She Professed Herself The Pupil of The Wisemen

prologue

Virtual Reality. It has been half a century since this system ha been implemented. It is a technology that today’s world economy can not do without.

Schooling is done through accessing special terminals at home, and connecting to a virtual reality through the internet to attend lessons. The risk possible during commuting has disappeared, and because of the lack of maintainance costs for a virtual school, in today’s world, schools have become extinct.

With work, greeting clients is also done through virtual reality, and because of electronic programs being used for everything, the cost of paperwork has also disappeared. Even when it comes to buildings for headquarters, the cost of renting and maintaining a private server for the company is overwhelmingly cheaper than the maintainance costs of a company building.

Because all things outside of physical needs could be satisfied with virtual reality, the VR technology continued developing rapidly.

Of course, there was no way this technology wouldn’t be targeted by the game industry. The technology was still a little expensive, but even so it boasted a rate of popularisation that made it common for normal households to buy them to celebrate a child’s coming of age for example.

It happened over different periods, but a number of VR games began being developed.

Sakimori Kagami was also one such normal youth who received a VR machine for his coming of age.

He did his job from home using the VR machine he received for his coming of age. At lunch break he would eat the food prepared by his mother, and then once again went to work using this VR machine.

There was no time spent commuting, and it was a normal small-to-medium firm, and he spent his days without feeling any particular dissatisfaction.

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There was an online game called 『Ark Earth Online』.
It began very quietly, and the closed beta started and ended before anybody had noticed.

The reason that Sakimori Kagami knew about this minor game was because of a commercial that had aired late at night. The commercial had neither sound nor video, and was merely the game’s personal VR access code aired for 15 seconds.

When he started up his VR machine to take a look out of curiosity, a white virtual space with the title 『Ark Earth Online』 appeared around him. The only other things were two lines:

Begin Open β

Download

He didn’t hate the fact that they didn’t try to butter him up. Thinking this, he tried downloading it. And after choosing “yes”, he installed it.

The background was textureless, and it only used a normal font, so he had absolutely no idea what kind of graphics or world this game would present.

However, Kagami was somewhat charmed. Coerced by something impossible to really explain, but that was similar to some sort of compulsion, he began.

The installation took roughly fifteen minutes. When he immediately tried to activate it, what appeared was a title screen that was almost like reality.

Thus began Sakimori Kagami’s days of addiction to 『Ark Earth Online』.

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