Chapter 4649: Desperate Escape (28)

When Anatoly and Lucifer arrived at the steel needle room, the mechanism had already been jammed. They didn't even need to go to the secret passage; they could just step on the ceiling and go up.

Lucifer had a bit of a hard time climbing up. The passage was relatively narrow, so he could only try his best to shrink his wings, but the edges of his wings were still rubbed raw. As soon as he got up, he complained: "Couldn't the passage in this level be designed a bit wider?"

"I'm afraid even if it were wider, it couldn't accommodate your wings." Anatoly looked back at him; I'm afraid since birth, Lucifer's wings had never suffered such devastation. And this wasn't a problem with his own ability; it was indeed that the level design hadn't considered non-humanoid creatures, causing him unnecessary damage.

"I will complain about them." Lucifer said somewhat indignantly, "I'll also give them a bad review and let other angels avoid this kind of instance."

"Except for you, I'm afraid no other angel would come to play." Anatoly laughed, "Don't tell me you want to have another go with Michael?"

"Oh, forget it. That guy would only shout about dereliction of duty, and he's so rigid; he's not good at playing this kind of game at all."

"I'll take it as you praising me for being good at it."

"You are indeed very good." Lucifer looked at him and said, "I bet if I weren't in the game, the moment the mechanism broke, that bunch of people in the design department would have already started banging on my office door."

"Who is in the design department?" Anatoly asked as if unintentionally.

"That's not certain." Lucifer said, "They have many freelance employees; some are invited to participate, and some are out of interest. But most of these independent instances are designed by them."

"Actually, you can see distinct personal characteristics in many instances, and some people will guess in the comment section who made a certain instance. Some instances designed by certain people have consistently high praise rates, while some..."

"I can't say they did a bad job." Lucifer paused, then said, "It's just that overly stylized designs are still very dependent on the target audience. Some niche themes, although they don't violate the Domain rules, the instance designer should still go see a doctor."

"Who has the highest praise rate?" Anatoly asked.

"Most people don't know who the real designer is; they use codenames to refer to them. However, judging from the system backend data, the instances currently designed by Greed have the highest praise rate."

In the monitoring room, Greed immediately waved his hand, bowed to the left, and bowed to the right, as if receiving an Oscar.

"Why?" Anatoly asked.

"I said some overly stylized and niche themes are unpopular, so the popular ones are actually relatively mainstream instances. Although the instances designed by Greed aren't top-notch in all aspects, they win by being balanced; the experience in art, combat, and plot is all good, the discount is deep enough, and the bundles are also very favorable, so everyone likes to play them."

Anatoly understood, then asked again: "What about the negative examples?"

"Of course, it's that bunch of lunatics from Arkham Asylum." Lucifer sighed and said, "The instances they design are really too niche; they are often difficult and perverted, and there are a bunch of riddler plots and hard-to-understand philosophical discussions. However, precisely because of this, they have accumulated a batch of niche work enthusiast fans who love this; they have become loyal supporters of this bunch of lunatics, even more fanatical than ordinary people."

"I know you want to ask who designed this instance." Lucifer stroked his chin and said, "But because in the Domain, the instance designers are just completing work, even if they might add some of their own bad taste to the instance, it just increases the game difficulty; since no one will really get hurt, it doesn't count as murder for money. I think you'd better not go looking for trouble with them."

Anatoly shook his head and said: "I'm not the type of person who would go beat up the creators at a game studio just because the game is too hard. I just want to infer what the plot is like by knowing who the creator is. There must be a mastermind in this plot, right?"

"So that's what you meant." Lucifer breathed a sigh of relief.

"It seems you've also designed quite a few high-difficulty instances." Anatoly said, "Are you afraid I'll settle scores later?"

"Uh..." Lucifer opened his mouth, seeming somewhat embarrassed.

Anatoly saw it, so he asked: "The instances you participated in designing have poor reviews? Why?"

"They said I mixed in too many religious elements, which belongs to illegal proselytizing." Lucifer said somewhat dejectedly, "There are also people in the comment section saying that as long as they see Eden elements, they avoid it and don't buy it. My bundles haven't sold many to this day."

"Then can't you put in fewer religious elements?"

"But to me, those aren't religious elements." Lucifer said somewhat helplessly, "For example, the Garden of Eden was my bedroom when I was young, the Sanctuary counts as the living room, the Holy Spring is my bathtub, and the Bible is my dad's diary. If I have to say it, I'm just using my original family as a creative blueprint; many designers do designs this way."

Anatoly seemed to feel somewhat novel, and he said: "So you're just recalling the past, but they think you're conducting religious narrative?"

"Yes, many people are annoyed by this now." Lucifer let out a long sigh, "Those who can participate in the Domain aren't fools; how many really believe in God? Let's put it this way, compared to some of them, your view of God is very friendly. These people will never be stingy with bombing every religious story with bad reviews."

"So designing instances has this kind of effect." Anatoly thought and said, "Can I join the design department?"

"Oh, God, you also want to proselytize... I mean, spread your ideas?" Lucifer scratched his hair and said, "Greed told me he's preparing to open the free design function, which means everyone can design instances and release them, and compete freely. By then, the competition will definitely be great, and only truly excellent works can stand out."

"Then I can try it by then; if there are technical problems I don't understand, I'll come find you." Anatoly was clearly very interested.

"What kind of story are you preparing to design?"

"How about our story?"

Lucifer was shocked; he looked at Anatoly, and Anatoly said: "The things that happened between the two of us can also be considered magnificent, right? Literary and artistic works with autobiography as the theme have never been few."

"Then you can also completely write your own autobiography."

"But you played a very important role in it." Anatoly looked into Lucifer's eyes and said, "I can't even avoid mentioning you when writing my autobiography, otherwise all of this wouldn't hold up."

Lucifer seemed somewhat at a loss, holding back for a long time before squeezing out a sentence: "Really? You want everyone to know the story between us? Even though..."

"Even though what?"

"Even though I lost many things you gave me." Lucifer avoided Anatoly's gaze.

"But I also lied to you; the two of us are even." Anatoly said while glancing at the steel needle he had been holding in his hand.

"Something's wrong." Greed paced in the monitoring room. "Anatoly is not the type of person who likes to expose private relationships to the public at all; in fact, he is quite conservative in this regard and rarely mentions his friends to strangers. Moreover, with someone like Batman around, is it really okay to just make his past public like this?"

"What are you worried about?" Stark asked, looking at him. "Isn't it normal to want to write the experiences of yourself and your good friends into a book or make them into a game? Once the free design permission is open, I'm also going to make an autobiography."

"It seems he is very important to you." Joker said to Schiller nonchalantly. "Could it be that you also played a very important role in his life experience?"

"That's the problem; if he can't avoid mentioning Lucifer, then he can't avoid mentioning me either. And he is a doctor with high professional ethics; it's absolutely impossible for him to disclose a patient's privacy."

"Perhaps he doesn't intend to sell it to the outside world." Stark said. "Just make it as a memento."

The word "memento" seemed to give Greed some ideas, but he didn't say anything, just looked at the monitoring screen again.

"How are we going to play this level?" Charles looked at the cage in the middle of the room, but Eric noticed a brick on the wall. This room wasn't as dark as before; although it wasn't as bright as the room with the scale, it could still be seen clearly. Therefore, he instinctively noticed that a brick on the right wall seemed to be bulging a bit.

He walked up and dug with his fingers; some slag fell from the seam, and then he dug the seam with an iron rod, finding it could actually be dug open. While Charles was studying the cage, Eric finally dug the brick down by constantly digging the seams of the bricks.

A line of words was written in blood on the back of the brick: "They are watching."

Charles also leaned over, paused when he saw the blood words, blinked, and then said: "Is this the plot?"

"It should be." Eric nodded. After thinking for a while, he said, "'They are watching'? Who are 'they'? And how are they watching?"

"It seems the mastermind is really an organization." Charles started thinking from another direction, "If it really is an evil company conducting some human experiments, it's normal to watch here through monitoring."

Eric shook his head gently and said: "I don't think it's that simple. After the devastation of the previous few levels, this person's state is probably not very good, and it definitely wasn't easy to spend energy leaving clues. Since he left it, he must have left the most important thing."

"And since this person could deceive the eyes of the monitors and hide information behind the bricks, it proves he is very smart, and it's not the case that he was too stupid to summarize important information. Since he chose to tell us 'someone is watching,' it means this information is the most important. But this is actually not normal, is it?"

"That's true." Charles nodded and said, "Normally, important information should be helpful for clearing the level, or directly point out the identity and purpose of the mastermind. Whether someone is watching oneself is not important; even if someone is watching, so what?"

"It's better to say, it would be strange if no one was watching. Anyone who can reach this level can more or less guess that someone is behind the scenes, so he wouldn't have built such a large secret room but forgotten to install monitoring cameras. Normal people can infer that someone is watching here; this looks completely like invalid information. Unless..."

The two looked at each other, and Eric said: "The identity and purpose of the mastermind are related to 'watching'." ===== CHAPTER 4650 =====