Lin Hao felt like he'd been nodding for an hour before he actually got to see the system they had the copy of the game running on.

The anxious team lead had rambled on about the things they hoped to copy from the game in order to build the next generation of their company's alien invasion series, while keeping up a running commentary about all the things Starcraft Technologies was doing wrong with 'Living Jade Empire'. Lin Hao could have explained that they had missed the point of 'Living Jade Empire', and how it was supposed to unravel the anxieties of its players as they unravelled its quests, but he just nodded.

The team leader, Baard Iverson, finished up at last with, "A friend let me know that Starcraft Technologies has had people making enquiries about our company having gotten a copy of this, although so far there hasn't been any official contact. As soon as there is, we will have to delete it whether we've gotten anything out of it or not, because, as you've probably guessed, we aren't supposed to have it."

"I am aware," Lin Hao agreed dryly.

Baard gave him a startled look, but one of the other team members reminded him, "Lee worked with the development team there, so he probably knows a lot more about how secure their setup is than we do."

Lin Hao just nodded again.

Baard took a deep breath and then nodded. "Right. Right… so you probably know Fredrick and Lin too?"

Lin Hao blinked and then gave the man a wry grin. "You could say that," he agreed.

Baard gave him a slightly suspicious look and said with false casualness, "Fredrick never liked coffee much."

"Blowing up a workstation that costs half of your yearly wage with your breakfast cup will do that to a person," Lin Hao agreed dryly. "He was quite fond of the stuff before that though."

A light tittering laugh came from one of the team members, although no one dared a comment. Baard opened his mouth and then shut it. After a moment he turned and opened the door he'd been standing beside for almost half an hour. It was the entrance to a clean room, and through the glass wall the large computer system twinkled its diagnostic LED lights at them cheerfully.

Lin Hao stared for a long moment and then asked accusingly, "You're seriously pulling my leg now right? You're claiming that that's what you're running 'Living Jade Empire' on?"

"It's an impressive system isn't it, cutting edge," Baard said proudly.

"You're lying," Lin Hao said flatly. "That's a nice server but it wouldn't hold a tenth of 'Living Jade Empire' when it's up and running."

"Um, well, we had to delete a lot of data before it would run for more than a few minutes," someone admitted nervously.

Lin Hao turned and gave the man an incredulous look, but Baard insisted, "The system is better than you think. I admit, it's running at full capacity, but we only emptied the player and book databases."

"We're not actually sure what the book database held," someone else admitted.

"Inclusion data." Lin Hao replied in a distracted tone. "Sample stories for the quest generation system to build off of. I can't believe you actually have it running?"

"It's really running! We've been playing it some, and while we might have damaged the story line generation a little, I swear it's running just as well as the real thing," the only woman on the team insisted sharply.

"You have a VR connection system I can use right?" Lin Hao questioned.

Baard cleared his throat and said, "Well, if you could help get us started on deciphering the code first, so we can see how the system actually works… we'd appreciate it."

Lin Hao gave the neatly groomed man a look, and then ran a hand through his own messy hair. "Whoever got you this copy didn't tell you anything about how to use it," he stated.

"We know that the Starcraft Technologies programming division works in VR, we just don't have an account with access," Baard protested. "But we don't need that for what we want to do if we can just get the thing decoded."

Lin Hao couldn't prevent the huff of laughter that escaped him, despite the potential danger of revealing that they were currently standing with one of the three people who could actually give them access. He said with deceptive honesty, "You have to disable the defense system first, it's got the whole thing wrapped in its own layer of encryption."

"I knew we needed to defeat the world dragon!" someone said triumphantly.

Lin Hao glanced at the man. The fact that they'd discovered the World Dragon meant that they were probably capable of breaking into the system eventually. It was really a shame that they were reducing themselves to piracy, when they obviously had talents capable of developing their own system.

"I might fail to reactivate my account and trigger the system into deleting itself," he warned Baard.

Baard grimaced, but replied steadily, "It's worth the risk Lee Soobin. We probably don't have much time to study it even if you can get us access right away."

"Alright, lead me to my station and I'll start tonight," Lin Hao agreed.

The VR systems they had lined up in the large room over the server weren't as cutting edge as the server they were presumably linked to, but they weren't the cheapest or oldest either. They also didn't obviously have any external monitoring equipment added to them, and Lin Hao breathed a silent sigh of relief.

Even with the necessary calibration and setup, he was able to connect to the copy in under an hour.

--

The Jade Emperor greeted the newest player with, "What are you doing? You should be logging into your work account so I can make a full report on all the difficulties this update has caused."

"That's not in your intro script," Lin Hao replied with amusement.

"It's not," the Jade Emperor agreed, but he added a little petulantly, "but you're just going to delete me anyway because I'm an illicit copy aren't you?"