Building a Gaming Empire From Scratch

Chapter 1290: Chapter 1163 A Terrifying Guess Chapter 1290: Chapter 1163 A Terrifying Guess Players thought the development team’s appearance to impede their progress was a sign of weakness.

There must be something critical in the city, or maybe the defenses were simply not ready, with loopholes such as rules that were designed to be lenient towards animals but aggressive against humans, which could have let them barge in and cause a leak of crucial content from the next chapter of “Chang’an”.

This would have forced the developers to urgently go online to assist NPCs in stopping the players’ invasion.

This line of thought was logically sound.

But if they had experienced what Stanley had through the nights in Chang’an, being relentlessly pursued and targeted by swarms of robots, armored vehicles, and drones, and repeatedly dying to electromagnetic, sonic, and laser weapons, they wouldn’t think so lightly of it.

ɴ0νǤο.сο

——The closer one got to the heart of Cyber Chang’an, the stronger the defense forces became.

Especially after determining the storyline was set after the end of the [Corporate War], to match the world view and branch stories, the city’s defense system had been upgraded time and again.

Even an alien invasion could be fended off, let alone mere cats and dogs.

Their current threat level hadn’t even reached that of a “biological disaster”, and the triggered defense measures were still not strong enough.

Once the destruction they caused exceeded the limit, they would welcome the devastating assault of warships.

The development team’s appearance was just to ensure a safety net on the ground——otherwise, they wouldn’t have just sent over 30 people.

The total number of the Cyber Chang’an development team had already exceeded 600.

Even on a Sunday evening, a casual call to form a group wouldn’t have brought out so few people.

As for why they ended up fighting with the players…

The high EQ explanation was, “To showcase the brand new combat system, to give the players a little surprise, so they wouldn’t have made the long journey for nothing.”

The lower EQ explanation, however, was, “No matter what, we need to teach these players who are always looking for loopholes and causing trouble a lesson today!”

And so, a chaotic encounter battle erupted.

The fight was fierce, with gunshots and explosions echoing through the night sky.

The development team selectively showcased some new-style weapons, the effects of genetic drugs, and special prosthetic enhancements.

With human bodies and these enhancements, they gained a considerable advantage in combat, and the situation at one point turned into “the development team beating up the cats and dogs mercilessly.”

But since they didn’t want to reveal too much, the players soon figured out their tactics.

Afterward, the players began to recklessly charge in, trading lives for damage.

The unstoppable onslaught of cat bombs and dog bombs quickly started to take a toll on the development team’s numbers.

The drone operators, hiding far away in relative secrecy, never expected the dogs’ noses to be so sensitive, able to sniff out their positions from a mile away!

After draining the energy of their shields, a swarm overwhelmed and clawed one to death.

Then, a Samoyed picked up the operator’s AR glasses, wore them itself, fumbled for a while, and barely managed to fit four control cores.

It then changed classes to [Drone Dog] on the spot!

That was it for the development team, who were decisively kicked off the battlefield by the cats and dogs.

Cheers like a tsunami erupted on the spot, celebrating the successful beating of the development team!

Of course, the players had paid a heavy price——

Of the more than 46,000 cats and dogs outside the checkpoint, after the breakout and this encounter, fewer than 5,000 remained.

And these 5,000 cats and dogs still had to face an endless stream of NPCs.

The advance became increasingly difficult, and the slower they were, the more enemies they had to face, and the quicker their numbers dwindled.

In the end, they had to scatter, each searching for a way to survive.

Some charged forward boldly to their deaths; others thought outside the box and looked for sewers; and still others logged off and fled on the spot…

The situation became utterly chaotic.

Super Tomato, after the last two “battlefield anchors” died in the crackdown, lost the opportunity to continue watching.

The players who had charged in were not wholly eliminated yet, but this operation had already reached its climax.

And the outcome of the operation…

Was of course a great success!

After all, the players had made it as far as the outer city district, saw many different structures and sceneries, and had a hearty fight with the development team, experiencing the combat style of the next installment ahead of time.

This was already a huge gain.

——In fact, even if there was nothing else, just the victory over the development team was already a great achievement, not to mention all the intelligence gathered.

So — a great success!

Battle reports, videos, photos, intelligence summaries and analysis, even a pictorial book of development team members who appeared and a summary of ways they died…

Forums were endlessly popping up with numerous posts analyzing the success of the operation, even encouraging everyone to make thorough preparations before launching an even larger scale “sightseeing parade”.

Super Tomato watched with great interest for a while before going back to continue live streaming The Way Back Home.

By that time, Little Princess and Lincoln had already ended their broadcasts.

Lincoln, who realized what had happened late, even specifically mentioned Fred in the workgroup, sharply criticizing their performance tonight —

[Embarrassing!

Combat Power is not even as good as a cat’s.]

The workgroup immediately burst with dozens of question marks.

Then it was flooded by hundreds of laughing emojis.

Until the next day, when going to work, those thirty or so employees who lost couldn’t lift their heads.

They really wanted to argue that those were tens of thousands of cats and dogs!

They were armed cats and dogs that could shoot guns and use bombs!

Anyone would have been overwhelmed, not to mention they restricted their enhancement level themselves.

But no one listened.

Everyone just smiled, patted their shoulders, and said it was okay, it’s alright…

This left them feeling frustrated all day long.

*

Lincoln only stayed at the company for the morning, and after being busy for a while, Henry pulled him away again in the afternoon.

The first stage of [Digital Life] was completed, and the total number of people who underwent the surgery was: 317 people.

Far below Lincoln’s initial expectation of a thousand people.

However, as the first batch of [Digital Life], it was barely enough.

Lincoln went over, not to do anything specific but to visit them together with Henry.

These people were all in their nineties, with nothing much to do at home, so they were brought together to Xiajing City for centralized care.

The highest level nursing home, the most comprehensive companionship, plus they were age-mates with common experiences, living there was even more interesting than at home.

Even family members who were worried about them came along, but there was plenty of space.

After observing their daily lives and medical check-ups, Lincoln also observed in situ six who were terminally ill and died shortly after the surgery, having lost their bodies and become pure digital lives.

In the Mixed Reality Transformed nursing home, their life was no different from that of their peers, to the extent that no one even realized they had “died once”.

On this point alone, [Digital Life] was undeniably a success.

However, when Lincoln was observing the complex, chaotic, and massive underlying code of these digital lives, he couldn’t help but feel an uncanny familiarity.

This wasn’t something strange, as the code of players, the code of Secondary Artificial Intelligence, even the code of Hibernates, there were some similarities in form.

He had discovered this a long time ago.

But what made his scalp tingle was that these digital lives, at the code language level, possessed some new elements.

He couldn’t understand them, but he had seen something similar before.

After the successful decryption of the Consciousness Chip, Mirage’s total user count and player online numbers had seen several leaps, Mavis’s decryption sales had increased substantially, and this work had never stopped.

But the subsequent decryptions turned out to be fragmented and unintelligible.

And there were a lot of them!

Even yesterday, due to the release of The Way Back Home, Mavis decrypted another part.

Neither Lincoln nor Mavis knew what it was, which led to Lincoln gradually losing interest in the remaining “technology package”.

But now, staring at these obscure, complex, and difficult-to-understand codes, he suddenly had a terrible suspicion.