I watched Long-ge walk over, and for no reason at all, I remembered that time she saw Xiaohua’s photo and roared at me all sour and jealous... I went speechless for a moment, then turned my head. Xiaohua was hugging the broom with both hands, her head tilted, who knew what she was thinking. I sighed and asked in a low voice, “Xiaolong’s got kind of a bad temper. She didn’t do anything to you, right?”
Xiaohua looked at me, thought seriously for a moment, then shook her head. “No!”
Long-ge strolled behind the counter, glanced at the machine, and looked a little impatient. She turned to Xiaohua and said, “No. 76, one large coffee. No. 12, one Coke... You should’ve already taken those out. Why’re you just standing there? I told you to sweep, didn’t I?”
I sighed.
Xiaohua nodded timidly and carried the broom out from behind the counter. I kept watching her. She hurried to the aisle, suddenly froze in place for a moment, then went back to the back area. She rummaged around for a bit, then came back out carrying a dustpan too.
“Why’d you come again?” Long-ge sat down behind the counter and crossed her legs. Beneath her short skirt, a flash of white fabric showed and vanished. She looked at me and asked lazily.
I watched Xiaohua sweeping over in the aisle, then turned back to Long-ge and said helplessly, “Came to check on you... Can you talk to the little girl nicely? Stop being so prickly...”
Long-ge didn’t care at all. She propped up her head and played with the computer. “So what? I’m not a little girl too?”
The second I heard that, I burst out laughing and shook my head helplessly.
Long-ge watched the computer for a while, then stood up. She bent down and pulled a tray out from under the counter cabinet. I watched her walk to the fridge, take out a cup of Coke, and set it on the tray. Then she took a plastic empty cup from under the counter, put in some ice, and started filling coffee with the machine... When she finished all that, she sighed and started carrying the tray out to deliver the drinks.
Old Shen and I stood by the counter and watched for a while. Long-ge was actually pretty decent at the job. Delivering stuff and all, she looked the part. As long as she was a little gentler when handing things over, and didn’t just slam the cup onto the table...
Old Shen and I watched for a bit. We’d already been standing around here for quite a while. After Long-ge came back from delivering the drinks, the two of us each got a membership and found two side-by-side computers to sit at.
Honestly, this trip today was just to check on Long-ge.
Once I saw that she was doing fine and nothing had gone wrong on her first day, well, since we were already here, we might as well play some games. We were here already, after all...
I discussed what to play with Old Shen. She said anything was fine. I thought about it and decided on PUBG.
We both opened Steam, found PUBG, and started logging in—
The full name of PUBG was Survival of the Jedi, a recent battle royale game that had basically become a phenomenon. The game gave you a huge map. You gathered supplies, and after a set amount of time, an electric field would appear and keep shrinking. If players touched it, they’d lose health. As the match went on, the field would hurt more and more, and shrink tighter and tighter on the map, forcing players into conflict until only one team remained. Once the final winner appeared, a line would show up in the top left of the screen—
Winner winner, chicken dinner.
That’s where “chicken dinner” came from.
On the surface, the game felt a bit like raising gu. You threw a hundred-plus players into one place and forced them to slaughter each other until only the strongest team was left. But in reality, even if a player was strong, that didn’t mean they’d get the chicken dinner. This game didn’t rely that heavily on aim. Sometimes, what you needed more was luck.
You could say there were always a lot of variables during a match. Things like how far the safe zone was, not finding a gun in a hot urban fight, dying in the bombing zone, getting a bad position when rotating into the circle, and so on...
But none of that had jack shit to do with me. I just had to coast—
Old Shen was seriously good at this game. I heard she even streamed it on a platform every night. Her total playtime was close to 2,000 hours. You could call her an epic-tier player... Anyway, as long as I listened to her, tossed her some supplies and ammo now and then, didn’t throw, and didn’t run around blindly, there basically wouldn’t be any big problems.
After we entered the game lobby, Old Shen said, “Invite.”
I glanced at Old Shen’s screen, found her ID, “Zhuheqiaobei,” typed it into the search box, and invited her into the room.
Long-ge walked over from behind us and set a cup of coffee on each of our desks. In a soft voice, she said, “Drink up first. I’m not charging you two for these.”
I nodded. “Not bad. Guess I didn’t raise you for nothing.”
“Fuck off...” Long-ge shot me a look, cursed at me, then went back to work behind the counter.
By then, the game had entered the black loading screen. Three seconds later, Old Shen and I both appeared in a cluster of buildings.
There were quite a few other players around too, all running and jumping nonstop. It didn’t take me long to find Old Shen. Her character was a white woman in a black coat. I was bored, so I controlled my character and punched her in the face.
Old Shen didn’t move at all. She just sat there drinking her coffee—
A line of small text appeared at the bottom of the screen: “58 seconds until game starts.”
At the start of the game, everyone spawned randomly somewhere on the map. At that point, all players were in a locked-health state and couldn’t lose HP. Around me, groups of players were beating each other up every now and then. Some people were blasting DJ music over open mic. Quite a few others gathered together and spammed Q and E, swaying all over the place... Truly worthy of the quality plaza. The scene was harmonious as hell.
Someone yelled over open mic, “Come on, come on, all the immortals go to the airport! Let’s have a battle of gods! Don’t drag these mortals into it!”
Someone nearby shouted over open mic, “Sell your mom’s stinking cheat, you piece of shit!”
Another open mic voice yelled, “Come on, come on, if you wanna ascend, add me on WeChat! Fifteen hundred a month! WeChat ID is kaiguasiquanjia!!”
“Immortals” was what cheaters were called in this game. Because of the game’s mechanics, cheating in this game brought huge returns. Battle royale games were a lot like the dark forest law in novels. The moment you made a sound, it could lead to your death.
For example, later in a match, experienced players would never fire recklessly. Based on where shots had come from earlier, they could judge what gun the other side was using, how far away they were, and how many people they had. Then they’d communicate efficiently, set up an ambush, wipe them out, and take the supplies they’d gathered...
But immortals were different. As long as there was one cheater on the other side, they could know everyone’s exact position. Then they could just run over with a gun and use things like no recoil and auto-headshot to instantly drop any player from a huge distance...
Even if you hid behind cover, if that immortal’s hacks were advanced enough, they’d even have stuff like curving bullets. You could say an ordinary player had no way to fight a cheater at all—when their damn bullets can turn corners, like the male lead in an anti-Japanese war drama, what the hell are you supposed to use against that?
And all kinds of bizarre hacks kept popping up one after another. Stretching arms to yank the other player’s model right in front of you and kill them. Magic bullets. Wallbangs. Wallhacks. No recoil with auto-lock headshots... There were even hacks that let you hover high in the sky and look down over the whole continent, freely control the poison circle, or lock your health. A while back, there was even gaming news about a hack that could blow up the plane with one punch. Terrifying stuff.
On top of that, while the game itself was pretty well made, because of issues with the company, cheats had practically become impossible to stamp out. Burn them down, and they’d come back with the spring wind. Because of that, the game had started to decline day by day.
After all, in this kind of environment, whether someone cheated or not basically came down to whether some grade-schooler had enough allowance money, or to the player’s own sense of decency.
