling around grew proportionally enormous.
Naturally, there was no way various corporations wouldn’t catch the scent of that money.
Because of that, countless real-world corporations staked out identical business grounds in virtual reality. And under the name “guilds,” they began to conduct business.
Most nations inside the game were monarchies.
However, the economic system was usually capitalist.
Here, too, was a world where money was power.
The reason China’s greatest mega-corporations, Alibaba and CGTV, were among the seven great wealthiest guilds across the in-game continent was exactly that.
Such Alibaba and CGTV often extended their reach into various new ventures, and recently had been secretly conducting active research on the theme of interaction between monsters and humans.
They started research on the possibility of transcendental domination beyond the level of taming or spirit contracts.
So over the past few years, they had spent enormous sums raising monsters.
Monsters at levels humans couldn’t yet tame!
First, CGTV began raising the
Matching this, the leader of the rival guild Alibaba,
“Why am I so unlucky? I’m ruined. Totally ruined….”
Ted felt like crying.
Ted had cut down such valuable research assets. And he had streamed it to the entire world, no less.
He hadn’t known the detailed circumstances between the monsters and the two guilds.
But understanding the flow of the game, even with what he knew now, he could infer the general situation.
‘Why, of all things, did it have to be those two… when boss mobs are everywhere in the game…’
Laments poured out.
Ted was someone who could accept and move past most misfortunes, but this time he couldn’t.
The scale was different from those. This massive incident that had come looking for him.
‘How the hell was I supposed to know! If they were going to raise them without anyone meddling, they should have put up name tags or something.
Complaining wouldn’t change anything.
Soon, calming himself, Ted racked his sluggish brain.
‘If I just sit here like this, I’m going to get beaten somehow. Isn’t there a way?’
Ted didn’t know the detailed inner workings of the two guilds.
But he did know the following:
1. That they had been secretly raising boss-grade monsters.
2. That the money spent raising them must have been astronomical.
3. That raising uncontrollable monsters was a serious crime under continental law.
‘They’re targeting me.’
He could tell immediately.
The contract offer from Xiao Binghai that came over the voice call earlier was the beginning of the entire scheme.
If he had taken the bait of the contract and rushed out recklessly to meet them?
He might very well be dead in pieces by now.
He absolutely must not meet them in reality.
The 2030s had become an era extremely sensitive to “real-life PK.” Thus, Cheon Gyeongu was perfectly prepared for it.
If he didn’t go out of his way to expose himself, there was no reason for him to be got.
‘Even in the game, I can’t feel safe.’
They would probably come looking for him soon.
Run? Not a chance. They had hundreds of thousands—or millions—of guild members.
Besides, just today Ted had exposed his location on Paprika TV.
‘A head-on approach is all that remains.’
Ted gritted his teeth.
Fortunately, the situation wasn’t entirely negative.
He had learned the true identities of those targeting him through the disassembly of the monster cores.
And he knew that it was a massive crime on the continent.
‘I have to make it. My weapon.’
Ted sat down and began to write something.
* * *
—Ring, ring! You have a voice call!
“Block.”
Ted ignored the repeated incoming voice calls.
Then, the very next day.
As Ted had expected, they came looking for Ted, who had been hiding in a small village disguised as a farmer.
“Mr. Ted? Looks like you’ve started farming content in a place with fine water and air?”
Gulp.
Ted tensed up.
The number of nearby Chinese users was exactly twenty. Likely ten affiliated with CGTV and ten users affiliated with Alibaba.
Normally, there was no way they would join forces. The two corporations were basically bitter rivals competing for number one in China.
But the massive incident Ted had triggered seemed to have united the two rival guilds.
Ted assessed their specific combat power.
‘Celestial God Artifact Set, War God Lambda’s Spear, Daomangseong Protective Gear, Asura Iron-Blood Longsword, Aegis of the Giant God Soldier… This is completely insane…’
Every last one of them was equipped with weapons and treasures of the
Even Ted, who had lived in the game for ten years, had only one Unique-grade item:
There was even someone draped in it from head to toe.
‘Their levels are all almost at my level. Most hovering around the 600s… and some are even higher than me.’
Every single one of them was a Chinese ranker.
Ted could tell without even rushing in to test it.
At his level of skill, he could probably take on about five or six of them.
But he could never defeat twenty.
They were cats, and he was merely a mouse.
“It looks like we need to have a little chat, don’t we?”
The one who appeared to be their leader spoke.
“If you attack me, you won’t come out of this looking good either.”
At the moment of first contact, Ted didn’t attempt any lengthy conversation.
He knew himself well.
That even if he tried to speak, he would only stammer with the vocabulary of a child.
So he had prepared. Without an agenda or introduction that could be hijacked by others—only the main argument he had readied.
“I warned you.”
Ted took out what he had prepared and showed it to them.
It was the small but sharp tooth of a mouse.