Chapter 233 - 231: Fourth Celestial Calamity

Jade Light Star System. Morning Star. Dead of night.

Inside a cozy, brightly lit room, a holographic game pod slowly opened.

A young woman with a flawless face gripped the edge of the game pod with her slender right hand and pulled herself out.

She raised her hands, slowly stretching. Her body, genetically customized since the embryonic stage, revealed an enviable figure.

Recalling the events of the game, the young woman furrowed her brow and grumbled to herself, 'What a trash game. There's no tutorial, they hand out high-grade cultivation technique manuals for free, and you still need an EXP bar to learn them? Do they think they can be this lazy just by pushing "realism"? One star.'

As an online game reviewer for the Interstellar Federation, she'd recently seen her feeds spammed by a new game company.

Ads for this online game were everywhere on the Federation's network; she couldn't imagine how much money the company must have thrown at it.

And as a gamer with a reasonably well-known account in the Interstellar Federation, she had received an invitation to test the game just yesterday, with a package arriving later that same day.

The moment she logged in and created her account, she was unceremoniously informed that she'd awakened superpowers, and the plot only escalated from there.

"So, this game has no main quest? It's all up to the player to explore?" Feng Qiaoyan muttered. "What's the point of that? There's no gameplay loop at all."

With a few gestures and swipes, the young woman opened a chat group. As a game blogger, she was naturally in several groups with her peers where they discussed the latest hot topics and game strategies.

Of course, she wasn't the only one who'd received a closed beta key for the game. Other well-known streamers in the Federation had gotten access codes as well.

But as soon as she opened the chat app, something immediately caught her eye.

In the mere half-day she'd been gone, the group chat of just over a hundred people had already hit 999+ messages.

'Are they all complaining about the ridiculous design choices the devs made for the sake of so-called 'realism'?' she wondered.

That was Feng Qiaoyan's guess. But when she opened the chat history, she was left speechless by the fanatical messages flooding the screen.

[AdvancingByAnyMeans]: I hereby declare that

is the greatest game in the history of the Interstellar Federation!

Seeing the long string of agreements that followed, Feng Qiaoyan thought to herself, 'Are they being sarcastic?'

But then she watched as a stream of "+1" comments flooded her virtual panel.

'So they're not being sarcastic... Does that mean I'm playing a pirated knock-off with the same name?'

Curious, she scrolled all the way to the oldest messages and began reading down through the conversation.

But after scrolling through over a hundred messages, all she found were complaints just like her own: the game had a poor tutorial, the content was too dull, you only got 1 EXP for an hour of practice, and so on.

'See? I was just imagining things,' the young woman thought.

But just as she was about to stop scrolling, a message made her freeze.

[BloodyHandBerserker]: HOLY SHIT, have you guys learned a Cultivation Technique yet? This thing is insane!

[BloodyHandBerserker]: The moment I logged in, I grabbed a knife on the subway and killed 10 NPCs for 100 EXP. Then I dumped all the EXP into the technique and immediately achieved Qi Refinement.

[BloodyHandBerserker]: After that, my EXP bar changed to Level 0, 0/1000. All I need is 1000 EXP to hit the next level.

[BloodyHandBerserker]: It's a lot of EXP, but what's that to me? I'm a glorious player! So I just went SLICE SLICE SLICE on the NPCs.

[BloodyHandBerserker]: Then I discovered the game's leveling mechanic. Even if you're Level 0 with your EXP bar at 50%, you still get half the physical stats of a Level 1 player. That's a +5 bonus to all attributes.

[BloodyHandBerserker]: Anyway, the grinding felt amazing. Before I knew it, I'd already hit Level 1, and my EXP bar changed to 0/2000.

[BloodyHandBerserker]: Then I decided to log out and take a break in the real world. And guess what? I can actually use my in-game powers out here.

[BloodyHandBerserker]: That's right, I'm not kidding. You get the same strength in reality that you have in the game. Do you get it?

...

"Power from the game... can be brought into reality?" Feng Qiaoyan stared at the text, and only then did she realize something was different.

She had subconsciously ignored it, just as one ignores their innate ability to control their limbs. But now she realized that the power to manipulate memories seemed to have remained with her even after logging out.

Curious, she instinctively glanced to her left, where an AI regularly fed her pet, a small, hamster-like homeotherm.

Five seconds later, Feng Qiaoyan was frozen to the spot, staring at the dazed animal in her palm—its memory wiped clean. Her mind flashed back to the Cultivation Technique in the game, the one that cost 120,000 EXP just to learn.

'This game... it's completely different from the others. And I've gained the status of a powered individual.'

She silently read through the rest of the messages. Following [BloodyHandBerserker]'s bombshells, more and more of the game's mechanics were revealed.

First, physical enhancements gained in the game carried over to reality. Second, players who were killed would immediately respawn at a random location within a ten-kilometer radius, with no effect on their real-world bodies.

However, upon death, all of a player's equipment would vanish, 1,000 EXP would be deducted, and NPCs would retain their memories of the character.

Since each person was tied to a single account for life, there were no do-overs. You couldn't create a new character, so it was best not to mess things up.

Also, players gained experience not just from killing people, but from killing other animals as well, with the amount of EXP varying based on the target's strength.

She thought about the game company's marketing slogan across the Interstellar Federation: "Absolutely Real." When she compared that to the fact that game powers worked perfectly in reality, a chilling thought emerged. 'This couldn't be a real world... could it?'

But while the Interstellar Federation's game reviewers were busy discussing this, Ji Donglai was being driven mad by the crime rate.

In a single day, the nation's crime rate had skyrocketed.

The number of homicides had increased by tens of thousands in just 24 hours.

Worse still, these murderers grew stronger the more they killed. Even after being put down by powered individuals, they would respawn nearby a short time later and continue their slaughter.

If there hadn't been dozens of such cases, Ji Donglai would have assumed it was the work of a single, newly awakened superhuman.

Of course, this chaos didn't last long.

Thanks to his extensive experience fighting various superhumans, Ji Donglai quickly adapted his containment strategy to deal with these troublemakers.

If they couldn't be killed, then they would simply be knocked unconscious and completely restrained. As long as they were immobilized but not dead, the problem was solved.

And so, within a single day, as dozens of the most headstrong beta testers were placed in confinement—a state tantamount to a permanent account ban—all the other players who had been itching to cause trouble temporarily went quiet.