God's Imitator

The rules continued to display on the large screen, accompanied by the round number and a countdown timer.

Huang Shengjie had been doing his best to keep up as the rules were read out, but by the end he had not only failed to take in all of them, he had managed to get himself somewhat turned around in the process.

He forced himself to try to sort through his thoughts again.

”Everyone mentioned before that a 40-player game would almost certainly have especially complicated rules. Hearing them describe it didn’t really register, but now I can see that there really is a difference between hearing it from someone else and seeing it for yourself.”

Although the large screen provided corresponding diagrams to aid comprehension, the player’s state of mind made a significant difference as well.

Back in the community, when other players had walked him through the rules of previous games, Huang Shengjie had picked them up quickly, and had even found himself thinking, without quite realising it, that there was nothing particularly difficult about it.

But actually being inside the game was a different matter entirely. Under conditions of extreme tension, the mind could easily seize up, and missing a single rule meant losing the thread of everything that followed.

On top of that, every rule could be concealing a textual trap, and one moment of carelessness could spell total ruin. It was genuinely difficult for an ordinary player to quickly work out the order of priority among all these rules.

As a newcomer, all Huang Shengjie could do was push himself to keep thinking.

”This game has no explicit completion objective, but if you become an ’Infected’ player and don’t get cured, you die. So the main goal is to avoid becoming Infected at all costs, or if you do become Infected, to find a way to treat it with medication as quickly as possible.”Clearly, ’medication’ is the most important resource in this game. You have to get hold of it by whatever means necessary.

”The rules say that Doctors and Sales can both buy medicine from their own vending machines, while Regular Patients can only buy from the Lounge.

”So that means there’s no medicine in my vending machine?”

The thought made him hurry over to the vending machine to check.

The machine had three main function screens.

The first was a standard item purchase screen. The second was a screen for functions related to the ’Medical Card.’ The third was a special screen for calls, the monitor, and voting.

In the regular item list, there were many different kinds of food and drink, but no medication of any kind.

The ’Medical Card’ screen displayed the current balance on the card, along with several different top-up options.

In the bottom right corner was a ’Create Card’ button. Huang Shengjie tapped it, and shortly after, a black card was dispensed from the vending machine. It had a few small raised dots on its surface and bore the three characters of his name.

In shape it resembled a bank card, though without the long string of account digits or the magnetic strip.

Before entering the game, Huang Shengjie had chosen to submit 5,000 minutes of visa time, so his Medical Card now held 5,000 Basic Medical Points.

As a new player, he did not have a great deal of visa time to his name. The loan he had received from the community would need to be repaid.

So in the end, before entering the game, he had settled on submitting 5,000.

What he currently held was ’Basic Medical Points,’ which could only be converted into ’Special Medical Points’ through trading activities within the game, and it was only Special Medical Points that would convert back into visa time at a 1:1 ratio when the game ended.

If he could not manage that conversion, then his 5,000 minutes of visa time would simply be gone.

The prices of items in the vending machine were actually cheaper than those in the community, which surprised him.

When Yao Yuan had explained the relevant rules back in the community, he had mentioned that some God’s Imitators designed their games with item prices double those in the community, and prices several times higher than that were not unheard of either.

A game where items were sold at a discount seemed to be a rarity.

Huang Shengjie slipped the Medical Card into his pocket, then looked at the two doors in the room.

”What can I actually do right now? It seems like nothing, other than choosing one of these two doors to open.”

He examined both doors in turn. The one leading to the ’Lounge’ appeared to have no mechanism on it whatsoever and could seemingly be opened directly.

The door to the ’Treatment Room,’ on the other hand, had a small screen beside it, displaying a special ’Request’ button and a number panel.

According to the rules, Huang Shengjie could apply to meet with the Doctor in the Treatment Room, but the Doctor was under no obligation to agree.

And conversely, since each player could only open one door per round, if he opened the Lounge door first, then even if the Doctor in the Treatment Room sent him a request wanting to meet, Huang Shengjie would have no way to open another door.

”Looking at the layout diagram, the Doctor can choose to meet with four people: the ’Reviewer,’ the ’VIP Patient,’ and the two ’Regular Patients.’

”The Doctor’s order of priority for meetings should be Reviewer, then VIP Patient, then Regular Patient.

”Sending money to the Doctor would increase the chances of being seen, but is that really necessary in the first round?

”According to the rules, the Doctor only has Basic Medication. It’s only the Sales player who has the Special Medication.

”The Sales player has to meet with the Reviewer first, and then the Doctor, which means it will be at least two more rounds before the Doctor can get hold of the Special Medication.

”The earliest the Special Medication could reach me would be round three.

”Even if I met with the Doctor right now, the medicine I could buy would be the same Basic kind available in the Lounge.

”My points are limited. I’ll send a token amount. If the Doctor opens the door, all the better. If not, I’ll head to the Lounge.”

Of course, there was another option available to Huang Shengjie, which was to go nowhere at all and simply stay in his room.

The advantage of that was that he could spend 2,000 points to monitor any room he chose.

But the game had only just begun, the cost was quite steep, and the probability of seeing anything useful was low, so after a brief moment of thought, he abandoned the idea.

With his mind working hard, the time passed quickly.

The first round was about to begin.

Huang Shengjie immediately pressed the ’Request’ button on the small screen next to the ’Treatment Room’ door, attached an offer of 500 Medical Points, and waited quietly.

...

At the same time, Qin Cheng had finished reading through the rules and was taking in the layout of his own room.

He was in Zone D, and had been assigned the default identity of ’Doctor.’

From the layout diagram on the wall, the Doctor’s room, the ’Treatment Room,’ was twice the size of a regular patient’s room, and had four doors in it.

These led respectively to the ’Review Room,’ the ’VIP Patient Room,’ and two ’Patient Rooms.’

In addition to the doors, between the ones leading to the Review Room and the VIP Patient Room, there was a large floor-to-ceiling window.

Through it, he could see an open courtyard.

Seven floor-to-ceiling windows looked out onto this courtyard.

Six of them were somewhat narrower, corresponding to the ’Reviewer,’ ’Doctor,’ and ’VIP Patient’ rooms of two adjacent zones.

The seventh was the largest, a corner window, and corresponded to the room where the ’Sales’ player was located.

The furnishings inside the Doctor’s room were also quite different from those of a regular patient’s room, and were arranged in a way that genuinely resembled a treatment room.

Beside each of the three doors leading to the patients, a designated area had been partitioned off, somewhat like a bank counter, with a thick glass panel overhead and only a small window left open.

At each window was a special machine with two screens facing in different directions toward different players, along with a slot for swiping a Medical Card. These were presumably for medication transactions.

The area leading to the ’VIP Patient’ looked a little more comfortable and well-appointed, but was structurally the same.

From the current rules, the ’Doctor,’ though listed as a special identity, had only one clearly stated privilege: the ability to purchase one type of ’Basic Painkiller’ from their vending machine.

Patients could also buy this same painkiller from the Lounge, but at a higher price and in limited quantities.

The Sales player’s vending machine carried four types of ’Special Painkiller,’ but according to the game rules, these could not reach regular players for at least three rounds.

Qin Cheng went to the vending machine to check what exactly the so-called ’Basic Painkiller’ was.

[Type I Painkiller]

[5 tablets per bottle.]

[Price: 300 Medical Points.]

[Recommended Retail Range: 600 to 2,000 Medical Points.]

Before entering the game, Qin Cheng had chosen to submit 10,000 minutes of visa time, so he currently had 10,000 Medical Points.

He spent 300 points first and purchased one bottle.

Shortly after, a small white plastic bottle dropped into the vending machine’s collection area, accompanied by the rattling sound of tablets inside.

Qin Cheng picked up the small white bottle and examined it. There was no information on it at all, just the simple label ’Type I Painkiller.’

He unscrewed the cap to find a foil seal inside, the same as an ordinary medicine bottle.

After a moment’s consideration, he peeled back the seal and shook a single tablet out into his palm to look at it.

The tablets were pure white and very small, roughly five millimetres in diameter.

Five tiny tablets like these in one bottle, even sold at the lowest end of the recommended retail range, would earn Qin Cheng at least 300 points in profit, which upon leaving the game would convert directly into 300 minutes of visa time.

”No ingredients listed.”

That, at least, caught him somewhat off guard.