God's Imitator

At the same time, Lu Bingjun had finished working through the visa time adjustments with the other players, ensuring that Deng Xiao, who had now endured pain twice, was rotated back into the top seven and would not be easily displaced again.

Once the adjustments were complete, Lu Bingjun confirmed the approximate standings for the players outside the three exemption slots.

Zhou Wanlin (0 times)

Zheng Chunhua (1 time)

Deng Xiao (2 times)

Huang Shengjie (1 time)

Shen Bowen (0 times)

Yao Yuan (1 time)

He Qinyun (1 time)

Wen Wan (1 time)Geng Yuxia (1 time)

Qin Cheng (1 time)

Lu Qi (0 times)

Of course, these standings did not reflect the players’ actual remaining visa time. Most of them had stored away their excess to maintain these positions.

Deng Xiao had now endured pain twice, which gave him a ’higher priority’ in the top seven. This meant that as other players cycled through the bottom seven, they would be prioritised for rotation out over Deng Xiao.

By rights, Zhou Wanlin should also be rotating into the bottom seven, but she was currently holding Qin Cheng’s slot.

Qin Cheng had decided to endure the pain at least once more to observe the precise effect of the community’s basic medications before exercising his exemption.

So Lu Bingjun had chosen not to force any adjustment for the time being, which amounted to giving Zhou Wanlin a kind of informal consideration. As long as no one explicitly raised an objection, this could quietly pass for now.

Of course, with the rotation continuing, Zhou Wanlin entering the bottom seven was only a matter of time.

Deng Xiao came up beside Lu Bingjun and said quietly, ”Thank you, Bingjun.”

Lu Bingjun shook his head and said, ”No need to thank me. These are rules everyone agreed to. I’m just following the process.

”You’ve endured the pain twice. You’re entitled to rotate back up.

”If someone else in the bottom seven ends up enduring it twice, they’ll rotate up the same way, until everyone in the lower half has been through it twice.”

Deng Xiao let out a quiet sigh and continued in a low voice, ”Even so, I’m a little worried. Can this system really keep running the way we expect it to?

”You must have noticed too. The further we go, the more issues could come up.

”I keep thinking about it and I get more worried each time.

”Take the randomness issue, for instance.

”I was rotated out once, so across three rounds of pain, I was only actually in the bottom seven for two of them.

”And of course, both times I was selected.

”Meanwhile Lu Qi has been in the bottom seven the whole time and hasn’t been selected once.

”Taking it to an extreme, is it theoretically possible that no matter how many times other players rotate in and out, one particular player is simply never selected, ever?

”The way this system works, it’s pure randomness, and pure randomness is fully capable of doing something like that.

”Then there’s the visa time gap problem.

”After a few more weeks or months, the gap between players’ visa time will only keep growing. We can manage it through things like raising the interest-free loan limit and having people deposit their visa time to adjust. But there’s a limit to how far that can go.

”What happens if the gap gets too large to manage?

”And there’s another issue: what if someone lies?

”Each round of pain selects three players. Looking at the first three rounds, three players have come forward to acknowledge it each time, so there’s been no problem so far.

”But once a player has been through it once, they know enough about what it feels like to describe it. What if four players all claim to have endured the pain? What do we do then?

”We’d have no way of telling who’s lying. The system doesn’t give us any indication either.

”Bingjun, have you thought about these problems? Is there any way to solve them?”

Lu Bingjun quietly shook his head, ”I’ve thought about all of it. I don’t have answers yet.

”All we can do is deal with things as they come.”

He was quiet for a moment, then asked, ”Oh, I forgot to ask earlier. How did the second bout of pain compare to the first?”

Deng Xiao thought about it and said, ”Much better.

”Could be the medication, could be psychological. Even the community’s most basic stuff helped a bit.”

Lu Bingjun nodded, ”Yes. So with each successive round, you can gradually adapt to the pain.

”Like how patients suffering chronic pain slowly build a tolerance over time.

”That’s a piece of good news. This kind of pain is very likely to become a long-term fixture, so adaptation matters.”

Deng Xiao patted him on the arm, ”Don’t worry, Bingjun. You’re doing fine.

”Whatever happens, I appreciate everything you’ve done for me. You have my support, always.”

Lu Bingjun nodded, ”Thank you.”

That evening, Lin Sizhi returned to his room to find a new game design invitation had arrived on his private computer.

[Hello, Lin Sizhi.]

[In the Gallery, death is a constant for players, and a step toward progress.]

[Please make your preparations. The Second Stage has only just begun.]

[In five days, the Gallery will simultaneously run several different Judgment Games. The game you have been assigned is: Case D.]

[In the drawer of your desk, there is a list of the relevant offenders, but no case files or verdict records.]

[This game invitation, as before, will be determined by competitive bidding among all Imitators currently active in this phase of the new world. Different cases will be bid on separately.]

[If approved, the entry with the highest visa time bid will be selected. Additionally, ’visa time income voluntarily waived by the Imitator’ will be treated as an additional scoring factor.]

[Following a successful bid, the relevant case files and verdict records may be accessed.]

[Bidding lasts 24 hours. The design submission deadline is 8 PM four days from now. Good luck!]

Reading the invitation, Lin Sizhi was thoughtful, ”So it looks like this bidding mechanism for game design rights will become standard in the Second Stage.

”This time they can even improve their chances by voluntarily waiving their cut of the earnings.

”So Imitators can now pay to do the work?

”We’re already into the ’earn from the Gallery, spend in the Gallery’ phase this early?”

Under the rules, the Imitator could only see the names of the offenders involved in the case, not the specifics of what they had done. In other words, the Imitator could confirm whether someone they wanted to target was among the offenders, but without actually spending visa time and winning the bid, there was no way to review the crimes and develop a targeted game concept beforehand.

That raised the risk considerably.

An Imitator might spend a large amount of visa time only to find that the player they were targeting had committed only a minor offence, or that there was simply no way to design a sufficiently focused and damaging game around their crimes. In that case, it would be a pure loss.

Beyond that, there was one more difference in this invitation.

It now permitted Imitators to voluntarily declare upfront that they would waive a portion of their earnings share when submitting their bid.

As a straightforward example: if two Imitators bid simultaneously, and Imitator A offered 500,000 minutes of visa time while Imitator B only offered 400,000 but also waived all of their earnings from the game, Imitator B could still come out as the winner.

Of course, the precise weighting of these factors was something no one could estimate. It was part of the black box within the Gallery’s rules.

”Either way, for a long stretch of the early Second Stage, the Imitators will almost certainly remain caught in this competitive spiral.”

Lin Sizhi opened the desk drawer and took out the materials for this case.

Unlike before, there were no case files. Only a simple list of names.

Lin Sizhi scanned through the list. Most of the players on it were unfamiliar.

Until he came across two names from the same community.

[Community 2 - Lu Bingjun]

[Community 2 - Deng Xiao]

The following day, everything in the community proceeded as usual. Nothing out of the ordinary occurred.

That evening, Lin Sizhi returned to his room again and found that the bidding results for the Judgment Game had come in.

[Current highest bid: 320,000 minutes of visa time, plus all Imitator earnings generated during the game.]

Lin Sizhi naturally had no reason to match that figure, and had withdrawn from the competition early on.

The Imitator who had won this bid would be designing this game at a pure net loss. Not only would they earn nothing from it, they would be spending an additional 320,000 minutes of visa time out of pocket.

The only plausible explanation was that they were specifically targeting one of the offenders selected for this case.

The only remaining question was which one.