Chapter 2 - Your Father’s Coming
Of course, Jing Huan didn’t get the link for the voice changer. The other party merely threw him the words, “At the very least, we were once in love, yet you’re insulting me like this?” Then he blacklisted Lu Wenhao’s QQ.
Lu Wenhao was listless for a few seconds after seeing that, then fell apart. “What the hell? He blacklisted me? He still has the face to blacklist me first?! I want to dox him! I’m going to fight it out with him!!”
“Doxxing is against the law, and he’s not worth it ah Hao’er.” Gao Zixiang had a throbbing headache. “All right, you’ve already deleted your character anyway, don’t think about it anymore. How can people not meet any setbacks in their lives, right?”
Lu Wenhao: “This is a ‘setback’?”
“It’s a heavenly tribulation. After you get through this, you’ll be okay for the rest of your life.” Jing Huan continued, “Hao’er, which server is your account in?”
“Heaven Grants Conjugal Felicity.” Lu Wenhao reported the server name, then picked up a tissue and blew his nose. “Why?”
Jing Huan shook his head. “It’s nothing.”
He opened up his half-packed suitcase and put all the junk on the table in it.
Lu Wenhao moved his chair and sat down beside him. “Huanhuan, are you moving out today? I’m already this miserable, yet you won’t stay with me for a few more days?”
Their school rules were very strict. They managed a group of college students as if they were high school students by establishing curfews and cutting off electricity once night fell. If it wasn’t because freshmen weren’t allowed to live outside, Jing Huan would have moved out long ago.
So as soon as he became a sophomore, he quickly rented out a small place near the school.
“I won’t stay, I’m afraid you’ll get annoyed at the sight of men these days.”
When Jing Huan finished packing his luggage, Gao Zixiang just finished eating his self-heating hotpot. He stood up and said, “Huanhuan, I’ll help you move your stuff over.”
Jing Huan locked his suitcase. “No need, I called for a small rickshaw taxi, it’s waiting for me downstairs.”
Gao Zixiang insisted, “Then I’ll help you move it downstairs.”
Since school had just started a few days ago, and he intended to get new bedding and stuff after moving over, Jing Huang didn’t have much luggage. One person was more than enough to carry it all.
In the corridor, Gao Zixiang held Jing Huan’s computer and tentatively asked, “Huanhuan, are you all right?”
Jing Huan frowned. “What can be wrong with me?”
Gao Zixiang and Jing Huan were very close. They had been classmates since junior high, so Gao Zixiang understood his situation well.
Jing Huan came from a pretty good family, was handsome, easy to get along with, and could be said to be one of Heaven’s favoured ones. If a weird point of his had to be picked out, then it could only be on how much of a siscon he was.
Jing Huan’s older sister was called Liang Ran. Jing Huan got into fights for her in junior high, bought milk tea and delivered meals for her in senior high, and helped her grab seats in the library in college– if he didn’t know the inside story, Gao Zixiang would have surely thought too much into it.
Apparently, Jing Huan was almost abducted and sold off when he was a child. It was Liang Ran who went all out to haul him back, and she didn’t let go even when her arm got dislocated; only then did she manage to haul his life back.
Since then, Jing Huan has adopted only one stance – you can provoke him, but not his sister.
So when Gao Zixiang learned that Liang Ran had been cheated by a slag guy in a game and was even chased around the whole server by his original wife while she was denounced as the &#k2018;other woman’, he was constantly worried that Jing Huan would hire a hitman to kill someone.
But unexpectedly, he did not respond at all and even calmly sent Liang Ran to the airport.
“Huanhuan, whatever happened to your sister was all in a game, it’s just a heap of data. Don’t take it too seriously.” Gao Zixiang said, “Your sister will definitely return after some time passes.”
Jing Huan put his luggage on the rickshaw and turned back to say, “I wanna ask you something.”
Gao Zixiang, “What is it?”
“How did you know something happened to my Jie?”
Gao Zixiang paused, and his expression shifted back and forth. “Just, just heard some gossip.”
Jing Huan frowned. “Tell the truth.”
“…” Gao Zixiang regretted following him down.
He had wanted to muddle his way through this, but upon seeing how serious Jing Huan looked, he dared not spout drivel and could only honestly say, “That woman blasted a ton of server-wide megaphones and talked about your sister for quite a few days. So I…happened to see it.”
Jing Huan took a deep breath. “Server-wide megaphones?”
Gao Zixiang said in a hurry, “Yes, she hasn’t been blasting for the past two days, so she probably stopped doing it.”
Jing Huan stood still for a while and then said, “Got it, go up ba. I’ll invite you guys over for dinner after I clean up the house.”
Gao Zixiang nodded but still didn’t feel reassured after thinking about it. He repeated his advice to Lu Wenhao today, “Um, Jing Huan, doxxing is against the law, you know that right?”
Jing Huan got on the rickshaw. “Yes. It’s all just stuff that happened in a game, I won’t drag it into reality to resolve it.”
Gao Zixiang breathed a small sigh of relief, yet he kept feeling like something was wrong. Before he could think too deeply about it, the rickshaw had already set out and drove out of the school.
——
Jing Huan’s rented house was more than a hundred square meters. It was a new place that no one had lived in before. When he arrived, the house was already cleaned up.
He took everything out of his suitcase, turned on his computer, and placed《Nine Chivalrous Heroes》 in the download list with ease.
After he finished taking a shower, the game just so happened to finish downloading.
He looked at the client icon of Nine Chivalrous Heroes on the desktop, and he was in a daze for a moment.
Jing Huan was no stranger to Nine Chivalrous Heroes; he was one of the users in its earliest test server. Out of the ten years that the game had been running for since its launch, he played the game for six years.
If he hadn’t been warned by his parents due to his falling grades in his first year of high school, he would not have quit the game.
He had left Nine Chivalrous Heroes for almost four years, but Jing Huan was returning this time not for the game itself.
Liang Ran got to know a guy in Nine Chivalrous Heroes a while back. They met, got acquainted, and dated online just as other players did. Liang Ran attached great importance to this online boyfriend of hers and had even planned to meet him on Valentine’s Day.
But who could have known that on the day before Valentine’s Day, a woman who claimed to be the empress appeared and blasted Liang Ran on the World Channel for several days. She even put up Liang Ran’s conversations with that slag man on the forum, leading countless players of 《Nine Chivalrous Heroes》 to hurl abuse at Liang Ran together. It could almost be termed as small-scale cyberbullying.
Liang Ran was not only named as “the other woman”, but was also pushed into the center of the struggle. She had to endure the scolding of tens of thousands of people, yet the slag guy did not appear even once and just allowed things to ferment.
Liang Ran grew up being treasured by her younger brother and elders and had never suffered such grievances before, so she fell apart within a few days after this happened. After hardening her heart, she deleted her game account and went abroad to relax.
Jing Huan almost went to Shanghai to burn down the head office of Nine Chivalrous Heroes after he learned about what had happened.
The more Jing Huan thought about it, the angrier he got, especially after learning that the other party had also blasted her on server-wide megaphones. That thing was different from server megaphones– the messages it sent out could be received by all servers.
Liang Ran didn’t mention this to him, probably because she didn’t want him to get upset over it.
Fuck! No wonder his Jie deleted her character!
Jing Huan opened up Nine Chivalrous Heroes without any expression, input his own alternate account’s login ID and password, and entered the server named “Illusion”.
This was his older sister’s server. Jing Huan made a decision the moment he heard about what had happened to her– debts in game would be settled in game. He wanted to kill that scumbag guy thousands of times in the game until the other party apologised and quit the server.
But things weren’t as simple as he thought.
The fundamental reason behind why Nine Chivalrous Heroes could remain popular up ‘till now was because there were many ways of playing the game. You could become an expert at PK, a master at instances, a skilled forger, leader of a guild, a famous businessman in the Jianghu, and so on. Every method of playing had its charm, and players could choose how to play the game as they pleased.
And every player’s dream was to see their name on the ranking list of their server.
There were also many kinds of ranking lists: expert rankings, wealth rankings, popularity rankings, fame rankings, guild leader rankings, and so on.
In other servers, these lists were mostly made up of different players. It wasn’t easy to make the list after all; few people could give consideration to two or more fields at the same time.
The “Illusion” server was the only exception.
Jing Huan had checked the official website before. In this server, except for the “Guild Leader” list, the top position of all the other lists was occupied by the same player — “Yearning For”.
Jing Huan had just gone online when he saw two players who had set up stalls next to him chatting.
[Current] Maybe One Day: I haven’t been online for just a few days, and the saga with Yearning For is already over?
[Current] Lanbb: Yeah, that mistress already deleted her character and quit the game, what other follow-up can there be?
[Current] Maybe One Day: Tsktsktsk, and I was even hoping for a reversal too.
[Current] Lanbb: How could it have been reversed?
[Current] Maybe One Day: Actually, Yearning For is a really loose person who flirts with anyone he sees, and his character isn’t married either. You never know who’s the mistress in this affair.
[Current] Lanbb:… How did you know that?
[Current] Maybe One Day: Because he flirted with me before ah, but unfortunately a booster was playing for me, hahaha. He even flirted with my friend before. She wears her couple title every day, yet Yearning For dared to flirt with her too, and he almost angered her husband to death…
[Currently] Lanbb: Something like that happened?? Didn’t her husband say anything?
[Current] Maybe One Day: How could he dare say anything, it’s not like he could have beat him in a fight. I reckon that the whole Nine Chivalrous Heroes won’t even be able to touch a strand of his hair even if everyone teamed up.
Jing Huan pressed a hotkey for one of his skills and returned to his sect after a few seconds of casting.
At the beginning of last year, the official website published a screenshot of Yearning For’s attributes, as well as several of his PK videos in the arena. These two people were right. There was probably no one in Nine Chivalrous Heroes who could beat him.
But how well he played the game wasn’t what Jing Huan was concerned about. He had been at the top of the expert rankings on another server four years ago, so he was very confident in his gameplay.
But…it would take at the very least three years to create an account that could surpass Yearning For, let alone how the other side would continuously grow in those few years.
It was precisely because of this that Jing Huan’s first revenge plan had to be temporarily shelved.
But it was okay.
He came up with a plan that was even more malicious than killing off the other party and forcing him to quit the game.
Jing Huan opened up the official marketplace of Nine Chivalrous Heroes, clicked on the filtering of accounts, and started to select keywords for the game account he wanted to buy.
Server: Illusion.
Required level: 150, the highest level.
Cultivation and support skill points must be maxed out.
Gender of character: Female.
Looking at the filtered female accounts on the screen, the corners of Jing Huan’s mouth lifted up, and he coldly laughed.
Yearning For, your father’s coming.
—
Juurensha: Aww, that really does suck, everything that happened to JH’s big sister.