Chapter 73: Reality

Mu Sicheng was already awakened by the time his boss picked up Muke.

He leaned lazily on the back of Bai Liu's chair, the jacket Bai Liu had given him over his shoulder in Mu Sicheng's hand. He soon realised that Bai Liu's determination to take part in the game was very strong, and considering Bai Liu's style of play, Mu Sicheng felt that Bai Liu's heart could not be easily shaken.

Mu Sicheng watched from the sidelines as Bai Liu lured Muke into the boat of thieves, but he didn't take any time to sleep because once he realised that he couldn't easily sway Bai Liu, all Mu Sicheng could do was to tell Bai Liu in all seriousness that he wasn't going to mess around with Bai Liu and take part in this extremely dangerous league.

But the jacket Bai Liu gave him softened Mu Sicheng's tone: "What, did you get that little beauty to come aboard?"

"Your name is Muke little beauty, are you gay?" Bai Liu glanced at Mu Sicheng, " Is Muke's type sexually, attractive to you?"

Mu Sicheng choked instantly: "I'm straight!!! Can't you understand a joke?!"

Bai Liu nodded casually, "I see now, by the looks of you, you have something to say to me?"

Before Mu Sicheng opened his mouth, Bai Liu found a bench and sat opposite Mu Sicheng.

Bai Liu sits casually, but involuntarily gives Mu Sicheng a sense of oppression that makes him go from slouching in Bai Liu's reclining chair without bones to sitting up straight.

Bai Liu looked blandly straight at Mu Sicheng: "I guess you want to tell me that you're definitely not going to be in this gaming thing with us."

"Can you give me a reason that will convince me?" Bai Liu leaned back on his desk, and tapped his fingers on the desk, "Why don't you want to join this gaming league?"

"High death rate, high risk, not enough people, not enough copies." Bai Liu said a few things in quick succession, he looked up at Mu Sicheng, "I can take care of all that, you just have to participate, do you have any other concerns?"

Mu Sicheng is almost laughing at Bai Liu's calm and relaxed look.

If he had been the same person before one copy, he might have been fooled by Bai Liu's look of having everything under control, but now Mu Sicheng is no longer the same Mu Sicheng, and after one copy, Mu Sicheng has become a little more aware of Bai Liu's character. -He is a gambling man.

Even if the success rate is very low, Bai Liu is a man who is willing to try as long as the returns are high enough.

"Those are the main concerns I have." Mu Sicheng a rare tone of seriousness, " Bai Liu, the league is really no joke, the player mortality rate is very high, you do not need to give up your real real life for this game, although this game does bring a lot of things, with your strength you can totally earn points slowly, this is more secure, besides the game, you always have to do for the real life Some retreat ......"

"The real reality of life?" Bai Liu repeated the phrase in a meaningful Buming whisper, waiting unhurriedly for Mu Sicheng to finish his bitterly persuasive words before asking irrelevantly, "What did you think of the single player game Muke cleared last time round?"

Mu Sicheng was stunned, he didn't expect Bai Liu to bring it up suddenly, but Bai Liu had just talked to Muke about it, and Mu Sicheng was so sleepy that he listened to it.

Muke's last round of clearance was called Day of Leaving School, a single player game in a somewhat Japanese school setting.

The content of the game was not what attracted Mu Sicheng's attention the most, Mu Sicheng's attention was drawn more to the...

-- Muke says the school in it is based on a private high school where he studied in Japan, which was haunted all the time because a girl jumped to her death, and a number of students died off and on afterwards.

Muke's dormitory was dead in all sorts of bizarre ways except for him, which is a big part of why Muke confused the game with reality and came out with injuries - the game's high school was set in the exact same setting as the one he attended.

It's also similar to what Bai Liu and his team experienced - The Exploding Last Train is based on an exploding last train that Bai Liu once rode by mistake.

Mu Sicheng is silent for two seconds: "I don't think it's that coincidental that two games in a row have prototypes in reality."

"That's right, I feel the same way."

"So I personally now think there are three possible ways of saying this could be explained." Bai Liu pulls a piece of paper from his desk.

Bai Liu used to record thoughts as they came to him, especially as Bai Liu now confirmed that their memories could be tampered with to deceive people at will.

Because writing specific information text will be [banned] disappear, so Bai Liu just distilled some simple key words to write down, he wrote it down with five fingers propped up on the paper a turn, to Mu Sicheng across the desk to see, Bai Liu explained in a very smooth tone.

"I tend to think that a lot of the games in this game have real life archetypal events, it's just that some people know the archetypes and some people don't know the archetypes, like you and I both know about the Mirror City bombing archetype because we were both in Mirror City, but obviously Zhang Gui doesn't, or this haunted Japanese high school that Muke was talking about, he knows about it, but neither you nor I know."

"But the question is, how were these realistic [prototypes] for designing the game, how was the game chosen?"

Bai Liu wrote a [scene selection] on the paper.

"The first possibility, that the game randomly picks real-life scenario events as a prototype to design a horror game, but judging from the Mirror City bombing and that haunted Japanese high school, it is clear that the game is chosen with a certain tendency that it will pick tragic cases that are already horrific in nature to design the game, so this possibility is not high, pass. "

Bai Liu wrote the words [inspiration] on the page again and continued.

"The second possibility is that the game will choose tragic and spiritual locations that the player has experienced as prototypes to design the game. Both you and I know that games can erase people's memories, so is it possible that the game can also read the player's memories and take inspiration from them, using the player's memories as a reference to frame the game."

"It makes it somewhat easier for the player to bring into the horror game and the scenes are more realistic, for example the train scenes in those last few minutes of the second copy are set exactly as I remember them, a level of realism that can make it difficult to distinguish reality from fantasy is actually difficult to achieve."

Mu Sicheng thoughtfully clasped his arm and tapped his index finger on the arm of his other hand, "I think this second possibility you're talking about is already more plausible inferentially, and I'm leaning towards that one, what about the third possibility you're talking about?"

"No, but there's a very big hole in that possibility, and that's that the logic of the timeline isn't right." Bai Liu looked straight up at Mu Sicheng, "That Exploding Last Train we played do you remember when it existed?"

Mu Sicheng was stunned as he recalled, "It seems quite a while ago, doesn't it? I was there when I went in."

Bai Liu calmly reminds Mu Sicheng: "But the Mirror City bombing was this year, which means that the game 'Bursting Last Train' predates 'Mirror City Bombing', and this game based on the bombing existed before the bombing even happened, Mu Sicheng, do you understand what that means? "

Mu Sicheng's face began to change and he seemed to realise what was going on, slowly looking towards Bai Liu who continued nonchalantly.

"It means we got the reference prototype wrong, it's not that Burst Last Train references Mirror City Blast." Bai Liu continued very smoothly, "Rather, The Mirror City Explosion references the game Explosive Last Train."

With these words, Bai Liu writes the words [Test Phase] on the page.

Mu Sicheng looked at Bai Liu's unmoving eyes, and it was as if a pot of ice water had been poured over his head. He looked stiffly at the four words Bai Liu had written on the paper, and the cold air came up in waves from behind him. He understood Bai Liu's meaning, but it also made him look at the words Bai Liu had written on the paper and retort incredulously, "How is this possible?!"

To use an in-game term to describe Mu Sicheng's current state - his spirit level has dropped below the safety line.

Bai Liu's tone is calm: "At the end of each game's development, a version is released, called a public beta, which is simply a partial public test and is not open to all players."

"Only if the response of this part of the players of a particular copy is satisfactory to us will we put this copy of the game in the official game and make this copy of the game public in the face of everyone, which is the final official game."

Bai Liu lifted his eyes, "The third possibility I'm speculating on, that the game and the reality we're in, are a public beta and a full release of a game, respectively."

"The in-game is testing how we, the selected partial players, react to a certain copy, and if [the system] is satisfied with our performance in this copy of the game, the corresponding game will be dropped into the reality we are in, made public to everyone, and become official."

"For example, if 'Explosive Last Train' was dropped into reality, it would be 'Mirror City Bombing', and if 'Day of the Leavers' was dropped into reality, it would be the Japanese high school Muke went to before - in short, it's just two different manifestations of the same horror game."

"In other words." Bai Liu looked at Mu Sicheng with nothing but emotion in his eyes, "Our world isn't safe from being dropped at any time with the official versions of those horror games in the system."

"If that's the case, Mu Sicheng the very meaning of the real life you seek is no different from surviving in a game, so I don't see the need for you to refuse a race for what you call your real life."

"Because the reality you are in is also nothing more than a game competition that you can't see."