11:30 AM.
Ninety minutes into the open beta.
The entire net had gone down.
Not the servers of Honkai Impact 3rd.
The server room Bronie was guarding with her life stood as solid as Mount Tai. The load curve kept grinding along the red warning line in a way that made your stomach drop, but it held, absorbing tens of millions of simultaneous logins without ever crossing that line by a single step.
What had actually crashed was the mental state of every player in the country.
Weibo's trending list.
No. 1: #HonkaiImpact3rdOpenBeta#
No. 2: #HonkaiImpact3rdBrandAmbassadorElysiaIsHere#
No. 3: #SparksHandstandHairWash#
No. 4: #IsmiHoYoRunningACharity#
That fourth entry rocketed onto the board forty-five minutes after launch, so fast that the trending-topic auditor in Weibo's back office assumed a bot brigade and manually reviewed the data three separate times before confirming it was organic traffic.
And the culprit behind this cyber-earthquake was the nuclear option Su Yu had thrown down, the one thing capable of overturning every rule in this world's game industry - free-to-play with in-game purchases, plus a gacha system with guaranteed pity.
The moment players laid a finger on the first ten-pull button, Honkai Impact 3rd's Supply system blew the ceiling clean off the entire industry.
The Honkai Impact 3rd board.
Posts refreshed so fast the page shuddered like it was having a seizure.
[Title: BROTHERS I'M PISSING MYSELF!!! THIS GAME'S GACHA HAS A PITY SYSTEM!!!]
Reply 1: [Holy crap, holy crap! I just cleared Chapter 1 and went hunting everywhere for the button to buy the next chapters, and there ISN'T ONE!]
Reply 3: [Not only is the base game free, they don't charge for later story or stages either?! Is miHoYo's Boss here on Earth doing targeted poverty relief?!]
Reply 7: [Are you dumb, mate? They've got a Store in there, it sells characters, it's called "Supply."]
Reply 15: [Wait! I just went and looked at that "Supply" system! A ten-pull guarantees an A-rank Valkyrie! A hundred pulls guarantees an S-rank, the highest rarity! Do you people understand what that MEANS?!]
Reply 18: [I just built an Excel sheet and ran the numbers. If you grind out all the launch newbie events and stage clear rewards, the "Crystals" they hand you add up to... the number is terrifying! Meaning the launch S-rank Valkyries - if we grind hard enough, we can freeload every single one of them without spending a cent?!]
Reply 23: [My whole body has gone numb. Use your brains for a second. This console-grade visual quality, this bone-crunching combat feedback, high-poly 3D models for every character... over at Penguin Corp or Pig Corp, the base game alone would run you 298 yuan minimum, right? Add DLC on top and you're looking at 500 plus! And now the base game is free, and you can pull characters using resources they GIVE you? Did this company's accounting department drink pond water?!]
Reply 31: [Stop, upstairs! I'm genuinely scared! This violates every commercial instinct I have! I'm terrified a game this conscientious goes bankrupt tomorrow because it can't make payroll, so I'm going into that Store right now to drop 648 to calm my nerves!]
Reply 32: [I topped up too! That "monthly card" looks like a steal, consider it protection money!]
Reply 33: [+1!]
Reply 34: [+1! It's not that I want to spend money, it's that I'm scared it dies too fast and I never get to play an action game this good again!]
Replies scrolled upward at hundreds per minute, until even the forum's own servers started showing visible lag.
In this parallel world, where everyone was used to cash-on-delivery, where the major publishers harvested their wallets over and over with expensive buy-to-play pricing and expensive DLC-
Honkai Impact 3rd's model of "free to play + microtransaction gacha + guaranteed pity" was like handing a caravan of travelers who'd spent their whole lives paying premium prices for muddy water in the desert an entire free factory of ice-cold cola.
The players lost their minds completely.
When they discovered a game of this quality had no purchase barrier at all-
When they discovered it was actively handing them its top-tier characters to freeload-
The spending urge that erupted out of them, along with a bizarre protective instinct, hit an all-time peak.
miHoYo Studio.
Su Yu watched the real-time revenue feed on the back end.
That string of digits, representing cold hard cash, hadn't stalled because the game was free. It was rolling upward at a violent speed.
Ten million. A hundred million. The digits flickered too fast for his retinas to catch the ones place at all.
And on the semi-transparent System panel beside it, visible only to him, the progress bar for [Global Human Emotion Points Collection] was surging just as hard.
Like an intercontinental missile at ignition, it shot straight up and punched through the upper limit of the System's preset axis.
[System Notice: Congratulations, Host. Your "dimensional-reduction business model" has taken effect. Moved by your "generosity," your players are weeping tears of gratitude while panic-voting for you with their shriveled wallets.]
"Heh."
Su Yu let out a mild, offhand laugh, though the curve at the corner of his mouth - the one that belonged entirely to a black-hearted capitalist - refused to be pressed flat no matter how he tried.
"Buy-to-play? That barely makes any money."
He looked at the danmaku scrolling past, all those people throwing cash at the game because they were "scared miHoYo would go under," and murmured to himself.
"Lower the barrier as far as it goes, raise the emotional value as high as it goes, and then... let them empty their pockets willingly, for love. That, right there, is the real Ninth Art."
Applause, if you understood any of that.
Beside him, Kiana pulled her head back into her shoulders. "You know, when you laugh like that you sound exactly like an evil final boss."
12:00 PM.
An office building somewhere in Arc City.
An MCN agency with a gaudy, overwrought name. About a hundred and fifty square meters of floor space crammed with thirty-some people, the air thick with the smell of takeout lunch boxes and cheap coffee.
The boss's office was the innermost room, glass partition, blinds drawn halfway.
At the moment those blinds were rattling violently.
Because the man inside was slamming the desk.
"How is this possible? Isn't she the non-combustible garbage who can't even string a sentence together, the one only fit to sit in the looks category as a vase?!"
The balding middle-aged man brandished a tablet. On the screen was Sparks' stream.
The viewer count had already blown past three million, and the danmaku was so dense you could barely make out the gameplay behind it.
Crack!
The boss slammed the iPad down onto the desk. "Right now there are dozens of top-tier MCN agencies digging into her background, getting ready to pay an astronomical breach fee to poach her! In the last half hour alone, three operations directors from major studios called my personal cell phone directly!"
The woman sitting across from him said nothing.
Sister Zhou.
Sparks' agent of three years, under contract.
She looked at the stream on the tablet.
Sparks was on screen, needling the danmaku with that sarcastic drawl of hers, white twintails swinging back and forth.
Three million concurrent viewers.
Three million.
Sister Zhou's right hand rested on her knee, five fingers tightening by degrees.
Her nails bit into the flesh of her palm. She pressed her lips together, and her expression didn't shift by so much as a hair.
She had always known, honestly.
What that girl Sparks lacked had never been ability. It was one perfect opportunity to go completely feral.
But Sister Zhou was just a bottom-rung agent with no real voice in this junk of a company.
Company management, wanting to push the top female streamers who were willing to "play along" with the unspoken rules, had quietly and unanimously struck Sparks off every list of premium brand deals.
They buried her channel's recommendation weight in the lowest throttling pool. They cut off, without a shred of mercy, every exposure resource she might have touched.
The reason? Simple.
Because Sparks was just too beautiful.
And that innate, faintly pathological talent for performance made every one of the company's flagship cash cows feel threatened.
But three years of that carefully engineered suppression had, at ten o'clock sharp this morning, been burned to ash by the storm Honkai Impact 3rd swept across the entire internet.
"You listen to me!" The boss jabbed his finger hard into the iPad screen. "I don't care what you do - beg, kneel, grovel! If you don't have her signed to a ten-year exclusive full contract by end of day, you can pack your things and get lost tomorrow!"
Sister Zhou rose slowly to her feet.
She looked at this man in front of her, apoplectic, flailing like a clown, and the corners of her mouth - clenched tight for so long - curved upward into something mocking, something with the taste of revenge in it.
Before, not one of you thought Sparks was worth more than trash.
Now the whole world is waving fistfuls of cash, fighting to sign her.
Truly the height of irony.
1:00 PM.
Sparks' rented apartment.
The stream had entered its third hour.
After being one-shot point-blank by an invisible Black Duck, after Su Yu's official account personally showed up to twist the knife, after the entire internet's danmaku mocked her as the "Tough-Talking Queen" - after that whole parade of humiliations-
Sparks had finally clawed back a little dignity in the combat portion.
It took her a solid twenty minutes of hardcore study to map out Black Duck's invisibility pattern and the dead angles in its projectile arcs. Leaning on the Masked Fool's monstrous neural reaction speed, she forced her way through the stage at the absolute limit.
After clearing it, she couldn't resist a couple of snide remarks: "That's about all this deadpan little girl has got, huh."
But none of that was the main event. The main event was what came next - the gacha. The Supply.
Right now the entire net was spamming "miHoYo is running a charity," and forums and boards everywhere were full of shills posting screenshots of their absurd luck.
Double gold in a ten-pull, two S-ranks. Single-pull miracles. Fresh accounts landing a top-tier Valkyrie on their first try.
In a world where even the concept of "paying to roll the dice" barely existed, these lucky players looked like they'd been personally chosen by a deity. Half of them wanted to print out the results screen, frame it in gold leaf, and hang it on the wall.
Sparks watched the danmaku, and the irritation she'd swallowed after the Black Duck disaster came surging back up her throat.
She decided she was going to win it all back, decisively, in the one arena she owned: luck.
"Family."
She leaned back into her chair, grabbed a fresh lollipop from the edge of the desk and stuck it in her mouth, all her unhurried composure restored.
"So they give away a lot of stuff. What's that worth? There's no such thing as a free lunch in this world. The wool always comes off the sheep's own back. Whatever this Supply pit is, it's sitting up ahead somewhere waiting to eat you poor little things alive."
As a Fool who had come from the Star Rail world, she'd seen gacha mobile games run into the ground by the Interastral Peace Corporation long ago. It was only the players of this world who'd never encountered such a thing.
Hm?
Sparks caught the wrongness right away. If a free-to-play gacha game that had never existed in this world was suddenly here-
Then it further confirmed her hypothesis. That man called Su Yu was not from this world.
Her right hand opened the Supply interface, her left propping up her chin, the plastic stick of the lollipop tilting up at the corner of her mouth.
"Watch Sparksy pull double gold in one ten-pull today and strip Boss Su down to his underwear!"
[Here we go! The streamer's classic talking-big segment!]
[Waiting patiently for the faceplant!]
[Streamer, could you PLEASE stop raising death flags! I'm scared!]
[I haven't forgotten that crisp crunch of a lollipop shattering earlier. Hope her teeth survive the next five minutes.]
Sparks didn't spare the danmaku's mockery a thought.
With total confidence, she tapped the first ten-pull.
A supply crate stamped with a HOMU bunny descended.
A pillar of light burst across the screen.
Results screen: one A-rank Valkyrie fragment, and a pile of scrap metal.
Though she did get the strongest early-game Stigmata in the game - the Hannah set, top, middle, and bottom!
Which went to show that, in a certain sense, Sparks' luck really was fantastic.
"Mm~ A warm-up. Perfectly normal probability." Sparks didn't so much as move an eyebrow.
Second ten-pull.
Another A-rank. A duplicate, at that.
"...Also normal. Probability fluctuates. It all evens out over a large sample."
Third ten-pull.
Pity again.
Sparks moved the lollipop from the left side of her mouth to the right.
Fifth ten-pull.
Guaranteed purple.
Seventh ten-pull.
One purple.
Ninth ten-pull.
Still the guarantee.
Staring at the classic one-purple-nine-blue lineup on screen, Sparks had run entirely out of words.
The rented apartment fell into an eerie silence.
And the danmaku in the stream began to shift into something subtle, a mixture of sympathy and unholy glee.
[WHAT?! Ninety pulls and still no S-rank?!]
[No way? I was just in another group chat, the unluckiest guy in there got gold at seventy!]
[Streamer, confess. Did the devs specifically target you?!]
The ninety-ninth pull.
Single pull. Blue light.
Sparks stared at the screen, and in those eyes that were usually brimming with mockery, the arrogant red glow visibly dimmed.
The hundredth pull.
Gold light. Knight Moonbeam.
There it was, finally.
Pity.
Hard pity.
One hundred pulls exactly, not one more, not one less. She'd eaten the guarantee down to the bone.
[A FULL hundred pulls hahahahaha!]
[Other people go off-banner at forty, and you, streamer...]
[This level of bad luck - were you out mining coal last night?!]
Sparks looked at the S-rank Valkyrie's art on the results screen and bit down on the lollipop twice. It didn't shatter.
"It's fine." Her voice was still more or less level, straining to preserve the last shred of the Masked Fool's dignity. "Just bad luck on the character banner. My hands have always been dead accurate on the weapon banner."
Thank goodness this account had been supplied by miHoYo themselves, with all the Crystal resources prepared in advance.
Otherwise, for a bottom-rung nobody streamer like Sparksy, the cost of pulling alone would have finished her off.
She took a deep breath and opened the weapon and Stigmata banner.
Su Yu had added an Epitomized Path mechanic to this pool. On top of the original two-for-one Stigmata rule, once you selected your target weapon, every off-banner pull accumulated Fate Points, and when the counter filled, your next gold was guaranteed to be the target.
Don't ask. If you ask, yes, it was copied from Genshin Impact.
Sparks selected the signature weapon - Moonbeam's Hyper Railguns.
First ten-pull.
Purple light.
A weapon dropped.
Not the one she'd charted.
Off-banner.
"Mm. Going off-banner once is normal. Fate Points plus one."
Second ten-pull.
Purple light.
Off-banner again.
"...Fate Points plus two."
All the way to the fifth round.
Still off-banner.
Sparks' lollipop had been chewed down to a bare plastic stick, and she was still holding it in her teeth, as if she'd forgotten to take it out.
The Fate Points crawled upward through miss after miss, and only when she had eaten the entire guarantee to the last pull did the signature weapon finally deign to arrive.
Sparks stared at the weapon that had ground dozens of pulls out of her, then slowly slid her gaze over to the danmaku.
[Everyone else gets double gold in a ten-pull, the streamer eats full hard pity EVERY time!]
[Sparks, this game really IS a charity. It's just that you're cursed!]
[Streamer, do you want to know I finished the banner in twenty pulls?]
[Live footage of an unlucky wretch's soul leaving her body!]
[HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!]
Sparks shot to her feet.
Her knee shoved the gaming chair half a meter backward, casters shrieking across the floor.
She jabbed a finger at the screen. The bare lollipop stick dropped from the corner of her mouth, bounced off the keyboard, and rolled twice.
"This is impossible! This is absolutely impossible!"
Her voice blew straight past the tolerance of her cheap microphone, static hissing.
"Su Yu, you black-hearted profiteer! Your code is targeting me, I know it is! Why does everyone else get lucky and I eat full pity every single time?!"
She sucked in a breath, her chest heaving with sheer rage.
"Are you such a sore loser you secretly nerfed my drop rates? Screw you, REFUND!!!"
[HAHAHAHAHA she's completely lost it!]
[Where's the elegance? Where did your elegance go?]
[She's mad, she's mad, she's genuinely mad!]
[I get it now. The streamer can accept people calling her bad at the game. She can't accept people calling her unlucky~]
[Miss Sparks, please maintain your smile!]
[Children, I know this is hard, but everyone keep those mouth corners pointed DOWN!]
[Reporting, sir! This is genuinely too difficult!]
The Elation Points collection system was calling out numbers at a frantic pace inside Sparks' head.
Because the harder she broke, the happier the audience got. And the happier the audience got, the more Elation Points she harvested.
A perfect, tragic perpetual motion machine, generating power off her own humiliation, had been born.
1:15 PM.
Sparks sat in her chair, wheezing, while the danmaku kept spamming looped screenshots of her greatest meltdown moments with sadistic devotion.
A notification popped up in the top right corner of the stream.
[Su Yu has sent you a PK call request.]
Sparks stared at the box, jaw clenched.
She reached out and hit accept.
The screen split into left and right.
On the left, Sparks' rented apartment.
Pink soundproofing foam, a beat-up gaming chair, a desk buried in chaos.
And one white-haired beauty glowing red with rage at a scumbag designer.
On the right, Su Yu's office.
Spacious, bright, Arc City's skyline stretched out beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows. Su Yu sat behind his desk, an iced black tea at his elbow, wearing the single most punchable expression in existence.
"Boss Su." Sparks ground her back teeth. "You give me an explanation today or this isn't over."
Su Yu lifted the iced tea and took a sip.
"Miss Sparks, miHoYo's drop rates are absolutely fair and impartial. A-rank guaranteed every ten pulls, S-rank guaranteed at one hundred, weapon Epitomized Path Fate Points - it's all written in the announcement, in black and white."
He set the glass down with elegance.
"If your own luck is cursed, don't blame the banner."
[HAHAHAHAHAHA official account taunting her to her face!]
[That's murdering her soul, Boss Su!]
[Boss Su, you're such a bastard, I love you!]
The corner of Sparks' eye twitched violently.
"Fair? If you've got the guts, pull on a fresh account right now, in front of several million people, and show me!"
Su Yu tilted his head, doing his best impression of a man thinking it over.
"My luck's pretty average."
He set down the iced tea and turned to wave a hand toward the office door.
"But I can get the intern who handles our odd jobs to give it a try."
Sparks blinked.
Footsteps sounded outside the door, followed by a muffled voice speaking around a mouthful of food.
"Hm? You called me? I'm not done eating yet."
Su Yu stood, reached off-camera, and hauled someone into frame.
A white-haired girl came stumbling into the shot.
Long white hair in complete disarray, one uncooperative cowlick sticking up from the top of her head.
Half a slice of pizza clamped in her mouth, a string of cheese stretched a good ten centimeters from the corner of her lips and still not breaking. A can of cola in her left hand, her right hand slick with grease.
She blinked twice at the camera, thoroughly lost.
"Eh? What's this? Are we filming something?"
Kiana Kaslana.
[Oh my god! Isn't that the white-haired Little Junior Sister!]
[Has Little Junior Sister's face gotten visibly rounder?]
[I maintain that Brother Su is a master pig farmer. Anyone care to argue?]
[No, seriously, how is this fair?! Brother Su is handsome AND rich AND has a beautiful junior sister living with him. I'm going insane with jealousy!]
[Brother Su, you detestable winner at life! You stole the life that belonged to ME!]
Su Yu paid no attention to the danmaku from those Frenzied Flame lunatics.
Envious? He'd traded his life for it.
Su Yu pressed Kiana down into the chair and pointed at the Supply button on the screen.
"Tap that for me."
Kiana looked at the screen, then looked back at Su Yu with total innocence.
"This one?"
"Yes. That one."
Kiana set the cola on the desk, extended a grease-coated right index finger, aimed it at the "Ten-Pull Supply" button, and poked it at random.
The supply crate dropped from the sky.
Five beams of gold light detonated at once, so bright they washed the entire stream feed to pure white.
When the results screen appeared, five full-body S-rank Valkyrie illustrations were packed across it, edge to edge.
One ten-pull.
Five S-ranks!!
The danmaku vanished.
In that single instant, the streaming platform's danmaku servers were crushed flat by several million simultaneous submissions of "?????"
The screen froze for a solid three seconds.
When it recovered, the danmaku burst out like a levee breaking.
[????????????]
[Am I hallucinating?!]
[FIVE GOLDS??????]
[Five S-ranks in one ten-pull????????? Is that a probability a carbon-based lifeform can physically achieve?!]
[Probability theory is dead! Newton can't stay in his coffin anymore!]
[What kind of monster is this janitor intern?!]
[Is luck on this level even legal?!]
[I'm calling the police! The devs are cheating on their own game!]
Kiana stared at the five beams of gold light still fading on screen, her pizza nearly falling out of her mouth.
She swallowed hard, then turned to look at Su Yu.
"Eh? Why are there so many lights?"
She pointed at the screen, expression entirely serious.
"Did I break the computer by tapping it?"
Su Yu shut his eyes hard and barely strangled the urge to howl with laughter.
"No. You're just lucky."
"Oh." Kiana tilted her head obediently and thought about it. "Then can I go back to eating my pizza?"
"Go ahead. Bronie might need an extra pair of hands, so check on her while you're at it."
"Roger!"
Kiana picked up her cola, clamped the remaining half slice of pizza in her teeth, and slipped happily out of frame.
Left side of the screen.
Sparks' face.
She sat in her gaming chair with her mouth hanging open, her lower jaw sagging as if it had come partly unhinged.
Her eyes were stretched perfectly round, the red four-leaf-clover pattern in them warping from how far her pupils had dilated.
Her brain, in that moment, went completely offline.
The Masked Fool's higher-dimensional processor had burned out.
Three years' worth of acting reserves accumulated on Earth, every sarcastic script in her arsenal, every flawless contingency plan for handling the unexpected-
In the face of a scene so absurd, so far outside every possible calculation, as "five S-ranks in a single ten-pull," all of it blue-screened.
[Streamer?]
[Is she dead?]
[Sparks, are you okay? Do you need us to call an ambulance?]
[Where's the mouth? Where's that cocky mouth from earlier?]
[HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA she has been utterly demolished!]
Sparks sat there frozen for a full five seconds.
Until one comment drifted past and pierced her last line of defense with surgical precision.
[Streamer eats full 100 pity, the cleaning lady gets five golds in a ten-pull. Sparks, this is FATE!]
Sparks broke. She slammed her face down into the desk and buried it there.
A voice, thick with the wobble of genuine tears, struggled out through the gap in her arms.
"...Refund!"
The roar of laughter in the danmaku brutally lagged the streaming platform's servers into paralysis.
However.
As the old saying goes.
The joys and sorrows of human beings are not shared.
At least. Fu Hua thought so.
At that same moment.
Inside the miHoYo game studio, at the desk of Fu Hua - motion capture team lead, and studio security chief on the side.
Since these past two days were launch days, Fu Hua, Ma Feima, and Cheng Lingshuang had all come back to the studio to lend a hand.
By now, though, there wasn't much left to do. Scrolling through her phone, Fu Hua felt a certain itch she couldn't scratch, and gave in and downloaded her own studio's game.
She pushed her glasses up her nose and tapped the pity she'd spent an entire day saving.
Gold light.
It had finally come.
She had barely let out a breath of relief, fingers moving to close the interface.
Then a System announcement popped up in the center of the screen.
[Severe network interruption detected. Your pity counter has been reset.]
Fu Hua stared blankly at that line of text.
Refusing to believe it, she read it again.
She slowly removed her glasses, wiped the lenses, put them back on, and read it again, very carefully.
A full day of accumulated pity. Devoured.
On the small table beside her, the surface of a cup of health-conscious red date and goji tea trembled faintly.
That was the hand holding the cup, shaking violently.
Not far off, Ma Feima was in the middle of a hard lifting set.
And then she heard a wail rise from her Master's workstation.
"SU YUUUU-!"
Ma Feima jolted in terror and dropped the dumbbell right out of her hands.
Five minutes later.
Technical director Bronie looked at Fu Hua's pity record, her jaw practically coming unhinged.
"What do you mean your hard pity got eaten? The probability of the gacha System throwing an error is one in a hundred thousand!!"
____
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