Alexander Smith
A bloody toxic work environment!
"Alex, what the hell is this? You have been working on this for a month and you give me this sh*t?! How incompetent can you get!? The numbers of bugs are unacceptable!"
Alex can only silently rebuke this idiotic manager of his deep down. How is he at fault here? Each week he will be given additional instructions and sometimes these instruction is less than feasible. Given the poor planning, it would have been a miracle if he can produce something that works properly.
"Sir, you need to give me more time to work on it. When you gave me this assignment, I have already said the requirements are too ambitious and there is no way we can complete everything within a month."
"More time? Do you even understand the importance of staying within budget. You only have one week left to complete the program. Your head will be on the line if you fail to deliver!"
The manager than move on to harass his other colleagues.
Alex can only submit to the inevitable and work overtime to complete the program. His manager was a total brown noser. Regardless of what the top management wants, his manager will brainlessly say yes and his whole team ending up suffering as a result.
Today is Monday and the whole team will most likely experience another miserable week working overtime again. Alex mood starts improving when he thought that he can at least login to
Thinking back to his interactions with Hall Master Derrick and Inner Disciple Yuri, Alex would have suspected both of them to be studio's game masters instead of AI controlled NPC because all the NPCs he had interacted with seems to be equally sentient. There are more easily than a hundred NPCs at the base and wouldn't it be too farfetched if every single one of them are operated by a game master?
Too bad he can't brag about
On hindsight, Alex should have read through the contract before signing his rights away to the game studio. Some of the terms in the contract are kind of out of place and weird when he reviewed it later. In one of the contractual term, it was stated that "By agreeing to be a disciple of Immortal Ascension Pavillion, the said disciple will forever swear loyalty and never to betray the interest of Immortal Ascension Pavillion even under any extenuating circumstances. As such, said disciple will agree to have a rune of secrecy inscribed on his / her soul to keep the sect secrets."
Then there is another term that states, "To allow for the revival of said disciple upon death, said disciple agree for a rune of return to be inscribed on his / her soul."
An even weirder term stated the following, "To ensure the health of said disciple's soul, the time a disciple is allowed to access
Aside from the full immersion technology, the time dilation technology in the game is also beyond word to describe. Alex has no idea how the game studio has managed to pull it off but time is ten times faster inside the game. As he has spent thirty six hours gaming over the weekend, it translates into being in the game world a whole fifteen days. Most impressive of all, he no longer needs to sleep in the real world. As long as he time it right and slept for eight hours before being kicked out of the game, he will wake up from the game fully refreshed. This will mean that he can game through the whole night later and wake up fresh for work the next morning.
*****
Acting Sect Leader Maximus Radcliffe
To any sect, the rise and fall of a sect is dependent on the talent of the future generation. In their hunger for more talents, it is very common for fight to break out between sects whenever a prospective disciple with good spirit root or martial bone was found.
Maximus couldn't believe the latest report he has just read. The sect has now recruited five hundred fresh disciples and had their spirit root and martial bone tested. The result is nothing short of a miracle and will be the sect's salvation.
On hindsight, Maximus is thankful that one of the elders have insisted on keeping the full result of the spirit root and martial bone test a secret. His argument at that point in time is the importance that the "game" appears fair to the earthlings. If it is revealed that some disciples have good spirit root or immortal bone while others only have one that is either mediocre or poor, it might lead to unwanted questions. Since the whole recruitment has been under the disguise of a VR MMORPG game, it should stick to gaming logic of such games and be operated like one. There shouldn't be such a huge game character imbalance between players.
In an ideal scenario, Maximus would like to give all new disciples a talented body. Sadly, even an immortal sect has to abide by the world's law. Sure, immortal cultivation allows one to bend the world's law but bending does not equal breaking it. The disciples body are actually generated from their own genetic sequence and they are in fact using a body clone when the transmission artifact transferred their soul over to Eldorin. It would be for the best if less questions are being asked on this subject matter. The earthlings after all has a famous quote that says ignorance is bliss.
Top cultivation talent is ultimately inherent. Off course, there are rare treasures that can uplift a person cultivation talent but all sects would have treated such treasures as strategic resources. Redeeming such treasure would need special approval and great merits. Therefore, any sect that by chance have mastered a method to mass produce top cultivation talent would become the unrivalled overlord of the immortal realm.
When it comes to cultivation talent, it is split into grade one to grade nine with grade nine being the most inferior. Above grade one, there is still earth grade and divine grade but both of this grade is so exceptionally rare that it is rarely ever mentioned.
Whether a person cultivates their spirit root or martial bone, their cultivation progress is split into eight major realms. A cultivator gains exponentially greater strength and longer lifespan with each successful breakthrough in cultivation realm. With hundreds of worlds in the immortal realms and thousands of worlds in the lower realm, one can imagine the vast number of naming conventions for the eight different major cultivation realms. Despite the diversity in naming conventions, almost all worlds last two major cultivation realms are labelled as the king realm and emperor realm.
Out of the five hundred disciples, even the most inferior disciple possessed either a grade seven spirit root or martial bone and they are even in the minority. Majority of the disciples possess spirit root or martial bone grade ranging between grade six to grade three. Most important of all, there are a hundred and eight disciples whose spirit root or martial bone grade is grade two or higher. One of them even has an earth grade spirit root that can only be chanced upon once a millennium.
The initial close beta test invites come from an e-mail database the sect had bought from a game studio that had went bust. What's the chances that it is in fact a secret database of the top talents on Earth? If this is the inherent talent of earthlings, Immortal Ascension Pavillion will have the force to topple the whole immortal realm thousands of years down the road.
Under normal circumstances, Maximus will have a big headache coming when he reports to the council that the sect has recruited more than a hundred disciples with talent higher than grade three.
Immortal Ascension Pavillion opens its door to recruit new disciples once every decade across the whole immortal realm and lower realm. Base on past recruitment, the sect normally recruited slightly less than a hundred disciples with talent above grade three each time. With twelve main pavillions within the sect, each pavillion will only get less than ten talented disciples if it is evenly distributed. One can imagine the chaos that follows when the talents each hall can recruit is fair competition. The sect leader always has to step in in the past to keep the peace during this period because even the ever-dependable law enforcement department will join the fight for these disciples.
With billions more prospective disciples in the near future, there shouldn't be any more reasons to fight over something that that is no longer rare, right? Maximus is even looking forward to seeing the disbelief in all the top leaderships' eye. He will just leave it to them to figure out how the sect should plan ahead with this new discovery.