Special Event

"All humans and demons, Ruth Wakado has betrayed his kind and is planning on killing you all with the Formation on which this city was built, I need you all to stop the core of the formation, otherwise all of you will be killed. Thus, I hereby command all the demons to stop this assault and help the humans in searching for the core."

This sentence was heard in every living being's ears across the whole city shocking them. After a few seconds of stunned silence, people reacted to Ice King's message in various ways. Attached to this message was the image of a golden coloured ball the size of a football which was clearly the core of the formation. Ice King was providing an image of what the core should look like to aid the players and demons in the search.

Nothing in this world was perfect. Since the formation was so overpowered, it also had a great flaw which was easy to exploit if one knew the know how. Its core was its weak point which could even be crushed by a normal person stopping the whole formation. The core of this formation was special since it had the ability to function as long as it was in the limits of the formation array providing the formation with energy. Of course, most people didn't even know what kind of formation it was so they didn't know this speciality until the information on the core sent by the Ice King alerted them.

Most of the Natives or NPC's treated it with disdain as Ice King was their original enemy while Ruth Wakado, their saviour, they believed that the life steal was being performed by him and breaking the core would obviously increase the speed of the ability.

While some of the people doubted Ice King, the few stronger ones were able to realize that it was the formation which was slowly killing them, thus, they had already started trying to find the core even without the message from Ice King.

As for the player, it was even simpler as they received the following notification:

{Special Event: Ruth Wakado has betrayed his own kind and ideal's and turned into a crazy madman who wants to use all the lives in the city as fuel for his return. As the guests of this continent who have been treated quite well by the natives, it is your duty to protect the millions of lives in the city. Find the core of the formation and destroy it.

Reward: According to contribution}

The moment the players received this notification, these people who were originally panicking and worried about their loss of level because of the formation instantly turned into bloodthirsty wolves with greed filling their eyes as the looked at the special event notification. Birds die for food while men die for riches.

The special events were as the name suggested events that were special not only because of their rarity(Example: Destruction of a city) but also because of the rewards that they gave. According to the game website, even the smallest of contributions would give a massive reward.)

Thus started a massive search across the city as the demons and players stopped fighting each other and started searching for the core of the formation. To the players, there was enough incentive to search for the core, their levels and the reward from the special events. As for the demons, there was a simple reason for their unconditional trust in Ice King, he was strong and the words of the strong were law in the demon tribes. The situation was as such that none of the demons even considered that the words spoken might not even be Ice King but an imposter.

Meanwhile, Lin Fang who was leaving the underground carven was frowning as he thought of all the possible locations in the city which the core would be. He had heard Ice King's words and gotten the notification for the special event which further confirmed the words of the deceased City Lord and Ice King.

Now all he had to do was find the Core and destroy it. But, this 'little' step had some major issues that had to be dealt with, the first one being that Ruth Wakado might be crazy but he wasn't an idiot. He would surely have anticipated that the demons and humans would try to eliminate the core of the formation the moment it activated as the stronger ones would have realized the cause of the life steal.

This meant that he would surely have hidden the core in such a place that couldn't be located by average means like a normal net search and it would surely be well protected. Ruth Wakado should have realized that it was very easy for a population of over fifty thousand to cover the whole city with an hour, the average time for a normal adult to die.

Thus the core couldn't be anywhere easily accessible like a shop or a house, the chances of it being in a cellar of some house should have been quite high but Lin Fang was sure that Ruth Wakado wouldn't take such a big gamble of someone accidentally noticing the cellar in the search in this well thought out plan of his. Thus, this possibility was also eliminated.

But if things were like this then the Core should either be in the middle of some houses wall or underground, it couldn't be on Ruth Wakado himself as it would be too far away from the main formation to be able to control it.

The Core, just where was it? Lin Fang wondered, as he thought about the core and more, instead of growing frustrated as most people would normally do, he got calmer and calmer as a hint of blue, once again appeared in his eyes.

His thinking speed increased by at least three-fold as various possibilities flashed through his mind. He slowly eliminated them one by one but he still couldn't reach a conclusion as there too many variables that he didn't know about like the functioning range of the core, the amount of glow, whether it had any movement abilities or not.

All his random thoughts turned into organized data while he used his terrifying analytical ability to try and locate the core.

As he tried to find the best hiding spot from Ruth Wakado's perspective, a thought suddenly struck him as his blue eyes glowed with brilliance. What about the Thousand-Handed Devil?

Where had he hidden the core, the greatest weakness of such a formation? As this thought formed in his mind, he started moving, he quickly reached the entrance of the carven and started glancing through the books in the City Lord's study cum Library.

His blue eyes which had given him a kind of brain enhancement allowed him to breeze through the books at lightning speed. He hardly checked the content of any book as he moved on to the next trying to find the specific information.

The library had thousands of books which were impossible for Lin Fang to cover in the limited time he had, thus, he skipped most of the books which had titles not related to his search or any martial arts techniques which came up lowering his search by a large amount.

It took him ten minutes to locate a book with a title similar to what he had in his mind, 'The Danger Zones and their Past'. Without wasting any time Lin Fang opened the book and quickly jumped to the third-ranked danger zone "Ghost Vengence City'.

Lin Fang with his blue eyes read the whole past of the City at an unprecedented speed. The book, fortunately, was quite detailed in its information as it even gave information about the formation and some illustrations of the whole formation and its core which was quite similar to the image sent by Ice King.

As he read about all the events of the genocide in detail, Lin Fang filled in the holes of his deduction with the newfound knowledge about the core and the number of possibilities got smaller and smaller until only one possibility was left. But as Lin Fang thought of his own conclusion, he couldn't help but start frowning, would Ruth Wakado really go for such an obvious approach.

Lin Fang suppressed the doubt in his heart as he stood up. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Lin Fang was sure that Ruth Wakado had gone for this approach, the approach same as the previous person who succeeded in using this formation, Thousand-Handed Devil. As for why he was so sure, because it was the safest option, with the least number of factors dependent upon luck.

The corpses of demons and humans he had seen in the tunnel further supported his hypothesis, they were the original sacrifice used for the creation of the device.

Another reason why Lin Fang was so certain was that even if everyone realized that this was the method he used, it would still be near impossible to locate the core. Besides Lin Fang was sure that none of the players except him and maybe one or two others, if they were lucky, knew the story about the formation Ruth Wakado was using.

As for those powerhouses of the Virtual World who were in the city right now, they would surely know the legend and most of them would also be able to make the link but the problem was, were they really able to catch the core.

Yes, catch it, Ruth Wakado must have used the demon and human bodies he found in the basement as a sacrifice when he originally laid down the formation to give sentience to the core allowing it to move and escape freely, he had used the lives of other demons and humans in exchange for a moving core which also had other special abilities to aid it in its duty, hide from everyone in the formation.

The core according to the records should also have the power to reduce its size to that of a baseball making the search even harder. It was also supposed to have other abilities which the books had no knowledge about since the formation hadn't appeared in millenniums. Things were much more severe than Lin Fang originally imagined.

Lin Fang's blue eyes calmly looked at the city from the highest tower in the CIty Lord's castle. The buildings he saw turned into groups of data in his eyes as he tried to reduce the search area by thinking from the perspective of a being who knew how to hide, he ones again used probability to rank the places with highest and lowest risk of being found out. Lin Fang was determined to find and destroy this core.