Chapter 4 (2/2)
***
When he returned to his room, Zhao Mingwei laid on his bed and stared at the ceiling.
The extended period of professional training over seven years had left him extremely exhausted. He still had some motivation four years ago when his team pursued the crown, but at the start of this year, he did not want to play [War] at all.
Even so, having signed a contract with JC Kings that almost reached the point of slavery, he still had two more years before being allowed to retire.
Whipping out his mobile phone, Zhao Mingwei then found a message from a former teammate in the Weixin forums.
“Is there a better game than [War] is this world?”
Zhao Mingwei smiled begrudgingly at the text, aware that it was a joke and not a real question.
Still, having no heart to read the forum messages, he aimlessly flicked his phone and suddenly noticed a curious inverted-triangular icon, with two simple words beneath that read:
[Sacred Souls].
He did not recall downloading such an unusual mobile game. The icon also stayed motionless when he tried to drag it to the bin to delete it, remaining still as if it had been nailed to the screen.
Was his phone having a problem? After Zhao Mingwei checked a few times and found that there was no issue aside from the Sacred Souls app, he turned on his antivirus software… which also found nothing.
Are viruses that terrific nowadays?
Nonetheless, Zhao Mingwei clicked inside the app out of curiosity.
The interface was simple and had only two buttons: ‘guide’ and ‘login’.
He roughly looked through the guide and understood that it was a virtual world app, and that users would enter the game world of Sacred Souls the moment anyone logged in.
Anyone normal would find the guide a load of foolery. Logging in to a VR game with a mobile phone? Not even cutting-edge technology could achieve them.
Even so, as Zhao Mingwei entered with a might-as-well-give-it-a-try attitude, the image in front of his eyes turned immediately.
When he recovered, he realized that he was inside a pure-white world, and a semi-transparent data field appeared before him.
Being a veteran gamer, Zhao Mingwei was familiar with everything he saw: editing character appearance, class, name and so forth was just a few options more than what [War] offered.
Nonetheless, it took him almost an hour to make an acceptable appearance despite the fact that only human characters were available in Scared Souls at the moment. After that, he almost did not think before choosing the Fighter class and keyed in ‘Giggle’ as his ID, but after a long moment of hesitation, he deleted it and instead typed ‘HappyGamer’.
“Character creation complete. Welcome to the world of Sacred Souls.”
A flat voice spoke beside Zhao Mingwei’s ears and the radiance in front of him quickly faded. When he opened his eyes again, he found himself on the street of a great city.
He then found that he was wearing white fingerless glove, and that he had also changed from his modern clothes to a Fighter’s training garb.
“A newcomer?!”
A warm greeting echoed before Zhao Ming could familiarize himself with the system, and he looked up to find another player dressed like a mage running towards him.
His ID read ‘NoUpdatesToday’.