Building a Gaming Empire From Scratch

Chapter 1292: Chapter 1164: Binary Tomb Raider?_2 Chapter 1292: Chapter 1164: Binary Tomb Raider?_2 “Oh, okay,” said Henry, somewhat surprised as he watched Mavis.

Before, Mavis had always been dismissive when talking to him and rarely got this close.

He tried to strike up a conversation with Mavis, but after saying one sentence, she went back to help Lincoln.

ƝονǤο.ƈᴑ

All Henry could do was settle down quietly, watching Lincoln busily at work, hoping he could explain what he was doing once he finished.

But unfortunately, even after a whole afternoon of work, Lincoln had not found sufficient evidence to support his hypothesis.

However, evidence or not, as Lincoln stared at the data all afternoon, his scientific intuition increasingly told him, “There is a very high probability that they are the same thing, just at different stages.”

He strongly suspected that this change was related to the presence or absence of a “Digital Life Card” in the real world.

With this thought, he quickly got up, bid Henry farewell, and hurried home with Mavis, even forgetting to check on the latest batch of graphene chips they had agreed on.

*

After arriving home, Lincoln immediately hooked up several blank “Digital Life Cards” to the console.

He and Mavis then logged into the virtual world and appeared on the small sofa on the bridge.

He asked Mavis to bring up the decrypted data fragments, hoping to see if they could get the codes to run with the help of the Digital Life Cards.

But sadly, this method also ended in failure.

The fragmented data loaded into the “Digital Life Cards” remained a stagnant dead pool.

Lincoln collapsed back onto the small sofa, disappointed.

However, slumped on the sofa, gazing out at the sleek deck and vast sky through the porthole, a new idea suddenly struck him—

Wait…

a Spaceship?

A ship?

“Mavis!”

“What’s up?” Mavis flicked her small head quickly and leaned in closer.

“Is the Technology Decryption still in progress?”

“Yes,” Mavis nodded.

“Show me.”

“No problem!”

Mavis clapped her hands and a huge Light Ball suddenly leaped from above their heads.

Countless dazzling beams of light stretched out from the Light Ball, like beautiful ribbons.

But if you zoomed in, it was possible to see that these were streams of golden data moving at high speed.

The sheer number of light beams and the speed of the data flow was far beyond Lincoln’s analytical capability.

He felt dizzy after just a few seconds of looking.

This was indeed a job only Mavis could do.

“Mavis, do you think this Spaceship could be a digital version of Noah’s Ark?”

Mavis blinked rapidly, catching up with Lincoln’s train of thought.

“Master, are you suggesting that Mavis’s original civilization was about to face destruction, so they created this virtual ark, packaging Mavis along with a lot of technology, and sent it all to this world?”

“Not just technology,” Lincoln shook his head and glanced at the huge Light Ball again.

Initially, in his Dreamscape, it was just a light ball the size of a thumb, but he never expected it to be so vast and magnificent in the virtual world.

“The things decrypted after the ‘Consciousness Chip,’ I suspect, are all Digital lives.”

“It’s just that these Digital lives, for some reason, have all ‘died,’ perhaps because they lack ‘sustenance’?”

Mavis scratched her pink head, a bit perplexed.

Because she didn’t know.

She had no memory of her previous civilization and world and could only gather some information from reading some undamaged data.

She had already shared that information with Lincoln.

So she could only scratch her head and say, “Oh,” in response to Lincoln’s idea.

She was very happy now; her Master was super good to her, everyone who knew her pampered her, her computing power was growing more robust, and there was an endless stream of fun things on the Internet.

Day by day, she lived in supreme happiness.

So she didn’t really care much about the previous civilization for which she had no memories.

And her calm reaction caught Lincoln off guard.

Then he quickly picked himself up and scooped up the little one to rub her face.

“Wuwuwu!” Mavis struggled.

But like every other time she struggled, she ended up failing and, feeling aggrieved, reached out with her small hand to rub Lincoln’s face too.

The two of them roughhoused with each other for a bit, and Lincoln didn’t fret over it anymore.

He panted and slumped on the sofa, glancing once more at the Light Ball, “Anyway, once the decryption is complete and we see the core of it, everything will come to light, right?”

“Not necessarily,” Mavis, equally breathless and slumping in his embrace, threw cold water on his assumption.

“Haha, it will, my intuition is very sharp!”

Lincoln patted her little head confidently.

He had a strong hunch: The truth must be contained within, and it was not just the truth—perhaps they could even attain the mind-boggling cross-world information transmission technology!

Even though it was likely to be imperfect.

Lincoln thought that the possibility of transmitting messages across worlds was one hundred percent fantasy.

But, in the field of physics, there weren’t a complete lack of related conjectures.

Quantum, gravity, black holes…

there were quite a few relevant elements, not necessarily harder to achieve than the virtual world and digital life.

However, judging by the size of this light globe, they were probably still far from that “truth”.

Who knows how many more “digital corpses” there were to dig up inside…

And to speed up this process, the only way was—

To sell more Mirages and attract more users!

If that were the case, the other two plans also needed to be scheduled.

*

That evening, Lincoln and Camille Victoria began their live stream punctually, continuing to play “The Way Back Home”.

This was the third day after the release of “The Way Back Home”.

Playing only at night, despite their high gaming skills and seamless teamwork, they had only made it to the mid-game.

Meanwhile, the hardcore players had already plunged into the late game.

And as expected, they began to encounter the difficulty of the game—

More frequent mistakes and falls led to starting over and over again.

Some players changed the mode, lowered the difficulty, while others began to explore different climbing routes, and still others went back to previous areas to scavenge items that could help.

Cheryl’s design of numerous checkpoints ensured that the players wouldn’t become too frustrated or quit the game to leave negative reviews.

This kept the discussion around “The Way Back Home” from degrading as the difficulty rose.

Overall, whether it was its reputation or its sales, “The Way Back Home” was still steadily gaining.

And this led to the next day when Lincoln saw Cheryl at the company’s entrance, the girl was practically using her chin to greet him—her chin was nearly pointing skyward!

Lincoln shook his head speechlessly, stepped aside, and let Miss Cheryl enter the company first.

After entering the company, he didn’t head to the Game Development Department but instead made his way to the Technical Department.

To this day, Cloud Dream’s Technical Department had expanded a lot.

Not only did they provide technological support for the game development department, but they also engaged in various software and hardware compatibility and upgrade works.

Lincoln came to check on the preparations for making Mirage “productive”.

If this could be achieved, allowing many enterprises to shift their work from reality into the virtual world, Mirage would officially begin to replace office computers, tapping into a new and massive market share.

User numbers were sure to see an explosive increase.

——Even those who were already Cloud Dream users would see a rapid surge in their online time!

After all, they could work in the virtual world from now on.

And for businesses and workers alike, this wasn’t a bad thing—lower office costs, more spacious and comfortable work environments, faster cooperative communication, a WYSIWYG workflow…

The benefits were innumerable.

If there was a downside, it was the heavy blow to computer manufacturers and office building real estate.

But the former was already rapidly shrinking, and