Zhou tapped his fingers impatiently against the table, waiting for the screen to log him in. The dark loading screen finally dissipated, revealing a myriad of vivid colors that was the Oasis.

The hue that caught his attention, though, was the bright ruby 126 encircled next to mailbox icon in the toolbar. He sighed. All these messages and invitations were a nuisance, but they had been flowing in nonstop ever since he had gotten onto the leaderboard. They were sent for various purposes and from various people, from Oasis journalists to other high-ranked players to fans, all vying to get some attention.

It didn't help that he was only able to log on around once a week, resulting in the buildup of plenty of notifications over the days, giving him a mountain of them to sort out every time. He opened up the mailbox, no longer surprised at the high number of bolder letters, indicating that the status of the message as unread.

In the beginning, Zhou had tried to read most of the mail, replying sometimes to the people that seemed sincere and had a genuine interest, not just bandwagoning with the crowd. However, at this point, he had realized that almost everything sent to him wasn't genuine, and didn't bother anymore. Deleting all the messages instead was far more efficient.

He did feel a little apologetic towards the few people who were actually inspired by his rise to the top despite having previously been just another insignificant player. There were only one or two of these in each batch of mail, though, and he didn't have the time to read through everything to find them. His time was already limited as of now, able to afford only an hour to play at the cafe each time he came.

Zhou selected all the mail, about to press the trash button, but paused, a message having caught his attention. It was near the top, indicating that it had been sent fairly recently.

Daito has invited you to join a challenge with him!

(no message)

The first sentence was very obviously one of the default automatic messages generated by the game system whenever an invitation was sent. Zhou pondered it for a moment. 

Daito... the name seemed vaguely familiar. Ah yes, he was one of those leaderboard players, Zhou realized, somewhere in the top ten, if he recalled correctly.

However, that wasn't the main part that surprised him; it was the no message in parentheses that piqued Zhou's curiosity. He had never seen an invitation that was sent without a message before. Which was speaking from experience, considering the flood of messages he saw every time he logged onto the Oasis.

He tapped on the message to open it, but the screen didn't react, so he tried again until it finally started loading. Zhou sighed, a little frustrated. The headsets in the cafe weren't in the best condition, but he didn't really have many other options, so he would have to make do for now.

After it finished loading, the message opened up and appeared for a brief moment, but then a new window popped up, saying:

You've accepted Daito's invitation! Have fun on your quest!

Zhou groaned. The system must've picked up on his second tap and assumed it was him clicking the accept button, and there wasn't really much he could do about it now. He supposed he could just not show up to the quest, but that seemed a bit too rude. Oh well. Hopefully having to spend time and talk, albeit virtually, to another human for a few hours wouldn't be too painful.