Chapter 391 — Public Opinion, Xiao Yan Meets Kirito

Top floor of the official SAO tower, in the office.

On the screen before Wang Huai'an's computer, the scene of Kazuto Kirigaya and Asuna Yuuki's conversation appeared.

Nanoscale cameras had long since been implanted in both their bodies; they could operate on nothing more than the electrical currents of human cells. In this era, it ranked among the blackest of black tech.

No help for it—being the shadow of a micro-magic plane meant a miserable lot: a scrap of supernatural power, and even that not to be used freely.

"Lu Bu? Truly, beauty is in the eye of the beholder."

Wang Xu shook his head.

In his view, compared with the "Lu Fengxian of Dynasty Warriors" that the Japanese had praised to the skies, Kirito rather resembled that splendid Xiliang horseman Ma Chao—face like powdered rice, lips like smeared vermilion.

He was far inferior to the Kirito of before his personality had been remade; now, at least, he was taking proper shape.

Shutting off the feed from Kirito's first-person perspective, Wang Xu opened a web browser.

No need for a VPN—with the level of technology he commanded, his optimized electronic devices could visit almost any region of the world that had not been physically cut off from the network.

Algeria, Papua New Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Denmark, Dominica, Ecuador, China, Britain, America, Russia, France, Japan...

Netizens the world over were spontaneously demanding the revocation of the killing permission held by SAO's top ten ranked players.

The various conglomerates and state governments, by contrast, showed utter indifference, as though the matter did not weigh on them at all.

All they cared about was the profit and progress SAO could bring the world.

As for the protests of the melon-eating masses and the keyboard warriors of the internet, Wang Xu paid them no mind whatsoever.

The thinking of the elite at the top of every nation was an open book to him.

A death or two—what of it?

Suppose each of the top ten combat-ranked players killed one person a day—set against millions of players, what did that amount to?

In the future, SAO's player base might well break ten million.

Every moment, the staff of SAO's map development team were working themselves to the bone—preparing for a rainy day.

The game's seven sky cities were not even a drop in the bucket.

Besides, the top ten were not unreasonable people; they only eliminated opponents foolish enough to provoke them.

This time, Nobuyuki Sugou was a thoroughgoing idiot, a self-important fool who, following stale conventional thinking, had tried to hijack public opinion and pressure others—never realizing that his targets simply did not play by his rules.

Online, many were memorializing Nobuyuki Sugou as "the first to give his life," and some keyboard warriors had even deified the man outright.

But netizens of average intelligence, capable of rational thought and having watched the full video of the incident, all insisted that Sugou, the fool, had brought death upon himself and had no one else to blame.

What if...

What if, among the future top ten of the combat rankings, there appeared a player who was irrational, inhuman, who took pleasure in killing?

Once such a person held the killing permission, would it not throw society into turmoil?

No.

The people at the apex of every nation's pyramid could not care less.

There were only ten holders of the killing permission, after all; a little investigation would bring out all the records—who killed whom, at what time, plain as day.

A true homicidal maniac, however rampant, would last no more than an hour before his real-world identity was dragged into the light and his original body simply erased.

Did people really believe the real world was all civility and virtue, simple and honest, with no killers to be found?

They must be dreaming.

Guided and coordinated by the elites of each nation, public opinion gradually settled back to stability.

The existence of the killing permission amounted to the creation of ten idol-class, extra-tier players; its symbolic weight far outweighed any practical one.

In fact, within a mere three days, of SAO's top ten combat-ranked players, all but the number one, "Xiao Yan," who had made no statement, issued declarations one after another—that they would never use the killing permission unless necessary, and that even when they did, they would submit written explanations or video evidence afterward.

Among them, the two players "Lu Mingze" and "Kirito," when confronted by negotiation experts, gave the most perfunctory responses of all: "Mm" and "Got it."

Naturally, the court scribes of the various governments expanded these two answers into essays of some twenty thousand words, brimming with emotion, buttressed by citations, drawing liberally on the allusions of every nation, to demonstrate Lu Mingze's and Kirito's love for the world and their yearning for a beautiful life.

Netizens came around one after another to understanding Kirito's earlier killing of Nobuyuki Sugou.

A hero's fury, all for a beauty.

What a marvelous thing.

It was like something out of a fairy tale—a prince, a hero.

Kazuto Kirigaya, who had been blackened until it seemed his very existence was pointless and even breathing was a sin, became in an instant SAO's first superstar, with fangirls beyond counting.

Yet one hidden danger remained.

In the combat rankings, the one in first place, that Jia Mingyuan, clearly held the killing permission, yet had never once declared his stance.

Some conspiracy-minded netizens said they did not trust this Jia Mingyuan.

Judging by the name, this Xiao Yan ought to be Chinese.

Of course, many Koreans insisted that Xiao Yan was an outstanding esports player of the Republic of Korea.

The melon-eating internet was rich in talent: some netizens well versed in anthropology analyzed the subtle facial features of Xiao Yan from videos posted on SAO's official site and insisted he was of Chinese descent.

As for why Xiao Yan had not declared himself on the killing statement...

The reason was simple.

No one could find him!

This Jia Mingyuan, first on the combat rankings, was far ahead of everyone else in clearing progress, and was forever in seclusion training in regions other players had marked "extremely dangerous."

...

In the blink of an eye, a month had passed.

The ten players who held the killing permission had not killed a single other player since.

Human beings are creatures who forget the pain but remember the feast.

Some ordinary players with no fear of death began provoking the top ten on the rankings.

Cowed by public pressure, these top-tier contestants chose to swallow their pride and bear the humiliation.

Of course, the ordinary players had not found Xiao Yan, Lu Mingze, or Kirito—nor did they provoke Asuna, who was forever hovering between tenth and eleventh place.

The reason for that was simple enough and needed no elaboration.

As for Nobuyuki Sugou's wretched death, the crowd of idiots he had incited were in the real world left with crippled limbs, unable to care for themselves.

The overturned cart ahead is a warning to those behind.

At least until they could be sure no harm would come of provoking these four Jia Mingyuans, no one was willing to linger in their presence.

On this day, on the thirty-first floor of the third sky city, "Stuart."

In the safe zone, a youth dressed all in black appeared before Kirito's party.

"I am Xiao Yan."

The black-clad youth came straight to the point: "I want to form a small guild, and I hope to invite you to join."

After becoming a Reincarnator, the special game helmet awarded for his first mission had granted Xiao Yan a "special ability" to raise his real-world strength within the game.

As time passed, he had gradually come to realize that the further SAO went, the less suited it was to a lone wolf's survival.