The Game Goes Live

Su Jin checked in from a guest room at the Cheng Family home in Jingdezhen.

Rain fell outside the window, striking the roof tiles. It sounded less like rain than someone cooking a pot of very thick congee far away: bubble, bubble, bubble.

She sat cross-legged on the bed with her laptop on her knees. On the screen was a test build of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, which Gu Yan had sent her yesterday. He had said the first playable version had only three levels-Nie Xiaoqian, The Painted Skin, and The Taoist Priest of Mount Lao-but that was enough for testing.

She played for half an hour and died twice in the Nie Xiaoqian level before getting through on her third attempt.

A system message arrived just then.

Little Golden Egg squeezed out of the screen and hovered above the quilt, her wings damp with rain mist. She shook herself, scattering sparkling droplets across the screen.

"Host, it's time to check in."

Su Jin leaned against the headboard and watched the rain outside. It was coming down harder now, and the sound on the tiles had gone from cooking congee to frying beans, a crackling clatter like someone scattering handful after handful of unbreakable beans across the roof.

Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Ding. Congratulations, host, on completing your 219th daily check-in.

Today's check-in reward: SJ Esports Club, with one hundred percent ownership, one permanent LPL slot, and a base in Shanghai. The entire building is yours.

The team had eight members, with an average age of twenty and an average height of 1.84 meters. On the day their official photos leaked, their supertopic shot into the top fifteen overall within an hour. The most restrained comment read:

"When they sat in front of their computers, I thought they were shooting a poster."

The captain was Jiang Che, a twenty-two-year-old from Zhejiang. He had injured his hand twice and taken eight months off. After he came back, his mechanics were no longer as fast as before, but his shot-calling was cleaner than anyone else's.

On voice chat, he never used more than five words: "Fight." "Retreat." "Dragon." "Watch the AD." "End it."

He didn't smile after a win or hang his head after a loss.

During an interview, a reporter asked what he thought was his team's greatest advantage. He smiled and said,

"We're good-looking."

The team became an overnight sensation.

Su Jin looked at the captain's promotional photo. He sat in a chair with his hand on the keyboard, looking at the screen rather than the camera. Its light fell across his face, cutting his profile into halves of light and shadow.

She turned her phone over and set it face down on the quilt. Little Golden Egg hovered in front of her, wings folded.

"Host, is your team going to compete?"

Su Jin shook her head and said no.

Little Golden Egg froze for a moment.

"They're going to play a game. Our game."

Little Golden Egg giggled, hovering in the rain mist, her golden glow like a lamp that would never go out in the gray light.

Three hundred closed beta codes for Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio had been issued worldwide. Su Jin had ten.

She kept one for herself and gave the remaining nine to the captain.

The captain took her call in the base's training room, said "Okay," and hung up. He didn't ask why, who had made the game, when it would be released, or how much the beta codes cost. He said only one word: "Okay."

The livestream began three days later.

There was no advance notice, no promotion, and no title.

The captain sat in the farthest corner of the training room, beside a floor-to-ceiling window. Outside was Shanghai at night, neon lights reflecting orange-red against the clouds. His profile was cool in the light of the screen and warm in the neon glow, the two meeting along the curve of his cheekbone.

He opened the game, clicked "New Game," and chose Nie Xiaoqian.

The stream had no title or cover image, only a default gray background.

When it began, ten thousand people were watching, most of them die-hard fans of the team. The bullet comments kept asking, "Wasn't today a day off? Why are you streaming?"

The captain said nothing. Nie Xiaoqian stood in front of Lanruo Temple. The wind came, and the grass bent, but she didn't move.

He tackled the Nie Xiaoqian level differently from everyone else.

Others fled. He waited.

He controlled Nie Xiaoqian and stationed her beneath the painted eaves to wait for Ning Caichen. He waited fifteen minutes. In the game, dusk gave way to deep night, and moonlight streamed through a gap in the broken roof, falling at Nie Xiaoqian's feet. Then he moved.

He took one step into the moonlight, stopped, and continued waiting.

The bullet comments began to grow impatient. Some people posted, "Is it stuck?" Others wrote, "The streamer fell asleep," or "Isn't this an action game? Why is he idling?"

He didn't answer.

After he had waited twenty-two minutes, Ning Caichen arrived.

The Ning Caichen in the game was unlike any NPC he had ever seen. He looked at the sky instead of the path as he walked, and when he reached the painted eaves, he looked at the moon instead of Nie Xiaoqian.

The captain moved Nie Xiaoqian in front of him, but he didn't react. The captain had Nie Xiaoqian speak, and the game presented three options-

One was, "Young master, may I stay the night?"

Another was, "It isn't safe here. Leave quickly."

The third was silence.

The captain chose silence.

Nie Xiaoqian stood in front of Ning Caichen, neither speaking nor moving.

Ning Caichen happened to glance at her. "Can't you sleep either?" Then he sat down, leaned against the wall, and closed his eyes.

The bullet comments fell quiet.

It wasn't that no one was talking. Everyone was watching and had forgotten to speak.

The captain had Nie Xiaoqian sit down beside him, not leaning against him, but a fist's width away, watching the moon.

The moonlight in the game shifted through the gap in the broken roof, moving from Nie Xiaoqian's face to Ning Caichen's, then to the ground between them.

In The Painted Skin level, the captain used no combat techniques at all.

The painted-skin ghost stood before him, draped in human skin. The skin bore a woman's face, very beautiful, with large eyes, red lips, and pale skin.

The bullet comments went wild.

"This character model is way too beautiful." Someone else said, "Is this really a ghost? She's obviously a fairy."

The captain continued moving his character toward it, without drawing his sword, drawing a talisman, or chanting a spell.

He walked up to the painted-skin ghost and stood there, motionless.

The painted-skin ghost spoke, its voice soft, like someone talking late at night, afraid of waking a sleeping neighbor.

"Do you think I'm beautiful?"

The captain didn't choose any of the options. He left his character standing there, looking at the painted-skin ghost's face for a long time.

Then he opened his inventory and turned to the last page. There was a mirror there, picked up in the Taoist priest's room at the start of the game. It had no attributes or uses, and its item description contained just one line: "Reflects the true heart."

He dragged the mirror onto the painted-skin ghost. The ghost looked down into it.

The face in the mirror wasn't the beautiful human skin. It was the ghost's own face.

The bullet comments froze. No one spoke, no one spammed the screen, and there were no gifts or emojis.

The painted-skin ghost's face filled the screen, pitted, rotting, and no longer human in shape. But it looked into the mirror for a long time.

Then it smiled.

It wasn't a shrill, mournful smile or a terrifying one. It was a smile of release.

It returned the mirror to the character and said, "Thank you."

Then it left. The human skin fell to the ground, empty.

A line appeared on the screen: "Painted-skin ghost: It lived wearing another's face for so long that it forgot what it looked like. You helped it remember."

The bullet comments came alive.

"I came here to watch someone play a game, and you made me cry for two hours."

"The ghosts in this game aren't ghosts. They're people."

Someone wrote, "The person who made this game has a ghost living in their heart, a very good ghost."

The viewer count passed five million.

The captain took fifteen minutes to complete The Taoist Priest of Mount Lao level.

There was no fighting, no puzzle-solving, and no chase.

The Taoist priest stood before a wall and told the character to learn how to pass through it. Get through, and the level was cleared.

Without pausing, he moved the character forward.

He didn't run, charge, or close his eyes. He simply walked, step by step, all the way up to the wall without stopping.

The character's face pressed against the wall. It was made of gray, rough brick, and the tip of his nose rested against a mortar joint. He didn't stop.

The character's face passed through the wall. It wasn't a special effect or an animation. The character really did walk from one side of the wall to the other. The screen went black.

A line appeared on the screen-

"The Taoist Priest of Mount Lao: The wall is not a wall. When you don't believe in it, it ceases to be one. Once you believe, it comes back."

By then, the viewer count had passed ten million.

The bullet comments were moving too fast to read, but a few had been pushed to the top and stayed there.

"This game isn't meant to be played. It's meant to be watched. After watching it, you'll wander through it in your heart for a long time, unable to leave and unwilling to leave."

By the time the captain closed the game, dawn had broken.

The neon lights outside the floor-to-ceiling window had gone out. Shanghai's morning was gray-blue, and a few distant high-rises had turned golden in the sunlight, while the streets nearby were still dark.

He leaned back in his chair with his eyes closed, saying nothing.

The viewer count in his livestream settled at twelve million.

He opened his eyes, which were slightly moist, and typed a line: "This game goes on sale May 1. I bought it."

Then he ended the stream.

Over the next hour, tens of thousands more comments poured into the comment section.

Su Jin watched the entire stream from the Cheng Family's guest room.

She sat cross-legged on the bed with her laptop on her knees. The captain's stream was on the screen. It had already gone dark, but the bullet comments were still drifting past, one after another, from right to left, like a river that would never stop.

She closed her laptop, picked up her phone, and sent Gu Yan a message: "Have preorders opened?"

Gu Yan replied instantly: "They have."

Su Jin asked how many.

He said, "Three million copies. Six hours."

Su Jin looked at those words without speaking.

The rain had stopped outside, but water was still dripping from the tiles, one drop, then another, then another, slow and soft, like someone who couldn't play an instrument trying its notes one by one, far away.

Her phone buzzed again. It was Gu Yan.

"Five million now. Eight hours. The servers are being expanded. The publisher is adding machines.

Amazon is restocking. Steam put our banner on its homepage. Sony is asking whether we want to add servers. Nintendo is also asking whether it can come to the Switch. Tencent is already preparing to publish the mainland China version."

Su Jin didn't reply. She set her phone face down on the bedside table.

When the full version of the game was released, it would be an even bigger hit.

She needed an IP empire of her own.

Outside, the rain had stopped, the tiles had dried, and the sound was gone. Only the wind remained, blowing from beyond the mountain, through the bamboo grove and past the kilns, over the Cheng Family's centuries-old gray tiles, and up to her window.

Outside, the wind passed over the tiles without a sound.

She fell asleep and slept sweetly.