The penultimate day of the preseason and mid-season tournament.
Wang Shun took a stack of information, took a deep breath and walked into the meeting room of the Wandering Circus. He looked straight at everyone sitting there and said, "I believe everyone should be able to recite the information about our opponent this time by heart."
"Because they don't have any data for us to analyze." Wang Shun smiled bitterly, "Russell Cemetery Team, our opponent in the last game."
As he spoke, he opened the system panel:
"Russell's performance in the preseason was similar to the previous two years. He gave up singles and doubles competitions and focused on team competitions. This is both a good thing and a bad thing for a rookie team like us."
"The good thing is that you only have to play one game, the bad thing is that this game is the team game you are least good at."
Wang Shun clicked on the system panel, and the panel slid to the next page, on which was a small video. After Wang Shun clicked play, the video began to play. A gray mist with black smoke and miasma was surging, and only a few people could be seen running in it, breathing heavily.
Wang Shun clicked Pause, his expression became serious:
"This isn't the first time I've played this little video for you guys. This is a video of Russell's last game at the cemetery. This is the video of Russell's almost all games throughout the preseason."
"It was all foggy and I couldn't see anything clearly."
Ri Liu leaned back in his chair. "We have analyzed this. Russell Cemetery should have fixed a player with fog concealment skills in the team in order to further keep the skills of the team members secret. During the game, he releases the skill, confusing the opponent's vision while keeping his information secret in front of the audience."
Wang Shun sighed: "This approach was very successful and cannot be replicated. They don't need the support of the audience, so they can do this. Because of this approach throughout the preseason, we know nothing about them except the number of deaths in Russell Cemetery."
"Compared to last season, the number of deaths at Russell Cemetery during this year's preseason has dropped significantly."
Wang Shun paused for a moment and said, "It can't be described as a sharp decline. In this year's preseason, Russell Cemetery only lost two players and successfully entered the preseason finals."
"Before this, I didn't understand why Russell Cemetery, which ranked 10th last year, gave up the qualification for this year's mid-season game and was relegated to the preseason. But now that I have come to this point, after President Ri's analysis, I realized that I was in a wrong thinking zone."
Wang Shun shook his head and smiled helplessly: "I have always believed that Russell Cemetery, which wantonly sacrificed the lives of its members in exchange for victory, is a cruel, inhumane, cold-blooded guild."
"Isn't it?" Mu Sicheng asked back while holding his chin and spinning his pen, "Last year, this team sacrificed more than 80 new players."
Ri Liu took out the pen that Mu Sicheng was spinning in his hand and said, "Not really."
"On the contrary, this guild is just as they advertised, a shelter for desperate players, a warm and humane collective cemetery. Russell Cemetery is a typical closed community guild. They have a sense of mutual assistance like neighbors, and are very united and friendly."
Question marks began to appear in Mu Sicheng's mind: "A solidarity and friendship that pushes people out to die?"
"You should change your mindset. When they joined this guild, they knew they would most likely die. In other words, these people did not join this guild because they wanted to live."
Ri Liu raised his eyes and said, "It's because I want to die, but I don't want to die in such a meaningless way."
"And Russell Cemetery is a place where their death can be maximized."
Mu Sicheng was lying on the table, glancing at Ri Liu who had confiscated his pen. "But even so, Russell Cemetery has nothing to do with solidarity, right?"
Ri Liu lowered his eyes to look at Mu Sicheng, and suddenly changed the subject: "What do you think is the greatest value of death?"
Mu Sicheng was startled, then he sat up straight and began to think hard: "Money? No, I won't be able to spend it after I die. Fame? It seems to be meaningless after I die..."
Finally, Mu Sicheng sighed and leaned back in his chair in resignation: "I don't know what these people are thinking. When a person dies, there is nothing left. Death is worthless no matter what it brings. Besides, I have already entered the game. If I fight to the death and earn points, I can still get something in exchange. Dying is too unwise."
"That's you." Ri Liu said calmly, "A highly capable newcomer that all the big guilds are vying for, Mu Sicheng, you are also a top-notch configuration in reality, with a good family background and a first-class school. You have a clear understanding of your own value, so you will not easily go to the option of returning to zero."
"You've never been swept away, have you?"
Mu Sicheng was startled: "What are you rolling?"
"Involution." said Ri Liu.
Mu Sicheng frowned: "Isn't that only available when you are employed?"
"No, wherever resources are monopolized, there will be involution." Ri Liu picked up a pen and wrote on an open piece of paper. "Points in the game can be earned by playing the game, just like wages can be earned by working, so playing games is a way of working."
"But there are all kinds of guilds in the game. They have subcontracted the work of playing games in a more efficient way, improving the efficiency of earning points through playing games. They also provide various guarantees to reduce the chance of you dying from the game, just like all kinds of companies."
"Normal players will take the initiative to join these companies in order to earn points efficiently and survive better."
"This is the first mechanism to be formed, and it is also a reasonable operating mechanism." Ri Liu wrote the words [Original Mode] on the paper. "Normally, this mechanism can continue to operate for a long time before it starts to break down. But at this time, there is a setting in this game that accelerates the breakdown of the mechanism."
Ri Liu slowly opened his eyelids and said, "That's gambling."
"Gambling in this game is a kind of expected loan mechanism. This mechanism ties your faith, interests, and even your life to the guild, which doubles the cost of your bet. Even if a player knows that he will most likely be exhausted to death by this guild, it is difficult for this player to get out of this guild because of the gambler mentality, sunk costs, and difficulty in finding a new buyer. This forms the first necessary element of involution."
"—Tied up."
"The tighter the binding, the slower the flow of personnel between guilds will become. The slower it becomes, the more people will realize that it will be harder and harder to find a new guild. Choosing a guild will become a lifelong choice. Then, in the newcomer period, everyone will madly compete to enter a large guild, lowering their own treatment, etc."
"Once you get to this point, you'll discover something amazing." Ri Liu tapped the paper twice with his pen. "The efficiency of the guild in earning points has increased, the speed of game rotation has increased, and the points circulating between the gambling pools are increasing. The points in the entire game are growing exponentially."
"But the treatment of new members in the guild is getting lower and lower. No matter how many points the guild saves, in order to maintain its ranking position, it will eventually have to be invested in the league, so there is not much left."
"Where did all these points go? Who took them away?"
Ri Liu put the pen down and pushed it gently with his fingertips, and the pen rolled in front of the stunned Mu Sicheng.
Mu Sicheng reached out and grasped the pen that Ri Liu pushed to him. He felt a chill on his back: "...In the gambling pool."
"Bingo." Ri Liu smiled. "That's right. The pool mechanism always bets out points with a five-fold leverage probability. It seems to be a loss-making business, but the points that take from the pool plus the points they earn themselves eventually return to the pool, and then the 5 to 15 percent handling fee quietly eats up the bulk of the profits in the wins and losses."
"From the fact that the richest guild is the Gamblers' Alliance, not the Killer Order, it can be seen that the betting pool is the biggest banker in this game."
Ri Liu looked up at the data on Wang Shun's system panel: "Suppose you are just an ordinary player in the game, with ordinary skills and panel. Although you can survive, you can't join a big guild, and you can't become a star player."
"You're trying to survive, and then in one league you can't help but bet all your savings on a team, and then you lose everything. In the midst of the devastation, you realize that it's hard to get money from the pool."
"But after each league match, the points gained from the five-fold leverage in the betting pool will drive up the prices of items in the entire game. If you don't dare to gamble, your points won't increase, and the items you can buy will become fewer and fewer, making it increasingly difficult to survive in the game."
"You don't have any extra points to exchange for money in real life. Games are not a place to release your desires. Instead, they make you more miserable, because after working six days in real life, you finally have a day off and have to work in the game. You have to save points to buy props so that you can save enough points to buy a life-saving prop before the next week's game starts."
Mu Sicheng's eyes widened: "...Thank you, after putting myself in your shoes, I feel like dying."
Ri Liu continued, "The high-level players who have points in their hands redeem items for real-life use, and the crazy players who don't care and just want to have fun today. The former are a minority, while the latter have become the largest base of players under the catalysis of the gambling pool, that is, gamblers. That's why the Gamblers' Alliance can grow so big."
Wang Shun nodded in agreement with Ri Liu's words: "But there are gamblers' alliances and non-gamblers' alliances. After President Ri gave me an analysis, I went to investigate the average investment situation of the Russell Cemetery team members in the betting pool."
"The result is very surprising to me." Wang Shun clicked on the panel, and a data analysis table popped up on the panel. "The average investment in their pool is no more than 10 points. It can be said that it is a true non-gambler alliance."
"Gambling is a form of stimulating future expected consumption. When this consumption desire decreases, it means that they are very pessimistic about their future expectations."
Wang Shun sighed: "I can't get involved in a big guild, I don't dare to gamble, and I have to go through the test of a weekly death game. Many people live very hard in real life. They work hard every day but don't make much money. Life is very tight. I finally got into the game, but the result is..."
“They’re having a hard time.”
It was so hard that even he, an investigator from the enemy side, couldn't bear it.
"...No way..." Mu Sicheng began to feel that the other party was in a bad situation. "They kept winning the team competition in the mid-season tournament last year, right? Even if they swallowed the bottom pool gold, it shouldn't be so bad, right?!"
Ri Liu raised three fingers:
"First, because they don't have any star players, they don't have many people investing in them, and they don't have much pool money, so they can only take the other party's money."
"Second, even if they win, the majority of the pool money goes to the spectators who made the investment. After deducting the commission charged by the pool, the team only gets 5% to 10% of the pool money."
"Third, they were an underdog team last year. The mid-season tournament didn't attract much attention, and there weren't many spectators betting on both sides. All they could get was 5% of the base bonus, which was the doubling of the small TV charging points of the big guild's star players."
"Overall, they have been winning but haven't reaped much of the league's benefits."
Wang Shun sighed and added, "And I heard that the president of Russell Cemetery used the gambling pool points they won last year as compensation, divided them into more than 80 portions and distributed them to the relatives of those deceased team members."
Mu Sicheng felt mixed emotions after hearing this: "...I probably wouldn't be able to hold on any longer."
"Then let's go back to the original question." Ri Liu opened his eyelids. "If a person can't do anything, can't get anything, has lived a very hard life, and finally can't hold on any longer, for him, what is the maximum value of death?"
"Money, power, fame and fortune are meaningless to a dead person. What is valuable to a dead person?"
Mu Ke, who had been silent the whole time, spoke up: "Being recognized as valuable at the moment of death, and this value will always be remembered by people."
"I studied abroad before, and the suicide rate there was very high. Many people would go to accident-prone areas or wander the streets before committing suicide. When they saw robbers or thugs, they would rush forward to help them and let them kill them."
"A magazine interview said that more than 70 percent of people who have had suicidal thoughts want to do something good before they die so that others will remember them."
Muke paused and continued, "Some suicide victims will form teams to help each other. I've seen a special report about them called [Suicide Community]. The leader of a [Suicide Community] is usually someone who wants to commit suicide. Usually, the leader sets up this community because he wants others to survive, so he will try every means to rescue other people in the community, hoping that they can survive."
"But the strange thing is that because of the existence of the community, the suicide rate of these people sometimes goes up."
Mu Sicheng asked: "Why?"
Liu Jiayi next to him answered: "Because someone remembers them, they can die in a way that they can be remembered."
"In this kind of community atmosphere of self-abandonment, it is easy to breed a kind of sacrificial sentiment. To describe it in a simple and easy-to-understand way, it is -" Ri Liu's eyes moved to the system panel showing the data of Russell Cemetery, "- I died for you, and I hope you will live on in my place and remember me."
"Those who survive may suffer more than those who die, because they have more to bear, and even the cost of death becomes heavier."
Everyone in the conference room was silent.
Wang Shun coughed, interrupting the stagnant atmosphere and continued: "Combining the above information, President Ri and I conducted an in-depth analysis of the Russell Cemetery Team."
"Everyone knows that the most important thing for a team is the tactician. However, because the members of the Russell Cemetery team are constantly changing, their tacticians are different in each game, but their tactical style remains quite stable."
"So we speculate that the real tactician who formulated the tactics was not the team members who were pushed out for rotation, but the president of the Russell Cemetery Guild who has never appeared behind the scenes."
"But this guild leader is so mysterious. He hasn't participated in any league matches in the past two or three years. The information we have about him is very limited. I tried many methods before I found an old player who claimed to have seen the Russell Cemetery guild leader participate in a match many years ago. He told me that this guild leader's skills are very strange. After he entered the game, he quickly defeated the opponent in a fog."
"This is not the first time we have seen a skill that can defeat an opponent at high speed, and this is not the most unique aspect of this guild master's skill."
Wang Shun raised his head, his expression solemn: "We all know that the league team competition requires five players to participate, but that old player swore to me--"
"——The guild leader entered the game alone, but when he entered the game, the system said that there were five players in the game map, Nellasel Cemetery, and the game was running normally."
After the meeting.
Tang Er, who had been silent during the meeting, stopped Ri Liu who was about to leave and asked, "Can we talk about Russell Cemetery alone?"
Ri Liu, who had just stood up and was about to leave, sat back down. He raised his hand to signal Wang Shun, who was the last to leave, to close the door. He turned around and looked at Tang Erda, "Captain Tang, do you have anything to say to me alone?"
Tang Erda stared at Ri Liu: "Do you think [Russell Cemetery] is a [suicide community] type of guild?"
"It seems so at the moment." Ri Liu placed his elbows on the table and clasped his fingers together. "And the president of the Russell Guild is the soul of this guild. He has the typical psychological characteristics of a leader of a mutual-help [suicide community]."
Tang Er frowned and asked, "What psychological characteristics?"
Ri Liu looked at Tang Erda calmly and said, "He is trying his best to save his members and team members."
"But Russell killed more than 80 people in the mid-season last year." Tang Erda tapped the table with his fingers and emphasized, "I don't see how sending new players to the league can be related to saving lives."
Ri Liu suddenly smiled and said, "Captain Tang, how do you think we can save a group of people who want to die?"
Tang Er beat him and said, "I don't know."
"Give them hope." Ri Liu looked at Tang Erda calmly, "Winning the league is their hope. This guild doesn't care about points or life and death. They just want to win. I guess the president of the Russell Guild wanted to win at all costs at the beginning, and then use the championship reward - wish to save everyone."
"But they lost to the Killer Sequence and were wiped out in the next 90 ranked match."
Ri Liu said, "Captain Tang, do you remember Wang Shun saying that the Russell Cemetery team collapsed and gave up after the team wipe? Do you think a team that really wantonly sent new players to the field to be slaughtered would collapse because of a team wipe?"
"It's just that five people died." Ri Liu said calmly, "The lives of low-level players are the least valuable thing in this game. Their victory in the mid-season tournament has already shown that this path is feasible for them. They are just one step away from success. Maybe they can succeed if they try again."
"But Russell gave up his rights. They didn't play in the mid-season game, but started from the preseason. Captain Tang, why do you think that was the case?"
Tang Erda fell silent.
He had an answer in his mind, but he found it both bizarre and... sad.
Hiruzen continued, "Because of the casualties."
"If they start from the mid-season tournament again and face a strong team, even if they can win, they will have to experience huge casualties again. They would rather give up the ranking, reputation, and points they have worked so hard to save, take on huge uncertainties, and start over from the preseason in order to reduce casualties."
"They just want to win, they just want to survive."
Tang Er felt in his pocket, as if he wanted to take out a cigarette, but he held back in the end.
Ri Liu lowered his eyelids. "The formation of this type of [suicide community] requires the existence of a group of people who want to commit suicide from the beginning. I guess that when the Russell Guild was first formed, the members should have entered the game at the same time, and this group of people probably knew each other in real life."
"This kind of self-harming community is not allowed to exist in the country, so I guess this group of people initially existed under the name of another group."
Ri Liu looked up at Tang Erda who was silent across from him: "And you came to me alone because of this group, right, Captain Tang?"
Tang Erda was silent for a long time before he spoke hoarsely: "Your analysis of Russell Cemetery just now reminded me of something. At this time last year, the Bureau of Heresy received a report of an abnormal incident, but after a long investigation, they could not find any heresy. In the end, they concluded that it was a social incident."
"What is this unusual case?" Ri Liu asked.
Tang Erda was silent for a while. "The owners of the Sunshine Building collectively jumped off the building. A total of 47 people died. They jumped from the building one after another within a month. Because we suspected that it was related to heresy, we suppressed the news at that time. Half a day later, we investigated it and released it quickly."
Ri Liu asked calmly, "What is a social event?"
Tang Erda took out a cigarette and lit it up after Ri Liu nodded in agreement. He took a deep puff and said in a hoarse voice:
"The Sunshine Building was a badly finished project that had been in a bad state for more than three years. The developer who invested in it attracted foreign capital, but when something went wrong, they took the money and ran away abroad. Those who jumped off the buildings were all owners of the badly finished buildings, one by one. After they jumped, all the families were wiped out. There was not even anyone left to help collect the bodies."
"After the person who jumped from the building died, the remaining owners of the rotten-end building helped collect the body and sent it to the funeral home. After cremation, the ashes were placed in their original house in the rotten-end building."
Tang Erda slowly exhaled a puff of smoke: "There are not many people living in the rooms in the rotten-end building now. There are urns full of ashes, like a cemetery."
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