Chapter 50
Chapter 50: Like Watching a TV Drama
“What the hell are you talking about? You’re Han Tian?”
“Han Tian isn’t even that handsome. And he’s not this sloppy. Who would just hire someone to pretend to be himself?”
“Bro, don’t tell me you forgot you showed your face in your review videos. You know what you look like. Don’t you?”
Sure enough, because that face looked nothing like reality, the stream’s chat exploded with doubts about Han Tian.
Han Tian just smiled, pinched his own cheek, and said lightly, “I’m not lying. I’m in the game right now, using my in-game face. Of course I don’t look like my real self. When you play a game, do you use your real face?”
The barrage stuttered into silence.
Character creation…?
“Liar!”
“Scammer, 100%. There’s no way you’re inside a game. Where’d you build your set—what film crew did you hire?”
“Is the video AI? Any big shot want to dissect it?”
“I work in AI. I’m not seeing AI artifacts so far…”
“This is creepy. Is he abroad?”
“I’ve been searching Weibo for days. I can’t find the place from that video anywhere.”
On screen, Han Tian was already walking out with Zhou Xiao and the others.
As they moved, he introduced things like a tour guide: “This should be the game’s first welcome event. Demon beasts are worth double points right now, so we’re forming a party and heading to where the demon beasts are. These next few days, you’re in luck—if I’m online, I’ll be streaming. You’ll see exactly how we hunt demon beasts.”
He cleared his throat, warming to the sound of his own voice. “Let me give you a simple overview of the situation on Yun Zhou Continent…”
Netizens watched with that initial, lazy curiosity—like it was a stunt, a prank, a passing show.
But the longer it went on, the more wrong it felt.
A stream with a hook this huge pulled in tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands. Someone would definitely try to attack Han Tian’s streaming address.
Forget the truth—if they could prove the stream was fake, that million would be theirs.
And the companies unhappy about Start with a Broken Sect stealing all the heat? Hiring hackers to hit a server was an old tradition. Even without open beta, this kind of hype meant market share. Who would let you enjoy it?
So they started at the obvious place: the website.
They hammered at it for ages—only to find they couldn’t even locate the game server’s address.
A game needed servers. If there were no servers… what was this?
Then someone snapped out of the assumption.
This game claimed to be full-dive simulation. Whether the game even existed was still an open question.
While the competitors were still baffled, the viewers watching the stream began to sweat. Han Tian kept streaming without pause, and the camera’s realism was almost cruel, as if the lens had been shoved through a crack in the world.
An hour passed. The backgrounds never repeated. The roads kept unwinding, the sky shifting, the air changing.
Then, on the path ahead, they ran into a First-Rank demon beast.
Han Tian and Jiang Tian Ya stepped up. Their palms flared—heat blooming, light licking across their skin—and two fireballs took shape with a weight that made people forget to blink. No glittering effects. No cinematic filter. Just raw flame, dense and alive.
The demon beast lunged, a nightmare of muscle and teeth. When the camera pushed in, the viewers could even see the fine fur along its hide—so detailed it made your scalp itch. It was disgusting, yes, but it was disgustingly real.
If this was a scam, the cost of these “effects” alone would be obscene.
After they finished it, Han Tian lifted the camera slightly and explained, breezy as ever, “This is a First-Rank demon beast. We still haven’t entered First Mountain’s range. We’re close to Wangan County, so you’ll get lone demon beasts wandering over now and then.”
The moment his words fell, a bell chimed overhead.
Han Tian looked up.
A cultivator swept past on a flying artifact. It looked like a woven flying carpet, soft as felt, with small bells hanging from the edges. The cultivator sat cross-legged on top, robes fluttering. As the carpet glided, the bells rang—bright, crisp, teasingly close.
“Holy—” Han Tian jerked the camera up to catch it.
Thankfully, the stream was something local cultivators on Yun Zhou Continent couldn’t sense.
The carpet was fast. It vanished like a thought, leaving only the fading jingle.
Han Tian’s voice went tight with envy. “Flying artifacts. Only the Artifact Refining Sect sells those.”
He sighed, and for once the performance slipped into something honest. “To control a flying artifact for travel, you need at least late Qi Refining Stage. We’re early Qi Refining nobodies. And they’re expensive—the cheapest starts at five mid-grade spirit stones. Most cultivators can’t afford one.”
He paused, then added, almost wistful, “You can refine one yourself if you work hard. I’m planning to go down the artifact-refining path… but I still want to ride a sword.”
Sword Flight. Or using the Flying Sword Heart Method. It was the kind of dream buried in China’s bones.
Sure—modern technology could fake anything. But Han Tian’s stream had already gone on for over an hour. The scenery never looped. The “effects” came one after another, the kind of thing money couldn’t stack fast enough. The world on screen had texture, distance, weight.
If it was fake, would anyone really burn this much just to hype a game?
Some viewers stopped caring about whether it was true.
They watched like they were hooked on a drama. The images were too vivid, too immersive—more thrilling than foreign blockbusters. And it was cultivation, the setting people back home loved most.
Soon, every frame of Han Tian’s stream was being picked apart, slowed down, analyzed.
In the real world, inside a special department in China—
“Little Qing,” a righteous-looking middle-aged man asked as he walked over, rubbing his brow, exhaustion etched deep between his eyebrows, “what do you see?”
Little Qing stared at the screen like it might bite her. She swallowed hard. “Director… I don’t even know how to say this, but the game really has a problem.”
She licked her lips, then forced the words out. “I had an internal coworker look. We can’t trace the server’s origin. I watched the player’s stream, and I checked the streaming site too. But the signal for this stream… isn’t coming through the site’s server.”
The man froze. “What do you mean?”
Little Qing tried to make it simple. “When we go online, information needs a signal path. We transmit using electromagnetic waves. But this stream—there’s no signal. I can’t trace a source. It’s like the origin point just… disappears.”
Her voice dropped. “Or like it never existed in the first place.”
The Director’s expression tightened by degrees.
“It’s like something unknown appeared out of nowhere,” Little Qing said, words careful, as if each one carried weight. “And if it isn’t unknown… then it’s technology more advanced than ours.”
But the facts didn’t change: the stream was hosted on a website. The website’s server was there. Yet the live feed itself didn’t originate from that server.
Wei Jun’s face turned grave.
Years ago, he’d suffered an accident on a work trip. Liang Xue Yao, traveling with him, had saved his life. Wei Jun had taken a blow to the forehead and been left with chronic headaches. Concerned for his health, his superiors moved him to a safer rear-line post.
Liang Xue Yao, though, had lost part of his leg. His dream had died with it.
Wei Jun carried guilt over that accident. No one had wanted it. Liang Xue Yao had never used it to pressure him, never once came asking for favors—
Until last night.
A single message: investigate a game that had appeared online out of nowhere. Strange. Wrong. A player would stream today. Watch it.
And now, watching this, Wei Jun felt the cold spread under his ribs.