God's Imitator

The four bottles were identical in size and shape. The only difference was the labels on them, which read ’Type C Painkiller’ or ’Type M Painkiller’ and so on.

She unscrewed the caps and peeled back the seals. All four bottles contained small white tablets of exactly the same size, roughly five millimetres in diameter.

Perhaps there were some subtle differences between the tablets? But Ye Lin held them in her palm and stared at them for a good while, and could not tell them apart at all.

”Since these are four different types of medication, their effects must differ in some way.

”The game rules also say that all these medications have real-world counterparts, and even come with corresponding side effects.

”But I genuinely cannot think of how to verify any of that right now.

”Perhaps you would have to take a medication and observe your body’s reaction? Or perhaps the Doctor and Reviewer have some special mechanism that allows them to distinguish and identify them?

”Either way, the identity I’m playing is ’Sales.’ That isn’t something I need to concern myself with.

”What I should be focused on is how to make a good impression on the Reviewer and sell these medications.”

Before entering the game, Ye Lin had submitted 30,000 minutes of visa time, which had converted into 30,000 Basic Medical Points.If she did nothing at all, those Medical Points would simply vanish when the game ended, meaning she would be down 30,000 minutes outright.

But if she converted all of those Basic Medical Points into medication and sold it to other players, then even without making any profit, she would end up with 30,000 Special Medical Points.

She would break completely even upon leaving the game.

On top of that, the more Special Medical Points she earned beyond that, the more visa time she would walk away with when the game ended.

So Ye Lin decided not to worry for the time being about exactly what distinguished the medications from one another. Without the relevant professional knowledge, looking into it would most likely be a waste of effort.

She had something more important to do right now, which was to commit the prices and recommended retail ranges of each medication to memory as thoroughly as she could.

The room had no paper or pen, nor any tool that might aid her memory. But if she got a price wrong when selling, it could trigger a violation and result in visa time being deducted when the game ended, so she had to get them right.

After that, Ye Lin spent time drilling the information into her memory while also purchasing two more bottles of each of the four medications from the vending machine.

That left her with twelve bottles in total. Of the four types of medication, she had one already-opened ’sample’ bottle of each, and eight sealed bottles ready to sell.

Her plan was to try selling the medications to the Doctor through the Reviewer, and from there on to the patients.

If a particular type sold out quickly and proved to have good demand, she would consider restocking.

The game was about to begin. Ye Lin sent requests to both Reviewer rooms simultaneously and waited patiently.

She had chosen in the end not to attach any Medical Points, not out of reluctance to spend them, but out of concern that doing so might backfire.

The ’Sales’ identity was, after all, quite different from the ’Patient’ identity.

If neither Reviewer accepted her request this round, she would simply have to offer more in the next one.

A moment later, Ye Lin heard a single beep from the small screen beside the Zone A Review Room door, and with it came the click of the door unlocking.

This meant the Zone A Reviewer had agreed to her meeting request.

Ye Lin tidied herself up briefly, took the four sample bottles of medication she had purchased from the vending machine, and stepped through into the Zone A Review Room.

...

”Hello.”

Ye Lin greeted the player in the Review Room politely.

The female player across from her was a completely unfamiliar face, though every player wore a name badge on their chest.

[Community 23 - Shen Qingyun.]

”Have a seat.”

Shen Qingyun gestured toward the chair opposite, though her cold manner gave the impression that she was not someone easy to get along with.

And for some reason, that manner gave Ye Lin a strange sense of familiarity, as though she had genuinely walked into a hospital and run into a doctor who had been working consecutive shifts for hours without a single moment to eat.

Shen Qingyun appeared to be around thirty, with her hair pulled back into a simple ponytail. A few loose strands had been pushed back and tucked behind her glasses, the metal frames holding lenses that appeared to be quite a strong prescription.

Ye Lin glanced around. The Review Room was considerably smaller than the Sales room. From the layout diagram she had seen earlier, it was only marginally larger than a Regular Patient room.

The Review Room had four doors, leading to two ’Sales’ rooms and two ’Doctor’ rooms, and a dedicated meeting area had been partitioned off within it, which compressed the usable space even further.

The player in the ’Reviewer’ role was essentially operating within a very narrow, elongated space, and the whole room had an almost suffocating sense of being cramped.

Ye Lin considered how to open the conversation. In her experience, running into a fellow female player in a game tended to go one of two ways: either they clicked immediately, or it was harder to communicate with her than with an unfriendly male player.

But the other woman was direct enough. She got straight to the point and said, ”You’ve got medication on you, haven’t you? Let me see all of it.”

Ye Lin hesitated briefly, but in the end took out all four sample bottles from her pocket, the ones she had opened when she first purchased them, and laid them out across the table in a row.

She had no desire to let Shen Qingyun take complete control of the meeting. Under different game mechanics, she might have considered certain moves to keep the initiative on her own side.

For instance, not producing the medication straight away and instead opening with a discussion of the game rules, or only showing some of the bottles rather than all of them.

But she did not do any of that in the end.

Because in this game, different identities came with different authority, and the balance of power between players was inherently unequal.

The Sales room only connected to two Reviewers. If she fell out with both of them, she would have almost nothing left to do for the rest of the game.

Looking at the layout of the game’s rooms, the ’Reviewer’ was arguably the most pivotal role in the entire game, unquestionably the most advantageous identity, sitting as a direct barrier between the ’production side’ of Sales and the ’consumption side’ of patients.

So Ye Lin chose, for now, to yield, and simply go along with whatever the other person asked.

As long as Shen Qingyun was willing to accept the medications and find a way to pass them down the chain to the patients, earning back Special Medical Points in the process, then even if the other party ended up taking the lion’s share of the profit, that was something Ye Lin could live with.

This was, after all, the game’s mechanics laid out in plain sight.

Shen Qingyun picked up the four white bottles from the table, and her brow furrowed slightly as well.

Her expression, though, carried little in the way of confusion. She then did exactly what Ye Lin had done.

She tipped the tablets out and held them in her palm to examine them closely.

Shen Qingyun fell into thought and said nothing for a long time.

Ye Lin did not say anything either, but she became very clearly aware of one thing: Shen Qingyun was different from her. She almost certainly had some specific professional background, and might even be a doctor herself in real life. And Shen Qingyun had almost certainly noticed something about these medications that Ye Lin had not.

There was no other reason to think for so long.

Unless she was playing games, but under the current rules, that would serve no purpose.

Ye Lin found herself desperately wishing she could run into Qin Cheng somewhere in the game. Unfortunately, going by how things looked at the moment, not running into him was far the more likely outcome.