FPE Chapter 10

Amusement Park Team-Building (2)

Miserable wage slaves — not only did they have to bow and scrape before their bosses on weekdays, but their precious weekend rest time was also forcibly spent playing house with their leaders, and they couldn’t even complain about it, only able to bully the weak by cursing an innocent amusement park.

As the busy day drew to a close, Meng Le, working as a receptionist, was responsible not only for receiving visitors and managing attendance but also for organizing the team building activities. After she had arranged the restaurant for the next day’s team building, she planned to contact the amusement park their leader had mentioned.

“Fantasy Amusement Park, 88 Taoyuan Street…” Although the boss hadn’t provided any contact information, as a miserable wage slave, it was naturally her job to track it down herself — this posed no difficulty for Meng Le. She skillfully opened the Eat Drink Play app and searched for Fantasy Amusement Park.

“Hm? No Fantasy Amusement Park?” Meng Le blinked and checked again. Modern human life had been completely taken over by smartphones — no matter what recreational activity it was, reservations could be made through an app. Yet the Eat Drink Play app showed no information about this park. Could it be a newly opened place that hasn’t had time to register online yet?

No matter. Such a small thing wasn’t worth bothering her boss about. Meng Le then opened the map app, searched for 88 Taoyuan Street, and switched to street view mode, where she did indeed find an amusement park. However, when she zoomed in on the map’s street view, what appeared before her was a long-abandoned, run-down… “Isn’t this the Childhood Amusement Park?”

Meng Le was a local of Jin’an City. As a third-tier small city, Jin’an didn’t have many entertainment attractions. The city only had one mid-sized amusement park, located in the western district — but before that mid-sized park had opened, the place that left the deepest impression on Meng Le was the Childhood Amusement Park.

When she was little, the thing she looked forward to most every weekend was visiting the Childhood Amusement Park. So many years had passed in the blink of an eye — and now this park had reopened? Meng Le wasn’t surprised that the map results didn’t match reality; the map wasn’t real-time to begin with, and if the park had recently been renovated and reopened, it was perfectly normal for the map not to have updated yet.

Thinking of the park director grandmother who had warmly welcomed her as a child, Meng Le felt a pang of guilt. Had she known earlier it was the Childhood Amusement Park, she never should have cursed it — when she was young and afraid of being beaten at home and had run away, it was the director grandmother who had taken her in.

In the end, Meng Le did find the contact number, inside a small notebook she had treasured for many years.

****

Chi Yizhen had spent all his points on virtual models in the early hours of the morning. That very morning, a construction crew arranged by the game had come and hammered away for an entire day, and by the time they left, he unsurprisingly received an experience notification crediting his account.

[The player has renovated the Holographic Experience Zone — Abandoned Park. EXP +200.] 

[The player has reconstructed the “Abandoned Park.” EXP +1000.] 

[The player has built the Hall of Merit Leaderboard. EXP +500.]

[The player has built the Magic Beast Compendium. EXP +300.]

[The player has built the Magic Beast Viewing Corridor. EXP +1500.]

Hearing that the Magic Beast Viewing Corridor had yielded a full thousand experience points, Chi Yizhen was somewhat surprised. The points spent constructing the Magic Beast Viewing Corridor hadn’t even reached half of what he’d spent on the Abandoned Park (the Abandoned Park being the experience zone visitors had entered yesterday), yet completing the Abandoned Park had only rewarded him five hundred experience points, while the corridor had given a full one thousand. What was going on?

Chi Yizhen couldn’t help but take a walk through the corridor. This viewing corridor had come to him as a sudden inspiration in the early hours — modeled after the glass tunnel style found in oceanariums, where people walking through could observe various marine creatures through the glass walls above and on either side of them. However, since Chi Yizhen had limited points, only one wall of the corridor was made of glass; the other side was an ordinary wall, merely decorated. The corridor ran from near the amusement park’s main entrance, winding around the Abandoned Park in a full loop, during which visitors walking through could look through the glass wall on their left and observe magic beasts in various states.

That’s right — after using magic beasts as the “monsters” in a holographic monster-fighting experience, Chi Yizhen had now put them on display as animals for viewing. One end of this corridor connected to a crack in the Interdimensional Barrier, while the other end connected to the Abandoned Park. When someone entered the corridor, Chi Yizhen would open the crack in the Interdimensional Barrier just a sliver and release some Level 1 magic beasts. Since Level 1 magic beasts were unable to break through the glass wall barrier of a Level 2 amusement park, they either drooled at the visitors inside the corridor or made their way into the Abandoned Park to be fought by visitors as monsters. Whichever way they went, Chi Yizhen came out ahead either way.

For instance, at this very moment as he stood there, a Level 1 magic beast came charging toward him, only to inevitably slam into the glass wall and could do nothing but let out a greedy, furious roar at him.

Chi Yizhen crooked a finger at it. “Come on then — if you can hit me, you win, hahaha!” He laughed for a while, then suddenly understood why the viewing corridor had yielded more experience than the Abandoned Park.

The Abandoned Park was, after all, a holographic experience zone — in order to look after the visitors’ monster-fighting experience, too many people couldn’t be sent in at once. With the Abandoned Park’s current size, it was at capacity with twenty people, and while more could technically enter, it would seriously degrade the experience. On top of that, the Abandoned Park could only be entered once every half hour. The viewing corridor, however, was different — visitors could stream through continuously. These magic beasts, bizarre in shape and appearance, were no less of a draw as viewing attractions than famous animals at a zoo, and any visitor who came in would certainly not leave disappointed.

Compared side by side, the value the viewing corridor could generate was clearly greater than that of the Abandoned Park.

“So that’s the logic behind experience points in this amusement park — it’s not about how many points you spend on a building, but about how much value it can create. The reverse, however, doesn’t hold true: if a building is too crude and the points spent on it too few, visitors won’t be satisfied with it either.”

With Chi Yizhen there as such a temptingly fragrant human, the magic beast kept charging at the glass wall relentlessly — just like that snake monster that had been pinned down before — with all the appearance of being determined to smash through it. Chi Yizhen glanced at it, then chose to level up the amusement park.

According to the game’s explanation, the amusement park was the player’s divine kingdom, and the player leveling up was equivalent to the park leveling up. When he had first entered the park, he had only had 20 experience points. Building the main gate and reopening the park had awarded him 100 experience, visitors fighting monsters had given him 40 experience — totaling 160 — and the experience earned from renovating the park added up to 3,500, putting the combined total above the level-up requirement.

After another round of chiming game sound effects, Chi Yizhen leveled up to Level 3.

He opened his personal information to take a look.

Player Name: Chi Yizhen 

Player Level: 3 

Player Points: 0 

Player EXP: 660 (Next level up requires 4,000 EXP)

At the same time, the amusement park also leveled up to Level 3. The magic beast that had been charging at the glass wall nonstop — this time when it slammed into it, it was as though it had kicked solid iron, and the whole creature went limp, sliding to the ground and lying there weakly for a good while. Immediately after, the game issued the next quest.

[Ding! Main Quest 2 has been unlocked. Please achieve a daily park visitor flow of one hundred within one week.]

Chi Yizhen had been worrying over how to accomplish the goal of a daily visitor count exceeding one hundred when Meng Le’s phone call came in.

The moment he heard that a company wanted to come to the park for team building, he immediately agreed without hesitation, and even mentioned that the park had launched its viewing corridor, asking whether they’d like to purchase tickets for the corridor. “This week is the park’s trial operation period — corridor viewing tickets are half price across the board, just ten yuan!”

Perhaps it was this rock-bottom price that won the other party over, or perhaps the wage slave on the other end didn’t need to worry about spending her boss’s money — the gentle female voice on the line agreed without a second thought.

Chi Yizhen, with a sum of money and experience soon to be credited to his account, was in high spirits. After hanging up, he began to calculate: That company has forty employees, which still leaves sixty people short. Tomorrow is the weekend, and there’s a night market at the front of Taoyuan Street — the foot traffic on this street will at least double tomorrow, but doubled foot traffic doesn’t mean they’ll buy tickets and come in. I need to figure out a way to draw people inside. What should I do?

The success with Sal last time had let Chi Yizhen get a taste for shortcuts, but he quickly shook his head. An amusement park was a business for all ages — while the park wasn’t currently suitable for young children due to the magic beasts being its main attraction, he couldn’t have only male visitors. Female visitors were worth winning over too, and women’s power to influence others was far stronger than men’s once they fell in love with a place. They were customers the park couldn’t afford to miss.

There was also a more important point: visitors who currently entered the park to fight monsters could receive one-fifth of the experience points, and as that experience accumulated over time, it would indirectly improve their physical fitness — and might even one day push them past a threshold, causing them to awaken as Level 1 Extraordinary Beings. If by that point only male visitors had grown stronger, wouldn’t female visitors be placed at an even greater disadvantage?

Looking at it from a long-term perspective, only with true equality between men and women could this world develop more quickly. In the future, if the crack in the Interdimensional Barrier were to expand further, if Extraordinary Beings from that other world were to slip through — wouldn’t women, with no ability to fight back, suffer casualties on a massive scale?

In order to win over more female visitors, Chi Yizhen thought it over carefully from every angle — and created a female account.