MMO: Pierce Heaven Til' It Breaks

The +16 Maylia’s Ring of Windstorms was back…

Li Yi glanced at the sender, and saw that it was Wind-on-Snow!

“I heard you yell out to me, so I thought it over and logged on again. Then I found you just standing there stupidly as a monster killed you, and you dropped this ring. Heehee, I picked it up went back to the city, and waited for you forever, but you logged off instead. So I had no choice but to send it to you by mail.”

When he saw the message that came with the mail, Li Yi did not know whether to laugh or cry.

He must have misunderstood her in their past life…

This Maylia’s Ring of Windstorms was worth much more than the Wind Sword. Wind-on-Snow had picked it up online, so if she had not said it, no one would ever know. However, she did not keep it for herself. Instead, she sent it back to him herself…

Li Yi immediately logged off and gave Wind-on-Snow a call.

The call went through. Before Li Yi even said anything, Wind-on-Snow could already tell who he was.

“Is this Dark Wing?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“No worries.”

The two of them fell silent. Their breaths grew heavier, but neither could figure out what to say.

“Cough…”

Both of them coughed softly at the same time, and then they laughed in unison.

Wind-on-Snow said, “I’m leaving tomorrow. I was just wondering, will we ever meet again?”

“We definitely will. You’re my girlfriend, after all—you were and forever will be. It doesn’t matter where you run off to, you’ll never escape my grasp.” Li Yi’s tone was slightly forceful.

“Haha, perhaps. I do feel that you and Jiaojiao suit each other quite well, though.”

“I think so too.” Li Yi sighed.

Wind-on-Snow spat at him softly, “You’re such a perv.”

“I can’t help it, can I? Too many people love me.” Li Yi was utterly shameless.

Wind-on-Snow said wistfully, “If fate wills it. If we’re fated to meet, we will. If we’re not, we won’t.”

“What is fate? I met you both in the past life and the present, isn’t that fate?”

Wind-on-Snow was quiet for a moment before she finally said, “If you manage to appear before my eyes before I leave, it’s fate. If it isn’t, we’re just not meant to be.”

Li Yi did not say anything else. He hung up his phone and got onto the maglev train headed toward Nanning.

…

The results of Xiao Changfeng’s case were out. Since he instigated it by attacking another person first, they decided that Li Yi was just carrying out an act of selfless justice. Not only was he in no trouble whatsoever, but he was also awarded an Ally of Justice badge from the government and earned 50,000 yuan as a reward.

Xiao Changfeng had yet to awaken. Milk Dipper Solitary utilized his connections to give Xiao Changfeng’s old man a large sum and signed a non-disclosure agreement. The aftermath of this incident faded into nothing, just like that.

Li Yi stayed in Nanning for three whole days, all the way until he sent Wind-on-Snow off at the airport. Only then did he drag his tired body back onto the train and back home.

He had turned his phone off and stayed away from the game for three days. When Li Yi logged on again, he received no fewer than a thousand private messages. After all, he was the mind and soul of the Little Drunk Cat Guild. Without him, the guild was completely directionless and falling apart…

“Boss, what’s the matter with you? Don’t scare us, man. We’ve sent out the troops to flood the official forums, and we’re wiping out those photos now. They’re practically gone now.”

“Don’t do this, big bro, this ain’t nothing. Ya can’t abandon your bros over such a small matter.”

“Guild Master, please reconsider…”

“Guild Master, please come back as soon as you can. If you wanna grab some t*tties, I’ll even disregard my boyfriend and let you grab mine as much as you want. I’m 34D, so they’re really perky. My idol, please come back, sob sob sob…”

When he saw those messages, Li Yi was at an utter loss for words. All of them assumed that the so-called T*ttygrabbergate had gotten to him, but what they did not know was that he had spent the past three days with the heroine of T*ttygrabbergate…

He could not reply to each individual message, so Li Yi went to the Guild Channel and sent a public message, briefly explaining the situation in order to put his subordinates’ hearts at ease.

Aside from this little incident, another large event was taking place in the Pantheon game.

The annual Ruler of God Appreciation Festival was upon them.

Ruler of God Appreciation Festival was a day to celebrate the birth of the Ruler of God, who bestowed peace on this land. The divine messengers would fly down from Mount Pantheon and set up bases in each of the major cities, where they would sell rare items that players would not usually be able to obtain.

This event took place once a year and lasted for seven days. The official statement claimed that it was their way of giving back to the players, but Li Yi, who had experienced God Appreciation Festival seven times, knew very well that this so-called Ruler of God Appreciation Festival was basically a Scam Festival.

The divine messengers only sold one type of item, that was the Ruler of God’s Great Gift Packs of Blessings. The gift packs were a really luxurious-looking purple color, and they could give Equipment Reinforcement Scrolls as well as many rare items.

A Ruler of God’s Great Gift Pack of Blessings was priced at 10 Gold Coins and there was no limit to how many a player could buy. Most of them would give +1 or +2 Equipment Reinforcement Scrolls, but there was a tiny chance they would give +5 Equipment Reinforcement Scrolls, an even rarer chance of getting a +10 Equipment Reinforcement Scrolls, or even the +16 Ultimate Equipment Reinforcement Scrolls.

A Ruler of God’s Great Gift Pack of Blessings only cost 10 Gold Coins, so if one could get a +16 Ultimate Equipment Reinforcement Scroll, it would bring in a large sum of cash even if they chose not to use it and sold it to another instead. That was why, when the first Ruler of God Appreciation Festival came along, nearly everyone bought those Great Gift Pack Scams and tested their luck.

Hope was a beautiful thing, but the reality was cruel. Players spent several hundred Gold Coins on buying the Great Gift Packs only to earn nothing but trash. There were even people who spent tens or hundreds of thousands, even millions in Gold Coins, but they all ended with more or less the same result.

All of them ended in tragedy…

Forget a +16 Ultimate Reinforcement Scroll, even a +10 Intermediate Reinforcement Scroll was a rare sight indeed. By the time the seven days of the God Appreciation Festival ended, everyone’s Backpacks were filled with piles of +1 and +2 Reinforcement Scrolls.

“That’s crazy, this is daylight robbery!”

“This shouldn’t be the way to play! I spent several millions on this, and the best thing I got was a f*cking +3 Reinforcement Scroll? The f*ck is that?”

Posts like that were a dime a dozen on the official site after every year’s God Appreciation Festival…

They carried countless hopes and tried to make something big out of something small. Countless people gambled away their entire fortune, just like that. This was one of King of Pantheon’s most evil money-grubbing schemes: the Ruler of God Appreciation Festival!

Before the Ruler of God Appreciation Festival even began, the game was already starting to hype it up. Every so often, there would be a string of red notifications flashing across the screen, describing the Ruler of God’s glorious achievements, the way the world was created, how the Ruler of God defeated ten demons alone… All to give the impression that the Ruler of God was extremely OP.

“OP my *ss, he’ll eventually get beaten down by the players anyway.” Li Yi did not think very highly of this at all.

Thanks to the way the game was hyping it up, many people were looking forward to this event. Li Yi made sure to keep busy as well. Jiaojiao was Level 38 now, and she could follow the guild’s third-liner party completely independent of him now, so she no longer needed him to carry her around. Over the next few days, Li Yi sold everything he could out of the equipment and items piling up in the inventory, and he even withdrew all the money from Shattered Frost City’s inventory, all so he could change them into cash.

Putting aside the Gold Coins Li Yi had changed into cash, he still had 50,000,000 Gold Coins in hand. At the current conversion rates, he could probably convert all of these into around 10,000,000 yuan.

There was no helping it. As opposed to when the game began, the conversion rate of Gold Coins had dropped quite drastically. However, Li Yi was not worried in the slightest, because after the Ruler of God Appreciation Festival, King of Pantheon would enact an earth-shattering change. When that happened, Gold Coins would be equal to real life cash, and that would continue for eight years.

Why did the Pantheon developers create something like the Ruler of God Appreciation Festival? It was because the system was producing too many Gold Coins, so they wanted to retrieve the money and restabilize the market prices.

Of course, up till now, other than Li Yi who had lived again, not a single person was privy to the truth behind the Appreciation Festival. The developers behind Pantheon had always been secretive. Even when the game had run for eight whole years, not even a single developer behind the game ever revealed themselves.

“If we get an Equipment Reinforcement Scroll for 10 Gold Coins, even a +1 or +2 trash Equipment Reinforcement Scroll would be better than trying to reinforce our equipment by ourselves. After all, trying to reinforce a piece of Level 40 equipment for the first time would already take more than 30 Gold Coins, and there’d still be a chance of failure.”

“Yeah, I decided to throw 500,000 Gold Coins into this. F*ck it, even if I don’t get an Ultimate Scroll, I’d still be able to break even with a few trash scrolls.”

“First Disciple, I plan to try my luck with 500,000 too. Let’s compare wares afterward and see who’s got the better deals, haha.”

“Haha, no problem.”

Chen Yang and Pretty Good Mood chatted excitedly. Ever since Li Yi changed Little Drunk Cat to a for-profit model, both of them managed to earn quite a sum. Although it was not nearly as much as what Li Yi had, it was still much better than normal players.

“Don’t invest too much into it, or else you might make a loss.”

Li Yi walked up to them and gave them a word of advice as he chuckled.

Chen Yang grinned. “It’s just 500,000, that’s nothing.”

“Don’t worry, Guild Master, we know where to stop.” Pretty Good Mood laughed heartily.

Li Yi shook his head and said no more. Instead, he went up to Fire Ice and began to look through the accounts with her.

The Little Drunk Cat had turned to profit mode, which meant that Chen Yang and Pretty Good Mood carried others into dungeons every day, running a boosting service. As the Guild Master, Li Yi got a cut of the earnings as well, but he never withdrew the money. Instead, he had always kept it in the guild bank.

“Ice, calculate how much money I have and withdraw it all for me.”

“Okay.”

Fire Ice began to calculate the money patiently.

“That’s 36,870,000 in total.”

By the time she came up with the final amount in dividends and bonuses, even Li Yi was struck dumb.

“Why is it that much?”

“The reward for the first kill of a dungeon is 10,000,000, and there’s still a half left even after we distribute the rewards for the others. Also, I managed to snag a sponsor recently. All we have to do is take a picture and yell an advertisement slogan every time we run a dungeon, and we’ll earn an extra 5,000,000 every month. Also, the Dream Guild collaborated with us on exploring a new dungeon, so we got another 30,000,000 there…”

Fire Ice explained everything to Li Yi carefully, stating very clearly where each sum came from. Li Yi was so impressed that he gave her a huge thumbs-up.

The Little Drunk Cat Guild’s number one secretary and minister of finance, Fire Ice, was already making a name for herself.

“Take the loose change and use it to fund the guild’s operations. Give me the rest.”

“Alright.”

Fire Ice withdrew Li Yi’s dividends and put it into his account.

Now, Li Yi had 80,000,000 Gold Coins on hand!

This was definitely an astronomical sum. After all, even when Li Yi was at his highest point in the past life, he never had more than 5,000,000 in funds on hand.

When Li Yi was about to leave, Fire Ice said, “Guild Master, did you withdraw all that money to buy the Great Gift Packs of Blessings? I think we shouldn’t bank too much on luck.”

Li Yi chuckled. “I got other uses for this money. I won’t buy even one Great Gift Pack because I never trusted my luck, but thank you for the advice.”

Fire Ice’s face reddened and she lowered her head.

After Li Yi settled these matters, he rushed back to the Blade Peak Arena.

He was still placed first in the arena rankings, but three or four players had accumulated enough points to give him a run for his money. Just to be on the safe side, he decided to deal those players a blow or two.

It had been so long since he obtained the Goddess of Hurricane’s Rage, but he never once used it in battle. This was the best chance to test the Hurricane Sword’s capabilities!

…