God's Imitator

”Beep—”

A sharp buzzing sound rang out, and Cai Zhiyuan suddenly came back to his senses, realizing he had already arrived at the game venue.

Before he had time to examine the specific situation around him, he first felt that his face seemed to have some special mechanism that prevented him from making any sounds.

Cai Zhiyuan tried reaching up to touch it and discovered it was a special ring-shaped mechanism that extended all the way to the back of his head.

Besides this, his body was also restrained to a chair and couldn’t move. Only his two hands could move freely.

However, this time the seat wasn’t a cold iron chair. The material was soft leather, so sitting for a long time wouldn’t feel uncomfortable.

Cai Zhiyuan looked around and found this was a room that wasn’t particularly spacious. On the wall was a huge number: ’4’.

Apart from him, there were four other players.

In front of each of the five people was a special operable device, a special touchscreen similar in size to a computer monitor. It was specially angled for easy operation, and there were some barriers around it to prevent others from seeing.

At the same time, these five people sat in a circle, with 5 screens in the central position, each facing one of the players. They could see them clearly just by looking up.The five players currently couldn’t speak and could only look at each other.

However, everyone had name tags hanging on their chests with their specific community and names written on them, so they could identify each other.

Cai Zhiyuan looked at everyone’s chest tags one by one.

[Community 1, Gao Jialiang]

[Community 8, Yang Hui]

[Community 13, Kong Yuxin]

[Community 15, Xu Zhao]

Among them, Yang Hui and Kong Yuxin were two female players. The male to female ratio in the room was 3:2.

There were no other players from Community 17.

This was not very good news. In a situation where they couldn’t communicate with each other, Cai Zhiyuan had no way to look after other players from the same community.

He could only hope that after the second phase of the game began, the rules would change and give players from the same community space to communicate.

”Our community has a total of 5 players participating, and there are also 5 players in this room.

”Besides this, the number ’4’ on the wall should represent room number four.

”That means this game has a total of 25 players participating, and the players from each community have all been assigned to different rooms.

”The other four players in this room are also all from different communities. They might have heard of each other before, but the possibility of being very familiar with each other is low.”

Thinking of this, images appeared on the large screen and began introducing the game rules.

Everyone looked up and watched carefully.

[Good morning, players. Welcome to ’Simple Q&A’.]

[This game has a total of 25 players participating from 5 communities, including 14 female players and 11 male players.]

[The game will be conducted in two phases.]

[In the first phase, the 5 players from the same community will play the game in 5 different rooms.]

[In the second phase, players will be ranked according to their performance in the first phase, and rooms will be reassigned with updated game rules.]

[The following are the basic rules for the first phase of the game:]

[The first phase will consist of a total of five rounds of games. In each round, a specific ’multiple choice question’ will appear on the large screen.]

[Each question will have three different options: A, B, and C, with one and only one correct answer.]

[After seeing the question, each player will have 10 minutes to think and give an answer.]

[During the thinking period, players have two channels to obtain references.]

[1. Uninvolved Player Votes]

[The question will be simultaneously displayed on the hall screens of ’communities not participating in this game’. The ’uninvolved players’ in these communities will have 3 minutes to answer freely.]

[After 3 minutes, the different percentages for the three options when ’uninvolved players’ answered this question will be announced as a reference for answering.]

[2. Player Representative Suggestions]

[In the five rounds of games in the first phase, one player will be selected as the ’player representative’ each round.]

[After the question is announced, the ’player representative’ will have 1 minute of free speech time to explain the question and provide suggestions for other players.]

[After 10 minutes, the correct answer to the question will be revealed.]

[Players will receive rewards or punishments according to ’hidden rules’.]

[There are three different factors that will affect the specific values of individual rewards or punishments. Players are asked to explore the details themselves.]

[In addition, if all players in the room answer with completely identical options, they will receive an extra reward.]

[When the overall earnings of players are positive, the question setter will pay; when the overall earnings are negative, the deficit portion will also become the question setter’s income.]

[The five questions in the first phase are fixed questions, so the God’s Imitator who designed this game will serve as the ’question setter’ by default. After entering the second phase, the ’question setter’ will be assumed by players.]

[At the end of each round of the game, there will be 5 minutes of free speech time for collective discussion.]

[Any violence or rule violations are strictly prohibited in this game. Violators will suffer immediate death penalty.]

[Please explore more rules during the game.]

[The game will officially begin in 5 minutes. Please prepare!]

The rules on the large screen continued to display, helping players better understand the rules.

Although the rules weren’t particularly complex, since the thinking time was only 5 minutes, everyone still hurried to think.

Cai Zhiyuan quickly searched for the key points in the rules.

”The basic gameplay is to answer a multiple choice question, which is why the game is called ’Simple Q&A’. Although there are other players’ answers as references, these references may not necessarily be correct answers.

”The specific reward and punishment rules are hidden, and there are three different factors that will cause effects.

”What exactly those three are needs to be guessed by oneself.

”That means players must think from the God’s Imitator’s perspective and consider what three types of reward or punishment rules would be reasonable to set for these options.

”Whether the answer is right or wrong should be one factor.

”If there’s a lie detection mechanism, then answering against one’s conscience or not should also be one factor.

”Whether answers are repeated, the number of people choosing the same answer, whether one has misled other players to change their answers, whether one consecutively chooses the same option, these are also all possibilities.

”I need to select the three most likely possibilities from these options as much as possible and decide on my strategy.”

After quickly thinking through the rules, Cai Zhiyuan looked at the other four players.

Currently, no one could speak. Some were still staring at the large screen thinking about the rules, while others were sizing up each other’s identity tags.

Cai Zhiyuan quickly went through the situations of these communities in his mind.

”Community 1 once ran a scam operation in the ’Blind Date Game’. Gao Jialiang was that handsome guy at the time.

”Yang Hui from Community 8 participated in the ’Fortune Game’. She’s an actuary and has cooperated with our community before.

”Community 13, we encountered them before in the ’Birth Judgment’.

”Community 15 is the community where Wang Weidong from ’Shelter Game’ was from, but this player named Xu Zhao didn’t participate before.

”The other rooms should also all have players from these four communities, just don’t know specifically who.

”Apart from Community 8 having some weak cooperative foundation, the other communities can all be considered enemies.

”Our Community 17 clearly advocates cooperation and mutual benefit, yet unknowingly, have we instead become the contrarians of the New World?”