Chapter 574 - 353: Message from the Ancient Deities

Chapter 574: Chapter 353: Message from the Ancient Deities

The night before the Zog online shopping platform’s major sale.

11:50 PM.

With ten minutes to go before the crucial moment, the platform’s entire operations and maintenance team was in position, ready to face the peak traffic.

Judging from the data gathered during the pre-sale, the event was performing even better than expected.

The number of new users on the shopping platform exceeded expectations, which also meant that at the stroke of midnight, the lag would be worse than anticipated.

This was something they had only discovered as the number of users on the Divine Remains Network grew.

In the past, Zog had assumed there was no limit to using faith as bandwidth.

It was only after experiencing occasional lag during peak hours that he realized the Divine Remains weren’t as perfect as he had thought.

A single Divine Remains could only handle a limited amount of faith simultaneously.

Therefore, they had to distribute the load, creating separate "servers."

In other words, they directed users to different Divine Remains to avoid hitting the upper limit and triggering some unknown consequence.

Now, Zog wanted to make that unknown consequence known.

Having acquired several new Divine Remains to use as backup servers, he decided to conduct an experiment.

Zog guessed that the upper limit for handling faith wasn’t locked in; it likely had room to grow.

It was like a Divine Remains’ capacity for Magic, which grew with the number of believers. So far, that capacity had shown no signs of approaching its limit.

Although Zog didn’t believe the capacity could increase infinitely, it currently seemed to be nowhere near its boundary—or perhaps it truly had none.

When it came to Deities, their unreasonableness was, in its own way, quite reasonable.

As for the growth in handling faith, the Divine Remains they currently used—the egg from Twin Tower City, the deer from the Northern Domain, and the bird from the Elf Silver-White City State—all began to lag at different traffic volumes.

The Elf Divine Remains could handle the highest traffic volume.

Judging by the state of the Spirit Bodies produced by these three Divine Remains, the bird was clearly the most intelligent.

Following this logic, it seemed the Divine Remains could evolve, with the evolution manifesting in the form and intelligence of their Spirit Bodies.

And an egg, clearly, was not a High Tier form.

The known method for a Divine Remains to manifest a form was through continuous, long-term, and uninterrupted faith.

However, the length of this cycle was uncertain, though it was sure to be long.

Who knew how many generations of tribespeople in the Northern Domain had offered their faith to produce that "big data" deer.

After the Egg Spirit Body appeared, it had remained inert for two years, until a crack appeared during the last server lag incident.

Perhaps that "unknown consequence" was something hatching from the egg, upgrading the server.

Even in the worst-case scenario, where the server "fried," he still had several backups.

The loss of some resources was an acceptable risk.

’No research is without its costs.’

While keeping an eye on the server backend, Zog opened the shopping platform’s interface on his computer.

He prepared to experience things from the user’s end at the same time.

He wanted to see just how bad the lag would feel for a user at midnight.

’The mark of an excellent planner!’

Time ticked by.

With three minutes left, Zog began to imitate a real user’s actions.

He started frantically refreshing the page.

He watched the order screen, waiting for the checkout price to update. On his desk, a stopwatch displayed the final seconds counting down to the new day.

The entire room fell silent.

Hundreds of Mages stared anxiously at the backend. They had no idea what would happen when the traffic completely overwhelmed the system; they didn’t even have a contingency plan for repairs.

They did, however, have a plan to quickly activate the backup servers.

3, 2, 1...

After countless refreshes, Zog clicked the button one last time. The screen in front of him went completely white, and the cursor turned into a small, spinning blue loading circle.

Zog found the spinning circle icon even more irritating than the classic hourglass.

The room erupted into chaos.

The Magic Programmers, each monitoring different parts of the system, began shouting updates to one another.

In a real emergency, nobody bothered to type out messages; everyone just yelled.

"I’m locked out! I can’t do anything on my end!"

"Me too!"

"What’s going on? We’ve lost the data feed from the Divine Remains."

Zog assessed the situation and understood: not only was the user end frozen, but the server side was, too.

"Boss, should we activate the backup Divine Remains?"

"Hmm..."

Zog unconsciously kept clicking refresh.

Activating the backup Divine Remains involved more than just switching servers. It meant scrapping the original plan—where the highest discounts went to those who checked out closest to midnight—and replacing it with a queuing system to prevent the new server from also crashing.

That would be a far cry from what they had advertised.

Although Zog had buried a clause in the fine print stating that the Zog Group reserved the right of final interpretation.

But that wouldn’t stop them from getting flamed online.

Besides, if they initiated the contingency plan this early, he wouldn’t get the data he wanted from his test.

"Wait," Zog said. "Give it until 12:05. If nothing has changed by then, activate the backup."

Those few minutes felt exceptionally long.

If the ideal scenario—the server upgrading itself—didn’t occur, then the longer he delayed, the greater the negative fallout would be.

It would damage user trust in the platform and discourage them from participating in future events.

Finally, the clock showed 12:04:32.

He clicked refresh one more time, fully expecting to see that same white screen.

But then, something miraculous happened.