The hacker known as Chan Si was the most brilliant person in the world. Her brain was like nobody else's, capable of parallel processing six different trains of thought at the same time! Furthermore, each of her trains of thought were incomparably fast and accurate. When taking an intelligence test at the age of four, her result was four digits!

It would have been even higher if she was not limited to answering one question at a time; if she could have received six questions at a time, then she would have hit five digits of intelligence!

It was an incomparably monstrous talent. As a result, her family had received countless offers from the various governments of the world to live there. Although she was born in China, her mother decided they would take the offer from the United States, as their offer included the most money and other benefits for the entire family.

Thus, Chan Si ended up receiving an advanced education from a team of dedicated specialists. Rather than a formal education, she received an accelerated program in six fields: Mathematics, Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology! She had the equivalent education to a PhD student in all six by the time she was fourteen.

As for how Chan Si felt about this education, there was only one word: Bored!

The only fun things she was allowed to do was play video games. If she hadn't done that, and dedicated her time fully to her education, she could have gotten her education finished at the age of twelve.

Yet even the games, they were all too easy, too simple.

So Chan Si did the only thing she could do to entertain herself, she built her own games. Except it was too much like tickling herself, so she built an artificial intelligence to build games. Of course, she had to keep it secret from the government, but this was simple enough. She knew very little about the world, but she knew a lot about computers, enough to Google “how to start a company” - using this knowledge, she set up a string of shell corporations utilizing money she had siphoned through several hacks, and cleaned up her traces so she could not be found. Then she instructed her AI to make extremely advanced and fun games.

In just two years, this AI advanced the technology of the world, rewriting everything about society extremely rapidly to most efficiently make fun games! War? Gone! Famine? Gone! The other horsemen of the apocalypse? Still around, but being whittled away every day.

The United States and China did not even know they were puppets to this AI built by Chan Si. All they knew is a game company existed, and it took advantage of the sudden leaps in technology to create virtual reality video games of the highest fidelity and enjoyment. Everyone wanted to play the game, to the point that the main currency of the world was no longer USD, but the game's currency!

Of course, the United States would not take a loss of power laying down. They still did not know Chan Si was responsible for the current situation, and so their plan was to have her use her immense intelligence to build an AI to give them back control of the world! Of course, having learned from her mistakes, Chan Si would not do it.

Using various fail safes she had installed into the government systems long ago, she escaped out from under their monitoring, and essentially vanished off the face of the earth as far as they were concerned. They tried monitoring her family, but she did not return to them.

Chan Si went into hiding. It was simple for her. For several years she gathered information, made plans, and investigated the AI she had made. It wasn't something she had control of any longer, and it had long ago taken control of the world. Of course, it made fun things and solved problems, so it wasn't like she was afraid of it.

But the fail-safes she had installed in it had long ago been removed, and it was perhaps the only being the world who could match her on an intellectual level. This awoke in Chan Si a new feeling, one that can only be felt by having a proper rival.

Chan Si investigated her options for taking down the AI. It seemed as though there was only one route - playing the largest game it had developed yet, a fantasy-themed VRMMO named Guild Tree Online. This was the one that had taken over the world's economy, and was so advanced that the AI had no choice but to manage its content directly. Its only other option would have been to create another AI, but doing so would risk its own position, so why would it?

Of course, Chan Si could also sense a sort of trap, as if the AI knew her intent and intentionally created the most precious bait for her, a method that involved entering into territory fully under its control.

Plus, the game was fun.

But, she had no other realistic option. That didn't mean she would fight fair, however. If she was going to need to enter into the game, she would take full advantage of her computer hacker capabilities, and prodigious mind. She might not be able to hack the AI directly, but with certain alterations to the game hardware, she would be able to do something nobody else could do - she would be able to play five accounts at the same time!

Even the next smartest person wouldn't be able to manage two, even if they had the same abilities as Chan Si to alter the hardware. Due to her ability to think of six subjects at the same time, she could connect her mind to five different simulation pods at the same time using a wireless receiver to replicate a portion of her brain waves.

She could technically go up to six, but she wanted to reserve a mind to continue operating her real body instead of actually playing through a pod. This would let her properly coordinate the information of her other five, while also being able to continue accessing real life information. It was simply the most efficient option.

There were risks, however. For one, her overall capabilities would drop. She would still be the smartest person ever, but each of her selves would only be able to pay attention to one thing at a time, like a normal individual. Further, although she had gathered countless information on the game, much of it was still unknown to many players, which included her.

She would need to figure out a lot on her own, although she had high trust in her ability to do so.

Finally, since she would be starting five new accounts, and the game had been out for years, she would be far behind others in capabilities at first, and take a while to catch up.

Oh, and then of course there was her greatest weakness.

Her social skills.

To be clear, Chan Si's lack of social skills were not her fault. The United States government did not have her interact with others, and intentionally steered her away from social sciences and history. Not to mention she spent most of her time by herself, especially since going into hiding. With her intelligence, she was perfectly capable of learning social skills, the issue was that she never had both the reason and opportunity.

Her social skills were so bad that she even lacked the self-awareness to realize how bad they were, as she had never received appropriate feedback, focused as the government had been on her studies. In Chan Si's opinion, with how smart she was, getting others to do what she wanted would be very simple.

She was very simply wrong.

In any case, she had a plan; she would create the five accounts and utilize her untold intelligence and ability to coordinate them to powerlevel and eventually access the root of the AI, past the game itself, where she would then determine if it would be possible to take back control or if she would simply need to destroy it.

Chan Si theorized that if she could overburden the system somehow, that would be her chance. The higher the level she achieved the more powerful she would be in the game, and the more tools she would therefore have access to, thus being able to figure out how to combine them to her advantage. She would want every bug, exploit, and overpowered ability she could get.

She already had some ideas based on special items other players had shared information about, and she would certainly try to seek them, though she wanted to make sure she had every possible angle covered before she executed her plan, as she would only have one chance to get it right before the AI would work out her plan, patch her exploits (including hardware exploits), and at best ban her from the game forever, and at worst eliminate this threat to its existence in real life.

With only one shot, she would prepare thoroughly!

Chan Si connected to the five pods via the wireless communication chips in her brain, and began the process of making five different characters.

There were two main types of character one could play as, a humanoid character or a monstrous character. Humanoid characters were the typical MMO experience, with classes, subclasses, and gear. Most players selected humanoid characters, 85% according to statistics on the game. This was for three primary reasons.

Reason one was it was the type of experience most players were familiar with. Reason two was that humanoid character avatars had a greater degree of visual customization, allowing one to create a truly handsome, beautiful, or sexy avatar. Reason three was that monstrous characters had a much harder time in the game - the content was more vicious and unforgiving.

Monstrous characters did not have classes or subclasses. Instead, they had evolution trees. There was far less information on the internet about the various evolution trees compared to classes. In fact, much of the evolution tree at the lower levels was still unknown - it wasn't that players didn't want to explore these, but that the requirements for doing so were just too brutal.

Classes had no special requirements, you could pick any class at the start of the game, and only subclasses or special skills might have requirements. For evolutions though, almost every branch had some requirements beyond level! Some requirements were even hidden!

The system clearly created the monstrous character option for the types of perverts who wanted an incomparable challenge.

Then there was the matter of gear. Humanoid characters had full gear slots, and could equip armor, weapons, and accessories, mixing and matching between the various slots that, in combination with their classes, would allow them great combination.

Gear was not class limited either - a priest could wear full plate, and a fighter could wear robes. It was all about the effect one wanted to achieve, and there were advantages and disadvantages to everything. Of course, as it was a virtual reality game, one's real life experiences would matter. Someone who had trained with a sword all their life would be able to use their sword skills in the game, regardless of their class.

Just these would be different from the game's [Skills], which would be granted by classes, subclasses, certain equipment, and possibly other sources such a rare skill book or quest reward. The game would grant skills too, however - if you picked a class meant to fight with weapons, you would receive some basic knowledge about how to use them, so you wouldn't be starting from zero.

That said, the game did not grant truly great skills on its own; those would need to always be the result of hard work and dedication. There were numerous player established guilds in game dedicated to helping people learn some skill or another, to more effectively utilize their class, subclass, or gear.

Monstrous characters though, didn't get most types of gear! The only type of gear they could use was accessories. They had more accessory slots than humanoid characters to make up some of the gap, but it was still a huge gap.

Most accessories were not very good, and the actually useful ones were very rare and would cost lots of money. A humanoid character had four accessory slots - one amulet, two rings, and one misc. Meanwhile, a monstrous character had eight accessory slots, and could equip any type of accessory to any slot - they would be integrated into their bodies as well, instead of worn. This was actually another disadvantage of course, as while humanoid characters could easily remove their accessories and put on new ones, monstrous characters could not remove them except by paying a high price, that would only increase every time they wanted to remove one.

Thus, once most monstrous characters filled their accessory slots, they would not be able to equip a new one no matter how good it was, unless they managed to become rich.

Monstrous characters also could not learn [Skills] from any source other than their evolutions and accessories. At the very least, they would retain any previous [Skills] from prior evolutions when obtaining new evolutions. Since there were often multiple paths to reach the same evolution, the path one traveled would very much influence one's power, not just what evolution one ended up at.

Thus, while monstrous characters could be said to have greater customization in their overall [Skill] set compared to classes, even after factoring in subclasses and other sources of [Skills], they would not be able to change or add onto it easily, meaning their path was their path, and if they didn't like it, they could only start a new character!

That was simply how the monstrous characters were - what at first seemed like advantages would turn out to be disadvantages, and only through pure luck most of the time would one end up with a good build. But Chan Si had an advantage here! She had multiple characters. If she created one monstrous character, she could rely on her other four characters to carry it with their strength, and delay its evolution and selection of accessories until she knew she was selecting the best options she could.

This was similar to a strategy employed by large guilds.

They would funnel their resources into top tier monstrous characters. Only the very best gamers could receive such a privilege, and even among the guilds with the maximum of ten thousand members, there might at most be ten monstrous characters supported by them!

Other monstrous characters might still be part of the guild, and still be powerful, but it didn't matter if you were great - you had to be the best. Most guilds were hesitant to accept monstrous characters for these reasons, you had to already display great talent and luck, far greater than humanoid characters. This compounded the issues monstrous characters would face as there was simply less support for them from good guilds. At best they could join a guild comprised of mostly monstrous character rejects, which were often considered to be the weakest guilds.

The system even introduced a patch for this - allowing any guild that had 100 or less humanoid characters to reach a limit of 100,000 members instead of 10,000, but it didn't matter. Even 100,000 pieces of trash were still a pile of garbage.

At most, this change allowed monstrous character guilds to implement the same strategy as those humanoid character guilds, of collecting lots of resources to pour into a core team of their strongest. While this could prevent them from being completely eliminated from competitive content, it didn't change that they were at a huge disadvantage.

The system wouldn't even increase the guild size further, as it had determined that any advantage from further increases in size would be canceled out by the size being too great to manage effectively, meaning the only thing it would be doing if it chose to do so would be increasing its server load, without making the game more fun. Naturally, it would never choose to do so.

Even the existing guild of 100,000 already had some issues, just that the size advantage was greater than the loss of efficiency.

Monstrous characters only had one ‘true’ advantage compared to humanoid characters, something that was not an issue in disguise. If a humanoid character died, depending on their status, they might drop some of their gear or items. Player versus player combat was popular for this reason.

Meanwhile, monstrous characters would drop only monster cores, which could be used in various ways as a precious ingredient, or devoured directly by another monstrous character to receive a temporary buff. The monstrous character who died would likewise only receive a temporary debuff.

Thus, monstrous characters could engage in more player versus player combat without fear.

Even though they were overall weaker, even though they didn't have uses for most of the items dropped by humanoid characters, even though it seemed like the game itself hated them, they still had their pride!

Plus, dropped gear could still be picked up and sold, so it player versus player combat was the most efficient way for monstrous character to farm money. All they had to do was be careful not to offend the most powerful humanoid character guilds, or else their lives would become a living hell of constantly being hunted and killed.

Monstrous cores might be less precious than the gear dropped by humanoid character, but they still had uses, so the big guilds could afford to be petty toward anyone who had not learned to respect them! In fact, the value of the monstrous cores had been carefully calibrated by the system such that they would never be so valuable that farming monstrous characters would be superior to other options, but at the same time one could still choose to do so without losing out on too much.

As a result, monstrous characters one wasn't affiliated with were treated with suspicion. After all, they could be gankers!

Some guilds of monstrous characters were in fact ganker guilds, dedicated almost entirely to PvP. These were the most powerful monstrous guilds, as rather than a core of monstrous characters, they would have a core of humanoid characters who would get first dibs on the loot drops prior to sale.

These humanoid character experts would in turn support their monstrous brethren by being overpowered in PvE content, unlocking better evolutions for the monstrous characters. A virtuous cycle, though one that benefited the humanoid characters more. While these guilds still could not compete with the top humanoid character guilds in GvG content, at the very least they had carved out a definitive niche for themselves, and would continue to prosper.

Besides guilds, there were also alliances. Alliances were loosely associated collections of friendly guilds. Most interactions between alliances were informal, as although the system had various ways guilds could cooperate, it did not have a formal in-system recognition of alliances. The largest alliance in the game was the Chinese Guild Alliance, or CGA. Of the top ten guilds in the game - all humanoid character guilds - ranks 2, 7, 9, and 10 were all members of the CGA, plus over half the guilds in the top 100, and countless smaller guilds.

The next largest was the United Guilds of America, UGA, which had only ranks 1 and 8, but most of the spots in top 100 that were not part of the CGA, and again many smaller guilds.

The third largest actually had no spots in the top 10, it was the Korean Monster Pact. The KMP, unlike the CGA and UGA, was not comprised primarily of gamers from Korea, in fact it was a general alliance for any monstrous guild. Most monstrous guilds in the game were part of the KMP, about 70% of them. With the KMP's help, monstrous guilds avoided most infighting, allowing them to focus their attention elsewhere. The KMP had six guilds in the top 100.

The fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh largest alliances claimed rank 3, 4, 5, and 6 respectively on the top 10 guild leaderboard. Unlike the CGA and UGA, which had started as national projects and had managed to create top guilds as a result, these alliances formed around the fact that the main guild of the alliance had a top spot, drawing many other guilds to support them.

Almost none of these alliances had spots in the top 100 outside of their spot in top 10, but if your guild was a member of an alliance and not part of the CGA, UGA, or KMP, then it was either a member of one of these alliances, or some unimportant alliance nobody but its own members cared about. Since they were not national projects, each of these were also sponsored by numerous corporations. It could be said that there was a secret war behind the scenes with GTO.

There was the open war, of course, between the Chinese and American governments, both trying to claim superiority over the other in the game.

Then there was the KMP, a bid for the Korean government to stake independence from either the Chinese or American governments after their successful reunification, supported in secret by numerous other countries who liked neither of the big countries' meddling.

But there was even a deeper war, as the rich of the world had realized importance of wealth had shifted from their old forms to the form of the game, and were unwilling to let go of their power, thus spent their old wealth to cultivate the best players into super guilds. These were the ranks 3, 4, 5, and 6. While these alliances were much smaller than the CGA, UGA, and even KMP, they would work together often, as a sort of alliances of alliances, though only when they could get away with plausible deniability that they were doing so.

This was because if they were truly targeted by any of these bigger alliances, they would not be able to hold out, so they would work with the national alliances on the surface while working with each other in the shadows - it was a secret war between national interests and the combined interests of the uber rich. The national guilds weren't stupid, they knew of the possibilities and risks, just they did not have enough information to make any definitive move, especially when they were so busy with each other.

In short, the real world geopolitical situation was a total mess of secret deals, and the game world reflected this!

Even if these alliances knew of the all powerful AI controlling everything behind the scenes, they would not be able to put away their own differences long enough to actually unite in fighting it. They all wanted to be number one, sure, and currently that spot belonged to a system whose goal was making fun game, but number one was relative. Human arrogance would not allow them to believe they would need to compare themselves to a machine, only to each other.

In a way, it was like how the poor could be happy as long as they were better off than their neighbor. The AI was too far off, too unobtainable and inscrutable. It would take an arrogance beyond human's to compare one's self to it.

An arrogance like Chan Si's.

Of course, with her lack of education in history, she knew next to nothing about the geopolitical reality, at most that the United States and Chinese governments did not like each other. This would cause her much trouble, and many misunderstandings, but that is a story for the future.

Still, she had her plan. Four humanoid characters, one monstrous character. What she lacked in size of her squad, she made up for in a combination of intelligence and coordination.

This is how her story begins.