To say the crowd was massive was an understatement. Jin took a look through his Dungeon Maker console, overseeing the CCTV live footage of his Tree Mall and saw that it was packed.
He was right to get the police to come to handle the situation and even deployed queue lines to enter or exit as suggested by the System. While the Dungeons and Pandas were supposedly open for 24 hours, Jin did make an announcement beforehand that he would be closing the store for at least three hours to update the Dungeon Instances.
It was the first time Dungeons and Pandas had closed their store this year since most updates were instantaneous or the customers were placed in a holding area for a few minutes before jumping into the new instance. Thus, people who thought they could do the same by jumping right into the PandaVerse Festival were disappointed.
Yet, at the same time most of them understood that if Jin was about to do something big, he needed some time to update the Dungeon and Service Instances. Thus the lines to go into Dungeons and Pandas were immensely long. Some of the long time customers who had been in and out of the Tree Mall realised that there were even new staircases to accommodate the queue.
They had no idea how it could be done but many had already recognised that the Tree Mall was something akin to a living huge tree that could change based on the caster’s needs. It’s just that many of them did not get to see it in real life and mostly heard it via the internet and to see it in their backyard was just purely amazing.
As for Jin, he did need the downtime to redecorate the place and fix a few ‘bugs’ that had been ongoing for quite some time. Even though most of them were quickly patched up by the System almost immediately, the constant live updates had made the dungeon instances and service instances not optimised. So this particular downtime was immensely helpful for Jin to fix everything the System had done previously and made sure it took the resources as needed and not anything more.
In the meantime, the System had remade its database to ensure it could accommodate the huge numbers of new customers that would be coming in. As well as revisions of the rescue protocols were done internally by updating the Pandamonium App with new codes which also forced the current users to have a mandatory update right before the opening of PandaVerse Festival.
It was to help facilitate the intense amount of data going through its own servers while ensuring that the cultivators would be still alive and well when they were killed by the Demon Rats. Even though it is THE System, the System was not acting at full capacity and as such, it needed to place some caution and failsafe procedures in the processes so that everything could go smoothly without too many hiccups.
Also, Jin did add in the forums that the other dungeon instances such as the Goblin Forest Dungeon Instances would be limited due to the scale of the Great Demon Rat Wars. If the number of players playing those one-time dungeon instances had reached maximum capacity, he urged the rest to be patient and instead try out the Great Demon Rat Wars as it is supposed to be the main event for this entire week.
As for the customers who were waiting outside, the food store owners had collaborated with Jin and opened way earlier in the morning than their scheduled timings to provide food services. Jin had also said that the delivery of food within 200 metres of the Tree Mall would be nullified for the event, prompting people to use the takeout services which were within the Pandamonium App.
To their surprise, the food delivery was terrifyingly accurate. Jin did say in the forums previously that it was an experimental feature where the customers could get food based on their live GPS coordinates. The only drawback was that the App would request a constant track of their phones although such a feature could be deactivated anytime if the user turned off the setting.
Many were a bit suspicious, thinking that Jin might use such information to gather more data about themselves and sell to people but Jin replied by stating that his company would not do such a thing and added that it was their choice whether to use it for convenience. (After all, if he really wanted to, the Pandamonium App could automatically send live feedback to the System. They never know how omnipotent it was. And in hindsight, there were people who tried to hack the App and the servers like how the major phone company Hua Wee tried to do it and leaks had confirmed that it was currently not possible to do so, making Jin’s data collecting leaking out to be less of a concern.)
And as such, the customers were slightly relieved that they at least had some grub before the start of the festival although a few of the knowledgeable customers knew not to eat too much as they were reserving their stomachs for Lynn’s Restaurant and her other counterparts that were serving food in the Dungeon Supplier store. Not because they were just delicious but their food proved to have temporary buffs that would help in the fight for the Great Demon Rat War.
However, what the customers did not know was that no one was making anything for the past three hours as Jin had mandated a System Order, an ability which he rarely used with his entire army of minions. He ordered everyone to take a good long rest with the aid of the System’s time dilation magic because the incoming festival would demand from them more than what’s expected.
That was why everything was prepared ahead of time before the imminent shutdown, leaving only Jin and the System to work tirelessly to get the store prepared for the largest event that they will ever host as of their time in the store.
“Let the floodgates open in ten minutes,” Jin said with a wide grin, knowing that all his efforts for the past month would be realised soon enough.
