Outside the group chat, Ren Yi slowly supported his forehead, his fingertips pressing against his temples with a look of utter helplessness.
He knew it. Lord Cha was such a flake. This game had been weird in every way from the very beginning, and there was no way it was a legit Instance. He just hadn't expected it to be this ridiculous.
This subconscious gesture immediately caught the attention of Player 2 beside him.
"What's wrong? You look terrible. Are you feeling unwell, or did you notice something off?"
Player 2 leaned in slightly, looking at the floating surveillance screen before turning back to Ren Yi to ask.
"No, it's nothing." Ren Yi immediately snapped back to reality and withdrew his hand. He came up with a random excuse, keeping his expression calm.
"I was just looking at Player 11 on the screen. She's been lying there so quietly, not moving at all. She hasn't even rolled over."
"Are we really going to just stare at her like this all night? It's way too boring."
Of course she wasn't moving. Zhang Qiuqiu was currently busy spamming question marks in the group chat to denounce Lord Cha. She didn't have time to move.
Hearing this, Player 2 actually let out a small laugh. He rubbed his aching eyes and complained with a face full of exhaustion.
"What else can we do? This line of work is just hard."
"I've spent the last few nights pulling all-nighters like this, staring at the surveillance footage without daring to blink, terrified of missing a key clue."
"Then during the day, I have to follow everyone around to search rooms and analyze leads. There were several times I was so tired I just passed out."
Ren Yi nodded very sincerely, his tone matching his words despite his inner thoughts.
"Indeed, you've had it hard these past few days."
"As the Peeper, your contribution to this game has been invaluable. If you hadn't been holding things together, everyone would have fallen into chaos long ago."
While insincerely making small talk to keep Player 2 occupied, Ren Yi's fingers never stopped moving as he quickly joined the army denouncing Lord Cha in the group chat.
【Lord Cha, don't play dead! Speak up!】
【Why do you always go silent the moment a difficult question comes up?】
Under the relentless questioning from Ren Yi, Zhang Qiuqiu, and Lu Zihan, Lord Cha finally buckled under the pressure and spoke up again.
【It's not that I'm trying to hide it from you on purpose. All the club Instances are like this! They're all polished and perfected bit by bit by generations of members. None of them are born perfect.】
【If the seniors of the previous generation felt the rules weren't quite finished, they'd just leave them for the juniors of the next generation to keep patching.】
【If a member is lucky enough to completely finalize an Instance, they can even take that result with them as their graduation project. This is standard practice in the circle.】
His righteous explanation only left Lu Zihan more confused. He asked with total bewilderment.
【Lord Cha, what kind of nonsense are you talking about? Graduation project? What does that have to do with our current situation? Don't get sidetracked.】
Ren Yi couldn't help but let out a deep sigh. The sound was significant enough to catch Player 2's eye once again.
"What now? Why are you sighing like that? Are you bored, or are you worried something will happen tonight?"
Player 2 turned to him, looking puzzled.
"I was just thinking that this Player 11 is way too good at waiting. This flake of an Anomaly is truly detestable!"
Ren Yi sighed aggressively and spoke loudly on purpose.
"If you have something to say, say it. If you have something to do, do it. If you're going to strike, just strike already. Dragging everyone along to pull an all-nighter like this is exhausting."
"Do all these Anomalies have something wrong with them? They always have to wait until the middle of the night when everyone is exhausted just to create that so-called 'horror atmosphere.' Is it really that fun to mess with people?"
Player 2 looked at him with an indescribable expression, his mouth twitching as he argued back through gritted teeth.
"Hey! If she actually strikes, there's a high probability she'll come to this room to kill me first!"
"If anyone's dying, it's me. Don't talk so casually like it's no big deal just because it's not your back on the line."
"Ah, cough, cough..." Ren Yi let out a fake cough.
He had almost forgotten that part. Player 2 was still convinced he was the Anomaly's primary target for the night.
"My bad, my bad. I forgot about that. What I meant was, it's better to just get it over with quickly and move on, rather than suffering through this wait."
"I'm the one who'd be 'moving on'! Not us!"
Player 2's face had been pale with fear, clearly not as indifferent toward his predicted death as he might have seemed.
But after Ren Yi's antics and their brief exchange, his face turned red with frustration. He was both annoyed and anxious, taking several deep breaths before he finally managed to calm down.
Once he settled, however, he suddenly looked up at Ren Yi, his gaze softening with a hint of gratitude.
"Thank you. After talking to you for a bit, I don't seem to be as scared anymore."
Huh?
Ren Yi opened his mouth but found himself speechless and utterly confused.
What did he even do? He was just complaining; he hadn't intended to comfort the guy at all. How did he end up making him feel better?
What kind of mental gymnastics did Player 2 do to misinterpret things this badly?
Back in the Anomaly Web group, Zhang Qiuqiu didn't dwell on Lord Cha's graduation project comment. Instead, she quickly caught the main point, ignoring the others' bickering to get straight to the heart of the matter.
【What was that patch version you mentioned earlier?】
【Hurry up and show it to us. We might find a way to break through this current deadlock.】
Lord Cha's reply was full of hesitation, his tone vague as he clearly didn't want to produce it.
【That... you can't see it from inside the Instance. I was just thinking about it based on my memory.】
【And even if I showed it to you, it wouldn't have anything to do with Qiuqiu's current situation. It wouldn't help.】
【To put it simply, we are currently Participants in the Instance. Whether human or Anomaly, we can only follow the rules.】
【That patch version is the backend control logs. Only the people who built the rules can see it. It's equivalent to having administrator privileges.】
【For example, at the start, the doors here were just ordinary wooden doors. One of our seniors, who could turn into liquid, found a loophole and bypassed the doors to kill people.】
【Then, the rules of the human world on the other side performed a targeted optimization and replaced the doors with the current sealed pods, closing that loophole.】
Good grief. So the rules could perform adversarial learning, with both sides fighting each other to patch holes?
At this moment, the scene was one of chaos on the surface and total disorder in the shadows.
On the surface, Ren Yi was still making idle small talk with Player 2, maintaining his persona as a good person.
In the shadows, the Anomaly Web group chat had already exploded into an argument.
However, Ren Yi had likely figured out exactly what was going on by now.
No matter how Lord Cha tried to defend it, this so-called game Instance was definitely not 'legit.' In fact, it could be described as shoddy workmanship.
Lord Cha had said it himself—the truly perfected, presentable Instances had long since been taken away by seniors as their graduation projects.
What was left behind was just a mess that no one had bothered to finish.
If building an Instance was like starting a business, then this Anomaly Kill game wasn't a mature company project at all. At most, it was a half-finished campus startup project.
The original seniors had left behind a fragmented framework, and the subsequent club members had simply been slapping together patches on this mess, slowly trying to fill the gaps.
Even worse, the original creators had long since graduated.
Lord Cha, the person who had taken over, didn't even have a deep understanding of the Instance's underlying logic or rule framework. He only knew how to make minor repairs and couldn't solve the root problems at all.
Ren Yi let out a silent, bitter laugh.
One phrase summed it up perfectly.
The ancestral shitty mountain of code had crashed once again!
Rate on N.U.
