Editor: Elanor
“He can’t kill Qi Qing!” The deputy director shouted.
“Can you call him and tell that? Gosh, it’s time to give them built-in earphones!” Another shouted.
“Even if there was a way to communicate, do you think he would listen?!”
“I told you, we need to have a built-in punishment facility and a miniature implant taser. These people won’t be obedient without some punishment!”
“They’ll have it in the next session, but the problem is this session doesn’t have it yet!”
“We can’t let them kill Qi Qing!”
Jakowski took a big gulp of wine. The sound in his earphones was a chaotic mess. He remained silent, and some individuals even swarmed into his office, insisting he had to make a statement right away so that they could plan the next course of action while they still continued to shout on the channel.
“Qi Qing is our people!”
“They are all ‘our people’.”
“He can’t kill Qi Qing. That’s Qi Qing!”
“Why can’t he?” Jakowski said, “This is the Killing Show, not a theme park for men’s games.”
His words were met with another explosion of feedback, with both planning teams blowing up and fans blowing up the official website.
Qi Qing’s popularity was quite high, and Jakowski admired his planning team’s sincerity. Qi Qing’s face and character were polar opposites. This man could get down and dirty when he needed to do the dirty work, and he had always had a tacit understanding with the planning team.
You needed someone like that, especially when you had to control the development of the show, kill specific people, or achieve certain purposes, so that fools would believe that everything in reality shows was random.
Another call came in, and Jakowski took a look. It was Qiao Ge’s call, which caused him to feel pain.
He drained the wine in the stainless steel bottle before gathering the courage to pick it up.
The first thing the Chief Planner, their Boss, said was: “He can’t kill Qi Qing!”
“He may not be able to kill Qi Qing, he is hurt,” Jakowski said.
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
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“But when it comes to this, one has to die,” Jakowski said, “Xia Tian went this route. Judging from the ratings of the third game, everyone just likes this—”
“Then he can’t kill Qi Qing either. That’s Qi Qing, not just any newcomer!”
“But our popularity has always been sustained by the dead,” Jakowski said, “Qi Qing is popular now, but the audience’s interest shifts quickly. We never let someone stay alive for a long time. The way to make money is to guide them to pay attention to newcomers.”
“This is your suggestion?!” Qiao Ge said, “Leave it alone, let Xia Tian kill Qi Qing, and turn the entire third arena into a carnival show?”
“I didn’t say that,” Jakowski said, “Boss, you already know what Xia Tian is going to do, don’t you? Even a perfectly normal person would get killed if they did this, and he’s still injured—”
Qiao Ge snorted.
“You just want Qi Qing to die,” he said.
Jakowski wanted to say something more but the other party hung up the call.
The messy bickering in his headphones came back in, a bunch of people talking about “ratings”, “popularity”, “popular PK wins”, and stuff like that. He fumbled for the bottle again, feeling like he couldn’t last a second without a gulp.
After finishing half a bottle of wine, his mind was empty for a while, and only then he called back, but there was no response at all.
He kept calling, wondering why on earth he was so on edge.
He wanted to say, “The conversation is not over yet. Did you see what Xia Tian planned to do? He’s just crazy! But although he is crazy, he’s still the company’s biggest moneymaker. If he is going to die, you go explain to the top. By the way, he still has a backer, and I am no way going to explain to Minkov Jr. why something happened to Xia Tian!”
He had seen the kid twice at a private party. He was just a child, but the way he stared at people made him feel uncomfortable. He didn’t want to look directly at those eyes at all.
He knew how badly Xia Tian was hurt and what he wanted to do, and was in no way as assured of him as Qiao Ge was.
Xia Tian… genuinely didn’t believe he could survive. He was very smart, and had first-class talent for killing people and the tenacious nature of the Lower City people, which allowed him to survive until now. But from a certain point in his life… he was just looking for a way to die with his dignity and pride intact.
The phone remained unanswered. Boss Qiao Ge was probably having a good time with his male and female bed partners, which was what he mainly did in his life.
Jakowski laughed a little nervously.
It was interesting that when someone like Xia Tian started confronting the planning team and saying who he was going to kill, the whole Upper World believed he’d succeed. Everyone thought that he was powerful enough to do whatever he wanted.
If he said that the Upper World should be destroyed, there was literally no need for even the entire Floating City to exist.
Jakowski knew why. This was the result of the long and dedicated work to create a God.
The cacophony in Jakowski’s earphones continued.
Qi Qing was also an expert, and his elite group had gathered up three teams and was continuing to grow. But the group of people in his earphones acted as if because he was chosen by Xia Tian, Qi Qing could only drop dead on the spot.
The real-time monitoring information from the PR media showed that the number of registered fans of Xia Tian had now reached a dizzyingly astronomical number and was still increasing rapidly.
This was marketing. They gave viewers the most exciting storylines, the most interesting characters, the most conflicting relationships, and true friendship, blood, passion, betrayal, and truth about human nature… to get them to spend money and turn them into “fans”.
They would seduce everyone to do the same thing and when everyone lost interest in it, they then would get them to become passionate about something new. Their job was to get everyone used to staying fanatical and vacuous.
On the Floating City, no one could escape the Killing Show and everything it radiated. You didn’t need reason, you just followed the trend of fanaticism.
Jakowski opened the virtual homepage of the God of War Temple and looked up at the bloody statue he had guided and built.
The corpses at its feet were rapidly increasing.
He had read a theory that said that religion was a delusion of human nature. How naive. People needed Gods, that was why Gods existed, covering the sky like dark clouds. Despite the fact that modern medicine could now treat all illnesses, the delusion of religion was a constricting ailment inherent in human nature that would follow them to the end of the world.
This was the way to sell a commodity that no one could refuse. In this age of consumerism, there was no better way to represent the pinnacle of business for the Floating Gold Group than to sell a God.
It was just that when you created a God, you had to pay a price. God was never a game.
In the live streaming video on the main screen, Xia Tian gave himself another injection of painkiller, something he did with great skill and casual attitude.
The medicine would relieve the pain, but it would also prevent you from accurately judging the injury and protect yourself if necessary. But Xia Tian never cared about this.
Watching him inject painkillers without a care in the world, Bai Jingan yelled, “Xia Tian!”
Xia Tian turned his head towards him and smiled, saying, “It’s okay.”
He reached out and wrapped his arm around Bai Jingan’s shoulders with a carefree look, and said, “You will look after me, won’t you?”
“But you have to control yourself,” Bai Jingan said.
Xia Tian smiled at him again, and caressed a handful of his hair. It was hard to imagine that under such a radiant smile would lie destruction.
They couldn’t look after anyone, Jakowski thought, and they knew it themselves… maybe not. Maybe this was the tacit understanding that he had never been able to figure out. He sometimes saw this kind of thing among people in the Lower City, a certain dignity that was only found in death and despair. He was quite sure that Bai Jingan belonged to the Lower City. There was no actual evidence, but his instincts had always been spot on.
Living in that kind of place, these people had never expected to survive. They had their own set of standards.
At night, Xia Tian’s face was pale from blood loss. Jakowski thought what he did was simply insane, but the man looked like he knew exactly what he was going to do.
Then, he saw Bai Jingan smiling at Xia Tian.
He rarely wore an expression like that. The coldness and detachment receded, revealing a completely different person underneath. His pupils sparkled in the dark and were attractive, but you couldn’t call them a gem or a star. It was the reflection of broken glass or a blade that could kill. There was so much darkness that you would draw blood if you even touched it.
But the two looked so close and casual, like a couple of good buddies going to a group fight again.
Jakowski inexplicably thought of the Zone N riots, which seemed to have started with a similar simplicity and fatality.
He shivered when he suddenly remembered that these two people had been drawn to a team by lottery, and then the planning team had arranged for them to live together. Truly a masterpiece.
When Xia Tian and Bai Jingan arrived at the arsenal, the atmosphere was already extremely tense.
Most of the players were gathered there, some were still arriving one after another, and three people were already dead on the ground.
More powerful teams joined the elite lineup, and one by one, stronger teams went forward to negotiate. Some of them were allowed to stay, but most were not. Everyone vaguely understood in their hearts where that line was, the line between life and death.
Those who were brushed off did not leave, but murderously stared at the group of people blocking them.
The network logisticians of several strong teams were trying to open the door. Smiling, the Lawyer-in-charge stood nearby, with his entourage, as he watched the youngsters “fully compete”.
There was an uproar among the crowd, and one man shouted, “You can’t take everything away!”
“If you do, you’re no match for so many of us—” said another.
“If you want to make a move, you are welcome to step forward,” Qi Qing said.
No one stepped forward, and after twenty seconds, Xia Tian arrived.
He walked out through the crowd and said toward Qi Qing, “I’m going in.”
He was like a strong beam of light that pierced through the darkness.
Jakowski sat up straight. The ratings for the third sub-arena had spiked wildly to a staggeringly high level. The fact that there was such a curve in every Killing Show over the years meant that a lot of bloodshed was also taking place at the same time in the city outside the arena. Fans were offering sacrifices to the Floating Gold Group’s bloody business totem. Looking at this graph line, today would definitely be a bloody carnival night.
On the Floating City, their Gods had a battlefield so humble and desparing.
They love chaos until it’s not under their control. I can’t wait for them to be pulled down.