God's Imitator

Lu Bingjun could not put certain things into words too plainly, but the sharper players in the room could fill in the rest.

Shen Bowen thought for a moment and offered a new line of reasoning, ”If ‘A Single Word to Settle a Case’ really was built from Gao Teng’s original design, does that suggest this Imitator had a close relationship with Gao Teng outside of the games?

”Right now the only people confirmed to know about Gao Teng’s identity as the Imitator are Wei Changfeng and Xu Yili.

”The only reason Xu Yili was able to come across that draft and destroy it is that Gao Teng trusted her enough to have it around her.

”Something like that, as long as Gao Teng wanted to keep it hidden, no one else would have any reason to see it.

”By that same logic, this other Imitator must have been someone Gao Teng trusted deeply, possibly even someone Gao Teng chose to show the draft to himself.”

No one responded.

It was obvious that whether or not any veteran player had actually been close to Gao Teng, naming one now would amount to a serious accusation.

Qin Cheng considered for a moment, then said, ”Or we could approach it from a different angle.

”Brother Lu, right after ‘Remorse Poker’ ended, when you did your first debrief, did you check the visa time of every player in the community?”Lu Bingjun gave a nod, ”I see what you’re getting at.

”Looking at the rules of ‘Remorse Poker’, the Imitator would have received a significant amount of visa time from that game, and there should have been a visible anomaly.

”The moment the game ended, three shattered bracelets appeared in the community hall. Every one of us was in a state of shock.

”After a brief period of confusion, it took us roughly ten minutes to gather all the players in the hall and begin the debrief.

”When we finished the first day’s debrief, we hadn’t reached any firm conclusions yet, but we immediately pulled the visa time records for every player.

”There was no obvious anomaly.”

Qin Cheng’s brow furrowed, ”If this Imitator really is in our community, that would mean they are an exceptionally cunning one.”

Yao Yuan gave a nod, ”We considered that during the debrief at the time.

”If the Imitator isn’t in our community, then of course that’s the best outcome.

”But if they are, that’s where the real problem starts.

”Looking at the rules, in ‘Remorse Poker’, half of a dead player’s visa time would be claimed by the surviving players from the opposing community.

”When you do the detailed calculation, the amount of unclaimed visa time this game produced was enormous.

”Fifty percent of the combined visa time carried by Wei Changfeng, Gao Teng, and Xu Yili would have gone to Ma Boheng.

”But what about the other fifty percent? And what about the full visa time carried by Zheng Qingyun’s two players who both died?

”The rules didn’t address that explicitly, which means it went to the Imitator.

”At the time, the community had begun discussing whether to donate the majority of individual visa time into the community fund to prevent these kinds of losses in games, but no formal motion had been passed and implemented yet.

”So Wei Changfeng, Gao Teng, and Xu Yili were still each carrying large amounts of visa time individually, over two hundred thousand each.

”Zheng Qingyun’s personal total was probably also substantial.

”So the grand total could very well have been seven or eight hundred thousand in visa time.

”If the Imitator is in our community, the only explanation is that they used the window when we were still in shock from learning the outcome to rapidly spend down that extra visa time before we checked.”

Huang Shengjie looked thoughtful, ”Spend it down?

”There’s only one way to do that: buy high-value items from the vending machine in your own room.

”Things like extremely expensive cigarettes and liquor, cosmetics, luxury goods, bags, watches.

”When I first arrived in the community I actually wondered about that. These things cost tens of thousands of minutes in visa time. Who on earth would ever spend that?

”So that’s what they’re for.

”They’re expensive, and they don’t take up much space. Just buy fifteen or twenty of them in bulk and leave them in your room, and you’ve burned through all the extra visa time in one go.

”Wasteful, yes, but it would work.”

Shen Bowen instinctively glanced at Lin Sizhi. She was beginning to understand why the community fund in Community 2 seemed so thin.

Her previous community hadn’t made donations compulsory, so it wasn’t a useful comparison. But looking at what Lin Sizhi had described of his former community, Community 2’s fund was noticeably low.

Now it was finally making sense.

At the time of ‘Remorse Poker’, Community 2’s players had not yet passed any motion to move the majority of their visa time into the community fund. Wei Changfeng, Gao Teng, and Xu Yili were among the community’s strongest players and had been carrying substantial amounts individually, and all of it was lost in the game.

Then Lu Bingjun and Ye Lin had been forced to spend significant amounts of their own visa time purchasing the full game records, adding further to the damage.

The blow to Community 2 as a whole was severe, the kind of loss that would take a very long time to recover from.

But Shen Bowen quickly arrived at a new question, ”Wouldn’t that be somewhat unnecessary, though?

”If the Imitator had already planned to spend down the excess visa time this way, why not simply reduce their own earnings in the rules from the start?

”For instance, they could have written the rules so that the surviving players take all the dead players’ visa time outright. Wouldn’t that have been simpler?”

Qin Cheng was quiet for a moment, ”Following that logic through to its conclusion, the only reason not to do that would be that writing the rules that way would make it more suspicious that the Imitator was in our community.

”But by setting up the current version of the rules first and then quietly spending down the extra visa time afterward, they could clear their name as thoroughly as possible.

”If all of these assumptions hold, there’s only one conclusion.

”This Imitator has covered every angle. There is no loose thread anywhere.”

A heavy silence settled over the room.

At this point, the assessment of this Imitator had been pushed to an extreme: they might not be in Community 2 at all, and everything could be nothing more than a false alarm. But if they were in Community 2, they would be a deeply hidden and profoundly dangerous enemy.

Lu Bingjun looked around at everyone, ”The veteran players in this community have all privately thought through this possibility long ago.

”We simply never said so in a setting like this one.

”Strictly speaking, when ‘Remorse Poker’ ended and I was put forward as acting community leader, I should have done something about it then.

”But the community had just gone through a catastrophic upheaval, and there were countless things that needed to be dealt with. Keeping the community stable had to come first, so this matter was something we were forced to set aside.

”This time I spoke privately with the key players in the community, and we agreed that continuing to ignore the danger indefinitely and pretend we couldn’t see it was not a sustainable approach.

”So I decided to use this moment to put everything on the table.

”I think we should use this opportunity to reopen an investigation into the Imitator within the community.”