“It’s just that our Olivia is too outstanding. If I were a guy, I wouldn’t be able to help falling for you, let alone anyone else… Especially since you, Olivia, are actually planning to take the Level 5 Mental Ability User assessment. It’s unbelievable. At this rate, you might become the youngest Mecha Knight in Changning City and earn the Knight’s Medal that comes with special privileges.”

“A formal Mecha Knight requires Level 7 mental strength. There are only a handful of such big shots in all of Changning City. I’m still far from that. Alright, let’s hurry up and go. This place is filthy.”

The voices of the two gradually faded away, soon disappearing around the corner of the street.

Ethan Clark watched for a moment, shook his head slightly, and turned his wheelchair, quickly arriving at his own courtyard.

With the progress of the times, nowadays, apart from the most bustling city centers, high-rise buildings are rarely seen elsewhere. Most residents choose to live in small courtyards, and the courtyard where Ethan Clark lives is one of the most ordinary and unremarkable in the neighborhood.

Upon entering the room, traces of someone having rummaged through things could still be vaguely seen, with many items left in disarray.

The most conspicuous was the note on the coffee table in the center of the living room, pressed under a fruit plate.

From the elegant handwriting, it wasn’t hard to guess that the owner of this note was none other than the recently departed favored daughter of heaven, the shining star of Changning’s top academy—Olivia Clark.

“I’m living at school now. Before I come of age and have full guardianship, I won’t come back. Don’t come looking for me.”

The message was simple, formally announcing a temporary pause in the sibling relationship.

Holding the note in his hand, Ethan Clark still looked calm as he shook his head slightly, gazed at it for a moment, then turned his wheelchair and went to the bookshelf in the study, placing it in a drawer.

After finishing all this, he seemed a bit tired, sitting in his wheelchair, gazing through the curtains at the sunlight streaming in from outside the window, just sitting there quietly.

In the empty house, it was incomparably quiet.

So quiet it felt a bit desolate.

So desolate it seemed devoid of any sign of life.

After a long while, Ethan Clark finally withdrew his gaze from the bright sunlight, turned around, and slowly let his eyes fall on the desk beside him.

On the desk, a book with a rather ornate cover lay quietly.

Title: “The True Profound World.”

Chapter 3: The True Profound World

The True Profound World.

It first appeared in everyone’s sight eight years ago.

The developer was just a hobbyist in virtual world creation. Right after developing the framework and signing the sales contract, he got so excited by the huge sum of money that he suffered a heart attack.

Later, the framework was taken over by a well-known company for further development, but a fire caused the loss of a large amount of valuable data.

By now, the new large virtual company that took over had already lost most of the core data.

However, these minor flaws did not affect the tremendous sensation caused by the launch of the True Profound World.

Because the intelligence of the NPCs in the True Profound World was absolutely the highest among all virtual worlds. In the hundreds of years of virtual world development, there had never been NPCs with such high intelligence. Moreover, its realism was claimed to be 100%, fully integrated with the real world. Anything that could be done in the real world could also be done in the True Profound World.

If not for the constraints of virtual world law, which forbade breaking the rules set by the virtual world, people could have even created firearms in the martial arts world of the True Profound World.

Because of these excellent features, the True Profound World achieved dazzling success upon its release, with tens of billions of people from across the Alliance Star Domain flooding into it.

However, this frenzy lasted less than a month before coming to an abrupt halt…

The early difficulty of the True Profound World was too high, the virtual world laws too strict, utterly inhumane, communication was difficult, pain simulation was 100%…

And so on and so forth…

All sorts of problems emerged, causing the number of accounts, which had reached tens of billions a month ago, to plummet to less than a billion.

Especially according to the True Profound World’s virtual world law—if a virtual character had a parent-child relationship with an NPC, they actually had to address the NPC as their parent, and if they encountered a sect leader who demanded them to kneel, they had to kneel. These requirements pushed the number of players down to a new low…

After death, everything resets to zero…

The world was too vast, transportation inconvenient. If you weren’t born in the same place, you could never hope to travel from one province to another in your lifetime…

After leaving the True Profound World, your character wouldn’t disappear. During this time, you had to find a safe place to hide, or else dying would be for nothing…

No system prompts, no system quests, no system guidance, no map, no trading system, no friends system…

Nothing, nothing at all—no help of any kind.

All these issues caused the number of virtual accounts in the True Profound World to drop again and again, finally struggling to hover at the one hundred million mark.