Chapter 1 Special Invitation

At dawn on May 1st, Neither Si Yu nor Bei Ling logged on. Since they hadn't signed up for the competition and weren't in a hurry to level up, they didn't bother joining the crowds. This allowed Brother Jue and Xiao Tan to focus on the preliminaries.

However, as the midnight chimes sounded, only Xiao Tan successfully queued into the preliminary channel, while Feng Bujue... received a system email.

The title of the email was: [Congratulations! You have been selected by the system as a specially invited player]

The content was simple and clear: "Dear Mr. Feng Bujue, you have been identified by the system as a seeded player for this Peak Melee. You will directly enter the [Butterfly's War] stage and participate in the 'One Hundred to Fifty' battle. Good luck!"

The email was sent at 12:01 AM. In the same minute, the list of ten specially invited players was announced on the official website.

They were: [Tun Tian Gui Xiao], [Zui Wo Chang Ran], [Shiva], [Yama], [Wu Dao Ke], [Fei Chai Shu], [Xu Huai Shang], [Shi Dao Wei Wang], [Mo Cha Su], [Feng Bujue].

About three minutes after the announcement, Feng Bujue was inundated with emails from strangers, friend requests, and duel applications.

His mailbox was as if infected by a virus; the number of emails didn't increase one by one, or even in clusters, but page by page...

Before this, Feng Bujue didn't really know how many emails could be displayed on one page of his mailbox, because he always deleted them after reading, and he had never received so many emails at once. Now he knew... one page of the inbox could display thirty email titles, as well as the first line of each email's content.

Tonight, in the period from twelve to one o'clock, Feng Bujue received more than a thousand pages of emails... The page numbers at the bottom showed 1.2.3.4...999.999+... End. If left unattended, it was estimated that before long, "1999+" would appear after the second ellipsis.

"This game's system is really powerful..." Feng Bujue muttered, standing in front of the touchscreen. "Online electronic mailboxes applied for on the internet usually only have a capacity of 2-3g; while virtual mailboxes in online games are often smaller, and even have limits on the number of emails. But this one... has already been filled with over a thousand emails, and it's still receiving them normally..."

In fact, this kind of thing happening was quite reasonable. In fact, Feng Bujue was likely the one among the ten specially invited players who received the most harassment.

The reason was simple... before the list was announced, he was completely unknown.

Let's take a look at the current combat power rankings in the game: First place [Tun Tian Gui Xiao] (Order), second place [Anonymous] (after the list was announced, most players began to suspect that this mysterious rising star was Brother Jue), third place [Shiva] (Deities), fourth place [Zui Wo Chang Ran] (Order), fifth place [Fei Chai Shu] (this is a freelance player with no studio background), sixth place [Xiao Wen Cang Tian] (Jianghu), seventh place [Vishnu] (Deities), eighth place [Brahma] (Deities), ninth place [Wu Si Can Xuan] (Order), tenth place [Wu Dao Ke] (Jianghu), eleventh place [Sheng Yu Pian] (Order), twelfth place [Yama] (Deities), thirteenth place [Meng Jing Chan] (Order), fourteenth place [Anonymous] (this anonymous player is Xu Huai Shang, one of the specially invited players), fifteenth place [Kuang Zong Jian Ying] (Jianghu), sixteenth place [Qi Sha] (Blade), seventeenth place [Mo Cha Su] (Shanhe), eighteenth place [Shi Dao Wei Wang] (Shidao), nineteenth place [Cai Bu Pa Ne] (Jianghu), twentieth place [Tian Ma Xing Kong] (Xingchen).

After the cloak battle, Brother Jue rose out of nowhere with the improvement brought by Soul Intent, causing [Shiva], [Wu Si Can Xuan], and [Qi Sha]'s rankings to drop by one place. And [Cai Bu Pa Ne], who was originally ranked twentieth, has now come to the nineteenth, indicating that her strength has improved again during this period. And [Zhao Ying Wang], who was originally ranked nineteenth, has now fallen out of the top twenty.

Of course, the ranking on this list does not represent the outcome of these players' battles.

For example, let's say there are two players, one ranked fiftieth and the other ranked eightieth; and the player ranked eightieth happens to have a specialization or combat style that restrains the player ranked fiftieth, then once the two fight, the one ranked eightieth will definitely have a very high chance of winning.

But this will not change the system's ranking, because the system's view is: even if you can win against someone countless times, it doesn't matter. The key is, in the countless possible battles, how many battles can you win in total.

The system's evaluation method is to take the data of these two people, put them into the entire database for comparison and combat deduction... to obtain the average win rate. Then, based on this, the ranking is carried out. Perhaps the person ranked eightieth can win against the person ranked fiftieth one hundred times out of one hundred times, but that's useless. If they were each to arrange a hundred slaughter games and duel with a hundred random players, in the end, the person ranked fiftieth would definitely win more.

For the optical brain, this is just a probability problem.

Let's get back to Brother Jue's situation...

It's not hard to see that the other seeded players are all famous figures. Although that [Xu Huai Shang] also chose to be anonymous on the combat power rankings, her situation is quite special. Even if she's not on any list, she's still a star player. The reason will be revealed later.

In short, among the specially invited players, only [Feng Bujue] is a dark horse that came out of nowhere.

The doubts of the general public will naturally come like a tsunami...

If it were someone else, they would probably have already clicked the "Clear All Mail from Strangers" option in the mailbox. But Feng Bujue... yes, he has a reading addiction, but he's not so far gone as to read the content of every harassing email... after reading about two hundred of them, he only browsed the titles and beginnings.

Brother Jue summed it up, and basically, these emails were divided into four types.

The first type: Questioning. This type of email was the most numerous. The senders had never heard of the ID Feng Bujue, but after seeing the list of specially invited players, they had various speculations. So they sent emails to ask questions, such as "Who are you?", "Buddy, which guild are you from?", "So the second place on the combat power rankings is you?", "How did you get in?", "Are you so-and-so's alt account?", etc., etc., all sorts of questions.

The second type: Jealousy. This type of email was slightly less numerous. Some also had a questioning tone, mostly saying some sour things, like "Bro, are you a relative of the game company's boss?", "Rich guy, how much does a spot cost?", and even "Heaven is watching what people do"... In short, all kinds of malicious slander and nonsense.

The third type: Flirting. The number was second only to the questioning type. The content was similar to the pickup emails that Order had sent these days, but the styles were strange and varied, with all kinds of weirdos... For example, someone added a pack of loose chewing gum as an attachment in the email, with the title set as "Let's be friends"; or sent canned chewing gum, with the title "Two pieces together are the best"...

The fourth type: Inexplicable. Perhaps the people who sent these emails thought that the player "Feng Bujue" simply didn't exist, and was made up by the game company to occupy a spot. Therefore, they randomly typed a few characters and sent an email to see if they could send it successfully...

In addition, some emails contained "Hehe", "WTF", "Watching the God", "Professional Cheat Making", "Old Army Doctor Specializes in Treating Athlete's Foot" and so on... These can also be counted in the fourth type.

Feng Bujue faced this massive amount of email with just one word: Delete.

He didn't bother to respond at all, and had no interest in responding. With the help of the batch delete function, Brother Jue destroyed these emails at a rate of one page per minute. He also conveniently added the senders of the emails outside of the "Questioning" type to the blacklist, so as not to encounter them in the script later...

From twelve to twelve thirty, Feng Bujue basically didn't do anything else, he was just dealing with emails. This was half an hour in the real world, but in the game world... it was a full five hours.

For these five hours, Brother Jue sat on the folding stool, browsing the email titles page by page with great interest, deleting them page by page, feeling a bit like browsing a forum... But in reality, he was browsing his own mailbox...

He didn't know that on the real game forums, "Mysterious Player Feng Bujue" had become one of the hottest topics.

This "one of" must be added, because the players' focus was not entirely on Brother Jue. After all, there were other specially invited players, many posts about the preliminary experience, and discussions about the competition system.

Various speculations about Feng Bujue's ID probably accounted for more than 20% of the total posts.

There were countless players revealing information. Among them, there were indeed people who had queued up for scripts with Brother Jue, such as [Xiang Ni Shi Zui Gu Du], whom he met in the early stages of the game, and [Mo Ri Qiang Xi], [Zui Zhong Qiang Xi] of Corpse Blade, and so on. Feng Bujue had contacted quite a few players along the way, and with his character, others would naturally leave some impressions...

However, people who had added Feng Bujue as a friend, as well as those famous players, studios, etc., all remained silent about this.

Thus, a very strange situation appeared. Because there were too many players randomly revealing information and spreading rumors, some real news was ignored... Brother Jue's identity became more and more mysterious, and the more it was spread, the more bizarre it became... Some said he would eat people, some said he had eight hands, and others believed that he was a ghost living in the game world... One had to admire the rich imagination of the vast number of netizens. Feng Bujue had not yet appeared in a public competition, and he had already become an urban myth-like existence...