God's Imitator

Li Renshu looked at Wang Yongxin and nodded.

Obviously, their previous conversation, especially the discussion about the Gallery’s attitude toward God’s Imitators and players, had given Wang Yongxin some inspiration.

Fu Chen looked at the game rules and said somewhat puzzledly, ”I have another question.

”Couldn’t the male players unite from the beginning and use ‘Dislikes’ to threaten the female players in return?

”Everyone clearly only had one like and one dislike per hour. Before the killing rules were clear, the deterrent power of dislikes was the same.

”But after four hours, it became females having more likes and males having more dislikes, with male players making comprehensive concessions.”

Wang Yongxin explained, ”This is where the game design is ingenious, or rather, full of malice.

”The designer forcibly cut off all connections between players. Communities and same-gender groups couldn’t discuss strategies, only communicating through broadcast data.

”The reason male players couldn’t unite as you suggested is because of a very important principle: ’The Principle of Fortunate Avoidance.’

”For example, in real life you’re someone who lives comfortably without worries about food and clothing. One day on the street you accidentally bump into a furious drunk, it might be him who hit you, but the optimal choice at that moment is for you to actively apologize.”This game issued all male players a blank check for 30,000, actually making male players the relative ’fortunate ones’ in the game, so they would spontaneously tend toward active avoidance.

”Combined with the discipline of original social rules, the natural alliance formed by female players due to their ’victim status’ (random deduction of visa time), the inability to communicate with each other within the game, and other factors, the strategy you’re thinking of would be almost impossible to implement.

”Because if you don’t give, plenty of others will. As long as some male players make concessions out of the ’Principle of Fortunate Avoidance,’ then your threat to have females give dislikes becomes meaningless.

”Just like in reality, males are also generally considered the party that benefits more from marriage. Although I don’t agree with this view, it can explain certain phenomena.

”Of course, getting more dislikes and having advantages in the latter four hours is another matter entirely.”

Jiang He added, ”And doing that would really make it easy for Lawyer Lin to mistakenly kill you as a God’s Imitator, right?”

Everyone laughed. Although this game was indeed very dangerous, the joy of returning safely made it seem even sweeter.

Li Renshu looked at the visa time income she had recorded earlier and nodded thoughtfully, ”So, in the end it was 31 players evenly splitting all of that God’s Imitator’s time.

”No wonder your visa times all have remainders.

”But... exactly how much visa time was it?”

Yang Yuting quickly calculated with paper and pen, ”I had no additional expenses or income throughout this game, only the parts randomly deducted by the game mechanism.

”3 minutes deducted per hour, so 6 hours should be 18 minutes total deducted, so one share of time should be... 24322.

”Multiplied by 31 gives the total time: 753,984 minutes.”

Everyone fell into silence, obviously all somewhat shocked by this astronomical figure.

Zheng Jie realized something was wrong, ”Wait, you didn’t spend a penny in this game? Never went Split on room fees even once? Didn’t buy food or water either?”

Yang Yuting thought about it, ”In my first four meetings I only encountered one female player, Lu Xinyi, and she actively paid the room fee.

”As for the other male players, they not only actively paid room fees but also brought food and water. I had no place to spend money.

”Later I was always matching with trustworthy players, so I never encountered new players requiring Split again.”

Zheng Jie was thunderstruck. Obviously the gap between people in this game was bigger than the gap between people and dogs.

Players with a ”wealthy beauty” image like Yang Yuting, even without adopting any sophisticated strategies, could easily win just by displaying normal human-level intelligence but thinking that male players ultimately left the game with 30,000, his psychology balanced out again.

Yang Yuting looked again at the total visa time she calculated and sighed, ”750,000 visa time is indeed quite a lot, but unfortunately, divided among 31 players doesn’t leave much.”

Jiang He sighed, ”Are God’s Imitators all so wealthy? It’s an astronomical figure I can’t imagine at all.”

Cao Haichuan corrected, ”Strictly speaking, this should be the total visa time of all the deceased in the game.

”When the God’s Imitator is alive, this visa time belongs to her, but when she dies, this visa time gets evenly distributed among the surviving players in the game.”

Jiang He looked at Yang Yuting again, ”So, the 30,000 minutes of visa time from mutual liking at the end is gone?”

Yang Yuting nodded, ”Yes, it should be gone, probably because this game didn’t end normally, but was forcibly settled after the God’s Imitator’s death.”

Cai Zhiyuan was thoughtful, ”That means there would be two different settlement rules.

”If ’game end’ is the settlement condition, then when forcibly ended due to God’s Imitator death, it would still settle normally. For example, ’male players indiscriminately receive 30,000 minutes of visa time.’

”But if it uses ’last meeting’ as the condition, then it couldn’t settle normally.”

Jiang He said regretfully, ”That’s such a pity!”

Zheng Jie shook his head, ”It’s not really a pity, because the rule about ’extra likes and dislikes costing money’ also didn’t settle, otherwise I would have been charged a lot.

”And most importantly, we came out alive.

”In that situation, even one more meeting could have been life-threatening, let alone persisting to the last meeting.”

Li Renshu pondered for a moment, ”So, now we’ve come to a very crucial question.

”Could Zhong Yuanyuan be the God’s Imitator who designed ’King’s Judgment’?

”Uncle Ding previously participated in ’Blood Poker’ together with Community 1. So we can’t rule out the possibility that players from Community 1 recognized Uncle Ding and targeted him.”

Cai Zhiyuan took the paper and pen and quickly calculated.

”We can’t determine it through visa time.

”Too many deaths. Once the data is slightly averaged out, it’s no longer accurate, and we can’t calculate Zhong Yuanyuan’s original time.”

Everyone initially tried to estimate exactly how much visa time the God’s Imitator had. If it was more than 250,000, there would be a possibility it was the God’s Imitator from ’King’s Judgment.’

But obviously this method wouldn’t work.

Cao Haichuan spun his lighter in his palm, ”I tend to think that Zhong Yuanyuan and the God’s Imitator from ’King’s Judgment’ are not the same person.

”Her killing methods and visa time harvesting methods are somewhat crude.

”The Gallery gave ’Blind Date Game’ a very low rating, while the God’s Imitator who designed ’King’s Judgment’ could get an S rating. No matter how much their level declined, it wouldn’t drop to this extent.

”Even if the goal was simply and brutally harvesting time, it should be done more skillfully.”

If they could prove that Zhong Yuanyuan was the God’s Imitator who designed ’King’s Judgment,’ then her death at this moment would give many people present great peace of mind but unfortunately, no matter how they looked at it, it didn’t seem likely.

Wang Yongxin coughed twice, ”It doesn’t matter. Even if this was just a not-so-brilliant God’s Imitator, being able to root her out from the game wasn’t easy. This experience is worth summarizing.

”More importantly, this God’s Imitator showed us a kind of completely new possibility we hadn’t considered before.

”God’s Imitators can actually cooperate with players to turn entire communities into scam operations?

”The Gallery would actually allow such blatant rule-breaking.”

Everyone fell into silence. Obviously, Wang Yongxin’s question was equally puzzling to others.

Before this, the vast majority of people understood the relationship between God’s Imitators and players as completely antagonistic.

God’s Imitators design games to slaughter players, while players need to survive in games and then find ways to locate and counter-kill God’s Imitators.

Killing the other party would allow them to seize the other party’s visa time.

The community rules also clearly stated this from the beginning.

[Hidden among all players is a special type of dangerous element: ’God’s Imitators.’ They design games for the Gallery and complete judgments of players.]

[When players die in the Gallery, the designer of the corresponding game will obtain all remaining visa time of that player.]

But the specific case of ’Blind Date Game’ clearly demonstrated the possibility of cooperation between God’s Imitators and players.