Twenty-three minutes left on the maintenance countdown.
In Sparxie's livestream, the danmaku had already thickened into a dizzying wall of text.
The viewer count kept climbing, new faces flooding in every second — all of them here to watch how the internet's number-one sponsored streamer, famous for trading insults with Su Yu the old scammer in person, would roast the new content.
She sat with her legs crossed, her face mostly hidden behind the mask filter except for a pair of red eyes, delivering commentary into the mic in a tone glib enough to spike anyone's blood pressure.
"Oh my, would you look at this danmaku — a screen full of poor little souls just dying to log in and get wrecked by the old scammer~"
"Once the servers open, you're not going to sit there bawling into a box of tissues over the story again, are you? Bunch of goldfish-brained masochists with no memory at all. Does it feel good being the old scammer's tear-harvesting machine?"
The danmaku exploded.
[Yeah right! Last time Final Lesson dropped, who was crying so hard in this very stream their mask filter glitched offline?]
[Exactly! Mouth harder than a rock, but cries louder than anyone! Sparxie the old scammer, don't get cocky!]
[I saw it with my own eyes — the mask filter dropped for a full three minutes, and your tears fogged up the camera, host!]
Sparxie stared at that comment, fingers tapping twice against the desk.
"Hmph, that's called a commercial breakdown, got it? Little old Sparxie was giving a professional performance to better serve her audience, you uncultured swine—"
[Host, your voice is shaking!]
[The host's breaking down! The host's breaking down!]
The danmaku instantly turned into a sea of glee.
Sparxie grabbed the cola sitting beside her, took a swig, and clunked the cup down on the desk.
"You lot are all talk when you're not the ones in the hot seat. Just wait — once the servers open, little old Sparxie's going to see who's the first one posting a sob-story essay on the forums about not sleeping because they got emotionally gutted!"
[That'll definitely be you!]
The maintenance countdown quietly ticked away amid the host-and-viewer trash talk.
Elsewhere, the mood in Elysia's stream was completely different.
Elysia rested her chin on her hand, chatting and smiling at the camera with her fans, while the danmaku filled with rapturous praise for the holographic projection over Arc City two days ago.
Elysia smiled and said into the mic, "Yeah, even I was blown away. I never expected Su Yu to have a surprise that big up his sleeve. He really does know how to grab everyone's heart."
The danmaku instantly flooded with "the old scammer really put in the work" and "just for that visual, I'm dropping money on the new character."
Just then, a red, eye-catching comment scrolled across the screen.
[Ellie! Have you seen the Arc City local forum? Someone caught a shadow flying through the sky last night — insanely fast, even left a sonic boom cloud behind it!]
The danmaku exploded again — someone said aliens.
Someone said it was an AI-generated CG video, someone else said it was the tail end of a drone show.
And someone joked it might be miHoYo's next promo stunt — that the figure flying through the sky was actually Su Yu himself.
The comment piqued Elysia's curiosity, and she pulled out another phone to open the Arc City local forum.
The forum's hottest post sat pinned at the very top, its title marked in red font with a glowing "HOT" tag beside it.
"SHOCKING! A Cultivation Master Spotted Over Arc City's Skies? Shattering the Void, How Terrifying!"
The post had a video embedded in it — blurry footage, clearly shot on a phone, riddled with noise from night mode.
Elysia opened it, dragged the progress bar to the end, then scrubbed back frame by frame.
In the video, the night sky over Arc City was a deep blue, neon glow bleeding upward into the cloud cover.
In one particular frame, there really was a streak of white light cutting across the sky, moving so fast it lasted less than two seconds on screen.
Elysia zoomed in on that frame. The image dissolved into a mosaic of pixels, but within that streak of white light, she could just make out the vague outline of a human figure, something unfolding behind its back — symmetrical, sharp-edged shapes.
She set the phone down on the desk and said nothing.
The livestream's danmaku kept scrolling.
Some were asking what she'd seen, some insisted it had to be a post-production edit, some were spamming "cultivation master" meme stickers.
Elysia watched the comments, tapped her fingers lightly on the desk twice, then flipped the phone over, screen down.
That outline — she'd seen it somewhere before.
Not in a game. Not in some show or film.
It had been in a real, specific moment — one she had witnessed with her own eyes.
But before she could untangle the thought further, the maintenance notice on her computer screen vanished, the game's login interface lit up, and the background music started playing.
"All right, the version update maintenance is over~" she said to the camera. "Let's set aside the cultivation master for now and dive into the world of Cyberangel together."
Her tone turned bright and brisk, and the danmaku instantly erupted with excitement.
In miHoYo's Director's Office, the big screen on the wall showed real-time server traffic data, the lines already climbing to a height that made eyelids twitch.
Only a few minutes into launch, and concurrent online numbers had already blown past the previous peak.
Kiana was holding her phone, watching Elysia's stream. She'd seen the SC and the forum post.
"Su Yu, look at this."
On the screen was that forum post, the blurry video paused on that one frame — the streak of white light and the faint human outline clearly visible.
"This white shadow online — it wouldn't happen to be you testing that new suit of armor these past few nights, would it..."
Su Yu glanced at the grainy photo, lifted the coffee cup in his hand to his lips, and took a sip.
"Probably some night owl who happened to catch it on camera," he said, unbothered. "Doesn't matter though — Arc City's already racked up a few hundred urban legends like this lately. The public's attention will shift to the game's story soon enough. Don't worry about it."
With that, he set the coffee cup back on the desk, his gaze settling on the data on the big screen, expression calm.
Kiana looked at him.
Her eyes swept over his face, her expression shifting from confusion to alertness, finally locking onto the corner of his mouth, where a curve hadn't quite finished retracting.
"Something's off with you." She smacked her phone down on the couch and leaned forward, closing the distance by a good several inches. "That look on your face — you're definitely brewing something rotten in your gut again."
Su Yu shrugged.
"Am not."
But at that moment, in the bottom-right corner of his vision, the System panel quietly lit up.
[Hidden Quest Triggered: "Suspected UFO?" — In Progress]
[Friendly reminder: spreading urban legends further muddies public perception, effectively reducing the future heat generated by "anomalous phenomena" caused by the Host's fights within the city. For example: gas leaks, natural gas pipeline explosions, construction blasting accidents, and so on. Good luck, esteemed Mr. "Unidentified Flying Object."]
Su Yu mentally flipped the System a middle finger.
Still, crude as it was, it wasn't wrong.
Arc City really had been having a few too many unnatural incidents lately. Having a ready-made urban legend to serve as cover beat scrambling to invent an excuse every single time.
He closed the System panel and casually tossed the empty coffee cup into the trash.
"What are you looking at?" Kiana's voice came from beside him, carrying the certainty of a hunting dog that had just locked onto its target.
"Nothing," Su Yu said. "I'm looking at the trash can. Thinking about the data."
"Liar." Kiana pulled her phone back. "You don't make that face when you're thinking about data."
Su Yu turned to look at her. "Since when did you start studying my expressions?"
"Since the first time you used that exact face to lie to me about there being no ghost peppers in the instant noodles. I took one sip and had to chug three glasses of water from the burn."
Kiana crossed her arms over her chest, leaned back hard against the couch, and let out a long, drawn-out hmph through her nose.
"Fine, forget it, I won't ask. You wouldn't tell me anyway. But next time I catch you red-handed, you're treating me to a month of HOMU feasts."
"Deal."
Kiana turned her gaze back to the big screen.
The numbers on the screen kept climbing, jumping a little higher with every refresh.
In a small window in the corner, the Cyberangel version PV played on loop, Bronya's silhouette flickering in and out of the data stream.
"Forget the online cultivation master talk for a second..."
Su Yu steered the conversation back, his voice losing its earlier casualness.
"Going by the pattern we've worked out, after a major version update, a Spatial Rift will probably show up in reality again soon."
Leaning against the couch, Kiana closed the livestream interface on her phone.
"Ready?" Su Yu looked at her.
Kiana flipped her phone over and set it down on the couch, screen facing down.
The playfulness and haze that had lingered in her odd-colored eyes were gone, replaced by the sharpness worn into her by months of real battle after real battle.
"Of course — this lady's been working extra hard lately! Just leave the monsters to me next."
"Let's go then," Su Yu said, nodding. "Before you fill up your merit ledger, we need to go to Anti-Entropy and get prepped."
Kiana had already reached the door. Hearing that, she turned back, the confident look on her face not yet fully in place before it got knocked sideways by his flat, half-hearted remark.
"Hey, what do you mean 'fill up my merit ledger' — the way you say it, when this lady rides out, it's not 'filling up,' it's 'clearing out,' okay!"
"Sure, sure, clearing out." Su Yu stood up, grabbed the jacket off the couch, and slung it over his shoulder. "You clear out, I'll handle logistics."
"That's more like it. But let's get this straight — recharging the spatial storage gadget is still my job. I went and asked Dr. Tesla this morning, and she said the operating procedure's all set, just waiting for me to go test it!"
"You're even more eager than I am about this."
"Of course I am — I'm the one you're trying to catch up to, so you can eat my dust way back there, buddy!"
Kiana pushed open the office door, hallway light falling across her face.
"You go work out the battle plan, I'll go handle my power supply — and then the two of us together will send every last one of those things that came crawling out of the rifts straight back where they came from."
Su Yu followed her out of the office and pulled the door shut behind him.
The click of the lock echoed once through the empty hallway.
He glanced down at the back of his own hand — the faint gold-tinted markings left from last night's armor binding were still there, catching a faint glow under the hallway's fluorescent lights.
He tucked his hands into his jacket pockets and quickened his pace, catching up with the white-clad figure striding ahead of him.
____
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