Starting from Zero Vol 2 Chapter 3

Chapter 3 – Company Announcement

After walking around for 3 hours, they sky was starting to get dark but I wasn’t even able to buy a single potion or piece of armour, not because I could not find a shop, but because they were all closed. Ever since those 5 knights had left, I had not seen even a shadow of a person, in addition, the city covered a huge portion of land and had many back alleys, intersections and criss-crossing roads in it, making me confused and disoriented.

Not able to bear it any longer, I found a small alley and then logged off. Taking off the helmet, I saw Ah Wei sitting beside the computer surfing the web. “What are you doing?”

Seeing that I had woke up, Ah Wei excitedly waved at me to come over. “Quick, look at this! This is the official website for !”

“Oh, what is on it?”
“There are a number of in-game leaderboards as well as a few posts related to announcements.” Ah wei explained as he kept browsing through the directories.

“Is there any important information?”

“One sec, I think I saw a few posts earlier… oh I found it!” I quickly ran right behind Ah Wei and looked at the announcement he had just brought up. “China Company said that today, they gave out 10100 accounts and those that received these accounts are the first wave of beta testers. Each of the accounts have a chance to claim a random amount of prizes ranging from 4 as the most to 0 as the least.” Surprised, Ah Wei looked back at me, “It’s possible to get zero? And I had thought that every account would get a prize! How many did you get?”

With my hand, I made a victory symbol and laughed towards him with a smile, “I was born invincible, and was lucky enough to get 4 prizes! Hahaha, i’m amazing aren’t I!”

“So awesome! Nice, when I get my account, i’ll be depending on you for equips!”

At this point in the conversation, my face immediately darkened a bit, “I’ll try my best!”

Realizing my expression wasn’t quite right, Ah Wei tensely asked, “What happened? Were you killed by someone else?”

“If I was killed by someone that would be alright!” I sat down on the side of the bed, “I don’t know how unlucky I am, I met two NPC monsters fighting each other. A dying but not yet dead monster was hit flying onto my head, panicking, I used my sword to block it but my sword ended up breaking!

“What? You mean you broke the Beginner’s Sword?”

“Ugh, let’s not talk about it! I was in a forest and found a white tier sword. Although it’s attack was average, it was much better than the Beginner’s Sword the system gives you. In addition, the Beginner’s Sword is only worth 1 copper coin and took inventory space, so I decided to throw it away! Who would have thought that I own no weapons at all now!”

“Brother, If you don’t have a weapon, how are you going to level up?”

“I’m also quite worried about it. Before logging off, I had stumbled upon a city and was planning to find a shop to their cheapest sword and get by that way, but this strange city did now have a single shop that was open!”

“Forget it! There’s not much to be sad about, you just need to spend a bit more time and find a shop!” Ah Wei focused his attention back to the webpage, “Bro, you’re actually pretty lucky! It says here that of all the accounts, 5307 of them ended up getting 0 prizes. So it turns out only 4793 accounts got prizes.”

“No way! So many people got nothing?”

“Yeah, China Company said that the success rate of pulling more prizes were proportional to the amount of prizes. Therefore getting 0 would be the most probable and the higher the amount, the harder it would be!”

“Then did they mention the numbers for the other possibilities?”

“They did! 3797 were able to get 1 prize, 792 were able to get 2 prizes and only 203 were able to get 3 prizes. For people who got 4 prizes…. What! Only one person, you, were able to pull 4 prizes! Bro, this is so exaggerated, in the whole world, there’s only 1 person and it was you! My admiration for you never ends like an endless rushing river!”

“Are you serious!” I was taken aback, I thought that there would at least a few hundred people who would get 4 prizes! “Did they say anything else beneath that?”

Ah Wei started reading again, “Right now, the person ranked first is a warrior called “A Big Knife Kills More People” and he’s already level 68.” Ah Wei paused.

“What’s wrong?”

“I found something fun.”

“What did you find that’s fun?”

“The second rank is a girl gamer called Red Moon, her profession being a Shadowblade. She’s actually already level 67! I have no idea what she did to level up so fast, aren’t mages supposed to have a hard time leveling in the beginning?”

Hearing these monstrous levels, I had no more confidence, “Hey! I’m only level 29, they’re more than double my level! How can I catch up to them?!?”

“Bro, don’t worry, you’ll catch up to them!” Ah Wei comforted me while trying to find more useful information. “It says here that in the entire game, there have been a total of 7 pets that have been tamed. Ranked first is that shadowblade’s pet called Fog, originally a level 800 BOSS, Mutated Night Spirit King. As it is right now, it is level 38… No wonder that shadowblade was able to level up so fast, turns out she had an extremely valuable treasure!”

Weird! My Luck is a level 1000 BOSS, why isn’t it number one? Although it is only level 1, it should still be able to rank number 1! Was it due to the Hermit’s Ring? “Is there any mention about other pets below that?”

“Below it?” Ah Wei looked for a bit, “The rest are all trash, ranked second is only a level 80 BOSS Mustang King that is level 21.”

Looks like it really was the work of the ring! Seeing Ah Wei looking at me waving his hand, “Below!”

Ah Wei continued, “The game has now officially entered the automated stage, all tasks are now given to the system to process. All processes, event occurrences, NPC behaviour will not be interfered with. All of these will be given to China Company’s supercomputer to be responsible for. The company said that they will not set any Game Masters, the game will run fully automated.

“Are you serious? This is also quite exaggerated! What are they trying to do?”

“It says that it’s to test the artificial intelligence capability of the system!”

“I guess I can understand that.” While listening to Ah Wei talk, I grabbed a few snacks from the fridge. “Is there any other important announcements?”

“China Company said that tomorrow at 8:00 in the morning, they will release the second wave of accounts which totals 100,000. Then the day after that, they will release the game to everyone to enjoy freely. At that time, you will no longer have to register for an account, everyone’s personal ID number would be their account number. (Currently, the personal ID number is used globally. The first three numerals represent the country you are from and the rest are arranged by your country. No matter where you are, as long as you have your personal ID on you, you have nothing to worry about since the ID is also bundled together with your bank account.). There’s nothing else at the moment. The website says that once there are new announcements, they will be immediately updated on the website as well as broadcasted in-game as well.”

“Alright, got it. I’m going to take a break and rest awhile!”

Chapter end