Thriller Paradise

At midnight on May 1st, Passing Rain and Laughing Soul did not go online because both of them did not register for the tournament. They were in a hurry to train, so they decided to stay away from the whole hullabaloo, leaving Brother Jue and Xiao Tan to focus on fighting their preliminary matches. But as the clock struck midnight, only Xiao Tan successfully queued into the preliminary channel. Feng Bujue, on the other hand, received an email from the system.

The subject of the email was: "Congratulations for being selected by the system as one of the VIP players." The content was equally succinct. "Dear Mr. Feng Bujue, you have been selected by the system as one of the seeded players for the Tournament for the Best. You will directly be entered into the Battle of the Butterfly and participate in the top one hundred and top fifty competitions. Good luck!"

The mail came at 1 am. Within a few seconds, the list of the ten VIP players were announced on the official website. They were respectively: Sky-Swallowing Phantom Dan, Lying Drunk, Shiva, Yama, Bladeless Swordsman, Uncle Worthless, Xu Huai Shang, Zombie Blade Victor, Matcha Cookie, and Feng Bujue.

After the news was announced, in about three minutes, Feng Bujue's friend request, mailbox, and duel request lists were flooded by strangers. It was as if his mailbox was infected by a virus. The emails did not come in single file. They came in page after page.

Before this, Feng Bujue had no idea how many emails would fill up one page in the game's system mailbox. He would always delete emails after reading them, and he had never received a large number of emails at the same time before. Whether he liked it or not, he got something that he did not ask for. A page within the mailbox could show only up to thirty emails in one page, and the platform would also show the first sentence of each email. That night, from midnight until 1 am, the amount of mail Feng Bujue had received reached over a thousand pages. The code of the pages showed 1, 2, 3, 4… 999 pages. If he did nothing, it would not be too long before it went up to more than two thousand pages.

"This game's system sure is powerful," Feng Bujue said as he stood staring at the screen. He looked through the pages of emails that he had received over the past few minutes. A normal online mailbox typically has two to three GB of storage and mailboxes in-games are usually smaller, and some even have limited storage. He had already received more than a thousand emails, but the platform is still accepting more. Actually, this was totally expected. In reality, of the ten VIP players, Feng Bujue was the most harassed. The reason was simple. Before the list was announced, he was a completely unknown player. No one had heard of his gaming ID before, so the other players naturally became very curious about who he was.

Let us look at the current combat stat ranking: First-Phantom Dawn (Regulation), Second- [Hidden] (After the list was announced, most players suspected this mysterious player was Brother Jue), Third-Shiva (Brahman), Fourth-Lying Drunk (Regulation), Fifth-Uncle Worthless (This was a professional player not affiliated to any gaming studio), Sixth-Smiling Divine Question (Jiang Hu), Seventh-Vishnu (Brahman), Eighth-Brahma (Brahman), Ninth- Understanding Death (Regulation), Tenth-Bladeless Swordsman (Jiang Hu), Eleventh-Sashimi (Regulation), Twelfth-Yama (Brahman), Thirteenth-Zen Dream (Regulation), Fourteenth-[Hidden] (This was one of the VIP Players, Xu Huai Shang), Fifteenth-Flashes of Sword (Jiang Hu), Sixteenth-Seven Kills (Blade Edge), Seventeenth-Matcha Cookie (Mountain River), Eighteenth-Zombie Blade Victor (Zombie Blade), Nineteenth-Not a Scaredy Cat (Jiang Hu), Twentieth-Pegasus (Celestia).

After the Battle of the Cowl, Brother Jue used the buff from Soul's Eye and carved a bloody road for himself, causing Shiva, Understanding Death, and Seven Kills to drop by one spot. Not a Scaredy Cat, who was originally at the twentieth spot, rose to the nineteenth rank, proving that she had gained more strength during this period. King of Shadows, who was originally on the nineteenth spot, had fallen out of the top twenty ranking. Of course, the ranking did not mean anything during an actual battle.

For example, there were two players, with one ranked 50th and the other ranked 80th. The player on the 80th had a mastery or fighting style that happened to hinder the player at rank 50. If they battled, the chance of victory for the lower-ranking player would be much higher. But this would not change the system's ranking because the system's calculation depended on how many times you could win in a possible numerical sequence of battles. Even if you could win a single person in a short amount of time, it did not matter. In other words, the system's rating method was to take out the two players' data and then place them into a battle simulation, hence coming up with the result in terms of overall probability. That is used as a basis to form the ranking. Perhaps the lower-ranking player would win a hundred times against the higher-ranking player, but that was pointless in factoring the players' ranking because players would be sent to fight in one hundred killing games with random players. In the end, probability-wise, the lower-ranking player would end up with a higher number of victories. That was why he would be ranked higher than the one on the 80th rank. That player would win in a fight every single time. For the photon computer, this was just a matter of math.

But now, back to Brother Jue.

It was clear that the other seed players were all famous characters. Even though Xu Huai Shang had chosen to hide the name on the ranking, her situation was rather unique. Even though she was not shown on the ranking, she was a celebrity player. The reason why would be explained later. In conclusion, of all the VIP players, Feng Bujue was the one who was relatively unknown. He came out of nowhere. Naturally, the player base and the public became hesitant, and they became quite suspicious of him.