Reckoning Day
Xi was put on a new medication and sent to school. He was told to take one or two of the white pills that were given to him in a yellow and white container with a screw off lid daily. He had to take one in the morning, and one later in the day. The pill was called Ritlatin. He said it made him feel jittery. The doctor was monitoring the situation, they said. It was a male doctor named Dr. Yizuan, and his first name was Gerald, and he was from mainland China, just like Xi. Xi was told he needed to follow the regimen exactly. He was taking them every day and playing Eve. He was beating everyone by miles, he said, and that was the term the community used for his playing style, where he was #1 all the time. When he was not, he had died to some ganking, and sometimes, he would climb up faster than ever. He never saw Zero_Nocturnal again after the 150,000 death count birthday party. That was their new name for the tragic event. It had dismissed their good playing styles for them. They had no longer met Zero_Nocturnal and he was now not their focus. But Clan Nocturnal checked his status updates frequently. He posted on Odd Duck, a national social board, called a venting chain by his community, and he was hacking in Eve. But that was recently. So he was online, they discovered, and tried to find him. He was using and advertising, both bannable activities, so they told support as well. They tried to contact the main office. But were unsuccessful in achieving their goals, to have this stopped. He was using a fast health recovery cheat, and a fast moving cheat, and an auto lock on cheat, and a cheat that did something awful. It automatically killed a player by initiating an area transition. On an area transition, if you stepped into the player who was entering the zone you were on, normally, it ganked you. People could not normally have this occur. In towns, no one saw the appearing animation. It happened, and then you were in the game, as if that was your transition. He must have downloaded these. He was telling people where to find these hacks, which were illicit, and the terms of service for Eve, which the player base called the TOS for short, which was an abbreviation of the term Terms of Service, said that if you were found hacking, you were in violation of their TOS, and a ban was possible, as was having your account deactivated. The hacks were free, except for the last two, which cost $99 and $238, and both were found on English-language speaking web sites. They were Game Anonymous and Game Channel, which Xi found that he could not find evidence of Zero_Nocturnal appearing on either. So he might not be telling the truth. The hacks were expensive. This meant the providers could be making a lot of money. They told support, and hoped they would solve this problem they figured they had. Zero_Nocturnal was never found. He was in the game, and he had posted a picture on his vent channel of him standing in the character select screen. He was listed as being in the Sand Desert Channel, which meant he was anywhere in the game world. That was what it said when you logged off in the main city, that you were in the Sand Desert Channel, where nothing was, the community considered, there being anything that took place that was very interesting to say otherwise of. The starting zone was impossible to enter. You began in the town district. You fought here and battled penguins and other mafia men, called mafiosos or gangster looking people by the community in Eve, and then moved to the sand and desert area, which looked like a wasteland to the community. Then you got to go to the what the player base termed the Antarctic north, where polar bears and penguins and even old ladies sat about and garbled the scene. Xi with his character Otter_44351147 was here grinding it out. He was level 99. So he was just ganking foes. He had to keep his score up to stay #1 on the ladder. If he lost to the next highest kill count scored player, who was Auria, played by the person he knew was his friend, Mitsuru Abhagasta, who was in class with him sometimes. He played against her a lot as well. But he had to defeat her or else he would die. If he did, then he would need to climb up again. He needed to be level 99 to go to PAX Eternal 2081. He had to be level 99, at rank 1, and have over 150,000 combined kills, and also have the PAX Pass, which was dropped by a special creature or purchased from the in-game store. It was lost when you logged off. So you needed to keep on logging in to keep it from being lost. This meant he had to log in daily over 150 consecutive days, not keep the game running. The game was just in Chinese. So it meant you could log out, but not log off, which meant you had to play once in every 24 hour time frame to keep from losing the pass and being unable to buy a new one was a feature of the game. And they were limited, too. There were only 24 in the game. 24 players could be carrying one from the store. The rest had to find them as a drop. They were not deemed by the community to be all that rare of an item to see. Many dropped, they dictated it was all the time basically, from the mob boss mafia drop monster Mr. Penguin, who appeared in the special event rotation all the time. You could play it once every day.