Prologue

During late 2138 a small company named Rising Phoenix revealed that they were going to release a Full-Dive Virtual Reality game called The Lost Cosmos on March 23rd, 2139.  When they announced, as they were still a small company, they did something that would allow them to be able to gain reputation, thus they released a beta at the very beginning of 2139 only allowing 100 participants to play the game.  Everyone was still skeptical about the game, but when the beta finished they were a little more convinced based off of what the players of the beta said.

Although the first thing they said was that they can’t reveal too much of the game, they would be able to tell everyone some of it.  They spoke on how realistic the game was, they spoke of the vast number of playable races and classes there would be. They didn’t give a specific number, but they did say that there were possibly hundreds of races and classes that one could play.  The thing that attracted the most attention was the mention of space travel.

People were excited about this because even though it was 2139, no one had access or ability to go to space freely.  This is all because of what happened in 2053, it was later dubbed ‘The Great Calamity.’ During ‘The Great Calamity’ the world fell to anarchy.  Meteors fell from the stars, and Australia collapsed. These events caused great decimation the population, leaving it with only 500 million people left at the end in 2076.  Luckily the human race survived and overcame the devastation it had caused. Humanity is still not back to normal even after 63 years, but the population had bloomed into the 3 billion people today.  People had many different theories on why it happened, but the one that stood out the most was the death of Li Xunren, an influential martial artist and poet that had changed the views of many, but this theory was rejected as it was not logical.

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Many things had changed since ‘The Great Calamity’ cities were erected over the fallen ones, items were reinvented, society changed as we know it, and many deep bunkers were made in the case that this would happen again.  People had great motivation in the first years, but like all things, it faded with time leading to the creation of some video games in 2094. Rising Phoenix was created during that time, and they spent over 40 years working on a game.  That game is The Lost Cosmos.  The fact that they could work for that long on a single project amazed people to the extreme.

After the remarks the beta players made, people started feeling great anticipation for the days to come.  Then out of the blue, Rising Phoenix released a lottery for anyone and everyone they could reach, the winners of the lottery would be able to have the very first edition when they released the game to the public.  Each person could only enter it once. Rising Phoenix would only release 5,000 copies in the first wave, and 10,000 the second. There would only be 1,000 winners out of everyone who signed up. Leaving the rest to be first-come-first-serve.  The game would come with a pod capsule, which was the thing that allowed people to enter the game.

Over a billion people signed up for it, showing the popularity and anticipation of the game.  The finishing of it happened without any grandeur. No one knew who won, all people knew was that game pods suddenly showed up across the world as well as Rising Phoenix allowing for the purchase of the remaining 4,000 pods, which sold out the same day.  The people who did get the pod registered after they got it, leading to the feeling of anticipation and the agony of waiting.

Eventually, it happened, the servers were released causing everyone to login and create their very own character.  Among them were people from a different age, gender, country, religion, and more.