Chapter 045: Server-Dominating King·Chen!

Chapter 045: Server-Dominating King·Chen!

After hearing Wu Chen’s request, Wang Zhuangyuan was dumbfounded for a moment. Not because it was hard—quite the opposite. It was about as simple as a task could get. It was just… strange.

But Wang Zhuangyuan didn’t ask why.

A big shot’s reasoning wasn’t his to question. He hung up and immediately called a dozen or so of the minor leaders under him, telling them to round up men.

A little over half an hour later.

Outside an internet café near Huahe Bar, Wang Zhuangyuan stood by the curb with a handful of trusted men, checking his watch again and again while he waited for Wu Chen.

The blue Lamborghini appeared down the street, drew close, and eased to a stop.

“Everyone here?” Wu Chen asked the moment he stepped out, already heading for the café door.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Wu. All of them are solid at games—” Wang Zhuangyuan said, hurrying to catch up.

Wu Chen went inside.

The place was massive, the equipment top-grade, but at the moment it stood nearly empty. A few dozen people were gathered near the counter; there wasn’t another customer in sight.

Wang Zhuangyuan had cleared everyone else out before Wu Chen arrived.

He’d booked the whole café for the day.

“Mr. Wu!” More than forty men bowed in unison as he walked in.

“Relax.” Wu Chen waved a hand, then gestured at the rows of machines. “Boot up. Download the game—the Aoshi Jianglong private-server version of Legendary City Lord…”

Legendary City Lord was an old game, twenty years old by now. Not unlike Legend of Mir from Wu Chen’s past life—not identical, but the core gameplay ran the same.

“Move it, all of you!” Wang Zhuangyuan barked.

The crowd dropped into seats row by row, booting up, searching, downloading, all with practiced ease. Most were eighteen or nineteen—genuine street kids who’d dropped out of school years ago and drifted into gang life, the kind who lived in internet cafés and were useless at nearly everything except gaming, where they were terrifyingly good.

A handful of middle-aged men were scattered among them, all past forty, though few in number.

Their reflexes couldn’t match the younger crowd’s. But they had something the young ones didn’t—they’d all played Legendary City Lord back when it first came out, over a decade ago.

Wu Chen walked to the last row and claimed it for himself, booting his machine and starting the download.

Since this was a private server, none of the café’s machines had it pre-installed. Everyone had to download it fresh.

The café’s connection was blazing fast, and since the official client was already loaded on every machine, all they needed was the small package that patched the official data. It finished in under a minute for the whole room.

“Everyone register. Go into Zone Three—it opened at five the afternoon before yesterday. Prefix your character name with Server-Dominating King.” Wu Chen’s voice carried across the room.

He’d just finished registering himself.

Character name: Server-Dominating King·Chen!

Wang Zhuangyuan stood at his shoulder, watching him download, register, and log in with unnerving fluency. His expression kept twisting, growing stranger by the second.

This was too damn bizarre.

When Wu Chen had called earlier asking to borrow his men, Wang Zhuangyuan had assumed something major was at stake—had told himself this was his chance to prove himself.

He never imagined Wu Chen wanted him to gather people to play games with him.

And not even a currently popular game.

A twenty-year-old relic. And not even its official server—a private one.

Wang Zhuangyuan had never played Legendary City Lord himself. Back then he’d been a good student, not the type to skip class for an internet café.

But the game had been massive in its day—half his classmates had played it, talked about nothing else—so he knew that when it launched at the start of the new century, it had swept across all of Asia.

From 2000 clear through 2006, its popularity had held before finally fading.

Even so, it kept a die-hard following. Its official servers still ran to this day, though updates had long since stopped.

Was this really a young person’s game?

Wang Zhuangyuan was starting to doubt Wu Chen’s actual age.

As far as he knew, the only people still chasing private servers for this game were greasy, thirty- or forty-something men—more than a few of them wealthy tycoons with too much time and money.

He stared at Wu Chen’s back, and the longer he stared, the odder it all seemed. His expression had settled into something close to bewilderment.

Really in his early twenties?

Wait.

No.

A thought struck Wang Zhuangyuan.

Could Mr. Wu be testing him?

The more he turned it over, the more it made sense. Nothing else could explain something this strange. Mr. Wu must be probing his patience—seeing whether he could handle even a task this small without complaint.

Big shots really did operate on a different plane.

Wu Chen’s back, in Wang Zhuangyuan’s eyes, took on an air of unfathomable depth once more.

“Log in and hold at the beginner zone,” Wu Chen called out, oblivious to the war Wang Zhuangyuan was waging with thin air behind him. “Wait till I top up and found the guild.”

He pulled out his phone.

“Mr. Wu, a few more brothers are still on the way—should be here soon. Another thirty or forty coming.” Wang Zhuangyuan leaned in and murmured close to his ear.

“Mm.” Wu Chen gave a soft nod, glancing at him. “No need to hover. Go handle whatever needs handling.”

“Got it.” Wang Zhuangyuan straightened, swept his eyes once across the room, and turned for the door. Just before stepping out, he called back over his shoulder, “Keep him company and do it right! Whoever performs best today gets a hundred grand from me!”

“Don’t worry, boss!”

“You can count on us!”

A chorus of voices answered.

Wang Zhuangyuan left.

Wu Chen began topping up his account—one million yuan, in one shot. He founded a guild, pulled every person in the café into it, then used the guild function to buy VIP status for every single member.

VIP status unlocked matching gear sets and other items outright, things like experience elixirs.

The VIP tiers on this server were absurd, running all the way to VIP15.

Wu Chen didn’t buy them the top tier immediately. No need to rush it. Everything in its order.

Once every guild member had their VIP perks, he made another call. To Li Ruobing.

“I’m in a meeting,” she said flatly.

“Give me ten million,” Wu Chen said, straight to the point.

“Hm? For what?”

“Operating funds.”

“…Fine.”

She hung up without asking what exactly required that kind of money.

Their relationship these days sat in strange territory—not quite close, and yet somehow it was. Li Ruobing had developed an odd trust in him, at least where money was concerned.

She wasn’t worried he’d swindle her.

After everything he’d done for Li Ruotai yesterday, handing him a hundred million outright wouldn’t have been excessive.

Just past noon, four hours later.

Wu Chen’s guild had become the largest on the server, crushing the former top guild, Dragon-Subduing Realm, into the dust. The cost: he’d poured more than eight million yuan into the private server, bit by bit.

He’d bought every brother in the café VIP15—a hundred thousand yuan a head.

He handed them the best VIP reward weapons and armor, gear good enough to send them into the top-tier dungeons to farm bosses for the finest rings, boots, belts, and amulets on offer.

Since it wasn’t his own money, Wu Chen didn’t feel the loss at all.

Under normal circumstances, none of this spending would have been necessary. But he’d locked into a spending war with the guild leader of Dragon-Subduing Realm, each of them pouring in more, driving the other to match.

More than eighty people now filled the café, all grinding away on the same private server. Shouts of “Kill him, kill him!” and “It dropped, it dropped!” filled the air, along with clouds of cigarette smoke—half the room was lit up.

The buzz of conversation never let up.

Wu Chen allowed it.

Gaming ran on emotion. Some of them needed a cigarette to focus. And a coordinated push like this depended on communication—cut that off, and nobody would play well.

He’d given them only one real rule: no swearing in the game. Taunting was fine—taunt the enemy as savagely as they liked—but no profanity.

And this crowd, it turned out, was brutal at trash talk, fingers flying across the keyboard.

Lunchtime came around.

Someone ordered in food, and a few of the younger ones ran it table to table.

“Mr. Wu, your lunch.” A young man with an earring set the food down carefully on Wu Chen’s desk.

“Mm. Go on.” Wu Chen glanced back at him, then turned his eyes back to the screen.

Things were nearly there.

The whole server had run dry of solo players. The small guilds had all been slaughtered until their members quit outright. Only Server-Dominating King and Dragon-Subduing Realm remained.

This private server opened a siege war every three days—a phased final showdown. Whoever took the city walked away with the title “Legendary City Lord” and its exclusive gear.

The siege could also be triggered early, for a price. But triggering it early carried the risk of losing to the final boss guarding the city.

In truth, the boss barely mattered. On a pay-to-win server, the real obstacle was the other players. Without beating them first, no one ever got close enough to face the boss at all.

Wu Chen clicked through a few menus. A server-wide notice went out.

“Attention all players: Server-Dominating King guild leader [Server-Dominating King·Chen] has triggered the Siege of the Main City ahead of schedule. Prepare yourselves—the battle begins in 30 minutes!”

“Eat up, everyone. Siege starts in half an hour,” Wu Chen called across the room.

Half an hour later.

All flagged red.

The siege began.

Server-Dominating King and Dragon-Subduing Realm clashed in the main city square in a brutal, all-out fight, players dying, reviving, and charging back in wave after wave.

“Kill him!”

“His weapon dropped!”

“Give it here, give it here, I just lost my gear!”

“Move! Push in!”

The café erupted into noise. This crowd of young men fought like they meant it, genuinely fired up.

The two guilds tangled for more than half an hour without a clear winner.

But Server-Dominating King held the edge throughout—it simply had more core members.

Then Wu Chen shouted into the public channel: “That’s it, done for today. Something urgent came up. Everyone scatter—give your gear away, log off, and quit.”

“Strip your gear. Log out,” he called into the room as well.

The more than eighty people froze for a beat, unsure why, but obeyed anyway.

The main city square filled with a glittering pile of top-tier equipment, gold light everywhere.

It was the Dragon-Subduing Realm members’ turn to freeze—every last one of them, dumbfounded.

They were mid-battle, and the other side just… quit?

Losing an opponent that abruptly could drain all the meaning out of a game in an instant.

“Damn it, man, what are you doing?”

“Don’t go! Don’t! We haven’t even settled this!”

“I’ve put in ten million. You’ve spent eight, nine million yourself, haven’t you? We finally get a real opponent and you’re just walking away?”

Three private messages landed in a row.

All from the same person.

Wu Chen glanced at the sender’s ID and smiled faintly.

His in-game name was Dragon-Subduing No Regrets, guild leader of Dragon-Subduing Realm. In real life, he was a sloppy, greasy middle-aged man—the youngest son of his family, and an absurdly rich second-generation heir.

He had one more identity.

He was the sugar daddy behind the reigning superstar, Tao Manying.