God's Imitator

That evening, Lin Sizhi returned to his room and, out of habit, opened his laptop to check it.

What surprised him slightly was that this time, new information had appeared earlier than usual, on the very first night after the game had ended.

What popped up wasn’t a new game invitation, though. It looked more like an advance notice.

[Hello, Lin Sizhi.]

[The next game invitation will appear in 3 days, open to all Imitators. The theme of this game is Selection.]

[Until then, you have ample time to think.]

[The following information constitutes the ’Waking Rules,’ and will be made available only to an extremely small number of Imitators, including yourself.]

[A select group of ’High-Value Players’ actually retain a ’second chance’ within the Gallery. Upon their first death, they do not truly die, but fall instead into an ’eternal slumber.’]

[Upon meeting the following conditions, you may act as an ’Awakener’ and bring them back into the New World:]

[1. The Awakener must be an Imitator who has designed at least 1 S-tier game or 2 A-tier games.]

[2. The Awakener must currently belong to the benevolent faction, and must remain in the benevolent faction throughout the entire awakening process.]

[3. During the awakening process, the Awakener must design games resulting in the deaths of 10 players (including 1 High-Value Player), and must correctly identify the true identity of 1 Imitator. (Past achievements do not count.)]

[4. The Awakener must additionally spend 1,000,000 minutes of visa time, and must set a high-difficulty objective for the ’Awakened.’ The Awakened must independently complete this objective by ’the end of the next game stage,’ or they will die permanently.]

[— The Waking Rules are a reward for unwavering conviction.]

Truly consequential information always seemed to arrive at unexpected moments.

Lin Sizhi wasn’t surprised for long. He read through the text on the screen several times over, quickly zeroing in on the crucial details buried within these rules.

In fact, this was the answer to the question that had lingered with him since the end of the first stage.

A method for reviving a player really did exist within the Gallery.

And based on what he was seeing now, the conditions attached to it were genuinely severe.

First, revival was limited strictly to players the Gallery classified as High-Value.

For an ordinary player, someone the Gallery judged to hold no particular value, death within a game was final and absolute. The Gallery held no mercy, only cold calculation of worth.

Second, this kind of revival wasn’t unlimited. No matter how high a player’s value, they could only ever be revived once.

And from a purely mechanical standpoint, the resources required to achieve a revival far exceeded the value of the person being revived. Reviving one High-Value Player didn’t just require killing another one. It also demanded, on top of that: 1,000,000 minutes of visa time, the deaths of 9 additional ordinary players, and correctly identifying the true identity of an Imitator.

Finally, and most critically, the requirements to even qualify as an Awakener were extremely demanding.

One had to have designed either 1 S-tier game or 2 A-tier games.

One had to currently belong to the benevolent faction, and remain there throughout the entire awakening process while satisfying all the above conditions.

Lin Sizhi could roughly guess that, across the many rounds of games that had already passed, a fair number of Imitators had likely already abandoned their benevolent stance.

Because ever since the first stage, Elimination-type games had effectively belonged exclusively to malicious Imitators. These games carried no cap on mortality rate, giving them free rein to kill without restraint, letting them settle personal scores while raking in visa time in bulk.

And now that the second stage had introduced the mechanism of bidding for the right to design a game, visa time had only grown more critical for every Imitator.

Malicious Imitators could design their own dedicated Elimination-type games to accumulate enormous amounts of visa time, then use that visa time to bid on Selection-type or Judgment-type games, or save up the full million needed for a special targeted-kill game.

So malicious Imitators had, in effect, entered a virtuous cycle where visa time kept compounding, while benevolent Imitators had fallen into a vicious cycle of no games and no visa time.

And the Gallery, cleverly, kept applying pressure on the benevolent Imitators, coaxing them toward switching sides.

Before Trust Marketplace, there had almost certainly already been a number of benevolent Imitators who had crossed over. But only one Elimination-type game had actually been selected in the end, meaning those who switched gained nothing tangible for it, and worse, lost access to this critical piece of information about the Awakening mechanism.

Which meant this had become the exclusive privilege of an exceedingly small number of Imitators who had held firm to their benevolent convictions.

Which was exactly why, at the very end of this message, the Gallery had added that one particular line:

’— The Waking Rules are a reward for unwavering conviction.’

There was one more detail worth noting: the Awakener had to set a high-difficulty objective for the Awakened, and if the Awakened failed to complete it, they would still die.

The deadline for completion was the end of the next game stage.

Which meant, if Lin Sizhi successfully awakened a player at any point during the second stage, that player would need to complete the high-difficulty objective Lin Sizhi set for them before the third stage came to a close.

The precise standard for what counted as high difficulty wasn’t explicitly given anywhere in the rules.

But based on the information available, designing an S-tier game, killing a large number of players, or killing multiple High-Value Players would presumably all qualify.

Of course, whether the Awakened actually managed to complete it was entirely up to them. The rules had explicitly stated it had to be achieved independently.

Lin Sizhi tapped lightly at the desk, lost in thought.

”So, from a purely mechanical standpoint, benevolent and malicious Imitators are finally roughly balanced after all.

”Fortunately, this condition is more lenient than I expected.

”I can now, grudgingly, accept that the Gallery’s balancing mechanism isn’t purely rigging things against us.

”Though, saving someone still requires killing an enormous number of people to get there.

”Could this itself be a trap?”

Setting aside every other condition, the core requirement was designing games that killed 10 players, including 1 High-Value Player. That clause clearly allowed for no compromise whatsoever.

And an Imitator committed to the benevolent faction would, by nature, already feel deep resistance toward killing players at all.

Wei Yinzhang from the first stage was a clear example of this. Even when forced to design a Selection-type game, he kept the mortality rate hugging the absolute floor of what was permitted. Given any choice at all, he would always have preferred designing a Distribution-type game instead.

Elimination-type games were off the table entirely, and Judgment-type games carried strong resistance too. Taken together, a benevolent Imitator’s total kill count could never come close to matching a malicious one’s.

And in the process of awakening a key figure, a benevolent Imitator might well find themselves forced, under the pressure of a limited timeframe, into designing increasingly brutal deaths just to hit the required numbers.

This could easily trigger a kind of broken-window effect, and in the most extreme cases, produce a very particular outcome: a benevolent Imitator, in trying to save someone, ends up accidentally killing the wrong person along the way, develops an inner demon over it, and in a moment of self-destructive despair, turns malicious themselves.

What people commonly called ”turning to darkness.”

Under this particular system, that outcome wasn’t remotely impossible.

Whatever else was true, this was a special rule accessible to only an extremely small number of Imitators, and it demanded careful, deliberate planning.

Lin Sizhi leaned back in his chair, sinking into thought.