24 New Players! Reinforcements Arrive!

September 12. 6:00 AM. After the closed beta invitations were distributed, following three days of agonizing anticipation, server launch day finally arrived. Following the tutorial on the official website, Du Mingdao put on the helmet, lay flat on his bed, and closed his eyes. Speaking of which... Was this really all it took? Yet the moment that thought crossed his mind, with his eyes still shut, he saw a beam of light pierce through the darkness and shine before him. He had not even opened his eyes... Du Mingdao sat up from the damp incubation pod and looked around. His dazed gaze was gradually replaced by overwhelming shock. This... This was the game world?! Metallic walls and floor tiles, a streamlined pod door steeped in sci-fi flair, and wisps of faint vapor rising from his shoulders, steadily carrying away his body heat. Taking a deep breath of the game world's air, he caught a faint, unpleasant odor. Du Mingdao had no idea whether everything before his eyes was real or not. Yet this one-hundred-percent immersion had already left him too stunned for words. This sensation— It was absolutely mind-blowing! Just then, the neighboring hibernation pod suddenly opened, and a figure with a lizard's snout, covered head to toe in dark green scales, sat up from inside. The instant their eyes met, Du Mingdao jumped in fright. "Holy crap?! What the hell are you?" "What do you mean, 'what the hell'—" "Who the hell are you? An NPC???" "What NPC? I'm a player! ID: Scavenger Lv99... I was about to ask you the same damn thing! Who the hell are you?" "You're Scavenger?! I'm Spare the Life Under the Blade! Holy shit, you're that newbie who joined the group chat a few days ago? Why the hell are you so ugly?!" "You're the ugly one, you bastard..." With his amber pupils wide and round, the lizardman was completely bewildered, clearly having failed to grasp the situation. Soon, however, his gaze fell upon his own scaly, dark green skin, and terror slowly crept into his baffled eyes. In a panic, he lowered his head, glancing left and right. His claws groped frantically over his body, and his tail twitched along with his torso, making him look exactly like a gecko that had tumbled into a mud pit. Right at that moment, his gaze suddenly glued itself between his legs. Immediately following that, he let out a shrill, miserable wail. "Holy shit! Where's my thing?!" Du Mingdao nearly spat a mouthful of blood. "You look like that, and your biggest concern is *that thing*?!" "That's gone, and that's gone too! Fuck! Damn dog developers, total scammers! If you can play as a lizardman, why the hell can't you create a female character?!" "If you don't want to be a lizardman, we can trade." "Piss off." The hibernation pod was connected to a body-scanning device that allowed players to check their attributes and level—information that had already been made public on the official website. Scavenger raised his index finger and tapped the interface. Soon, an attribute panel projected onto the screen: [ID: Scavenger Lv99] [Gene Sequence: Mutant · Lizardman] [Level: LV.0] —Basic Attributes— [Strength: 8] [Agility: 7] [Constitution: 8] [Perception: 8] [Intelligence: 2] [Talents: Cold-Blooded (Higher stealth, sluggish movement in low-temperature environments) Webbed Feet (Higher endurance, difficult to operate complex machinery) Flesh Regeneration (Higher recovery rate, difficult to level gene sequence)] Holy crap? These attributes were something else! Scavenger vaguely remembered the official website stating that the baseline attribute value for a normal adult male was 5, fluctuating within plus or minus 2. Evidently, he was not being measured by adult male standards. Aside from his Intelligence being a bit low, his other four core attributes were absurdly high. More importantly, he did not feel any less intelligent in practice. So what if his numerical Intelligence stat was on the lower side? It wouldn't hinder his ability to show off in the slightest! Realizing this, Scavenger grinned from ear to ear, his tantrum completely forgotten. Sitting in the adjacent incubation pod, Du Mingdao watched the lizardman grinning like an idiot and asked out of concern, "You... all right?" "Haha, couldn't be better! Let's go, let's get out of this room and meet up with the other players first! Can't keep the esteemed Manager waiting!" Saying that, Scavenger vaulted out of the incubation pod. He discovered another perk of being a lizardman: he didn't need clothes. Taking off pants or leaving them on made no difference anyway, since there was literally nothing to hide! Staring at this lively, leaping lizard, Du Mingdao wore an utterly bizarre expression. Then, he suddenly noticed a slip of paper seemingly stuck to the fellow's rear end. "There's something on your butt." "Where?" Prompted by the remark, Scavenger also felt the strange sensation on his backside and reached a claw behind him. Unused to operating this new body, he scraped around with both claws for a good while before finally managing to peel the slip off. The paper was made of waterproof material and had not gotten wet. However, the text written on it was neither Chinese nor any other language he recognized. Completely at a loss, Scavenger scratched his head with a claw. "What the heck is written on this thing?" ... Shelter resident hall. The space, which had originally been fairly spacious, was currently packed to the brim with newly joined players. People of every description stood there, their faces uniformly stamped with confusion, astonishment, excitement, and curiosity. Before this, nearly everyone had assumed that this so-called "fully immersive virtual reality game" was probably just a prank concocted by a few bored gamers. Even after receiving the helmets sent by the game company, the vast majority had harbored doubts. Now, however, every shred of skepticism had vanished into thin air. If one truly had to name a game more realistic than this, it would probably only be "Earth Online" itself! Passing through the automatic sliding door, "Scavenger Lv99" caused quite a stir when he stepped out of the room. At first, everyone thought he was an NPC. Only after asking did they learn that he was also a player, and quite possibly possessed a legendary "hidden class"! Basking in the envious gazes of the crowd, Scavenger seemed to have cast the matter of his missing package entirely to the back of his mind, smiling with immense pride. Did having that thing really matter? Not at all. "Brother, stick with me from now on, and I'll look out for you." Full of swagger, Scavenger clapped the shoulder of Brother Blade beside him. The latter merely rolled his eyes in exasperation, not bothering to entertain him. It was only a slightly better set of starting attributes, that was all. Having emerged from the room alongside this fellow, Du Mingdao also drew plenty of attention. Unfortunately, his gene sequence was merely ordinary Strength-type, with nothing remarkably extraordinary about it. While the players in the hall sized up the two of them, he was likewise observing the other players in secret. Aside from Brother Scavenger, most players seemed relatively normal—at least on the surface, nothing visibly set them apart from ordinary humans. Judging by their builds, most appeared to be Strength-types and Constitution-types, though there were also a few Perception-type, Agility-type, and Intelligence-type candidates. What surprised Du Mingdao most was that there were actually two female players among them. One stood 180 centimeters tall, with an hourglass figure that filled out her shelter uniform to the brim. She was likely a Strength-type. The other was noticeably shorter, probably barely over 150 centimeters, with an average figure that made it hard to tell her type, though she certainly did not look like a Strength-type. Du Mingdao had a background in civil engineering and had worked in the field for years. His visual estimations were exceptionally accurate, especially for distances and dimensions, and rarely carried significant error. The two women had walked out of the same room and seemed to have clashed over something, glaring at each other with daggers drawn. "Who's this pipsqueak? Have you even been weaned yet?" "You! You think being tall makes you special?! You're probably a dwarf in real life!" "Heh. Someone who talks like that clearly isn't very old in reality. You aren't an elementary schooler, are you?" "Hehehe, sorry to disappoint, but this big sister happens to be a director at a fashion design firm. I'm plenty grown. Unlike you, who probably has to seek validation in a video game." "Heheheh, just a director? Here I thought you were the president of some massive conglomerate. Mind sharing which company little sister graces with her presence?" "Heheheheh, none of your business!" Du Mingdao: "..." He couldn't shake the feeling that both of them were acting pretty juvenile... Naturally, they were far from the only noisy ones. Having waited so long and finally securing closed beta access, the freshly arrived players were brimming with excitement. Their mouths never stopped running, and their hands were constantly touching and prodding everything around them, unable to sit still for a second. Someone was banging his head against the wall, not crying out in pain, but instead clutching his head and giggling like a fool. And that was considered relatively normal. Another person had grabbed a nearby player, begging to be slapped in the face just to experience what taking a hit felt like, so he could mentally prepare before fighting monsters later. Du Mingdao felt his scalp tingle. Had he stepped into a game world, or had he been locked in an insane asylum? Just as someone dropped their pants intending to take a dump, threatening to plunge into even more eye-searing antics, an authoritative voice cut across the resident hall, echoing from the main entrance. "Silence." In an instant, total quiet descended. That dignified voice seemed to carry a unique aura of authority, causing the players in the resident hall to cease their clamor involuntarily. Pair after pair of eyes reflexively turned toward the source of the sound. Du Mingdao was no exception. Looking at the man standing by the entrance, the expression on his face instantly lit up with excitement. An NPC! The opening cutscene! This had to be the legendary Manager! Although it was his first time playing the game, he had been avidly following Ample Time Ahead's posts on the official forum, so he was quite familiar with the in-game lore. The other players were the same, holding their breath in rapt anticipation for the story to begin. When selecting players, besides referencing the professions listed on the registration page, Chu Guang had also reviewed their historical forum posts, online duration, and activity levels, doing his utmost to filter out childish trolls with twisted logic and fools who spent all day picking fights. Those kinds of people were better suited for hauling bricks on a construction site, not for being here. Sweeping his gaze across the players in the resident hall, Chu Guang spoke again in a calm, solemn voice. "Welcome to Shelter 404." "I am the Manager here." "Codename—Dawn."