God's Imitator

From the very start of the game, Zeng Yiming had been working hard to push cooperation forward.

Of the three players who had confessed, he was the only one who had exposed his own crime number entirely on his own initiative.

After that, he had voluntarily taken on the more dangerous Production Room, and when the offenders had come close to tearing each other apart, he had done everything possible to hold things together.

Honestly, no other player could have handled it better than he had.

On the floor, the countdown on the large screen kept ticking forward.

This was the final batch, though there was no real need to keep producing anything at this point. Even without an offender stepping into a Production Room, the process would still run through automatically. The game wouldn’t drag on indefinitely, but no medication would come out of it either way.

The outcome seemed already decided.

But just then, another broadcast rang out.

[A Community 2 audience member has chosen to send a broadcast to all players.]

Ye Lin’s voice came through.

”Don’t let yourselves be fooled. Zeng Yiming is the true source of this entire disaster. He was the first player to insert a fake coin.

”Every one of you has been played by him from beginning to end.”

The chaos on the floor fell suddenly silent.

Zeng Yiming seemed to become a different person in an instant, his expression darkening as he turned toward the large screen.

Wen Wan, who had already sunk into despair, tears welling helplessly in her eyes, felt a flicker of hope return upon hearing Ye Lin’s voice.

The game, it seemed, wasn’t over yet.

Over the broadcast, Ye Lin let out a sigh and continued, ”We were all played by Zeng Yiming. Let me lay out exactly how.

”In truth, right from the start of this game, before even the first batch of medication was produced, Zeng Yiming had already decided to take a gamble, aiming for a windfall profit unlike anything ever seen in the Gallery.

”Think about it. What is the theoretical maximum payout in this game?

”The answer is: 1 million minutes of visa time.

”To reach that theoretical ceiling, two conditions have to be met simultaneously: all 10 batches of medication sell successfully, and all four of the other offender players die.

”Because each batch sells for roughly 200,000, 10 batches come to 2 million total. Half of that, 1 million, gets split among the surviving offenders, and the other million gets split among the audience members who never bought anything.

”So why would Zeng Yiming need to sell fake medication?

”Because if the medication were genuine, the audience would naturally do everything they could with their Sympathy Votes to keep the other offenders alive too.

”If the other four survived, Zeng Yiming would only end up with roughly 200,000 for himself.

”So he had to sell fake medication, to stoke the audience’s fury and get them to withdraw their Sympathy Votes and let the other offenders die.

”And Zeng Yiming himself could distance himself from all of it, emerging as the sole winner.

”I know this might sound far-fetched. The production process was jointly determined by all five offenders, they could each see one another inserting coins, and the audience could also inspect the medication.

”There genuinely are a lot of uncontrollable factors in this.

”There was no way for Zeng Yiming to control every player at once. Any single misstep anywhere in the process would have collapsed the whole plan.

”But that’s exactly what makes this so audacious. Through a very specific method, combined with a fair amount of luck, he managed to work around every one of these problems.

”First question: why didn’t the audience’s inspections catch the problem?

”Because in this game, the inspection process itself wasn’t flawed. But the mechanism for selecting who did the inspecting was fatally flawed.

”Do you all remember the criteria for choosing an Audience Representative when the offender communities received their invitations? ’Someone who trusts the offender absolutely, and is trusted absolutely by the offender in return.’

”I don’t know the exact criteria for the audience communities, but it was almost certainly something similar.

”Players selected through this kind of mutual, absolute trust are overwhelmingly likely to be the most naive, least worldly, least socially experienced, most easily trusting newcomers in their community.

”It’s the same principle as a shabby street stall that’s operated for years right outside a famous university, and even the sharpest students there somehow never noticed anything wrong after years of eating there.

”Because the selection mechanism filtered specifically for the people most prone to trust others, and that herd instinct then reinforced itself into a self-sealing bubble.

”These representatives simply assumed that since the five offenders couldn’t have coordinated with each other, and none of them had reported anyone else, the production process must be sound.

”This batch of Audience Representatives most likely hadn’t taken any medication before, and had no interest in testing something on their own body when they weren’t even in pain. They’d have thought, someone else will test it.

”And once they saw another representative genuinely try it and press Pass, they’d simply conclude the medication was fine.

”But why would the ones who actually took it press Pass?

”When the first batch was inspected, 3 out of 8 representatives sampled the medication directly, and none reported anything unusual. Does that seem reasonable?

”Some of them may genuinely never have taken Type M before, so even taking it now, they’d have had nothing to compare it against. Without active pain at that moment, they’d have had no way to confirm whether it was actually relieving anything.

”Seeing that no other representative had raised any concern, they too would have leaned instinctively toward assuming the medication was fine.

”That’s plausible, but the odds of all 3 falling into that exact trap are extremely low.

”Someone among them must have noticed something wrong and simply chosen not to say anything.

”Again, because of that same selection mechanism: the representative and the offender shared absolute mutual trust.

”So even if they noticed the medication was fake, they would have chosen to protect the offender rather than expose it.

”Between these two types of representatives, each pressing Pass for entirely different reasons, this batch of counterfeit medication sailed straight through inspection.

”Even if one had raised an objection, it wouldn’t have mattered much to the overall plan, since Audience Representatives can’t communicate with anyone else. Everyone would have simply assumed it was a yield rate issue.

”Second question: the other offenders could clearly see the previous player inserting a fake coin. Why didn’t any of them call it out?

”Because Zeng Yiming, in turn, exploited the other four players’ own gambling instincts.

”He Qing said himself that he was shocked to see Liang Guicheng insert a fake coin, but he didn’t call it out immediately either. He chose to wait.

”He wanted to see the outcome of the Audience Representatives’ inspection first.

”If the inspection had failed, he would have immediately jumped in to point the finger at Liang Guicheng and shift the blame.

”But since the inspection passed, he simply stayed quiet and shared in the benefit of the fraud.

”And every other offender was thinking exactly the same way: if something goes wrong, blame the person before you, if nothing goes wrong, share in the profit of the deception. From every angle, the reward clearly outweighed the risk.

”Zeng Yiming never needed to coordinate with any of them. There was no need to.

”Because they had all been convicted of similar crimes, they carried similar character flaws, and they arrived at similarly self-serving choices.

”All the suffering they displayed in the Production Rooms, hands submerged in the toxic solution, shivering violently in the extreme cold, all of it was performance.

”The reason He Qing stayed curled up motionless in that corner for so long wasn’t to conserve warmth. It was because he was worried he couldn’t convincingly act out genuine hypothermia, so he chose the simpler route of staying still and pretending.

”Liang Guicheng put on an equally exaggerated performance. The moment a mere trace of the Room 1 solution touched his skin, he yanked his hand back as though he’d been electrocuted.

”Zeng Yiming deliberately placed himself and Liang Guicheng in Rooms 1 and 2 specifically. It was an elaborate trap from the very start.

”In Liang Guicheng’s mind, he was simply following Zeng Yiming’s lead by inserting fake coins. But to everyone else on the floor, the origin of the fraud appeared to be him, never Zeng Yiming.

”So when the fake medication was finally exposed, Zeng Yiming slipped free of suspicion with almost no effort at all.”