Feng Bujue needed a long time before he could calm down and come up with a reasonable explanation for what had happened earlier. He believed that this character named Woody was possibly not a normal GM, and his position was much higher than that of Pan Feng and Hwa Xiong whom he had met earlier.
Since he could manipulate a player’s log-in lobby in any way he wanted like adding a button, then leaving through the mirror should not be too difficult for the man. The identity that he had revealed, the strange things that he had said, questions that he had asked, after giving them some thought, Feng Bujue decided they were quite meaningless. Unless there were indeed some supernatural forces in this world, he was purposely making a mystery out of everything.
Assuming that everything that he had seen was real and the resurgence of his fear… that meant that his illness was recovering, and he had started to feel fear again. That… should be a good thing, right?
In any case, that was the only logical explanation that Feng Bujue could come up with. What about illogical explanation? Woody’s words were the illogical explanation…
After coming up with this ’logical’ conclusion, Feng Bujue stopped thinking about it. After all, other than coming to play a prank on him, the high-level GM did not warn him against playing the game because he was ’immune to fear’. Because of that, Feng Bujue felt strangely emboldened.
He tossed this little interlude out of his mind to prevent it from interrupting his mood of playing the open beta. He moved his gaze back to the control panel next to the elevator door. There were four buttons left, and there was nothing suspicious about them, so they should be the buttons that were meant to exist normally.
’Storage’ was naturally the space to accept and store the rewards from the rating review. Feng Bujue had not received the rewards from his previous scenario, and that was what he planned to do. However, he reminded himself that since the market was open, he would have more use for Game Coins. Therefore, he did not hurry to get the reward and decided to visit other places first so that he knew what the best reward for him to pick was.
First, Feng Bujue pressed the button for the Conference Room, and the system audio said, “Your conference room has been created. You can invite your friend, teammates, and players not in your blacklist to enter the conference room to communicate. The limit on players allowed in the room is ten players.
“When you are in the conference room, market, or Thriller Box, you can use the new text chat to communicate with others.”
After the notification ended, the elevator doors opened. It revealed a metallic room slightly larger than the storage. It was bright and spacious. In the middle of the room was a long table, and around it were ten black lounge chairs with back support and wheels. The surface of the table was silvery white and looked like a smooth, even surface, but upon closer inspection, one would notice that there were ten circular surfaces that were slightly different in color around the edge.
After Feng Bujue stepped into the room, the elevator behind him closed automatically. He hesitated because that did not happen when he visited the storage. He turned back to look, and on the side of the conference, there was also a control panel next to the door. It was obviously used for entry and exit.
“At the ’conference table’, you can access a specific menu to view the items in your inventory and storage. Without actually taking out the item, you can directly display its attributes on the table.”
When he saw the notification, he decided to try it out with Mario’s Wrench. A 3D image showing the item’s shape immediately floated up above the table, and it was slowly spinning on its own. The item attribute showed up inside the conference table’s menu. If there were other people seated at the table, they would have been able to view this menu as well.
“Ah… Other than exchanging information, equipment, and items with team members, this place can be used to conduct a private auction,” Feng Bujue said.
This function of the conference table was to display certain items to a group of people because, during normal occasions, you would have to hand the item over to someone if you wanted them to look at its attributes. During the closed beta, this could only be done voluntarily without asking anything in return, but during the open beta, the party that handed over the item could choose to ’gift’, ’trade’, or ’show’ depending of the situation. The chosen function would be carried out as soon as the brain signal traveled to the system; the players would not need to spend a whole minute trying to pull the items out of their bags.
Feng Bujue stepped away from the table, and the item display stopped automatically. He pressed the button next to the elevator, and the doors reopened. When he stepped into it, the doors closed again.
Then, he pressed the button for the market, and the system said, “Connecting you to the market. Please wait a moment… Your Zone Number is 17.
“The Market is a large public space, and to prevent overcrowding, many zones are generated. You can select a default zone to connect to in the log-in lobby, but if that is not set up, the system will assign you to a zone that is relatively empty. Each zone can support five thousand players at most, and you’ll be placed into a queue should the zone that you wish to connect be full.”
After the notification ended, the doors opened. The first impression that Feng Bujue got was that of the New York Trade Center, but this space was even larger. A metallic building that looked like a lightning rod was placed in the middle of the market. Around it, from two meters up to eight meters, the wall was filled with screens updating the game data. The crowd surrounding this ’information tower’ was the heaviest, and it reminded Feng Bujue of the Hong Kong stock market in the 90s.
After Feng Bujue walked out from the elevator, the doors closed after several seconds, and then they quickly opened again to spit out another player. He turned to look and realized that, on this side of the building, there were around one hundred identical elevators arranged neatly in a row. They kept opening and closing, with players entering and leaving every minute. Those doors were merely the interjection between the log-in lobby and the market, and they would lead to different places. When he needed to leave, Feng Bujue could take any of the elevators to return to his log-in lobby.
Of course, there were people who had tested walking into the same elevator together, but that would not work; one of them would be blocked by an invisible wall. It was the same for the conference room. If a player was invited to join another player’s conference, they had to enter it through their own log-in lobby’s elevator. In other words, the ten players had to come and go on their own.
Feng Bujue walked to the central area of the market and looked around. He realized that the roof was extremely high, so high that he found it impossible to tell how high it was. The walls of the building were curved, and from the outside, Feng Bujue believed that the space would look like an upturned bowl.
There were four panels built into the wall of the information tower, and they were curved, hugging the shape of the tower. On the four panels hung many screens where information was flowing. This area was the heart of the market—the Auction House.
Further away were rows of shops arranged like a night market. Those were official shops, and there were a few customers milling about. However, since the items on sale were fixed and they would have to wait until the next season before a new stock replaced the old one, players would normally look around, make their purchase, and leave, so the players that lingered there were not as numerous as the people around the information tower.
This zone was rather crowded, and people filed in and out of the crowd. Feng Bujue planned to visit the official shops when someone called after him. “Eh? It’s you!”