Lin Feng
Lin Feng is standing at the entrance of city's morgue in denial. Despite having seen Lin Fu's corpse a while back, he still can't come to term with his cousin brother's sudden demise. Both of them were still having a great time playing yesterday. Bai Xue has been a true slave driver and the two of them had been grumbling behind her back about the long demanding to-do list she has given them. They were supposed to be on another hunt today after work if he had not received a call from his uncle to visit the city's morgue.
The family has been in chaos since his uncle broke the news. Ever since he became a police officer, his family has come to term with the fact that he might one day get injured in the line of duty but getting killed? China is a peaceful society with a low incidence of violent crime. In most cases, criminals know better to surrender than putting up a fight to the death with law enforcement agencies. There are a few exceptions, drug traffickers being one of them since China impose the death penalty for those smuggling drugs in the country. Although Lin Fu works for the General Administration of Customs, his work carries minimal risk. He is not part of the drug enforcement task force or any of those departments that will put him in the way of danger. He spent most of his time behind the desk handling paper works and only occasionally he will have to go out on a random site inspection. However, it was this random inspection that things have gone horribly wrong.
Lin Fu and his junior, Li Yong was supposedly out on another one of those random checks making sure the shipping manifest and the cargo that arrived matches. Even if they somehow managed to find contrabands, at most it will only lead to a seizure and a fine. Two customs officers being shot dead in broad daylight has definitely caught the city's top leadership attention. There are a lot of questions but the initial investigation reveals that both of them might have accidentally stumbled on a drug smuggling operation. There is nothing conclusive at this point in time and until the investigation has been completed, Lin Fu's superior is not at liberty to reveal further information.
*****
It was two days later before Lin Feng have the time to login into . The family gathering has been one sombre affair and it breaks his heart seeing his uncle and aunt grieving at the unexpected loss of their only son. Lin Fu is only twenty-six and his parents will no longer be able to witness their only son getting married, their daughter-in-law getting pregnant nor any chance of pampering their grandchild. With the autopsy and ongoing investigation, Lin Fu's funeral has been arranged for this coming weekend. It will be a ceremonial funeral organised by the General Administration of Customs for honoring his death in the line of duty. Until then, Lin Feng needs a powerful distraction whenever he is off work.
"Disciple Lin Feng, the sect leader wants to see you now."
The instruction has totally caught Lin Feng off guard. He might be doing well within the game but nothing spectacular to the point that should warrant the sect leader's special attention. He is still deep in thought wondering why the sect leader wants to see him until he saw Lin Fu standing there next to the sect leader inside his office.
*****
Things have been confounding ever since the meeting with the sect leader. Leveraging on his relationship with Yan Wenming, he was able to secure a meeting with Yang Wenming's uncle who holds a senior leadership role in the central government. It took a bit of convincing before Yang Wenming's uncle is willing to arrange for someone to login into and initiate first contact. If what Lin Feng claims are to be true, there is no way the government will risk sending one of their senior official to meet up with an unknown entity for the first time. The amount of state secrets a senior official knows will be a serious threat to national security if he ever ends up in enemy's hand or is compromised.
Less than five minutes after the person arranged by Yang Wenming's uncle to login into After that, Lin Feng was either inside helping to collect data or in meetings with groups of analysts, scientists and military personnel. has quickly escalated into a top priority central government project. When the majority of personnel assigned to the projects being geniuses and elites in their field of expertise, it became highly stressful for Lin Feng just answering their questions and keeping up with the speed of their thought process. In just a matter of days, he felt like a highly incompetent fool incapable of properly completing the tasks given by those elites. Fortunately for him, he was reassigned after two weeks working with those elites. After the initial rounds of testing, the government leadership skeptically believes isn't an immediate threat and began allowing some of those scientists access to the cultivation world. They can now obtain the needed data first hand without relying on third parties like Lin Feng.
Those two weeks is more than enough time for the government leadership to decide on Lin Feng's new assignment. His old superior has been notified of his transfer to the newly established Virtual World Administration of China.
When it comes to anything that is not related to national security, the western world has an awful track record at keeping things a secret. Just a week after Lin Feng has found out the truth about , the western medias has started publishing news of a new era defining virtual reality game using technologies that prior to this, the public believes are just science fiction. The general public across the world were so intensely passionate that they ended up crippling the general lines for almost all government agencies involved in regulating digital content. Governments had to release official statement on soon after and it was also during one such official statement that the Chinese central government introduced the newly formed Virtual World Administration of China.
is a new virtual reality MMORPG developed by United Nation using a number of groundbreaking technologies jointly researched by scientists sponsored by it. Two of these core technology, namely the full immersion technology and time dilation technology takes up so much processing power that traditional mainframes just wouldn't do. It will takes dedicated quantum computing mainframes to run smoothly and the government has already begun building more quantum computing farms before the game can officially go live.
This will also be the official reason given by all countries why player slots for will be limited at the very beginning and the number of concurrent active players can only be increase with the completion of new quantum computing farms. All this will take time to accomplish.
Since the revelation of , beta players who are willing to come forward to share their gaming experience quickly shot to fame becoming the next up and coming internet celebrities. The guilds within the game has also quickly jumped on the bandwagon to garner fame and solicit investment to accelerate their growth. The media companies were out in full force tracking down any beta players that are willing to give them an exclusive.
Despite all the buzz out in the world, Lin Feng hardly had time for it. His transfer to Virtual World Administration of China is just a cover, a way for the government to hide his new identity in plain sight. His true assignment is with division 625, a new clandestine organization established to operate out of Eldorin gathering intelligence and resources for the expansion of the minor world led by the Chinese alliance.
Being the first batch of beta players have its advantage. After more than seven months "playing" , Lin Feng cultivation is now at the second major realm proficient stage. That also makes him one of Earth's most powerful cultivators and gave him the qualification to lead a team of his own. As per his latest marching order, he and his team will soon have to depart off world into enemy territory once the second minor gateway is completed two weeks down the road.
