Chapter 1.2 : : Prologue - 2 (Previous Chapter no. 2)

About 2 hours later…

"System start initialization," (Rex)

[System initializing..1%..32%…44%..50%]

[Error… system initialization failed]

[System can't connect to Core-X… ]

"Just what are you Core-X," Rex rubbed his temples.

Core X is the temporary name Rex gave to the solid dark sphere Rex used to make the energy core for the machine which James thought of as a normal old game pod.

In appearance, Core-X looked like a black shotput, but in terms of weight, it was heavier than even shotput. Rex had no idea what type of stone or matter Core-X made of, even the name Core-X was something he gave it.

Around eight years ago, Rex first saw it in a secret auction in Black Market, it was the time of his rise. At that time Rex came to be known as a young genius Inventor who had given a completely new direction to VR technology.

But the growing fame didn't change his attitude, curiosity…. to be exact his personality, like before he still attended many underworld events to get his hands over things that he legally can't, his thirst for knowledge was above everything else for him, whenever he found something new in those events or markets he would buy it even when their price was way above their value.

All the things that were auctioned in that auction house were either from professional thieves or underworld big shots.

The channels for all the things that got auctioned were kept secret and even asking about the source of things was a taboo.

The one who actually Core-X was Stalin Rudolf, the leader of a mercenary team who had his roots in the underworld for 25 years.

As for where he got it there was a story behind it…

He never intended to steal Core-X from the start, Core-X was just an added bonus his man got while completing his task.

Several months ago, Stalin received a contract to steal the research result of a particular subject from a space research center.

The money the contractor offered was 20,000 Kg gold, it was the medium he usually used to complete a deal. When he got the offer he knew that if the contractor is giving so much money then this task must be very dangerous but his greed took our reasoning.

He made a team of trusted men from his group and made a plan to steal that research result

They bribed or threatened all the guards one by one and included them in their plan… after 2 months of planning and hard work they finally got an opportunity, they successfully broke into the research center and stole the research result.

But just when they were going to leave that place, Stalin's greed again overpowered his reasoning, and a thought surfaced in his mind if the research result of a single experiment material worth that much then what about all the research material and research sources present in the whole research center.

If not all, he stole many things from the research center before escaping for his life from the alerted police.

Later he handed over the research result to the contractor, it asked for and completed the deal. He asked the contractor if it wanted to buy other research results or subjects too but the contractor directly refused, it was like even the contractor was working for someone else and couldn't make the decision to buy other things on its own free will.

Stalin wanted to quickly sell other things to get rid of them as faster as possible and make a huge lot of money but the remaining things were like Moon Stone, a Meteorite piece, asteroids dust… and the drives that had encoded data on them

Stalin didn't have much knowledge about these things so he didn't know to whom of at which price he should sell them, therefore he decided to add them to the auction, he had seen many rich billionaires buying these kinds of things just to satisfy their taste or to show off.

When the Core-X appeared in the auction it was represented with the details of it being a stone from space, made of some unknown material. The host didn't have any more information on it so the starting price of the space stone was low but it still didn't catch the attention of many people.

After all bidding for an unknown space stone was like gambling, even if someone buys it just to add it to their collection then when someone asks them what is it, then what would they say… it's just an unknown stone from space?

Compared to it why won't they bid on other things like the stone from the moon or the sand from mars, they were more appealing than this one. There was one more reason for them to hesitate, it was a black market auction although the one who organized it was a well-known person in the underworld but no one would want to trust someone from the underworld too much… the point was what if that thing was fake? can they come back and complain? the organizer will just say that you switched the original material to swindle them.

At that time Rex was fairly rich, but he was a far cry compared to the billionaire big shots present in the auction. He bid more many things but wasn't able to compete with other, when it was time for Space stone he gritted his teeth and squeezed out all his savings to bid for it, others didn't want to risk too much on an unknown thing so they backed off.

Rex excitedly took the stone to his workshop and spent some of his time every day trying to find out something about this stone, he did many experiments involving using X-Ray instruments to look through it or infrared scan but he didn't found a single thing about it, in the end, he just used it as a decoration and placed it on a free shelf of his workshop.

After that Rex stopped focusing on that Space Stone.

Later Rex invented the first Game Pod in the same workshop, he then became famous all over the world, in the eyes of the public, he opened a new world for all the gamers to interact and with each other, they could live a new life in the digital world using the Game Pod.

After Rex launched the Game Pod in the market his business thrived, he expanded his business to all over the world, his success knew no bounds, in just a few years he reached heights which even he never thought of, he then had a bigger home to live, luxurious car to travel.. the friends that used to show off things in front of him started to show off to other using his identity as a friend, the girls who never remembered his name started to coincidentally meet him all the time.

In everyone's eyes, Rex was the happiest person in the world at that time, but in truth, he became extremely lonely, the reason being he lost the most precious person in his life at that time, the one whom he wanted to show his success the most.

On his 21st birthday, after the party, he went to his workshop in the basement of his old house to relive the memories from where his success really started.

When he looked at the white-blue Game Pod lying in quietly lying in the corner a smile appeared on his face, it was the first Game Pod Rex ever made.

"More than four thousand errors when modifying and redesigning software, more than three thousand hardware crashes and in the end, only one success… but that one success alone made up for more than seven thousand failures," Rex muttered with a nostalgic tone.

Out of nowhere, Rex decided to use it, he wanted to relive that feeling… the feeling of his first-ever success when he made the Game Pod.

Rex led in the Pod and put on the nerve gear, he manually started the system then finished the process to dive into the game.

[Player Identity Confirmed]

[Initializing Dive….]

[Starting Countdown…]

[03]

[02]

[01]

Rex closed his eyes, his breathing became slow, it was time for him to wake up on the other side but….. this was when that incident happened, the one that changed his world view forever.