The Queen's Descent animated short: ended.
Inside Elysia's dedicated stream room.
And, in fact, across every platform on the entire internet that was rebroadcasting the short.
In that instant, everything fell into an eerie dead silence that lasted three full seconds.
The viewer counter in the lower-left corner had already blown past thirty million.
And yet that danmaku layer, the one that normally buried the picture itself, was spotless right now. Not one new message drifted across.
Nobody was typing.
Viewers sat frozen at their desks, phones cradled in their palms, and even their breathing had stalled.
Those few minutes of ultra-high-quality full-3D rendered CG, that absolute crushing pressure that treated every scrap of human resistance as though it did not exist, had simply crashed their brains.
One second.
Two seconds. Three seconds.
The instant the third second passed, the platform's data center let out a shrill alarm.
The danmaku System stuttered first, the whole frame locking up.
Then, like a levee giving way, a flood of comments, packed layer upon layer, so dense that the text smeared into afterimages, drowned the entire screen from edge to edge!!!
[HOLY. CRAP. HOLY CRAP!!!]
[The top of my skull is going numb! What kind of divine footage was that?!]
[A mobile game made that CG?! Theatrical blockbusters don't even have that texture!]
[That snap! That look of contempt! I literally dropped to my knees and finished watching from the floor!]
[The pressure was terrifying! When that torrent of mechs came charging in, I honestly thought the counterattack was locked in, and then the Queen just raised one hand and the only word left in my head was "despair"!]
[That was Anti-Entropy's Titan mech army! Torn up like scrap paper, just like that?!]
Five minutes earlier, back during the duel between the two Herrschers, the danmaku had still been spamming battle cries like "friendship face-breaker punch" and "wake Kiana up with love."
But now.
After witnessing two absolute powers that weren't even on the same dimensional plane, all that hero's-journey plotting, all that hot-blooded turnaround, had been smashed to powder by a single snap of the Queen's fingers.
The players were dumbstruck.
Fight? Fight with what! How was anyone supposed to fight that!
[These models, these effects! Is miHoYo a god descended to earth?!]
[So this is the power of a Herrscher? Wait, no, hold on, then why is our Wendy so pathetic?]
[Case closed, Brother Su is straight-up playing favorites with his Little Junior Sister! Look at our Mei and Wendy, both Herrschers, and the gap in treatment is insane!!]
As the Official Brand Ambassador, Elysia's reaction right then wasn't any better than the average player's.
She sat in her oversized gaming chair, and those eyes that normally curved into little crescents were stretched wide open.
Her lips were parted, and she'd forgotten to close them.
She had always assumed she understood this game pretty well.
After all, she was a closed beta officer.
But before today, the build she'd been playing hadn't contained this animated short at all!
That guy named Su Yu had been sitting on a nuclear warhead of this size, clamping it down with both hands, hiding it even from his own spokesperson.
And he'd waited until today's launch to set the thing off.
Elysia blinked, then let out a long breath.
Her brain started turning again.
And right at that moment, a scene from the studio a while back flashed through her mind.
Art Director Nuwa, behaving like a woman possessed.
That girl who normally collected figurines and slacked off now and then had hauled a camp bed into the server room.
Day after day she'd shown up with dark circles blacker than a panda's, drawing tablet in hand, pouring espresso down her throat while she obsessively tuned the light and shadow on a single character model's strands of hair.
Elysia had walked past the washroom once and seen Nuwa clawing at her hair, a whole handful coming loose with every pull.
Back then she'd joked that at this rate Nuwa would go bald.
Now she finally understood what all those fistfuls of hair had bought: a visual miracle worthy of the history books.
Elysia leaned in toward her microphone, her voice still carrying the shock that hadn't faded, and a thread of genuine admiration.
"Oh my goodness…"
"I finally know what Nuwa and the others were doing all that time, locking themselves in the server room day and night, not even going home."
She shook her head, a note of wonder in her voice.
"Producer Su, you kept us in the dark so cruelly! Is this even game development anymore?"
She faced the camera, eyes shining.
"This is straight-up filmmaking! Not even Hollywood dares to burn money like this!"
In the stream's danmaku, the tech nerds and game UP-loaders who actually knew their stuff had already started tearing the short apart frame by frame.
Beyond the scalp-tingling visuals and modeling.
There was one more thing, something that functioned like a soul, that had pushed The Queen's Descent onto a throne ordinary people could never reach.
[Hold on! You're all staring at the visuals! Am I the only one who noticed that BGM?!]
[I was listening on studio monitors! The second that holy, ethereal soprano came in, paired with the Queen walking down through the void, every hair on my body stood on end!]
[Is that a sound a human being can produce?! Absolutely unreal!]
[Obviously not, since the music supervisor and vocalist for that track is Eden!]
[WHAT! You mean THAT Eden, the world-renowned top-tier musician with a shelf full of international awards?!]
[Who on earth even is Brother Su?! He got a goddess like Eden to score a mobile game?! How much money did that cost?! No wonder he says he isn't short on cash!]
Watching the discussion scroll past, Elysia lifted her chin with a touch of pride.
That was her closest friend, after all.
"That's right, everyone. Captains," Elysia chimed in, tone utterly certain, basking in the reflected glory. "That soul-shaking battle anthem really was composed and performed by Eden herself."
She laced her fingers together and propped her chin on them, savoring the memory of what she'd just seen and heard.
"Eden's music goes right through your soul, and then you add Nuwa's team and their real-time 3D rendering tech, the kind that's supposed to exist only in theory, the kind almost nobody in the world can pull off."
Elysia looked into the camera, her voice serious now.
"In that one instant when the Queen snapped her fingers, with the sound design layered on top, I honestly felt like that wind of Destruction inside the screen had already blown across my face. It was genuinely suffocating, like living through the apocalypse firsthand."
"Getting to play a game like this really is a kind of happiness, isn't it?"
In front of their screens, players nodded like their necks were broken.
Too strong.
Strong on a level that wasn't even the same dimension.
Animation of this caliber was something even famous major studios couldn't serve up more than a couple of times a year.
Never mind that this was a free game.
Su Yu had flipped the whole table over and announced to the world: everybody watch closely, this is how you're supposed to package beautiful girls, with full 3D, top-tier motion capture, and a world-class symphonic score!
Faced with an Outclassed by None of this magnitude, how could anyone not lose their mind?
The stream went on, Elysia still bantering with her viewers.
But outside that stream room, across the entire internet.
A tidal wave had already risen.
High-definition clips of The Queen's Descent, cut and edited by every major UP-loader, tore across the video sites at a speed like viral cell division.
On Bilibili's front page, page one and page two both, every single thumbnail was the same white-haired queen snapping her fingers.
It wasn't just the gaming crowd. Plenty of ordinary passersby with no connection to the anime scene clicked into that short, got completely flattened, and then hit share with their scalps still prickling.
Meanwhile.
In Arc City, and in every other major game company across the country.
The mood in the R and D departments had gone cold as a morgue.
At one industry-leading studio.
Project executives and several backbone-level producers were gathered around a conference table.
On the projection screen, that Queen's Descent CG had just finished playing.
The image was frozen on the Herrscher of the Void's profile.
The meeting room was silent enough to hear a pin hit the floor.
The project director held a cigarette between his fingers.
The ash had burned long and drooping, and he hadn't noticed a thing.
Only when the ash snapped off and landed on his expensive bespoke trousers did he jerk upright, the cigarette dropping from his hand to the floor.
Nobody cared about the cigarette on the floor.
They stared at the screen, and every face in the room was written over with the despair of a man burying his own parents.
"That just now… was that hand-keyed animation, or motion capture?"
The lead artist's voice came out dry as sandpaper.
"Mocap and hand-keying combined," the lead programmer answered, his own voice even drier. "And with the most advanced mocap rigs in the industry. That natural physics sim on the hem of the coat, plus that mass of on-screen particle effects detonating all at once… these lunatics, they actually crammed all of it into a phone!"
The lead programmer dragged a hand down his face.
"How the hell are we supposed to compete with that?"
He shoved the documents on the table away in frustration.
"We've spent years in meetings figuring out how to reskin big IPs and sell them for cash, and meanwhile they're not only giving the thing away free, they're steamrolling us on tech too!"
The project director leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling.
"miHoYo has started running Hollywood-grade 3D sci-fi blockbusters on people's phones. And they're handing it out for free, no less."
This wasn't commercial competition.
This was a merciless, one-sided industrial massacre.
Despair.
That was the only theme running through the entire game industry today, and for a long time to come.
And on the topmost floor of Arc City Tower.
In that quiet office.
Su Yu sat behind his desk, watching the System backend on his screen.
The rate at which the numbers were climbing could no longer be described as a straight line. It was a terrifying parabola that had punched clean through the top of the chart.
Downloads were rising in increments of ten million.
Player Cognition and Emotion Points were surging upward like a waterfall running backward.
Su Yu lifted his coffee cup and took a sip.
A little bitter, but the sweetness that lingered after swallowing was very pleasant.
Inside Elysia's stream room.
After three seconds of dead silence and the tsunami of danmaku that followed, everyone's emotions had been driven to their absolute peak.
It was the awe that came from witnessing overwhelming power, and it was a desperate craving for whatever came next, whether a last-ditch counterattack or an even deeper despair.
Elysia sat in her gaming chair.
She'd forgotten to breathe a moment ago. Coming back to herself, she gulped down a lungful of air, her slender fingers clamping hard around the controller.
"Come on, come on, come on!"
She muttered it under her breath, thumb hammering the confirm button on the controller.
"Let's see what happens next! Mei got taken away, Teacher Himeko got captured, and now even Kiana's body has been hijacked! How is this plot supposed to resolve?! Give me the next stage already!"
And it wasn't only her.
The millions watching the stream in front of their screens, and all the players who had fought their way to this point themselves.
Every one of them made the same motion in that instant.
Clicking their mice like maniacs.
Mashing their screens.
All of them waiting for that friendship face-breaker punch they'd been imagining, or failing that, an even bloodier battle.
But.
No new stage loading screen appeared.
In the middle of the darkened frame, a few large white characters surfaced slowly, stripped of all feeling.
[Main Story Chapter Eight complete.]
[Please look forward to future updates.]
The entire stream room dropped into a stall even more surreal than the one during The Queen's Descent.
Elysia's thumb froze on the controller.
She blinked.
Then blinked again.
As though she couldn't believe what she was seeing.
"It's… it's over?"
Her voice cracked into a different register against the microphone.
"It just ends right here?!"
With that cry of disbelief, the stream's danmaku System faced another epic-scale stress test.
The players who had been raving over the Queen's finger-snap a heartbeat ago were now jumping out of their seats, furious at the cliffhanger dropped on them out of nowhere.
It was the specific rage of a person right on the edge of climax getting a bucket of ice water dumped down their back.
[The hell?! That's it?! You cut it off HERE?!]
[Boss Mei's fate is unknown! Himeko's been captured! Kiana's been body-snatched! And then you tell me to look forward to future updates?!]
[You dog of a planner, do you even have a mother?! Cutting it off here, are you trying to kill me?!]
[I've already got my pants off and THIS is what you show me?! I want the counterattack! I want Kiana to wake up!]
[One day when the blade is in my hand, I'll slaughter every cliffhanger dog under heaven!! Su Yu, get out here, AAAAAH!]
A screen packed solid with "cliffhanger dog" and warm regards to every member of Su Yu's family, scrolling past like a blizzard.
Elysia was livid too.
She tossed the controller onto the desk with a light clack.
She puffed out those soft round cheeks, abandoning even the graceful fairy image she usually maintained.
"Horrible, awful Su Yu!"
She shook a small fist at the camera, denouncing him at full volume.
"How can you stop at the single most critical moment?! He did it on purpose, I know he did! Leaving everyone's feelings dangling right here, I'm so mad! I'm definitely not sleeping tonight!"
Completely unlike the roaring cyber-coup atmosphere in the stream room next door.
Inside Su Yu's office.
The air conditioning vent gave off a faint hum.
The only light here came cold off a computer screen.
Kiana sat at the broad rosewood desk.
She had just finished watching The Queen's Descent right here.
Which was also, in her fragmented memories, everything that monster had done while wearing her body.
She didn't sob and cry out the way she had when she saw the Tower of Babylon in the stream room.
But she looked terrible right now.
She sat in the executive chair, both hands clamped around the hand of the Su Yu standing beside her.
Her breathing came fast and ragged, her chest heaving.
Her forehead, the tip of her nose, even the strands of hair at her temples, all of it was beaded with a fine layer of cold sweat.
Su Yu stood next to her.
He didn't pull his hand back, and he didn't glance at the computer beside them where the danmaku was still boiling over.
He could feel that Kiana's fingers were ice cold and still faintly trembling.
With his free hand, Su Yu drew a white cotton handkerchief from his pocket.
He bent down slightly and carefully wiped the cold sweat from Kiana's forehead.
His movements were unhurried, as though he were polishing a piece of porcelain that might shatter at a touch.
After a while.
Kiana closed her eyes and pulled in a deep breath.
And then.
She let it out slowly.
Those eyes, unfocused a moment before from sheer panic and delayed terror, somehow found their focus again when they opened.
The struggling and the running-away at the bottom of them receded like an ebbing tide.
She looked at Su Yu.
"Thank you, Su Yu."
Her voice was still rough, but her tone was startlingly calm.
Su Yu's hand, handkerchief and all, stopped in midair.
"Thank you for telling me this way."
Kiana released her grip on the back of his hand, then turned her hands over and cupped his palm between them.
"For telling me… what that monster occupying my body did to everyone, back when my consciousness was sunk in that darkness."
She looked straight into his eyes, no longer the idiot who could only scream and run away when something went wrong.
"A person has to answer for what they've done. Even if none of it came from my own will, those blood debts were still incurred through my hands in the end."
Her thumb brushed lightly over the red marks she'd pressed into the back of his hand.
"If I don't even know what happened, if I don't even know how much I owe… then taking responsibility and atoning are meaningless words."
"So."
The corner of Kiana's mouth lifted.
"I'm grateful to you. For giving me the chance to look this bloody past in the face. For giving me a… a set of coordinates for atonement."
Su Yu stood there, looking at the girl in front of him.
Something inside him took a hard hit, and an ache he couldn't name spread through him, followed by a thick, warm relief.
The shot of adrenaline he'd given this stray cat, the one labeled "save Himeko," had genuinely worked.
It wasn't just a goal anymore. It had become the spine holding up the entire weight of Kiana's world.
The girl she was now could step over that threshold called "running away" on her own, even in agony.
He closed his hand around hers in return.
"Don't mention it," he said.
And it wasn't only Kiana.
In that hushed office, there was another onlooker being cut deep.
In the Sea of Consciousness.
Reliving that history all over again, the past in which Kiana's body had been crushed and hijacked.
The phantom of Fenghuang huddled in the corner, that plume of red feathers standing for Yu Ducheng, was shaking violently.
For Fu Hua, those images were their own form of death by a thousand cuts.
Another irreversible mistake in fifty thousand years of life.
["Kiana… I…"]
Fenghuang's voice sounded in Kiana's mind.
Right now that voice was packed so full of guilt it seemed ready to spill over, so full that she couldn't get out a single complete sentence.
Kiana heard her, of course.
She drew a deep breath.
"Squad Monitor."
She answered in her mind, and the resentment from before was gone from her tone, replaced by a broad-shouldered acceptance particular to the Kaslana family.
"I'm not going to be magnanimous and say I forgive you. Because these things happened, and the harm was done, so we have to face it."
"'Forgiveness' is far too weightless a word."
The red feather in her mind went still for a moment.
"But."
Kiana turned her head toward Su Yu.
A fierce fighting spirit had begun to burn in her eyes, like two flames that would never go out.
"Right now isn't the time for us to tear ourselves apart and wallow."
She stood up out of the wide executive chair.
Her feet were bare except for white cotton socks, but she stood ramrod straight.
"Su Yu."
She looked at the man in front of her.
"You said the players' tears and emotions could become a lighthouse in the future, one that guides us through the Sea of Quanta to… to bring Teacher Himeko back. Right?"
Su Yu nodded.
"Then that settles it!"
Kiana slapped both her cheeks hard, two crisp cracks, and color flared across her face at once.
"So, as the CTO of Anti-Entropy Entertainment, and as the game's producer, you and I…"
She grabbed his wrist and strode for the office door.
"…ought to get out there and work! Let's go pour some fuel into our lighthouse!"
Two minutes later.
Elysia's stream room next door.
The door banged open.
Elysia, who was hugging her HOMU cushion and still furiously complaining into the microphone about "awful Su Yu," jumped so hard the cushion dropped straight out of her arms onto the floor.
She turned to look.
Kiana came sweeping in like a gust of wind, dragging Su Yu with her, and landed the two of them right in front of the camera.
The stream's danmaku stalled for half a second, then detonated!
With the culprit himself suddenly on screen, a million players found their outlet, and the cyber-coup shot straight past boiling point.
[HOLY CRAP! The man himself showed up!]
[Su Yu, you old crook, you've got nerve appearing here!]
[God Su! Please accept my knees! A mobile game made that animation?! Did your art team grind their livers into dust?!]
[Forget the animation! I'm asking you why you cut the chapter off there!]
[So the devs themselves are leading the Mei-bashing, huh! Why'd you kill her, nya!]
[Hand over the next chapter! Otherwise I'm crawling through the network cable today and hanging myself on your front door!]
The danmaku had split into two wildly opposed camps.
One side worshipping that Outclassed by None level of technical firepower, the other sharpening their knives, sworn to hunt down the cliffhanger dog.
Facing a screenful of murderous intent practically spilling out of the monitor.
Su Yu looked entirely at ease. He stood in front of the camera and, in fact, slid both hands casually into his trouser pockets.
"Everyone, everyone. Let's calm down."
He spoke into the microphone, voice steady as a rock. "About the next chapter, don't panic. Let me put your minds at rest right here."
He paused.
"Three days from now, meaning this Thursday, Main Story Chapter Nine goes live on schedule."
The danmaku quieted down a little.
[Three days? For real?]
[Old crook, don't you lie to me! I want it NOW!]
Su Yu smiled, and began skillfully redirecting these impatient players' firepower toward the enormous world he'd spent the last few days laying out.
"Do you all really have nothing to do for three days?"
He pointed at the game's main menu on the screen.
"The main story is only the tip of this iceberg above the waterline. Don't you want to go into the side story The Forgotten and see Squad Monitor Fu Hua's past?"
He kept dangling bait.
"Don't you want to dig into the Chronicles and learn the real secret of Theresa's origins? Don't you want to find out just how unhinged that old fox Otto really is?"
"We launched with that many Valkyrie characters today, and opened up that much world exploration area. And I generously stuffed your inboxes with that many gacha resources and stamina potions."
Su Yu spread his hands, the picture of innocence and generosity.
"Take these three days and explore to your heart's content! Digging out all the hidden stories has to be more fun than staring at the main story icon all day, doesn't it?"
The moment those words landed.
The players in the stream room, still raw from that oppressive plot, got clubbed senseless by the sheer generosity of the rewards.
Some of them even started switching sides.
[He… he kind of has a point, though.]
[I just checked my inbox, they gave out a ton of Crystals!]
[With this much content, I've got days of playing ahead of me.]
[But God Su, if you hand out resources like this and still keep up full-3D quality, aren't you going to lose money?]
Su Yu saw that comment.
The look on his face changed.
He shed the loose, wheeler-dealer manner of a moment ago, and the corner of his mouth curved into a smile brimming with confidence.
He looked straight into the lens.
"Lose money? Not a chance. When I make games, I've always believed in one guiding principle."
His voice echoed in several million headsets.
"And that principle is: create joy, with heart."
He delivered that history-book-worthy piece of outrageous nonsense without a shred of shame.
After a thoroughly merciless round of bragging and banter, backed up by Kiana nodding along beside him as his straight-man, and a stack of blank checks written in free rewards.
This mob of furious players got swindled so thoroughly they couldn't find north anymore, and the danmaku had already started spamming [God Su is so classy].
Su Yu quit while he was ahead and walked out of the stream room with Kiana, thoroughly satisfied.
Let them sharpen their knives all they liked.
If he rushed the main story onto the table this fast, how could it possibly land with maximum impact? Feelings were the kind of thing that needed time to settle.
In the end, the two of them made a clean exit at the height of their triumph.
Once they were gone, Elysia sat back down in her chair.
She watched the danmaku gradually return to good cheer, people already debating which banner to pull on.
She reached down, picked the HOMU cushion up off the floor, and patted the dust off it.
And then.
She smacked her own thigh.
Crack!
"Wait, that's not right!"
Elysia's rosy eyes went wide as the realization caught up with her, and she shouted into the microphone.
"That awful Su Yu just led us all around in circles!"
She stared at that cold [Please look forward to future updates] sitting on the screen after The Queen's Descent.
"Who says this game is healthy and sunny?! The animation was stunning, sure, but… the Herrscher of the Void is the villain!"
She started counting on her fingers.
"Silly little Chongchong got body-snatched, hello?! Mei had her gem taken away! This whole direction is completely wrong!"
She smacked the desk again in her anger.
"And Teacher Himeko and Doctor Tesla are still locked up in that freezing cold Schicksal prison! What kind of happy ending is that?! What kind of creating joy with heart is that?!"
Those few sentences.
Hit like enlightenment poured straight over the crown of the head.
The danmaku, smug a second ago about their free Crystals, woke as if from a dream!
[Oh CRAP! She's right! Old crook Su talked us in circles!]
[That dog planner is way too good at redirecting attention! He nearly conned me into limping!]
[Create joy with heart my foot! More like create heart attacks with heart!]
[Ellie! I hereby order you to go gather intel at top speed! Lay siege to Su Yu and don't let up! I want the script!]
Hyperion gifts came crashing down across the screen again in a frenzy.
Accompanied by a single premium comment, bolded and dyed red:
[If I can't play Chapter Nine of Honkai Impact 3rd right now, I'm going to lose something beautiful!!]
At this very moment.
Outside the stream room door.
Su Yu leaned against the cold corridor wall, both hands in his pockets.
His phone screen was lit, showing the feed from Elysia's stream.
He watched that "lose something beautiful" comment slide across the display.
Su Yu paused.
He fished a mint out of his pocket, peeled off the wrapper, and tossed it into his mouth.
The cold flavor burst across his tongue.
He let out a low sigh, so quiet only he could hear it.
Then he raised his head.
As though addressing all those players inside the screen, he offered up one final whisper worthy of The Devil.
"Oh, children…"
He crushed the mint between his teeth.
"You're going to find out very soon."
"Even if you really do get to play Chapter Nine three days from now…"
"You are still fated, forever… to 'lose something beautiful.'"
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