10:45 AM.
Sparks had cut her way through everything in her path and arrived at the Chapter 1 boss fight.
In the center of the screen, Bronya, sheathed in dark armor, hovered expressionless inside the chamber.
The massive Project Bunny 19C floated behind her like an emotionless mechanical reaper.
Sparks took in the scene, narrowed her eyes a fraction, then laughed out loud with pure contempt.
"Yoo-hoo~"
"A crippled little sister in a wheelchair?"
Her free left hand tapped lightly against the scuffed desktop, and the lollipop turned a half-circle against her full lips.
"How heartbreaking. Don't worry, you poor thing. Big sis will go easy on you. Very, very easy. I promise I won't make you cry."
[Oh no, oh no, she's starting again!]
[Black Duck, teach her some manners! Black Duck, blow her damn head off!]
[Please, please let her crash and burn, that mouth is unbearable!]
From the opening bell, Sparks put on a terrifying display of dominance.
White Comet blurred into a white afterimage, dashing in close, riding the exact frame window of a perfect dodge to force her way into the attack opening.
Every punch, every kick landed precisely in the recovery gaps of Black Duck's animations, until the boss's shield bar started flashing violently.
Add in the Crimson and the Chariot segments from the main story, every QTE chained together so smoothly that she looked nothing like someone touching this game for the first time.
Even the passersby who had wandered in specifically hoping to watch the white-haired streamer make a fool of herself had to admit it: the woman did have some real skill.
"Hm?"
"This boss's windup isn't bad."
"At least it telegraphs its attacks. Not completely shameless."
The tail end of her taunt hadn't even faded from the air.
Black Duck, poise bar restored, went straight into a zero-frame startup.
Flashbang.
The screen washed out to blinding white. White Comet stopped dead, clutching her head, locked in a brief stun.
Then, in the next instant, every light in the chamber went out.
Black Duck dissolved into the darkness on screen, cloaking herself where she stood.
In Story or Normal mode, the game's lock-on indicator would still appear, warning the player to dodge the instant before Black Duck's ambush landed.
But.
On Hard mode, the lock-on was disabled outright.
Sparks's fingers paused over the keyboard for less than a tenth of a second.
She was already yanking the camera around, straining her ears for the roar of Project Bunny's engines.
Too late.
A heartbeat later, out of the absolute blind spot, a stab of cold light detonated across the screen.
Black Duck blinked in point-blank, materializing right in White Comet's face.
The enormous cannon barrel lifted, a black pit of a muzzle.
"BOOM!"
A point-blank shotgun barrage that followed no logic whatsoever. White Comet's perfectly healthy health bar went the way of a man kicked off the roof of the Arc City Tower. One swipe, and it was empty.
The [BATTLE FAILED] results screen popped up without a shred of mercy.
When the image froze, Kiana was still stuck in the undignified pose of being blasted airborne by a cannon shell.
Sparks didn't slam her keyboard like those apoplectic gaming streamers. She didn't leap up and start screaming obscenities.
She just stared at the screen. Hard.
And then, through a microphone with excellent pickup, one very clear sound came through.
Crunch.
The strawberry lollipop clamped between her teeth, the one that had existed purely as a prop for looking unbothered, splintered into pieces under her molars.
The rented apartment was far too quiet.
Which only made that brittle little crack all the more piercing.
The corner of her eye twitched twice, entirely against her will.
The movement was tiny. But under a high-definition webcam, the tens of thousands of eyes in that stream, all of them there precisely because they loved watching a disaster unfold, caught every damn frame of it.
[HOLY CRAP!!]
[SHE BIT THE LOLLIPOP IN HALF!!]
[She's tilted, she's tilted, she's tilted, the streamer's gone red-hot!]
[Streamer's mouth is harder than Black Duck's cannon barrel HAHAHAHA!!]
[I recorded that crunch, it's going in my archive]
Sparks swallowed the candy shards, her throat moving once.
She stared at the defeat screen for a full two seconds. Then her face whipped around toward the camera.
"Aiyaya~"
She was smiling again.
Sweeter than before. Brighter than before.
But anyone could see it: behind all that syrup, something murderous was seeping through.
"I see how it is. Can't win a straight fight, so you go invisible, and then you ambush people at point-blank range with a shotgun."
She spoke slowly, biting down hard on every syllable, as if she were chewing through somebody's bones.
"It would appear that your dear producer's talent for numerical balance and level design is, well, appallingly nonexistent."
She tucked a strand of loose white hair back behind her ear, her voice light as air.
"All he can do is lean on this cheap, gutter-tier first-encounter kill garbage to paper over how incompetent his design is."
"Such a hard life he must lead. Throwing away every last shred of dignity a game producer has, just to squeeze out one pathetic point of difficulty for his players."
[HAHAHAHAHA she's broken!]
[She's STILL talking tough!]
[As long as I refuse to admit I suck, it's the designer's fault!]
[Stop making excuses, streamer, your eye is literally still twitching!]
[Tilted tilted tilted tilted tilted!]
Sparks's mouth was dripping sarcasm, but the other system running in her head was close to bursting.
Strings of prompts only she could see went flying up the edge of her vision.
Column after column of dark red notification boxes, visible to no one but her, scrolled upward in a frenzy:
[Elation Points +170]
[Elation Points +290]
[Elation Points +420]
[System Notice: Extremely broad, high-quality emotional current detected. Schadenfreude, spectatorship, mass emotional collapse, contrast-induced pleasure.]
[Elation-type emotion harvesting efficiency in current region: increased by 800%!]
Sparks stared at those numbers cascading upward like a waterfall, and the shadow behind her eyes vanished all at once. Her mood turned downright delightful.
So that was it.
These little pets down here on Earth liked watching this.
They liked seeing someone lofty like her wipe out. They liked seeing her refuse to admit she was wrong. They liked the ridiculous spectacle of a woman getting humiliated and still holding on to her arrogant posture for dear life.
She pressed her tongue against her back teeth, where a few grains of candy still clung.
"Fine, then."
Both hands settled back onto the keyboard, and a fevered, playful light kindled in her eyes.
"This little wheelchair sister does know a thing or two about being obnoxious, I'll grant her that."
"But that's all she's got, hmm?"
"That last run was Sparksy being kind and giving her a warm-up. Now, out of the boundless generosity of my heart, I'll allow her... five more minutes of survival in this world."
[LMAO, you said the exact same thing to the Zombies five minutes ago!]
[Streamer, maybe keep your health bar alive before you start bragging!]
[Quit posing, start run two, I want to watch you die again!]
[Where's the handstand hair-wash? Who's going to fill in the handstand hair-wash I'm missing?]
The stream turned into an ocean of pure joy.
And as everyone knows.
One person's grief and another's delight are never quite the same thing.
Meanwhile.
Inside miHoYo Studio.
On the morning of open beta's first day, the office sounded like a hundred wet markets and a frontline command post had been forced to share one dinner table.
Server load alarms, player payment figures, third-party channel traffic distribution, Weibo trending topics. An avalanche of information came down on Su Yu at the master console like driving snow.
Even Kiana had been conscripted by Su Yu to handle the less complicated paperwork.
Su Yu had just signed an emergency capacity expansion authorization to keep the servers from melting and tossed it to Kevin.
On his retina, a blood-red System warning box flared into existence, so bright it hurt.
[HIGHEST-LEVEL WARNING]
[High-dimensional anomalous node detected. It is siphoning Elation-concept emotion within Arc City!]
[Spatial fluctuation source locked. Establishing visual feed for you...]
Su Yu's brows drew together. He stalled for a beat, then dragged his mouse back to the main monitor and followed the secure link the System offered into the stream.
A livestream window jumped open.
Inside a rented apartment.
White twin tails. Red eyes. A mouth that had just crunched a lollipop to pieces, and was currently offering elegant regards to every last member of Su Yu's family tree.
Unfortunately for her, your Brother Su was an invincible man, so that particular move didn't work.
Su Yu watched for three seconds.
"...Sparks?"
That face. That personality, rotten straight through to the marrow. How could he possibly not recognize it?
A Masked Fool.
One of Sparkle's masks.
A high-output fun-generating machine walking the Path of Elation. A super-lunatic who, if you dropped her into a pond of stagnant water, would hand you back three layers of nuclear-grade entertainment.
The problem was.
How the hell had she ended up in this world?
And why was she squatting in a run-down rental, running a livestream, farming "Elation" Emotion Points by passive-aggressively roasting him?
Su Yu's initial wariness and defensiveness evaporated the moment he saw those glaring words in the System notice: emotion harvesting.
What replaced it was the instinctive euphoria of a game producer holding a business worth hundreds of millions, a man whose capitalist DNA had fully awakened.
This girl was a bottomless pit. She needed emotion by the ocean-load.
And what he needed most right now was nuclear-grade heat, controversy, traffic, and a super-topic capable of blasting through every audience barrier at once.
Was there anything in existence better at manufacturing explosions than a Masked Fool?
Wasn't this heaven itself dropping a limited-edition "SSR-grade self-propelled marketing machine" right onto his face?
"System." Su Yu asked the question calmly inside his own head. "Does this count as me finding an exploit? Or is it another big hand moving things behind the scenes?"
[System Notice: Congratulations, Host. You have captured one high-dimensional fun-seeker in urgent need of emotional nutrition. Recommend immediately adopting a high-value anchor strategy.]
The corner of Su Yu's mouth twitched. "In plain language."
[Throw money at her! Give her earth-shattering traffic! Build her the most extravagant stage money can buy! Whatever emotion she's starving for, pump it into her with capital! Give her enough entertainment and she'll set this fire burning across the entire internet on your behalf!]
[Of course! A friendly reminder, Host: play with fire and you get burned~ Please mind your distance from Miss Sparks, or you are highly likely to end up the plaything of this devotee of Elation~]
"You could have left that last note out."
Su Yu weighed the pros and cons at speed. He had no idea why Sparks needed to harvest Emotion Points.
But clearly, when it came to making players break down, rage, and stomp their feet, their goals lined up beautifully.
The end of the world was breathing down his neck. Even if the woman was a raving lunatic, as long as she was useful, he'd take her.
"Understood."
Su Yu laced his fingers together and cracked his knuckles hard, drawing out a series of sharp pops.
He tabbed out of the backend and logged into his own account without a moment's hesitation, the one with the ornate verification badge and its halo of official gold.
The ID was blunt and simple.
[Honkai Impact 3rd Executive Producer - Su Yu]
The next second.
Directly above Sparks's stream, whose viewer count had already rocketed to two hundred thousand, a site-wide golden announcement banner came grinding across the screen, blindingly bright, borderline brazen, carrying official effects heavy with pressure.
[System Notice: Welcome, Honkai Impact 3rd Executive Producer Su Yu, to the stream!]
The entire chat detonated in that instant into a boiling pit of magma.
[??????]
[HOLY CRAP HOLY CRAP HOLY CRAP!!! OFFICIAL ROOM INSPECTION?!]
[The producer himself crawled through the network cable to commit murder!]
[HAHAHAHA streamer you're dead, that's what you get for trash-talking the design team!]
[EPIC-TIER SHOWDOWN! Front row, selling sunflower seeds and peanuts at premium prices!]
Sparks looked at the banner and her eyes widened, just slightly.
She didn't get the chance to say a word.
"BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!"
Ten "Hyperion" virtual battleship gifts, the most expensive and most obnoxiously flashy item on any platform anywhere, came roaring one after another straight across the center of the screen, engine noise tearing through the display like it wanted to rip the monitor open.
The whole rented apartment lit up from the gift effects alone.
Blue-and-white battleships screamed through the cloud layer, main cannons firing, gorgeous particle effects bursting across the full screen like fireworks, so heavy the streaming software actually dropped a few frames.
Every single one of them reminded the audience of one thing.
A whale with enough money to kill a man had entered the arena.
Sparks stared at those ten battleships, each one convertible into cold hard cash, and the shock in her eyes lasted less than a second before it was swallowed whole by feverish exhilaration.
Then came a pinned message, sitting rock-steady at the very top of the chat.
[Su Yu (Pinned): If your gameplay is trash, go practice instead of blaming the game's mechanics every five seconds. See that difficulty setting? If you can't beat it, be a good girl and switch down. Oh, and when you do the handstand hair-wash, remember to max out the level-10 beauty filter. I'd hate for you to frighten my esteemed players.]
Sparks read that line twice, front to back.
Not only did she fail to explode at being humiliated in public, she let her body sink loosely back into her chair and even recrossed her legs into a cockier position.
Those molars, the ones that had nearly shattered a moment ago, now ground against each other in sheer delight as she began frantically drafting the earth-shaking script to come.
As a Masked Fool who had set foot on the Path of Elation, she possessed a razor-sharp "nose for fun."
The second Su Yu stepped into the arena, she caught the scent hidden inside his words. The scent of her own kind. And the script rolling off him in waves.
Clearing a path with money.
Then coming down into the ring under his official title to twist the knife personally.
In one clean motion, he'd erected the trashiest possible melodrama stage, "Game Producer Comes Down to Tear Apart Arrogant Female Streamer," right under the noses of several million viewers across the entire internet.
This man hadn't come to cause trouble.
He'd damn well come to close a colossal business deal.
The light in Sparks's eyes blazed to life.
Looking at the residual effects of those ten Hyperions on her screen, she might as well have been looking at ten money printers running at full speed, each one stamped with the word "Elation."
Boosted by the supercharged heat of an official-versus-streamer bloodbath, the viewer count blasted from two hundred thousand straight to five hundred thousand.
The numbers climbed so fast that the servers stuttered, and when the display refreshed, it had already smashed clean through eight hundred thousand.
The danmaku packed together into a solid white wall with no gaps at all, almost burying that exquisite face of hers entirely.
Sparks laughed softly, reached up, dialed down the danmaku opacity so she could see her own screen again, and leaned in close to the camera.
"Oh my."
Her voice switched channels on the spot.
Still syrupy, still soft and coy. But the manic, trouble-hunting glee underneath had torn straight through the disguise.
"Now look who's come to visit."
She tilted her head slightly, as if she could see clean through the camera's glass lens and was sizing up the man sitting in his top-floor office, brazenly, across an invisible stretch of cable.
"If it isn't our supremely gifted, utterly untouchable Great Producer Su. Willing to lower himself so far, tracking mud all the way down to my shabby little broken-down stream, and casually tossing out this much pocket change while he's at it."
She tapped the gift log with a fingertip, and her red eyes curved.
"Looks like those few heartfelt compliments Sparksy paid you earlier landed right on a sore spot, hmm?"
[FIGHT! FIGHT!]
[This is too good, I'm entering this segment into the Internet Bible!]
[Official dev throwing hands with a chaos gremlin. Skipping my 8 AM class today was worth the price of admission!]
[Lady Sparks, don't back down! Keep pushing! Take his money AND stomp on his face!]
[Total outsider here, this streamer is unhinged! She takes a sponsorship and then trash-talks her own sponsor to his face? Good, good, good. For that courage alone I have no choice but to hit follow!!]
Sparks braced her hands on the desk and leaned in further.
The camera caught her mocking face so close it seemed about to press through the glass into the room on the other side.
"Since Boss Su is in such a refined mood, wouldn't it be terribly cold of Sparksy not to keep him company?"
She paused for a full three seconds.
In those three suffocating seconds, the entire chat spammed four hysterical words over and over: handstand hair-wash, handstand hair-wash.
Sparks watched the flood, and the corner of her mouth curled into something uncanny.
That fever-pitched danmaku kept feeding her Elation Points in an unbroken stream, and Sparks, taking the hint perfectly, drove the drama toward its climax.
"Today, if I fail to clear this game you're so proud of, in front of the entire internet..."
Her finger rapped hard against the desktop, one crisp knock.
"...then I'll buy a plane ticket with my own money, fly straight to the foot of your studio building, and in front of the whole world, personally perform for you, Great Producer Su, the most magnificent handstand hair-wash ever witnessed."
Her red lips parted around one last brazen provocation. "When that day comes, do try not to be too scared to open the door~"
Two seconds later, timed almost to the stopwatch, Su Yu's reply hit the chat.
[Su Yu (Pinned): Fine. Go beat Black Duck first, then we'll talk. I've already had a word with building security downstairs. If you're out of shampoo, I'll sponsor you a bottle personally.]
Sparks read it and burst out laughing.
"Wonderful."
"Then you sit tight up there and wait for me!"
Two black-hearted schemers, both of them crawling with bad intentions, traded lines back and forth across a stretch of cold data cable, timing so perfect it was as though they'd rehearsed under the same blanket eight hundred times in advance.
In reality, this was the first head-on collision of their lives.
And the first black-hearted double act they'd ever run to harvest the entire world's traffic.
By this point, the internet had gone completely feral.
On every short-video platform, countless clips split and multiplied like a virus.
Hot threads on the gaming forums got bumped into oblivion, servers throwing errors left and right.
The streaming platform, reading the room perfectly, forcibly pinned Sparks's room to the single most prominent banner slot on its front page.
[SHOCKING! Official Producer Throws Cash to Crash the Stream of the Girl Trashing His Game! And the Wager Is an IRL Handstand Hair-Wash!]
An unprecedented, bottom-shattering spectacle like this. Even people who didn't play games at all would want to click in for a look. Who wouldn't want two eyefuls of a wonder like that?
The cyber stage was fully built.
The mad actors had all taken their places.
And hundreds of millions of oblivious, fanatical spectators had packed the house to bursting.
Sparks watched the popularity value in her backend climb like a rocket leaving the pad, then glanced at the progress bar of the Elation System in her mind, which looked ready to start smoking from overload. She couldn't flatten the curve of her mouth no matter how she tried.
And far away on the top floor of the Arc City Tower, Su Yu looked at his own backend, where the real-time new-user curve for open beta was exploding on the same exponential arc. He picked up the coffee at his elbow and took a sip, in the finest mood of his life.
Two black-hearted villains who would use any means necessary to get what they wanted, separated by a single network cable, arrived at the same understanding in the same absolute second:
This deal was an absolute steal.
"Su Yu, your expression's been weird for a while now. Did something go wrong with the game?"
Kiana had turned to look at him, puzzled, her gaze complicated.
"Nope." Su Yu was struggling to keep the laughter down. "I'm just thinking about how rare it is to find a like-minded Captain-in-crime on the game's very first day."
"...?"
Kiana had no idea what he was talking about. She understood the word "Captain" perfectly well, but what on earth was a "Captain-in-crime"?
"When you're as old as I am, you'll understand."
Su Yu patted Kiana on her little head, looking into those heterochromatic eyes and the faint, still-"crystal-clear" stupidity in them, and spoke with the weight of hard-earned wisdom.
"Why do you talk exactly like my stupid dad?"
Kiana rolled her eyes at him, thoroughly unimpressed.
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