The next day was the weekend, and the warm, bright sunlight slanted through the glass window, casting a golden glow into the room.
Raven-feathered eyelashes fluttered slightly, and after a long moment, the youth slowly opened his eyes.
He sat up, his back facing the window, his hair casting a silvery sheen under the sunlight. There was still a slight ache in his chest, but it was much better than the night before.
The memories of the attack gradually returned… Lin Qiansheng, who was rubbing his tired and sore eyes, suddenly froze.
Last night, did he accidentally send a friend request to Lu Xincheng’s account?
This was the first time Lin Qiansheng resented his own extraordinary memory. If he hadn’t remembered it, he could have pretended it didn’t exist; however, now that he remembered, he couldn’t forget it even if he tried.
He could only tell himself that fortunately, it was just a secondary account, and with the countless people adding Lu Xincheng every single day, it shouldn’t cause any problems.
Right?
For some reason, a trace of unease lingered in his heart. Lin Qiansheng decided to distract himself with something else, glancing at the alarm clock to find it was already noon at twelve o’clock.
By the time he finished freshening up and walked downstairs to the living room, a rich, mouth-watering aroma of home-cooked food was drifting from the kitchen.
Lin Qiansheng was somewhat surprised. Normally, only he and Dr. Bai lived in this house, and as for the food they cooked…
Aroma? That simply didn’t exist.
Being edible was already a luxury.
He glanced into the kitchen and saw a black-haired boy standing at a height of over one meter seventy, wearing a pink apron while stir-frying dishes. On the counter beside him sat a plate of shredded pork in garlic sauce, freshly cooked and still steaming with heat.
Hearing the movement, Lu Jing turned his head and, upon seeing who it was, his expression instantly shifted as he barked, “Didn’t you see I’m busy? Hurry up and dish out the rice and carry the food over!”
Lin Qiansheng was slightly taken aback. “You know how to cook.”
The boy wrinkled his nose and retorted, “What kind of nonsense question is that? Why wouldn’t I know how?” With that, he pointed the spatula in his hand toward the finished dish. “Hurry up and take it away, get out of here and don’t come back in! You’re an eyesore!”
Lin Qiansheng suddenly found this rather amusing. He good-naturedly agreed, and just as he was about to step into the kitchen, Lu Jing let out a huff and abruptly changed his tone: “Hah, waking up this late—do you know a huge disaster has happened?”
As if on cue, right after those words left his mouth, Lin Qiansheng’s communicator chimed.
Ding—Ding—Ding
Three consecutive times.
This gave Lin Qiansheng another bout of bad premonition. He carried the plate to the living room table and opened his terminal.
Zhang Zhou had sent him three consecutive messages. The first was a big thumbs-up, and the second read: Teacher Lin is a beast!
As for the third message, it contained two screenshots.
The first was a screenshot from the gaming forum. The thread on the screen was marked as “hot,” and its topic was none other than: F, does anyone know who that secondary account is that suddenly airdropped onto the Pollution Star Solo Points Leaderboard?*
By the time the screenshot was taken, the thread had already reached two to three thousand likes and seven to eight thousand replies.
Compared to the time the Star Sea Academy forum had blown up that night, the buzz this time was even higher—and not just by a factor of one or two.
Following the link in the image, Lin Qiansheng rather clumsily registered an account and poked his way in. The forum interface looked a bit rudimentary, dominated by a starry-blue color scheme, with the real-time online user count displayed in the upper right corner.
Right at that moment, the real-time online count was 123,000 people.
After maintaining silence for a long while, he exited the forum and opened the second screenshot. The second screenshot showed a trending search topic on the StarNet that had briefly surged to the top ten: The Virtual Life Solo Points Leaderboard Has Changed Hands!
Although he didn’t use StarNet very often, he still understood a thing or two about trending searches; for a topic to organically climb into the top ten, the level of public attention was self-evident.
Lin Qiansheng’s calm expression finally cracked.
The students at Star Sea Academy numbered only in the tens of thousands, and the forum’s daily active users barely reached eight thousand even on a good day.
Coupled with his identity as a teacher at the Mecha Academy, no matter how outrageous an event happened to him at school, the spread of the news remained strictly confined within the campus.
This time, however, was completely different. According to what Lu Jing had said, Virtual Life could currently be considered an ultra-empire-level game, exploding in popularity across the entire interstellar community.
Its viral spread might not even stop at the borders of the empire.
But he had genuinely thought those pollutants were just ordinary little mobs found everywhere!!
Cutting down minor mobs like slicing vegetables was completely normal, right!
Besides, because he hadn’t touched a mecha in a very long time, he had actually messed up and made several mistakes.
Lin Qiansheng tried hard to maintain his composure and replied: [How did you know it was me?]
After a few minutes, Zhang Zhou replied: […That account used to be mine, actually.]
Zhang Zhou held a fair amount of popularity within the Virtual Life game, boasting around four to five hundred thousand followers.
He hadn’t checked his group chats that night, having been abruptly woken up at one or two in the morning by a gaming buddy’s phone call. Still half-asleep, the moment he heard his friend say that a secondary account had magically airdropped into third place on the leaderboard, his sleepiness vanished instantly, and he rushed into the game.
The very first glance at that obviously secondary account gave him a strange sense of familiarity, and upon taking a second look, he realized it wasn’t just familiar—he actually had that account on his friends list.
“…F.”*
He had already finished his livestream by then; otherwise, if this sight had gone live, his private messages probably would have exploded right then and there.
Right away, Zhang Zhou called Lu Jing: [Holy crap, where on earth did you find a professional booster, kid? You haven’t even played much on that secondary account, yet with that gear, you managed to climb to third place??]
Lu Jing hadn’t gone to sleep in the middle of the night either. After picking up the phone, he impatiently snapped back: [Find a booster my ass! That was played by Lin Qiansheng!]
Then both of them fell silent, plunging into quietness.
After a long while, Zhang Zhou muttered in disbelief: [Lin Qiansheng?]
[Yeah. Even though he claimed it was just a bug, do you believe that?]
Zhang Zhou didn’t believe it either.
He only felt that this was ridiculously insane.
Who could have guessed that a hidden, overpowered master was actually living right beside him?
At that moment, he felt endlessly grateful that he had reformed ahead of time and hadn’t leaked any whispers about it at school. After all, according to novels, such overpowered big shots hiding their identities must have some sort of deep reason for doing so, and he certainly wasn’t going to ruin it.
After hanging up the phone, Zhang Zhou, who already had Lin Qiansheng’s terminal number, quickly tracked down Lin Qiansheng’s StarNet account.
It looked like Lin Qiansheng rarely logged into his StarNet account either; the profile only contained a few landscape photos, some of which featured sceneries so bizarre that they even made Zhang Zhou suspect they were photoshopped.
The follower count on Lin Qiansheng’s StarNet account was pitifully small—only two or three hundred people. Stripping away dead accounts, the rest were all students from the Maintenance Department, with some having graduated several years prior.
Terrified of bringing trouble to Lin Qiansheng, Zhang Zhou didn’t dare use his main account to follow him. When he switched to a secondary account to hit follow, it landed precisely on the milestone of being the three-hundredth follower.
Although ordinary people could pilot mechas in Virtual Life, under identical conditions of level and equipment, players lacking formal training simply couldn’t compare to professional pilots.
This was precisely why the top spots on the leaderboard had been monopolized by the same individuals for a long time.
While there was no official public statement, everyone tacitly knew the true identities of the top-ranking players.
They were either members of the military or interstellar fugitives boasting Grade S threat levels.
Therefore, failing to match their score was completely normal!
Yet today, a secondary account had suddenly airdropped out of nowhere, shattering the long-standing monopoly held by the top three.
The number of people paying attention to this could only be described as terrifying.
Right now, the Virtual Life forum was practically being flooded by posts discussing this mysterious secondary account rocketing straight to third place.
If people found out the true identity of the person who piloted that secondary account to third place, it would spell trouble for Lin Qiansheng, who was burdened with a “mission” and required to keep a low profile.
Therefore, before Lin Qiansheng could even speak up, Zhang Zhou preemptively replied: [Teacher, don’t worry! I won’t let a word of this slip out. Nobody will ever find out who the owner of that account is!]
Upon receiving this message, Lin Qiansheng let out a sigh of relief. No matter how chaotic the virtual world got, as long as it didn’t impact his real life, he didn’t care.
“Hey, where’s that doctor?” Lu Jing asked, frowning as he brought the remaining dishes out from the kitchen and noticed only Lin Qiansheng in the living room.
Lin Qiansheng put down his terminal. “He’s probably in the laboratory.”
Lu Jing casually set the food on the table, a look of disdain crossing his eyes. “Two grown adults and neither of you knows how to cook. Go call him to eat!”
“No need to call him.” Lin Qiansheng smiled faintly. “When he’s engrossed in an experiment, he can’t hear a single sound.”
Remembering another extremely crucial matter, Lin Qiansheng paused for a moment and continued: “By the way, you must remember one thing while staying here: never go into the laboratory.”
“Why?”
“There are many highly toxic creatures inside the laboratory. If you touch them by accident, it could be life-threatening.”
Lu Jing widened his cat-like eyes and glanced toward the direction of the laboratory. The wooden door of the lab looked somewhat aged and dilapidated, its lock long rusted over, while faint dark-red stains and animal claw marks were vaguely visible across the surface.
Though harboring a shred of curiosity, Lu Jing wasn’t completely reckless and quickly responded with an “Oh.”
Lin Qiansheng smiled. “Also, that holographic helme—”
Before Lin Qiansheng could finish, he was interrupted by Lu Jing. The boy arched an eyebrow and let out a cold snort: “I don’t want that piece of junk anymore. The account belongs to you now, and whatever happens to it has nothing to do with me, so don’t bring it up to me.”
Fine then.
Holographic helmets weren’t cheap; throwing it away would be quite a waste. Lin Qiansheng had no choice but to keep it for now, though until the hype died down, he figured he wouldn’t log back online anytime soon.
Meanwhile, Wen Fenghyu, who had also slept straight until noon, woke up on the living room sofa. His very first priority was logging into the game to check if that secondary account—which had managed to edge just a fraction ahead of him—had accepted his friend request.
However, whether it was due to having gone to sleep way too late last night or pure absent-mindedness during login, he accidentally tapped the wrong profile and logged into Lu Xincheng’s account instead.
Back when Virtual Life first launched, Wen Fenghyu was the one who had dragged Lu Xincheng into playing it. Although Lu Xincheng hadn’t played much since, his account remained saved on Wen Fenghyu’s device, and occasionally Wen Fenghyu would help log in to clear out some side events for him.
Realizing he had logged into the wrong account, Wen Fenghyu’s first instinct was to switch back, but right before doing so, he casually clicked open the friend requests list to clear out the backlog.
He had no choice; the owner of this account was simply too legendary, drawing countless new and veteran players to submit friend requests every single day. If he didn’t clear them out, his terminal wouldn’t be able to handle the load and would completely freeze up.
Perhaps because the buzz surrounding the mysterious airdropped secondary account on the leaderboard was still dominating everyone’s attention, the number of friend requests today was significantly lower.
Because of this, amidst an unintentional glance, he spotted an account wedged deep inside the request queue—an account he had tried desperately to add in the past, yet failed to connect with no matter what.
A deep, resentful look filled the man’s eyes as he hovered his mouse cursor back and forth between the green checkmark and the red cross, though he only dared to put on a show since he wasn’t the actual owner of the account.
Who was he? He was the magnificent Movie Emperor Wen, adored by millions of maidens! How could anyone possibly reject his friend request?! Only to turn around and add the Admiral instead.
Suffering yet another defeat, Wen Fenghyu let out a sigh. Holding onto the faint, hopeful thought that that little secondary account might have finally accepted his request, he prepared to switch accounts and check. Just at that moment, the front door of the living room was suddenly knocked upon. Feeling a bit guilty while logged into Lu Xincheng’s account, Wen Fenghyu’s hand slipped in a start, and he accidentally clicked the checkmark.