FPE Chapter 19

Stolen Glasses

The game, in ways unknown, had arranged for the bank’s asset appraisal team to visit the park on Sunday. After the television interview aired, the park’s popularity skyrocketed. By Monday afternoon, Chi Yizhen had already received a text from the bank, and within two days, the land lease agreement with the government was automatically sent to his email. He didn’t even need to show up in person — everything could be handled entirely online.

Chi Yizhen thought to himself that the game truly had extraordinary reach. If he’d had to handle all of this on his own, it probably would have taken a full month just to get through the process.

But even with the game overseeing things and no fear of being taken advantage of, Chi Yizhen still reviewed the contract carefully.

This time, he planned to lease the 1,000 mu of flat land and hills behind the park — currently nothing more than a stretch of overgrown wasteland that had sat untouched for years, unable to generate any value due to various factors. Despite being classified as commercial land within the city, the lease price was not particularly steep: 1,000 yuan per mu per year, with a minimum lease term of ten years.

The government had taken note of Fantasy Amusement Park’s technology and the buzz it had generated over the past few days. They clearly had high hopes for the park’s future prospects, and with policy support and preferential terms offering a two-year rent waiver, the total lease cost over ten years came out to 8 million yuan.

“Eight million yuan!” Chi Yizhen let out a pained sound.

[The task does not require the player to lease 1,000 mu of land. If the player finds the price unmanageable, they may choose to lease only a few hundred mu, or even just a few dozen.]

Chi Yizhen flatly refused. “No.”

The task requirement was to expand the park by one mu, but that was only Task 3. There were still Tasks 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and countless more to come. If he only leased a tiny plot now, would he have to keep going back to sign new contracts with the government every time the game issued another expansion task? Why make multiple trips when everything could be settled at once? That would just be wasting his own time.

On top of that, although the game had broken things down into many smaller tasks, Chi Yizhen had never lost sight of the main objective: to become the world’s most premier amusement park. A premier park could not afford to be small. When it came to land for future use, more was always better than less.

So he went straight to the bank for a loan, intending to lease the entire thousand mu in one go. He even worried that a thousand mu might eventually not be enough — though that was a concern for several years down the line. For now, Chi Yizhen focused on the present.

The park his grandmother had left him was old and small, but it still sat on two mu of land, and paired with the far more valuable “holographic technology,” the bank was more than happy to extend a loan to Fantasy Amusement Park. He signed the contract, sent a copy to the bank, and the approval came through swiftly, with the funds disbursed shortly after.

Of course, the money didn’t go into Chi Yizhen’s account — it was transferred directly to the government.

Once the process was complete, those thousand mu behind the park were his for the next ten years. During this period, Chi Yizhen had also leveled both himself and the park up to Level 4.

Player: Chi Yizhen 

Current Level: 4 (Starting to look like something proper.) 

Current EXP: 400 (4,600 EXP required to reach the next level) 

Current Points: 42,600 

Current Inventory: 2 Rare Character Cards (Sal, Chi Xiaozhen), 1 Interdimensional Travel Card, various props (already deployed in the park)

[Congratulations, player, on completing Task 3. Reward: 100 points.] 

[Congratulations on completing the task of maintaining a daily average visitor count of 200 within one week. Reward: One Smart Ticketing System.] 

[Player’s current total points: 42,900. Keep up the great work!]

With so many factors working in its favor, Fantasy Amusement Park had been riding an enormous wave of attention that week. A number of influencers had even shown up outside the gates to ride the buzz, and the daily ticket queue far exceeded anything seen before. He no longer needed to use his Character Cards to rely on looks to attract customers. He’d been running off his feet and hadn’t even had time to check on task progress or incoming points. Now, seeing a balance of over 40,000 points, Chi Yizhen — who had long been scraping by with only a few hundred or a few thousand — was struck by the surreal sensation of having suddenly struck it rich.

“What am I even going to do with 40,000-something points?”

Task 4 required a daily average visitor count of over 200, but in reality, daily ticket sales at Fantasy Amusement Park had exceeded 500 every day this week. It wasn’t that only that many visitors were coming — the park was simply too small. Even running from 8 in the morning until 9 at night without interruption, it could only accommodate so many people. Quite a few visitors had bought tickets but couldn’t enter right away, and had to wait outside and be let in in batches. The experience was poor, and over the past two days Chi Yizhen had already heard plenty of complaints. At the time, the land lease process hadn’t yet been finalized, so expansion wasn’t possible and he’d had no choice but to carry on. But now things were different — the land had been secured and points were plentiful. It was time to overhaul the park in a big way.

If Chi Yizhen had been pushed into this reluctantly at the start, he now felt the genuine pleasure of running an amusement park. He was full of energy every day. He thought that if his second-year-of-university self could have seen what the park looked like now, when facing his grandmother’s dying wish, he would surely have felt very happy.

Knowing in advance that the land lease process would be finalized today, he had hung up a notice when the park opened that morning informing visitors it would be closed for two days for upgrades, and had also posted announcements on the park’s social media accounts and official blog.

Full of enthusiasm, he opened the park model and was about to dive into construction when he noticed a red message alert on the game panel. He opened it.

[Please be advised, player: a batch of glasses was stolen approximately two hours ago.] A surveillance video was attached.

In the footage, two men dressed in unremarkable, low-profile clothing — the kind that would vanish into a crowd at a glance — bought tickets and entered the park like ordinary visitors. Then, while Chi Yizhen wasn’t paying attention, they stole a small crate of plastic glasses and slipped away.

Chi Yizhen: Ah, well…

He felt rather conflicted. If those people ever found out that the holographic glasses they’d risked everything to steal were nothing but a few-yuan-a-pair pieces of plastic, he wondered what kind of expression they’d make.

“Game, why didn’t you alert me at the time?” 

[The player was in deep sleep and was not to be disturbed.]

Chi Yizhen: …

As his level had risen, his physical condition had long since surpassed that of an ordinary person. He now only needed to carve out two or three hours of sleep a day to feel completely refreshed and ready to work. And to ensure that rest, he had indeed told the game not to disturb him. The time of the theft had fallen right in the window when he’d rushed to close up and get some sleep.

“Fine!” Chi Yizhen forgave the game, but he could not forgive the people who had stolen from him. After a moment’s thought, he had the game file a police report on his behalf and send the surveillance footage to the police station, then put the matter out of his mind.

He rubbed his palms together. “Perfect timing with the park upgrade — let’s see if we can get rid of the glasses altogether and achieve true naked-eye holographics.”

Although each pair of glasses only cost a few yuan and could be reused, a few yuan was still money. On top of that, they required him to continuously pour magic into them, and he spent half of every day on nothing but that. The issue had to be resolved. Otherwise, as visitor numbers kept climbing, just dealing with the glasses alone would run him into the ground.