If You're Bad, Practice More!

"What kind of game are you going to use to crush me next? I'm already fearless!" Silver held his head high, not even breathing heavily.

"For the next game, I guarantee none of you will be able to call it Very Simple." Ethan Vale spoke with absolute confidence.

"You're that confident?" Silver froze. "Aren't all your games playable as long as you have hands? If you're bad, practice more. Anyway, the game is Very Simple."

"Then you'd all better get ready." Ethan Vale did not say what he planned to make, but a game had already surfaced in his mind—a game that tested one's conscience.

When war was viewed from another angle, what choices would people make when driven into desperate circumstances?

Everyone said the games they made were Very Simple, that if you were bad, you should just practice more, but this game would not require any skill at all.

Even players with clumsy hands could operate it with ease.

"I don't believe it." Silver immediately shook his head. What game could possibly stump him?

The chat also expressed their disbelief.

'The gods have angered you!'

'Cursed to death. You lost 114,514 cells.'

'The Giant: You're really a hopeless **!'

'() just () more.'

"I'll get off for today, then. In three months, I hope everyone can greet our new game with a smile." After saying goodbye to everyone, Ethan Vale ended the connection between them.

Silver glanced at the popularity of his stream. Just seeing the viewer count made him jump—a million people online in a single night!

The online viewer count in this world was extremely real, without even the slightest bit of falsification.

Normally, when he streamed, his room only had a little over a hundred thousand viewers.

Even so, he was already one of the platform's top streamers.

After all, not every streamer could maintain a stable daily viewer count.

"You all got here so fast!" Silver's brow twitched.

"Based on what everyone knows so far, we have one piece of good news and one piece of bad news." Silver could not help laughing bitterly as he spoke.

"The good news is that we'll have a new game to play in three months."

"The bad news is that in three months, everyone will begin another round of suffering and torment." His expression was extremely strange as he said it.

At first, he had simply been tormented to the point of breaking down by that damned game Getting over it. He had only wanted to use "Very Simple" to trick more players into trying it, so everyone could break down together.

But he had never expected the designer to actually compete with the players. The new games he made were truly excellent.

There were two types of game ratings. One was the classic numerical score.

Right now, both Getting over it and Dead Cells had scores above 9.0.

Besides numerical ratings, there was another kind, something like a questionnaire. It was simply feedback sent to the creators and had nothing to do with the rating.

At this moment, beneath the ratings for both games, everything was tagged Very Simple alongside high scores.

Players who did not know any better saw the comments and high ratings, downloaded the games, then emerged in agony less than half an hour later. Looking at the uniform [Very Simple] comments, they went completely numb.

Brothers, we got played.

This was called Very Simple?

Did you people even have a conscience?

Quite a few of those writing such comments were famous game reviewers, and some players had downloaded the games only after seeing their reviews.

Whenever someone mentioned the word "hard," veteran players would step forward with wide grins.

'This is hard? Such a simple game, anyone with hands can play it. Same old line: if you're bad, practice more.'

'Your princess is in another castle.'

'If you're bad, just pr-pr...'

As the players progressed through the games, the full story gradually unfolded.

When they saw the ending, it felt even more like black humor.

Everything had died. Everything had been destroyed. The panacea was gone, and the island could no longer be saved. Yet the King's wish had been fulfilled. The King had obtained what he wanted, no matter the cost.

Then another "green" King appeared, and history repeated itself.

The former King had extensively mined red crystals, hoping to create the Philosopher's Stone. But the caves contained more than red crystals; they also held monsters and poisonous gas.

The King believed the alchemist's claims about immortality.

The alchemist applied the red crystals directly to corpses, but the corpses showed no reaction. In the end, the corpses and piles of useless red crystals were dumped into the graveyard.

The complex mixture of those corpses and red crystals infected all the plants in the graveyard. The plants then spread into the Slumbering Sanctuary and gradually seeped into the sewers.

The seeds of the plague took root and sprouted there.

At the time, they did not notice the problem and continued their research.

If experiments on dead people would not work, then they would use living people. The King turned the prisoners in the cells into test subjects.

While playing, players could piece together the entire game's story through various fragments. Beside an experiment table, the protagonist found a note.

[Using crystals on corpses has had no effect so far, but I cannot give up on continuing the experiments!]

Beside the note was a transparent glass container, where bubbling red and blue potions continuously reacted with each other.

Because the wastewater from all sorts of live experiments was poured into the sewers, the island began breeding mutated monsters.

The prisoners in the cells ate plague-ridden rats and crows. Their visiting relatives also carried the virus back to Misty Harbor, and the city was soon struck by the plague as well.

By then, the plague had leaked out of the prison. To contain it and conceal the King's pursuit of immortality, the King ordered every villager who had visited the prison, as well as those showing suspected symptoms, to be locked in the prison. Anyone who defied the order would be severely punished.

At first, the villagers merely buried the dead, but before long, they had no choice but to fight the corpses.

And the King upon the throne—the hero the entire island had once revered—chose to guard his own territory and ignore whether the people lived or died. The jailers climbed the ramparts and kept strict watch.

None of this did anything to control the plague. The jailers soon grew bored and came up with all sorts of ways to pass the time.

For example, hanging up prisoners who had worked themselves to death, or finding a condemned prisoner and throwing them down just to hear their desperate screams.

The King had two right-hand men: the Hand of the King and the Guardian Giant.

The two could not stand each other, but both the Hand of the King and the Guardian Giant hated the alchemist.

The Giant possessed a strong sense of justice. He repeatedly urged the King not to ignore the spreading plague, but the King paid him no heed. In the end, he led the people in rebellion. This was the so-called Bloody Night of the Rebellion.

That night, crimson blood and fire dyed the entire sky red. Corpses lay everywhere, and the graveyard no longer had room to bury them.

The corpses began to mutate, and the entire island slipped beyond the kingdom's control.

The King abandoned the prison and retreated to High Peak Castle, watching as the entire kingdom and island fell apart, completely transforming into a horrifying hell filled with monsters.

Out of options, the King summoned the alchemist, hoping that this mysterious man could save the kingdom—or save himself.

The King trusted the alchemist without question.

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