Chapter 1 Getting Started

Two in the afternoon, the intercom at the door rang, and Feng Bujue, jolted awake, felt groggy and irritable.

Although he had bathed the cat at the pet clinic that morning, he had spent more than half an hour tidying up after returning home before finally collapsing. He hadn't even bothered to change, just flopped onto the bed and fallen asleep. It had only been six hours since then.

Stumbling to the door, Feng Bujue picked up the intercom receiver. "Who is it?"

"It's me," Wang Tanzhi replied. "Bao-daren is here too."

"Is the door open?" Feng Bujue pressed the door release button, yawning as he asked.

"Yeah, yeah, come on up."

A little over a minute after the call ended, the two of them arrived by elevator. They walked down the hallway, rang Feng Bujue's doorbell, and the latter, peering out the peephole, opened the door. He didn't even greet them, just turned and headed for the sofa.

Wang Tanzhi and "Bao-daren," not standing on ceremony, closed the door behind them, put the pizza and a six-pack of beer on the coffee table, and went into Feng Bujue's kitchen to get plates and chopsticks.

"Hey? Jue-ge, how come there's a cat?" Wang Tanzhi quickly spotted the little calico napping in the corner of the sofa.

"Didn't you see the sandbox in the corner? I'm raising it," Feng Bujue said groggily, twisting open a bottle of beer. He gargled it like mouthwash before swallowing...

"When did you start raising cats again?" Wang Tanzhi asked, tiptoeing toward the little calico.

"This morning," Feng Bujue burped. "Don't think it's really asleep. Cats are very alert. They seem to sleep for a dozen hours a day, but any slight movement around them will make their ears twitch. This indicates..."

Just as Xiao Tan was about to grab the little calico, it instantly opened its eyes, darted forward, turned a corner, and slipped behind the sofa. Xiao Tan, leaning forward, lost his balance and stumbled.

"Why did you suddenly decide to raise a cat again?" Bao-daren returned from the kitchen with plates and napkins, waved his hand, and motioned for Xiao Tan to sit down on the sofa. He sat down too.

His name was Bao Qing, and he was actually only a few months, a year at most, older than them. The three of them had been classmates from kindergarten to middle school, and Bao Qing had been called Bao-daren since elementary school. The problem was... he wasn't black at all, no one in his family had ever been an official, and he had never been a class leader when he was a student.

Who would have thought that Bao-daren would really become a "daren" when he grew up? He was twenty-five years old, a civil servant, working for a public institution, and his daughter was two and a half years old. He was much more stable than these two bachelors. Bao-daren's characteristic was that he always had a "melancholy" look on his face since he was a child, and it was even more so after he got married, with a permanent bitter expression.

"It's fate between me and that cat," Feng Bujue replied. "It's all about fate."

The two of them used the word "again" when asking the question because they both knew that Feng Bujue had raised cats when he was a child. At that time, an old lady next door had a mother cat that gave birth to four kittens. She gave one to Feng Bujue, and he raised it for thirteen years. The kitten became an old cat, and finally died of old age. The child also grew up and buried the old cat with his own hands.

"Did you give it a name?" Wang Tanzhi asked excitedly.

"Arthas," Feng Bujue replied very calmly, as if the name wasn't blurted out, but had been thought of long ago.

"Pfft..." Bao-daren spat out a mouthful of beer on the spot. "Even if you don't want Xiao Tan to participate in naming, you should make up something more ordinary, like Cool, Mike, or something..."

Feng Bujue snapped his fingers. "Arthas."

The little calico actually turned its head and "meowed."

"See, it fits perfectly," Feng Bujue pointed to Arthas's cat face and said.

"I'm going to post it online," Xiao Tan said, taking out his phone.

"Wait," Feng Bujue put down his beer, went to the window and opened the curtains, then picked up Arthas, who hadn't had time to escape.

Feng Bujue's hands passed under the cat's armpits, holding it up so that the cat's face was turned away from him. He stretched out his arms, held it up high in the sunlight, imitating the scene of the Lion King opening on Pride Rock, and said a line that had nothing to do with it.

"My son... the day you were born, the very forests of Lordaeron whispered the name... Arthas..." Feng Bujue said in a serious, low voice.

Wang Tanzhi held his phone, filming the bewildered cat from every angle.

"What are you guys doing! How old are you this year! Is this some kind of middle school male syndrome?!"

After being scolded by Bao-daren, the two sat back on the sofa, and Arthas slipped onto a cushion and continued to doze off.

"How come Bao-daren has time this week?" Feng Bujue asked.

"My wife took my daughter back to her parents' home," Bao-daren replied comfortably, taking a sip of beer.

"Permanently or temporarily?" Feng Bujue asked again.

"Nonsense! How could it be permanent! My mother-in-law just wanted to see her granddaughter," Bao-daren almost choked to death.

"You look like you've been liberated..." Feng Bujue said.

Wang Tanzhi interrupted them. He picked up the remote control and asked, "What's the theme for this week?"

"Bad Movie Marathon," Feng Bujue replied.

"Huh?" Wang Tanzhi turned his head.

Feng Bujue said, "That's right. We discussed it last time. There are so many notorious bad movies that have stood the test of time and become the bottom line of the film industry, and we haven't seen any of them."

"Okay... let me see..." Wang Tanzhi used the remote control to browse the available streaming program list on the TV.

When the three of them had time to get together, they would come up with a theme and watch movies for more than ten hours in a row. As for the films they watched, most of them were works from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. After that, with the increasing maturity of computer shooting technology and the popularization of fifth-generation computers, it was basically impossible to find too many bad films. In the future, no matter how bad a movie was, at least the picture and sound effects could gloss it over.

"How about *Ghost Rider*?" Wang Tanzhi said.

"Do you know *Daredevil*?" Feng Bujue said.

"Um... I've seen it," Wang Tanzhi replied.

"Same director," Feng Bujue said.

"Okay..." Wang Tanzhi searched again, "Look at this, *The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2*. Wow, there are actually seven films in this series." (There were two more in 2055)

"Haven't seen a single one," Bao-daren shrugged.

"I remember this movie swept seven of the ten awards at the Golden Raspberry Awards that year. Twenty years later, it was rated as one of the three most dominant bad films of the early twenty-first century," Feng Bujue said.

"I'm curious what the other two are... Don't tell me it's the other episodes in this series," Bao-daren said.

"No, it's *Battlefield Earth* and *Jack and Jill*. The latter swept all the Golden Raspberry Awards in 2012," Feng Bujue said. "I've only heard of them, never seen them. Why don't we watch these three today."

"Whatever." "Agreed," Xiao Tan and Bao-daren replied.

Two hours later...

"Are you guys okay?" Bao-daren asked, looking at the end credits rising on the big screen.

Wang Tanzhi looked at the floor with a gloomy expression. "I feel like I've lost something important..."

Feng Bujue stared blankly at the sunlight outside the window. "These were the most humiliating two hours of my life. My brain was raped..."

"There's still a science fiction film and a comedy film next... Let's watch the comedy first," Bao-daren's bitter face was incredibly solemn.

Ninety minutes later...

"Al Pacino's reputation is ruined," Wang Tanzhi said.

"The acting is beyond criticism, the plot is really..." Feng Bujue said, "Bao-daren, what do you think?"

No one answered.

"Bao-daren? Bao..." Feng Bujue turned his head and found that Bao-daren had fallen asleep with his eyes open, and was even snoring lightly.

"This despicable civil servant..."

Around six or seven o'clock, the three of them ate some unclean barbecue at a roadside stall. Jue-ge and Xiao Tan told Bao-daren about their recent experiences in Thriller Paradise, but Bao-daren said he wasn't interested. Men with families had a harder life and didn't have much private space or entertainment time. The three of them chatted for a few hours, and then dispersed around nine o'clock. Feng Bujue and Wang Tanzhi agreed to go online again at midnight to farm some scripts, and then they went their separate ways.

The friendship of these three was hard-won and very sincere. When they were children, they were all snotty, silly kids, and that kind of friendship was the purest. Even if they looked back at these friends when they were fifty or sixty years old, this feeling in their hearts would not change.

…………

Because he didn't get enough sleep during the day, and considering that he had to log in to the game, Feng Bujue lay down in the game pod at midnight. After the scan was completed, he selected sleep mode to log in and set the connection time.

[Access type is sleep mode, adjusting... Adjustment completed, please set the loading time for the game, or return to the previous option.]

[Setting completed, the connection program will start at Am1:00 on April 6, 2055. Good night.]

After listening to the voice prompt, Feng Bujue closed his eyes. The game pod was very comfortable, and with a little bit of drunkenness, he quickly fell asleep.

When he regained consciousness, he was already standing in that familiar elevator. On the screen on the wall, the current real-world time was displayed: April 6, Am1:00, but this electronic timer did not show the seconds. Moreover, after it felt like several minutes had passed, the time had not jumped to 1:01. Obviously, this was Thriller Paradise in sleep mode.

The screen quickly popped up with Wang Tanzhi's team invitation. After joining the team, Feng Bujue found that Long Aotian was also in the team. Xiao Tan had seen that the other party was in a free state and had invited him in first.

"Jue-ge, something big has happened!" Wang Tanzhi said as soon as he opened his mouth.

"Someone has already reached level 20?" Feng Bujue replied immediately.

"Eh? You already knew?"

"Just guessing from your tone."

"Hehe... Brother Feng is indeed incredibly resourceful," Long Aotian said. "At about twelve thirty, real time, the server's first level 20 player was born."

Feng Bujue looked at the team frame. In just one day, Long Aotian had reached level thirteen, and Xiao Tan had also reached level eleven. He must have gone online about ten minutes earlier and soloed a single-player script to level up.

"Is there an announcement in the game when the first max-level player appears?" Feng Bujue asked.

"Yes, all players in the login space will hear a system prompt, and this news will appear on the touch screen. Besides, the forum is already in an uproar," Long Aotian said.

"Let me see..." Feng Bujue opened the forum and found the official pinned post, with the title prominently written: [Congratulations to "Fearless Warrior" of the "Order" Studio for becoming the first player to reach the level cap during the closed beta phase!]