Chapter 165: A Dreamlike Start

Just as Wu Chang had anticipated, the Abyss game not only matched him with an A-rank instance, but one on the verge of losing control.

An A-rank instance on the verge of losing control wasn't worth paying attention to, but the multi-faction PvP mode of the instance caught his eye.

"Multi-faction PvP Mode: The instance contains multiple factions. Players choose a faction to join and help that faction achieve its ultimate objective. If the chosen faction wins, the player gains 25% additional instance completion. If the chosen faction loses, completion will be adjusted up or down based on the player's performance within the faction. The additional instance completion can raise total completion to a maximum of 75%; any overflow will be converted into base instance rewards."

"Note: In Multi-faction PvP Mode, players will not spawn in the same safe zone upon entry. The mode encourages competition between players; those focused on clearing the instance should take care to conceal their player identity."

Hide your identity, split up and join different factions, then let the factions compete against each other?

Wu Chang raised an eyebrow. It sounded interesting, but the problem was that the game system didn't automatically assign factions — it let players choose for themselves, which was very problematic.

If all players, or most players, joined the same faction and the balance between factions was thrown off, what then?

To secure that 25% bonus completion, all players sticking together would be the optimal choice — wouldn't that so-called multi-faction PvP just become a decorative setup for players to farm completion?

He didn't believe Abyss players would do charity work; there had to be some hidden restriction on joining different factions.

Either a player cap, or the difficulty scaling up with the number of players in a faction — in any case, trying to cut corners would likely backfire.

After analyzing the multi-faction PvP mode, Wu Chang finally turned his attention to the main quests.

"Main Quest 1: Obtain a ticket for the Star Leap and survive the full voyage aboard it, reaching the destination."

"Main Quest 2: Uncover the truth of the Silent Route."

"Main Quest 3: Choose a faction to join and help that faction emerge as the final victor."

Worthy of an A-rank instance — even the main quests come in threes.

As Wu Chang confirmed the main quests, his title, Master of Breaking the Game, activated.

"Current Instance Corruption Value: 100."

"Master of Breaking the Game attribute amplification: 50%."

With the Master of Breaking the Game amplification active, Wu Chang's current attribute panel was:

Player Nickname: No Beef.

Player Level: 18 (2060/6500)

Titles: Perfectionist, Master of Breaking the Game, True Wanderer.

Vitality: 62 (41)

Strength: 56 (37)

Agility: 50 (33)

Endurance: 45 (30)

Energy: 82.5 (55)

Inspiration: 104

Will: 87

(Note: Values in parentheses are pre-amplification attributes.)

Free Attribute Points: 0

Decayed Silver Coins: 2750.

Skills: Mamba Iron Elbow, Firearms Use (Proficient), Social Anxiety, Elite Stealth, Iaido, Combat Basics (E).

Arts: Thunder Art Remnant Scroll (B), Advanced Spatial Magic (C).

Items: Dawn's Weight Hammer, Lady Luck's Favor, Whisperer's Echo ×1, Mortal's Poison, Soul-Purifying Command Banner, Four Directions Year-Fire Lamp, Saint's Remnant Mask, False Miracle, Golden Throne, Arcane Trial Crest, Research Report on Miracles and Wishcraft (1/3), Healing Type I ×3, Minor Recovery Potion ×2, Energy Activation Potion ×2.

Talents: Salvation, Calamity Bringer, Sea Clan Transformation, Miracle Channeler.

The later the stage, the more powerful the percentage-based attribute boost from Master of Breaking the Game. Even within an instance on the verge of losing control, setting aside Inspiration and Will, just the points in his five physical attributes alone were already on par with an ordinary level-30 player.

Although as a balanced, well-rounded build, his peak combat power couldn't compare to those min-maxed single-attribute specialists, the well-rounded build won out in adaptability — no weak points, and when clearing instances, it allowed more room for error and was harder for special environments to shut down.

As for peak combat power — save the talk, let him stack up the Whale Transformation first.

As Master of Breaking the Game activated, another of his titles triggered as well.

"Title: True Wanderer"

"Title Effect: While equipped, the player will only be matched with True Instances. The method of entry is no longer as an outsider, but by replacing an existing native of the instance, perfectly integrating into the instance plane. Upon instance settlement, completion increases by 15%; this bonus can raise total completion to a maximum of 80%, with any overflow converted into base instance rewards."

Wu Chang looked at himself and found his body had changed — from a fitness-influencer's lean physique to a kimchi-style double-door demonic muscle man, the distance between his two shoulders wide enough that a cab ride between them would exceed the base fare.

He was wearing a white suit with a red tie, the tailoring and fabric extremely refined — clearly worth a fortune,

He pulled out his phone and switched to the front camera; in the lens appeared a middle-aged man of thirty-seven or thirty-eight, his hair slicked back in a pompadour.

The man's features were refined and genteel, but beneath the surface there was always a predator's viciousness. He tried on a few expressions — joy, anger, sorrow, happiness — and each one gave the impression that at any moment he might turn on you, pull out a gun, and put a few holes in you.

Behind him, four men in black suits stood in a row, shoulder-width apart — not only tall and broad, but each one bulging under his jacket, stuffed with all sorts of hardware, every one of them wearing "I can fight" right on his face.

Based on his Inspiration's perception, each of those four bodyguards had skills no worse than a level 27 or 28 player.

You ask how a few gun-toting smelly bodyguards could possibly match up to high-level players who look like superheroes?

Sorry — that's just how the numbers are filled in.

Just as Wu Chang was observing the four bodyguards, his consciousness wavered and an extra segment of memory surfaced in his mind.

The original owner of the body he had taken over was named Li Zaishi, eldest son of the chairman of Gao Mu Nation's fourth conglomerate, the Star Heaven Group — and the de facto controller of Gao Mu Nation's largest underground gang, the Star Color Gang.

The four men standing behind him were all his personal bodyguards; one of them was even the Star Color Gang's top enforcer.

In short, with his identity in Gao Mu Nation, as long as he didn't provoke the upper echelons of Midi Nation, he could do whatever he wanted.

Snapping out of the memories of decadence, power and violence, he looked ahead.

At that moment, he was in a reception room. Sitting across from him was a man nearing sixty, named Yu Jinzhe, the port's director, who was currently bowing and apologizing while wiping his sweat.

Li Zaishi's original plan had been to take his private yacht out to sea for a vacation, but yesterday a heavy fog rolled in at the port and a maintenance workboat lost control and crashed into his yacht, leaving him unable to set sail.

With his sea craving acting up, Li Zaishi had taken a liking to the Star Leap, which was docked at the port and preparing to depart, and told Yu Jinzhe to find a way to drive everyone off the ship and requisition the liner.

As a big boss, of course he didn't need to speak — his secretary would handle everything for him.

A tycoon start — money and men to spare, Main Quest 1 is basically a freebie!

If not for the underlings around him watching, he would have wanted to throw his arms up and shout: "Such a wonderful opening, please cheer for me, toast me, toast my triumph!"

Yu Jinzhe looked pleadingly at the secretary and said: "The Star Leap isn't an ordinary ship. It came with a mission. The bigwigs above are all watching it—they want to use it to test a new ocean-sightseeing route. The tickets were booked a year in advance. We really can't clear it out."

The secretary was very considerate. Understanding Yu Jinzhe's difficulty, he said with concern: "You worry about problems if the Star Leap is cleared out, but aren't you worried about problems if your department is cleared out?"

Sweat seeped from Yu Jinzhe's forehead again. Just as he was about to say something more, Wu Chang behind him spoke up.

"The ship doesn't have to be cleared out. I can squeeze in with the guys on board, but I want the best cabin. You arrange it."

Yu Jinzhe's face broke out in even more sweat. He stammered: "But the tickets on the ship have already been sold. Could you see about switching to another one…"

Wu Chang couldn't be bothered wasting words with Yu Jinzhe. He gave the secretary a look, then turned and walked away.

The secretary took the hint, bowed his head to see Wu Chang off, then turned around and looked at Yu Jinzhe with an expression of utter disbelief.

The world is vast and full of wonders—there's really someone tired of living, daring to bargain with the boss.

The secretary extended his hand toward Yu Jinzhe, as if going for a handshake. Yu Jinzhe, completely bewildered, took it, and immediately the secretary gripped hard.

The sound of bones shattering rang out.

Yu Jinzhe was just about to scream when the secretary quickly snatched a tissue from the desk, pressed it in his hand over Yu Jinzhe's mouth, and smothered the scream back down.

"Shh, don't disturb the boss."

Yu Jinzhe's eyes went wide. He bore the pain with all his might and nodded frantically.

The secretary frowned and leaned close to Yu Jinzhe, whispering: "Before dark today, arrange everything the boss wants."

Yu Jinzhe said through gritted teeth against the pain: "That ship is dangerous. You really can't board it."

The secretary: "What danger."

Yu Jinzhe wanted to say something, but just as he opened his mouth, he felt a stabbing pain shoot through his brain, stopping him from leaking any secrets.

"I can't say." The secretary shook his head, not wanting to get too tangled up. "A couple of days ago, a salvage crew pulled over a hundred oil drums filled with cement from the seabed in coastal waters. You don't want your whole family going diving together, do you?"

With the double assault of head pain and hand pain, Yu Jinzhe's mental state was already unsteady. Now under threat as well, a wild gleam flickered in his eyes.

"I'll definitely find a way to arrange it!"

Wu Chang left the Harbor Hall office building where Yu Jinzhe was. The moment he stepped outside, he saw the entire port shrouded in a thin layer of mist.

Looking into the distance, the closer to the sea surface, the thicker the mist. Within the mist, the ocean seemed to become another world.

The heavy fog had lasted three days. During the time the fog hung over the port, all ships were forbidden from leaving port. Only today had the mist thinned a little.

Wu Chang wore a conspicuous white suit, with four fierce-looking bodyguards behind him. This display was especially eye-catching, drawing countless gazes all the way from Harbor Hall to the port.

Most of those gazes came from curiosity and awe, but quite a few were filled with scrutiny and other meanings.

Obviously, those gazes came from players.

Before entering the instance, Wu Chang had done a certain amount of investigation on the A-rank instances ranked at the top of the difficulty list, including the Silent Route.

The Silent Route instance, like the Midnight Graveyard, happened to lie outside the Management Bureau's control, and compared to Xia Kingdom, was closer to the neighboring Bang Island.

!

As the watchdog of its master, Bang Island's relations with Xia Kingdom were extremely poor. Even without anyone poking at it, every few days it would bare its fangs, bark twice, and shout a couple of cries of loyalty!

Under such relations, the Management Bureau naturally couldn't conveniently intervene in breaking the Silent Route. It could only stand by as a recorder, thinking that if this landmine ever blew up, at least it wouldn't spread to its own house.

The Silent Route's true instance had an extremely low clear rate. The last recorded clear happened when the instance's contamination level was still 62.

Let alone a contamination level above 85 on the verge of losing control—even after entering a high-contamination state above 70, the only records left were of survivors bailing out halfway with life-saving props.

The intelligence Wu Chang could access showed that the Silent Route was an instance that took place on a passenger liner. The liner would ultimately sail toward a special Silent Sea area, where a dangerous ritual would be completed.

As for the details within, he hadn't purchased them, because each piece of information cost at least 5,000 Rotten Silver Coins.

When the next instance couldn't be determined, freeloading some instance background was about all one could do. Buying detailed intelligence was too extravagant for him.

The vast majority of intelligence on the Silent Route came from its projection instances.

Projection instances were convenient for gathering intelligence, but there was one problem: a projection instance was a reflection of the true instance at a certain moment in time—it didn't necessarily represent the current progress.

Simply put, in the Silent Route's true instance, over a dozen or even dozens of ships had vanished on the Silent Route over time. Each ship that vanished was an instance.

In the true instance, time kept moving forward. If you queue for the instance now, you'll only be matched with the Star Leap.

But if you queue for a projection instance, what you encounter is very likely not the Star Leap, but the Sun Leap or the Moon Leap.

In the Silent Route's projection instances, getting matched with the newest Star Leap was very difficult. Among the sparse intelligence on the Star Leap, there was one piece of unverified, questionable intel—because its truth couldn't be confirmed, it was released for free.

That was: after the instance began, there was a small chance of a special NPC spawning—Li Zaishi.

Li Zaishi was a Gao Mu financial tycoon, with great authority on the ship. Getting on good terms with him could greatly increase the clear rate, and might even unlock hidden quests.

The financial tycoon Li Zaishi mentioned in the intel was exactly the character Wu Chang was playing at this moment.

In the eyes of other players, he was a high-value hidden NPC. Naturally, they'd want to take a second look once they spotted him. If not for the four fearsome bodyguards behind him looking hard to deal with, some players would probably have already been unable to resist making a move on him.

And the very reason he was parading around so conspicuously was precisely to draw the players' attention.

In multi-player versus instances, players were scattered in independent safe zones and didn't run into each other. Players didn't know who else had queued into the instance, or even how many people had.

Only by running into each other would they discover one another.

What Wu Chang was doing now was using himself as bait to lure those players to bite.

The Li Zaishi he was playing wasn't the type of NPC you kill for gear drops, so he wasn't worried about being assassinated. At most, some players who'd lost their minds might try to use skills to control him—but his spirit and will were such that in the Wasteland Realm, no one could control him.

He could fish without danger, but the players who took the bait had better watch out.

If it was just ordinary passersby, fine. But if he ran into Evil God cultists, or dogs like the Iron Armor Gang, then he could take the chance to ambush them.

Wu Chang arrived at the port. Before he could even make out the lettering on the ship's hull, he saw a passenger liner wrapped in occult power. The concentration of occult energy was so dense it was no less than the terrestrial divine kingdom set up in Wanghai City.

No need to look further—this had to be it.

Because of the heavy fog, all kinds of ships were docked at the port. On the coastal rocks, some sailors could be seen worshipping a deity statue.

The statue was called the Sea General. It depicted a burly young man in colorful armor, looking heroic and extraordinary.

He was a deity often worshipped by the coastal people of Gao Mu. Legend had it that he could show the way to those lost at sea, bless sailors, and release the wronged souls who died in the ocean.

Legend had it that the Sea General was a drowned warrior general who happened to be saved by a Dragon Daughter. The two fell in love and became husband and wife. Later, because he often helped the coastal fishermen, he was enshrined as a Dragon King.

Wu Chang stood on the shore and took a few extra looks at the statue of the Sea God General.

It had neither crescent-moon eyes nor any horn decorations, so it didn't look like it belonged to the Tranquil Sect or any Yanshengzong Sect derived from the Book of Revelation.

Speaking of the Tranquil Sect, Wu Chang frowned, recalling the memories belonging to Li Zaishi.

Gao Mu's nation was known as the museum of evil cults, and among the most famous ones was one called the Xinyuzhou Sect; the Xinyuzhou Sect's emblem contained the crescent-moon vertical pupil that symbolized the Tranquil Sect.

Coincidentally, in his memory, the Xinyuzhou Sect's biggest backer was the Xing Tian Group of the Li Zaishi family — the kind that had been funding them since the Xinyuzhou Sect was still just an ordinary little cult.

Damn, the head of the Xieshen Sect Sect turns out to be me myself.

Wu Chang rubbed his nose, thought for a moment, and decided to order first.

He'd been in the dungeon for a while now and hadn't had a chance to eat yet.

While Wu Chang leisurely enjoyed his meal, other players were fighting desperately for ship tickets.

The Star Leap would set sail tomorrow morning; if they couldn't even get on the ship, that would be quite a joke.

Many players took the gold exchanged from rotten silver coins and went around looking for people to buy tickets from; the asking price had been driven up to a hundred times the normal fare, yet they still couldn't get a ticket.

The players were anxious, and the scalpers were even more anxious — practically going crazy — because they didn't have tickets in hand either.

As if to make things harder for the players, all the regular tickets on the lower deck of the Star Leap cruise ship were group tickets; the upper-deck tickets could be purchased individually, but most of those passengers had already had their tickets checked and boarded.

The requirement of Main Quest One was not to sneak onto the Star Leap, but to obtain a ticket for the Star Leap.

There weren't many tickets left for them to compete for.

Once the players confirmed this fact, they began to show off their various skills in order to get tickets to board.

Every system-native in the port area who might possibly provide ship tickets was tracked down by them.

Wu Chang had long anticipated this scene and had arranged informants in advance around the Harbor Hall office building, the homes of Harbor Hall higher-ups like Yu Jinzhe, and people like the captain of the Star Leap.

Every suspicious person who approached them was noted down in his little notebook, so that if needed in the future, he could go find them one by one.

Besides the above targets, he himself — as a hidden special NPC — was also approached.

At eight in the evening, having just finished dinner, he had barely stepped out of the restaurant and gotten into the car when his secretary took out the ship ticket Yu Jinzhe had sent, holding it with both hands and placing it before Wu Chang.

The driver was about to drive back to the hotel when he suddenly saw someone standing in front of the car.

The secretary frowned, secretly wondering why so many blind fools were running into them today, daring to block even the boss's car.

Fearing the boss would be angry, he was just about to get out of the car to handle it when Wu Chang pressed down on his shoulder.

"It's fine, I'll go down and take a look."

Getting out of the car, Wu Chang faced the all-too-familiar fellow blocking the car and said, "What do you want?"

He could tell the other party was a bit nervous, but the fellow still braced himself and said, "I can see your status is extraordinary, but your security around you is a bit thin, so I came to ask — do you need a bodyguard?"

Wu Chang looked at the person blocking his way and used every ounce of strength to hold back his laughter.

How did this poor unlucky bastard end up queued for the Silent Voyage.

(End of chapter)