The second time Shuixing entered Numberspace to try and re-summon Pechorin, she found him already re-summoned. This surprise sent her disembodied consciousness through a thought-looping tailspin until she found herself in the asset storage envelope for trees. After that she was able to imbue her consciousness with enough volition to avoid being swept away by the tides of changing numbers.
If Pechorin was alive again, she reasoned, the only entities with the power to make it so were—according to her hypothesis—Pechorin himself, or the Yishang. And since Pechorin had not re-summoned himself at any point during his long, dark stay in oblivion, she decided it must have been the Yishang. The question then became: For what purpose? Pechorin had no fan following among the Celestials and no plot relevance to the current apocalyptic special event that the Celestials were aware of. She ruled out the possibility that the Yishang had revived him for the sake of some grand narrative on the Po-Lin side, as the private lives of the Heroes mattered only insofar as the Celestials knew about them. With a finite amount of time to entertain the remaining Celestials and entice them to buy into a new game world, the Yishang's incentive was to show off the “good” Heroes like Boulanger and Ailing, with the “bad” Heroes as one-dimensional villains. Even giving the final boss (who was undoubtedly Natsuko) some last-minute character development was essentially a waste of time.
No matter how Shuixing looked at it, reviving Pechorin was simply bad writing.
It occurred to her that if she wanted to understand the Yishang’s thought process, she must once again return to their communication channels. Entering through an administrator’s access, she had at her fingertips the entire history of the Yishang’s communications stretching back over a decade. Though having trawled a good portion of their most recent (and comparatively sparser) communications, any attempt to investigate further back was confronted by a scientist’s worse nightmare: An unfavorable signal-to-noise ratio. There was simply no practical way to pare down the enormous cache of data aside from using key terms like ‘Pechorin,' a prospect which itself presented her with a scientist’s second worst nightmare: The unknown unknown, or the lack of knowledge about which knowledge might be useful to her. She could key-word her way to an email between programmers detailing algorithm parameters, but this might lead down a rabbit trail of mundane, useless knowledge. Conversely, an off-hand lunch request might hint at the physical layout of the Yishang’s realm, in turn aiding the discovery of an escape route to whatever wider network of algorithms bolstered the Yishang’s private one.
And Shuixing herself.
All of this was nothing but a cognitive detour from what she had come here to do, and was also a sign to Shuixing that she was losing her mental dexterity within Numberspace. Refocusing, she queried the Yishang's email database with ‘Pechorin’ as a key term. The results surprised her. Or, more accurately, the lack of any results since 2045—over two years ago prior. The last and final email mentioning Pechorin by name (whose ‘real’ name in the Celestial language was actually 毕巧林, or Biqiaolin) was dated to October 25th, 2045:
To: Zhou Yuxuan
CC: Zhuge Min, Yang Wenxiong
From: Huang Jianyu
Subject: Permanent Death Event Retrospective
I agree with manager Yang on this matter and I believe we can firmly report to the executives that we have balanced their demands to the best of our ability. What we are working with is simply a cursed problem. We might take one or two popular Heroes like Daixi for such an event, but as we cannot control the storyline produced by the characters TianXiaAI spits out, putting too many high-earners on the line presents the risk of them being removed from the game. This was meant to be a way to give players freebie upgrades, not take their favorite characters away from them. However, as I stated in a previous email, the event will not be interesting for players if it is full of only venerable elders like Xiazi, Shuixing and Biqiaolin.
If we are to repeat a similar event in the future, my recommendation is to demonstrate the stakes on the venerable elders and provide recently-released Heroes with some form of immunity.
Wishing you all the best,
Senior Event Design Specialist, Huang Jianyu
P.S. I would like to ask our cunning executives to consider whether such a measure is necessary while a game is profitable, but I fear their infinite business acumen is superior to mine in all respects besides the creation of stable revenue. If you forward this email, please remove my post-script.
Though this email provided some modicum of insight into the permanent death crisis of two years ago, it told Shuixing nothing about what the Yishang intended with ‘Biqiaolin’ in the present. Nor did Shuixing find it helpful to follow Huang Jianyu’s organization tree since he had been reassigned to the company’s newest game, Novo Nocturn Nine, the previous year. Flux Aeternum, the game whose world they were all stuck inside, had had its team reduced to a skeleton crew whose main objective was to manage the finale and prepare the server to be turned off. With no notion of what else to do, Shuixing flicked to one of the earliest emails mentioning Pechorin, praying for any insight she could find. She found one from 2040, the year the game was released:
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
To: Li Huateng
CC: Chen Bowen, Henry Li + 24 others
From: Zhou Yuxuan
Subject: Report on the state of the Competition Method of AI Character Modeling
Dear President Li,
On behalf of myself and my team, I would like to once again thank the board of executives for green-lighting our ambitious and strange project. Although I am personally quite interested in the details, I will not bore the board with the nitty-gritty of why I believe the competition method is so effective in creating compelling Heroes and storylines and drawing players into to the dynamic nature of the weekly stat retrieval. Instead, I will allow our achievements to speak for us:
* Flux Aeternum was the quickest game to reach 100 million concurrent players across all platforms a mere five months into its development cycle.
* In its first quarter, FA created over ¥1,000,000,000 in revenue for YiShang Co., Ltd.
* FA has won numerous awards and accolades in both Unified China and the West for its innovative use of LLMs for dynamic storytelling and character creation.
* FA’s development was almost 45% cheaper than YiShang’s previous title due to the automation of tasks previously assigned to character and story designers.
It is with the greatest humility that I attribute these achievements to the success of the Competition Method of AI Character Modeling.
To provide a brief overview to those esteemed members of the board unfamiliar with our current undertaking, the Competition Method Program was a special R&D project of the YiShang Co., Ltd. research department to retrofit the TianXia AI model used in Kaishun Dragons’s reactive dialogue generation in order to create a holistic gaming experience in which a language-learning model would simulate real-time stat increases, character developments, and cosmetic designs, etc… of each new character, who would be introduced with minimal inputs from a team of artisan prompt engineers.
From here, the AI model competes against itself using these characters to create a positive feedback-loop, incentivizing the model to build a week-by-week, dynamic and generative experience for the player. For example, the algorithm took a Hero called Biqiaolin, who we under-calibrated as a test, and it pushed Biqiaolin to compete against his fellow Heroes until he was at the top of the scoreboard for most players.
I am overwhelmed with joy to announce that after two years of research, a year of playtesting, and eight months of active development, the Competition Method has proved a resounding success for YiShang. At present, we foresee a ten year lifespan of profitability driven by event planning and asset creation rather than character design as the primary focus, allowing us to save on valuable labor expenses. It is my prediction that the technology developed for Flux Aeternum will set a benchmark not only for YiShang, but for the broader video game industry.
With best regards,
TianXiaAI Lead Project Manager, Zhou Yuxuan
None of this was new information. Upsetting in its flippancy and disregard for Shuixing and the other entities of Po-Lin, yes, but not new, with the exception of learning Pechorin had been deliberately made underpowered to test the ‘competition method.’ Shuixing realized there was little chance of penetrating the Yishang’s motives, and that it was equally likely, in light of that, that Pechorin had simply chosen an arbitrary moment to re-summon himself and the Yishang had nothing to do with it. Had she possessed a respiratory system to sigh with, Shuixing would have.
This line of inquiry no longer worth pursuing, and with an indeterminate amount of time remaining until the end of her journey, Shuixing decided to update herself on the emails coming through the Yishang's mail server. The most recent email was one entitled simply, ‘Relating WeChat Conversation.’
To: Henry Li
CC: Guo Mingyu, Ouyang Zimo + 2 others
From: Zhou Yuxuan
Subject: Relating WeChat Conversation
Dear President Li,
Please forgive this intrusion on your time. It is only in order to bring my team into compliance with the companies’ new policies pertaining to the centralization of information channels that I am bothering you with an update about Flux Aeternum’s latest developments. Below is a brief overview of what my team and I have discussed in an off-server WeChat group over the past several weeks or so:
We have given the players free control over a selection of eight Heroes who have been given large buffs in anticipation of a finale event. The gacha components of the game have been disabled, preventing players from rolling new characters (see Manager Bo Yongle’s email about this decision). This was done in preparation for the release of Novo Nocturn Nine and in order to sell out remaining merchandise for these Heroes including our ready-made cosplay packages. The sales team gave us two years to clear stock before we will need to contact the municipal waste disposal.
Player count as of the latest update is up by 210k. Below estimates, but still respectable for a game as old as Flux Aeternum. The game continues to run at a loss, though we expect once the recurring costs are discontinued that the remaining merchandise sales will earn around ¥100,000,000 or so.
This is the extent of what my team and I have discussed in our WeChat group.
With that said, I have one additional request to make in this email: Please consider moving more of my team over to Novo Nocturn Nine once we have shut down FA. Manager Chen Bowen has already guaranteed me a lead prompt engineer position to ensure a smooth transition for the eight characters we are moving to the new game, but my team, all of whom are extremely talented programmers, asset-developers, and event designers, are still unsure whether they will have a job in the coming weeks. I humbly ask for some information to give them regarding this matter as soon as possible.
With best regards,
Lead Game Designer, Zhou Yuxuan