Official Service Launch Day (2)
Just before noon.
People settled into their capsules and waited, carrying countless questions with them. The game had already been pre-installed through the advance download, but logging in was still impossible. All anyone could do was sit there, twiddling their thumbs.
Not everyone, however, was brimming with hopeful imagination and curiosity alone.
Please let it flop. Please let it be sour grapes. Please let it be a scam…
There were those whose hearts were twisted that way, and those whose own projects stood to crash and burn depending on whether Fantasy of Galicia lived or died.
Hmm. Is that all it is…?
What if the hype is just empty marketing…?
And the people who normally prided themselves on "cool critical thinking" couldn't help but harbor doubts. Of course, anyone who had tried the demo at Gamestar—or who had been thoroughly toyed with by Sevels's small, soft tongue—would never deny it. But from the perspective of a so-called cool intellectual, there were quite a few claims that simply didn't hold up in reality.
Among the announcements made at Gamestar, the standout example was this:
We will prepare a game environment where one hundred thousand concurrent users—no, one million—and even beyond that, ten million or more people can log in and play.
Ten million concurrent users?
Was that even possible?
In a certain RPG widely regarded as having drawn a legendary arc that rewrote the entire history of MMORPGs, the concurrent user count during the glory days when the Lich King unleashed his wrath was estimated at roughly two million.
And how had they even accommodated that many people? By spinning up countless servers to split the world entirely, and further applying a phase—channel—system to keep fields from overcrowding.
And yet?
Fantasy of Galicia will operate on only a single independent server. Within it, you'll be able to adventure alongside anyone in the world. Ah—don't forget about time zones.
A single server?
A single serverrrrr?
It was absurd. Since virtually nothing about the virtual-reality technology had been properly disclosed, whether the servers could handle the load was almost a secondary concern.
Suppose just a hundred thousand players flooded in. Judging by the scale of the game revealed during the closed beta, if all those players poured into the tutorial zone at once…? Unless they completely disabled player collision, everyone would be packed so tight they couldn't even breathe, let alone move.
In every way, it simply couldn't work…
"We'll see. Seeing is believing."
At last, a notification that noon had arrived floated up before the eyes of the man who had been cycling through nothing but negative thoughts. Of course, he held zero expectation that he would actually be able to connect right away.
Twenty years of walking the pure MMORPG path had honed his instincts. The screen he was about to see would be one of two things: a connection error from server overload, or some ridiculous fake queue cooked up to inflate the game's scale for marketing.
But then…
"Was I… that fast?"
He had set an alarm, sure—but watching the screen transition so naturally, the man let out a small gasp of admiration.
The opening screen that appeared. It evoked the opening of Sword and Art, the title credited with popularizing virtual-reality games as a mainstream genre… and the crown of a World Tree, clearly an homage to the Celestial Castle, seized his gaze completely.
Before long, his field of vision was being drawn deeper and deeper into the World Tree.
"Hmm."
Somehow, he found himself facing a mirror. Countless menus floating beside it told him this was probably the customization stage. Today the mirror made him look a little uglier than usual—a strange feeling—and he was just thinking he might tweak a few things when—
"Auto-correct?"
A single button caught his eye. The moment he clicked it—
"Oh, damn."
Years of community experience spat a useless exclamation straight out of his mouth. The squid that had been reflected in the mirror a second ago was gone… and in its place stood a version of himself whose features were almost entirely preserved, yet naturally corrected to a pleasantly good-looking level.
Like catching your reflection in a steam-fogged bathroom mirror. Like glancing sideways into a car side-view mirror on the street. Or like a selfie with just the right amount of filter and a light Photoshop pass.
At this level… I'm actually pretty decent, aren't I…?
An appearance that invited exactly that kind of thought. The man nodded in satisfaction and moved on.
In that instant, the body he had customized with a few clicks dissolved into a single shaft of light, soared into a sky higher than the World Tree itself… and began a slow descent.
Guidance messages appeared alongside it.
Connection from Republic of Korea confirmed.
Starting point automatically assigned to the west-central continent.
Since it was a simultaneous global launch, it seemed they were dispersing players by region from the start. He was a little worried about the main-quest routing, but it was something he could live with…
"…Huh?"
Another window floated up before the man's eyes. It appeared to be a map of the "west-central continent" the system message had mentioned.
But…
It was vast.
Incredibly… vast.
And it wasn't just empty space—countless villages, cities, and castles completely captured his attention. Having never played the closed beta, the man couldn't fully grasp what "a hundred years after the closed beta" truly meant. But this… this was real.
Even if a hundred thousand people from Korea logged in—no, even a million—there was more than enough room for them to spread out and live across this west-central region.
Only then did the doubt and distrust in the man's heart begin to fade, little by little. The feverish expectations people had been screaming about in the communities… maybe they weren't just empty hype. Maybe this really could be delivered.
The conviction settled in, bit by bit.
Somewhere higher than even the World Tree.
In the heavens, wreathed in mystical clouds no ordinary eye could ever observe, Serin and Elisha sat side by side, watching a meteor shower of countless falling lights.
Not a natural disaster.
Every single one of them was…
"They're all… heroes, huhhh…"
At Elisha's awed little murmur, Serin smiled softly and reached out to stroke her hair. Unlike Serin, who had been born on Earth, Elisha had been bound to the dimension of Galicia from the moment of her existence. She had encountered plenty of Earth's culture lately and could be called reasonably enlightened by now—but even so, wonder still filled her eyes.
Naturally, it was a spectacle for Serin as well. Countless heroes' souls gathering at the World Tree, then scattering across the world in bodies suited to each of their tastes…
The true beginning of everything.
The first public unveiling of a continent that everyone at Team Galicia had spent months ruthlessly wringing every last drop of precious time and creativity into.
"It's already been over a hundred years…"
"Hm?"
"Nothing. Never mind."
Of course, she could adjust her perception of time acceleration, so she hadn't been hit head-on by the full roughly one hundred forty years the continent of Galicia had actually lived through. Still, she couldn't freely abuse time acceleration during important work, which meant Serin had experienced an impossibly long stretch of time alone—far beyond what any ordinary person could fathom.
So the moment hit her all the harder.
And then there was this.
83,492
98,105
Watching the player count leap by entire orders of magnitude every time she glanced away, she couldn't help feeling a flicker of worry. Of course, the routing for instance dungeons and main quests had been meticulously designed so players could access them no matter where they started.
And by using her divine authority to finely fragment the dimension itself, she could implement not only instance channels but fully permanent ones if needed.
For now, all she could do was watch.
But then—
"I really can't take it anymore…"
Serin was a gamer at heart. Watching her carefully stockpiled divine power drain away was one thing… but as a goddess, tending the continent was an absolute duty she could never abandon. By the same logic, she also couldn't just smash herself in the head with a hammer and forcibly erase her game-development memories.
So instead, she quietly poured a thread of her will into a golem she had poured her heart into creating—the same kind of golem players used as their avatars.
It was far too fragile to hold a goddess's soul in full, and it was impossible to give it a form that completely defied her nature—her old male appearance, for instance. But she could craft something that resembled Serin just enough without anyone recognizing it as the same being.
And so Serin carefully split off a fragment of her soul and slipped it, soft as silk, into the pliant body of the golem. Of course, she wouldn't be able to use a goddess's authority in that body. At best, she would be on the level of an ordinary player.
"That's plenty. Heh heh…"
In fact, that was exactly what Serin wanted more. She would still clearly know that she was the goddess Serin and the director Kim Se-rin—but the overwhelming volume of game-related knowledge was far too vast to cram into the brain of a mere golem. Strip all that away, and what remained was…
The body and mind of a gamer encountering Fantasy of Galicia for the very first time.
Birth!
And if anything went wrong or an external summons came in, she could instantly switch her consciousness back to the body of the goddess Serin. The safety measures were perfect.
"Elisha? People still have a little ways to go before they reach the capital, Pradera… but keep a good eye out, and greet them when they get here. Got it?"
"Mm-hm!"
After giving Elisha one last set of instructions, the goddess hurled her alt into the continent of Galicia—to inspect the world she had crafted… or, more honestly, to enjoy it.
Here stood a female character.
The name floating above her head was Serina. Level 1. No class yet. Automatically equipped in the basic outfit given to novice adventurers… she found herself caught on a trivial worry.
"The design is pretty, but… this is… a little…"
Because the outfit was tailored to a standard body type, certain areas that diverged rather dramatically from that standard stood out a bit more than she liked… but anyway, it wasn't anything of real importance to the adventurer Serina.
Just in case, she tested whether she could instantly return to the body of the goddess Serin—then—
"Alright then… let's go…!"
The girl broke into a run toward the starting point.