Back in his own room, Su finally got a moment of quiet.
The door closed, and the chatter, footsteps, and clatter of spatulas from the kitchen were all shut out behind it.
Su set his suitcase against the wall, hung his coat on the rack, then went to the sink and splashed cold water on his face.
The face in the mirror was still familiar, but the exhaustion from the long flight and days of working without a signal was plain underneath his eyes.
Of course, compared to the physical fatigue, what really had his mental state teetering on the edge of collapse was the brutal blow his two best friends had dealt him less than half an hour after he'd stepped off the plane.
"Welcome home, Miracle Doctor Su."
"Miracle Doctor Su's peerless skill saved my worthless life."
Those two giant crimson banners, like a pair of death sentences, were still looping in Su's mind like a slideshow gone mad — add a soundtrack and they'd finish him off for good.
Su lifted his head, looked at himself in the mirror for two seconds, and finally just exhaled silently, smoothing back the slightly mussed hair on his forehead.
Business first.
He took the encrypted terminal from the suitcase's inner pocket, and the screen lit up.
The signal stabilized quickly, and the connection went through just as fast. Otto's impossibly composed face appeared on the holo-screen.
"So, you've arrived safely in Arc City, my dear student." Otto held a cup of black tea.
"Just got in." Su sat by the table and switched the terminal to privacy mode. "Let me report on my itinerary first. My cover identity for the school lecture tour is secure. I'll arrange a separate time later to make contact with the Schicksal agents currently active in Arc City."
"As for the drug smuggling case, I'll investigate along the route you gave me."
Otto watched his star pupil on screen, whose work ethic was so rigorous there was nothing to fault, and nodded with satisfaction.
He genuinely seemed to be in a good mood, a faint, hard-to-place smile even lingering at the corner of his mouth.
"Good."
"One more thing." Su paused, his gaze fixed on the other end of the screen. "Teacher, back in the office you were speaking in riddles... Did you already know Su Yu was here in Arc City? And just how outrageous his situation has gotten?"
Otto seemed to have been waiting for that question, and let out a soft chuckle.
"If you mean the miHoYo Studio that's stirring up storms all over Arc City — yes, I know a thing or two about it. Strictly speaking..." Otto deliberately drew out his words, savoring the way Su's expression flickered. "I could even be counted as one of their original investors."
The corner of Su's eye twitched involuntarily.
"You... invested in miHoYo?" Su's voice cracked.
This was somehow more terrifying than being told that Su Yu had actually landed a sugar mama.
Schicksal's Bishop, investing in an anime-styled game studio?!
"To be precise, I arranged for Theresa to serve as the representative investor, making her one of their original shareholders," Otto said, leaning back leisurely in his chair like some Wall Street shark who'd cornered the market.
"As for this investment, both the process and the outcome have been extremely satisfying to me personally. And by all appearances, the returns have been remarkable — one might even call it a miracle. Wouldn't you agree?"
Su was silent for a few seconds.
He raised a hand and pressed his fingers to his brow.
"Purely from a business standpoint, that free gacha micro-transaction model is certainly enough to send shivers through the entire industry."
"But put less kindly, this isn't just about having guts anymore — it's gnawing human nature down to the bone, not even leaving the marrow."
"I'm genuinely curious how that guy Su Yu ever dreamed up something this diabolical."
Hearing Su's razor-sharp assessment, Otto only laughed harder, even giving a light clap of his hands.
"Su, you're jumping to conclusions, and misjudging your friend in the process."
"Misjudging him?" Su frowned. As a doctor, he had an instinctive aversion to any model that profited off exploiting the mechanisms of human addiction.
"Before you came back to your room just now, you must have already browsed some of the community forums and comments, yes?" Otto said. "Let me ask you this — you saw plenty of people posting about their pulls, good luck or bad, right? But among all those endless posts, did you see a single person actually claim the game is predatory?"
Su froze for a moment.
In the car earlier, his head had been full of the 'public humiliation banners' Su Yu had arranged at the arrivals gate, and he'd been dizzied by the online revenue figures so exaggerated he'd thought he was misreading zeroes, and the flood of posts calling Su Yu an 'old scoundrel.'
He'd been so busy being shocked that his best friend had transformed into some kind of capital shark that he hadn't actually stopped to think about the 'reputation' angle.
Now, prompted by Otto, he shrank the holo-screen window to one side and opened his computer.
Su pulled up several of the biggest gaming communities and professional forums in Arc City right now.
The longer he looked, the deeper his frown grew.
Something was off.
Very off.
Ten out of ten off, maybe even twelve out of ten off!
As a rigorously logical researcher, Su scrolled through page after page of top posts, and it was only belatedly that he realized the truly outrageous part of all this had nothing to do with the gacha 'money-grab' itself.
It was that this genius bastard Su Yu had somehow forged the whole thing into an almost flawless ultimate commercial ecosystem — one that left every competitor in despair and every player willingly walking into the trap.
First, he pulled everyone in with free entry.
That was the most ruthless part, because the barrier to entry was terrifyingly low.
Players didn't even need to weigh whether it was worth it — they just clicked download, figured 'it's free, might as well try it,' and just like that, they'd walked straight through miHoYo's front door.
Next came the quality.
This was the part that really made Su's scalp crawl.
He pulled up several gameplay demo videos of Honkai Impact 3rd trending on the forums' front pages, along with elite combat highlight reels and technical breakdown posts from industry professionals.
He watched the same few videos over and over, three times through, his expression growing more horrified each time.
The crisp, satisfying impact of the combat, the modeling detailed enough to render the physics of a character's skirt, the absurdly smooth skill chaining, the cinematic camera cuts, all layered over meaty hit sound effects and explosively flashy particle effects...
Even as a complete outsider with zero knowledge of game development, he could plainly feel it: the artistic and technical polish here was far beyond what Earth, at its current stage, should be capable of producing.
This was flat-out Outclassed by None.
And that wasn't even the end of it.
Next came the gacha system.
Gacha itself wasn't new — blind boxes had existed for decades — and in a world where pay-once purchase models had long dominated, this was old wine in a new bottle.
But what made Su Yu's approach so nauseatingly clever was how ridiculously generous he was with it.
Free gifts for new players, free gifts for daily logins, compensation gifts for server lag, gifts during pre-release livestreams, gifts for every holiday — hell, it probably even gave out ten-pulls just because it rained outside someone's window!
Players would curse in the forums, calling Su Yu a 'shameless old scoundrel,' while simultaneously discovering, to their shock, that they could actually pull miracle results using nothing but the free resources handed out by the System, landing the top-tier characters they wanted.
So the cursing kept going, but their hands, ever so honestly, kept playing.
And once the free resources ran dry, players whose appetites had already been spoiled by top-tier visuals and maximum thrill would be gripped by a powerful sense of sunk cost and gambler's psychology, and would willingly reach for their wallets.
Worse still, the gacha banners themselves were tightly bound to the game's storylines — which were, without exaggeration, absolute knockouts — and to richly developed characters.
One moment, players would be sobbing their eyes out over Chapter Nine's 'Final Lesson,' gutted emotionally, screaming that they wanted to mail the old scoundrel a knife.
The next moment, they'd turn around and see a brand-new armor banner for Himeko had just dropped.
So tell me — a group of players already this emotionally invested, do they pull, or don't they pull?
Su stared at the forum posts screaming things like [For Teacher Himeko! One more charge for the old scoundrel!] and [Even if I have to eat dirt, I'm bringing my fully-decked Paramecium home!] and fell completely silent.
This was nowhere near a simple business model.
It was a full combination punch.
A complete ecosystem that ran from free entry, to retaining users through raw technical power, to stimulating dopamine through gacha, and finally locking people in with an overwhelming density of freebies.
Players inside this system would get emotionally destroyed by Su Yu's brutal storylines one moment, then spontaneously go around the internet singing the game's praises the next — some kind of Stockholm syndrome in full effect.
Because, honestly, the game was just too fun.
And honestly, it was way too generous with its freebies.
A free game with maxed-out generosity, world-leading technical and artistic quality, one where a player could clear nearly the entire main story without spending a single cent — from what angle, and with what justification, could anyone possibly call that 'predatory'?
Call the developers monsters? Sure, fair enough.
Call the story too brutal, too depressing? Sure, the whole internet already agrees.
Call the characters too quick to die, too inhumane? Also fine — players even joked about blowing up the miHoYo building.
But if anyone actually stepped up and said the game was 'a money trap,' 'a scam,' 'shamelessly greedy'...
Well, sorry — Su Yu wouldn't even need to lift a finger. Tens of millions of furious players would drown that person in spit themselves.
Su stared at the screen full of hot posts and, for a long moment, said nothing.
He flipped through a few more posts from industry professionals as well.
The wording there was even more blunt, and even more despairing.
"Guys, just give up. miHoYo's combo attack is currently unbeatable on this planet."
"The free model nukes the market wide open right out the gate, the dimension-crushing tech power drags users away by force, the massive freebies keep the base goodwill rock solid, gacha mines the long-term revenue... and worse, word is they've got some bottomless-pocketed sugar mama backing them up from the shadows! How the hell is anyone supposed to compete with that? With our lives?!"
"Honestly, the whole gaming industry looking up at miHoYo right now is like ancient spearmen looking up at a B-2 stealth bomber loaded with nukes."
"We can't win. We genuinely cannot win. We can't match their technology by a single toenail, we can't match the money behind them, and their community management — that player-manipulation sorcery — is beyond anything we can dream of. This fight's unwinnable. I'm submitting my resignation tomorrow and going to sell street food."
"Ha, I'm already planning to switch to food delivery!"
Reading this, Su couldn't stop the corner of his mouth from twitching.
Sunlight slanted slowly through the window, falling across a corner of the desk, glinting off the freshly-opened medicine order form.
Su turned back to Otto, his expression deeply complicated.
"Teacher."
"Hm? Finished reading? Any thoughts, my student?" Otto still wore that leisurely, watching-the-show expression.
"I have a very serious question right now."
Otto looked at his dead-serious face, as though he'd already guessed eighty percent of it, and made a go-ahead gesture.
Su spoke slowly, his voice heavy with deep self-doubt.
"That kid Su Yu — when exactly did he... suddenly mutate and wake up?"
"Is this really something the same guy who survived a week on instant noodles after graduation, whose highest life ambition was gaming and finding a sugar mama to mooch off of, could actually pull off?"
Otto couldn't help laughing at that.
"Heh. Sounds like getting off that plane today really shook you up."
Su's face was expressionless, but his eyes had gone glassy. "I'm starting to wonder if my deep-sea project in Europe actually never ended. Maybe I'm still down there, out of oxygen, and this is all just a dream while they keep me floating in recovery fluid."
Otto propped his chin up with obvious interest. "So, what do you think of this investment now?"
"In terms of return on investment, it's an outstanding success," Su summed up. "From the victims' — no, the players' — perspective, the method is admittedly outrageous, but hard to pin any real blame on. And from the perspective of the competition, someone's probably already thinking about hanging themselves in a conference room."
"A sharp, objective summary," Otto said approvingly, nodding.
"But I still don't understand it," Su said stubbornly, pushing up his glasses. "How does one person's mind make a leap this incredible in just a few short months?"
"Take your time thinking about it," Otto said with a smile, his tone carrying a hint of deliberate mystery. "You've only just come back from the deep sea, after all. You still need time to adjust."
"But rather than getting stuck applying scientific logic to this puzzle here, I'd recommend you spend more time actually going to see, with your own eyes, what kind of incredible 'monster' your good friend has become."
In the end, Otto left him with one of his classic cryptic lines: "You might find, when the time comes, that the Su Yu who stirs up storms online and the Su Yu who picked you up at the airport... are both just small fragments of who he really is."
The call ended.
Su didn't dwell on Otto's last pretentious remark, and just pulled up the Honkai Impact 3rd community page once more.
The screen was covered in "old scoundrel Su Yu," "monster of a developer," "give us back Himeko."
But strangely, there was no real malice in the insults.
The comments read more like the words of someone pushed to tears by a toxic lover, who then discovered they simply couldn't leave...
Su looked at these posts, which read like the terminal stage of cyber-Stockholm syndrome, his expression growing stranger by the moment, his stomach even beginning to ache faintly.
What the hell was even happening here! Was that guy Su Yu making a game, or casting some kind of curse on all of humanity?!
Right then, two knocks sounded at the door.
Not too hard, not too soft — distinctly Kevin's style.
Su killed the terminal and got up to answer the door.
Kevin stood outside as expected, holding a tray with a freshly reheated meal and a bowl of soup.
"It's still warm from the kitchen. Eat something."
Kevin handed the tray over.
"Don't just get back and starve yourself in your room dissecting Su Yu's shady little business empire. That guy's got more schemes than the oil slick on top of this soup — you won't figure him out."
Su took the tray and let him in.
Kevin stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind him.
He saw Su's computer was still on, the forum page displaying a massive headline: "Honkai Impact 3rd Revenue Hits New Record" — and he could pretty much guess what Su had been doing.
Su set the tray on the table and turned to look at Kevin.
His eyes were strange.
Strange enough that Kevin actually paused.
"What's wrong? Something on my face?"
Su considered for a moment, then decided to just ask it.
"Kevin."
"Go on."
"We're best friends. I don't want you hiding anything from me. Just tell me straight."
"What?"
Su stared at him, his tone completely serious.
"I want to know... over these past few months, has Su Yu suffered some kind of severe physical blow to the head?"
"Like — did he walk into a load-bearing wall at eighty miles an hour because he wasn't looking where he was going?"
"Or maybe his monitor exploded during a livestream and slammed straight into his face? Or maybe — from staying up all night watching pretty streamers, some rare, nuclear-fission-level mutation occurred in his brain's neural synapses?"
Su finished this all in one breath, took a deep inhale, and delivered his final conclusion.
"In short — did he suffer some kind of fatal brain trauma, and then wake up one day suddenly... mutated?"
Kevin's face went blank for a second, then the corner of his mouth twitched.
"Su."
"Yeah, I'm listening." Su looked dead serious, ready to take notes.
"Just how worried are you about that menace Su Yu?"
Kevin pulled over a nearby chair and sat down, rubbing the bridge of his nose, his voice carrying a note of exhaustion.
"You're not his mother, you know."
"It's not that I'm worried," Su said, shaking his head. "It's that this whole situation defies common sense."
He tapped the screen.
"Look at everything Su Yu's done these past few months. How am I supposed to reconcile this with the ultimate slacker who used to survive on gaming and instant noodles?"
Kevin's face took on a look of world-weary experience, like someone who'd been through it all.
"Let it go, Su. Trust me, our symptoms when we first found out were pretty much identical to yours right now."
Su blinked. "Pretty much identical?"
"Yeah, basically the same," Kevin said, nodding solemnly. "From the initial 'is this guy insane,' to later 'when did this guy secretly evolve behind our backs,' to finally becoming completely numb and realizing — oh, this was just the beginning."
Su froze, spoon halfway to his mouth.
Watching him sit there, pupils practically quaking, Kevin suddenly found the whole scene damn familiar.
And it wasn't just himself, either.
He thought back to everyone at Starfire Furnace: the self-proclaimed carefree old man of a father; the genius hacker Bronie who thought she had everything under control; even the worldly, well-traveled super-rich Eden...
In the end, anyone who'd climbed aboard Su Yu's thief ship, whether an ordinary person or one of Schicksal's aces, ended up going through a painful period where their entire worldview got tossed into a blender and pureed.
It looked like it was this out-of-contact-for-months friend's turn now.
"Eat first, keep questioning your life choices after. This stuff's not going to get explained in a hurry anyway."
Su swallowed his mouthful of rice and let out a soft breath. "True enough. He's back now, so there's plenty of time to get to the bottom of Su Yu eventually."
Kevin nodded and didn't say anything more.
But as he stood to leave, he casually picked up the bag of supplements Su had brought back, his gaze lingering a second on the words "kidney support," his expression growing more complicated.
"This." Kevin lifted the bag. "Want me to pass it along to Su Yu later?"
Su looked up and met his eyes.
A few seconds later, he spoke, expressionless.
"Give it to him."
"Really give it to him?"
"Give it to him." Su lowered his head and kept eating. "Given how hard he's been wrecking the entire gaming industry lately, he's surely been staying up plenty of late nights too. Better start supplementing early."
Kevin held back, and in the end didn't say the words "your mother-hen complex is truly beyond saving" that were on the tip of his tongue.
Just before heading out the door, he glanced back at Su.
Su sat at the table, chopsticks picking at his food, brow still faintly furrowed, scrolling page after page through the forum posts on his computer screen.
Clearly, once this meal was done, he'd go right back to digging through everything he'd missed during his months without signal.
Watching Su in that state of grim determination, believing he'd already touched upon the "truth"...
Kevin thought of the humanoid war machine Wotan hidden beneath Anti-Entropy, and of the space rifts that could tear open the sky at any moment...
The things that would truly flip Newton's coffin lid clean off — this poor materialist medical expert hadn't even glimpsed the shadow of them yet.
A flicker of deep pity crossed Kevin's eyes at the thought.
He figured Su's current state, sitting at his computer dissecting business models, was actually pretty blissful, all things considered.
After all, business models, predatory gacha systems — those were all just mortal games.
"Enjoy these last few hours of your materialist worldview while you can, buddy."
Kevin said it silently to himself, and gently closed the door.
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