God's Imitator

Huang Shengjie was stunned for a moment, then understood Ye Lin’s meaning.

According to the game mechanics, the ’Sinners Community’ has 3 audience members participating in the game, while the ’Audience Community’ has 4 audience members participating.

The ’Audience Representative’ can only inspect the drugs and cannot communicate with the sinners or other audience members.

But it’s different for the ’Ordinary Audience’; they are divided into groups of two or three members, and they are free to communicate within their groups.

Just like Huang Shengjie’s initial thought: he and Ye Lin, with only one of them buying drugs, it would be best if the one carrying more visa time makes the purchase.

This way, the player who didn’t buy drugs can still get dividends, and the player who did can bring the precious M-type drug back to the community, which is a good choice for either personal use or resale.

Other communities would have no reason not to think of such a simple strategy.

Ye Lin continued, "Of course, we should also consider that some communities are more gambling-oriented, and indeed there’s the situation where all audience participants might buy drugs.

"This is because most communities should have established proposals limiting the maximum amount of visa time players can carry.

"Some might bring only seventy to eighty thousand, while others shouldn’t exceed 120,000 or 150,000.

"If one player’s visa time runs out, and the game’s core in their community still wants more drugs, it might indeed happen that all audience members in the same community purchase drugs.

"But such cases should not be too many.

"All 8 batches of drugs have been sold, assuming we calculate each player spends 100,000 minutes of visa time buying drugs, about 16 players would go bankrupt in this game.

"For the vast majority of players, buying drugs leaves only two choices: either buy until all their visa time is used up or don’t buy at all.

"Players like Lu Qi, who buy just a portion, should be very few."

Lu Qi was a bit embarrassed, "I... I didn’t expect that there would be so many dividends, had I known, I wouldn’t have bought...

"I just wanted to buy a bit to bring back to the community in case of emergencies."

Huang Shengjie frowned, "Yeah... the number of audience members getting dividends should be far greater than five, so how did we end up with so much?

"Assuming there are 10 audience members getting dividends, with each receiving 220,000, wouldn’t that be 2.2 million total? That’s more than all the profit generated from the drugs!"

Ye Lin nodded, "So...

"The only explanation I can think of is that the Imitator designed hidden rules for ’profit distribution.’

"With all the sinners dead, all the profits from drug purchases, and even the visa time carried by the now-deceased sinners, would be split among the audience members who didn’t buy drugs.

"That’s why we see such exaggerated profit figures."

Zheng Chunhua was quite surprised, "Right! The game rules say: the total profit from selling drugs, 50% is evenly split among ’living sinner players,’ and the other 50% is evenly split among ’audience players who didn’t purchase drugs.’

"But if all the sinner players are dead, how to distribute the visa time they carried and their 50% portion was deliberately left unwritten.

"Such a crucial profit rule made into a hidden rule?"

Shen Bowen frowned, "From the current situation, it seems it can be.

"Actually, Walkway has always had this trend: the exact ways the Imitator gains from the game have always been deliberately concealed.

"It’s clear that they harvest the visa time carried by deceased players, but besides that, they could use other ways like skimming. For these, the Imitator didn’t need to specify.

"Moreover, the circumstance of this game is different from before:

"The Imitator isn’t sneakily allocating these ambiguous profits to themselves but distributing them to other players present.

"So it’s even less of a problem."

Lu Qi suddenly understood, "So, not specifying ’in the event all sinners die, 100% of the profits will be evenly divided by the audience’ is to conceal their identity?"

Qin Cheng pondered seriously for a moment, "There is certainly such an intention, but...

"I think there might be another layer of intention: if this rule were explicitly stated, the trick of this game might no longer hold.

"Because once this rule is brought to light, the audience would try in every possible way to kill the sinners inside, the enthusiasm for drug inspection would greatly increase, and the timing of the drug’s exposure would inevitably be accelerated.

"The audience must be made to think they can’t earn the other 50%, so the game’s mechanism can function normally and achieve this wipeout outcome."

Huang Shengjie felt a bit deflated as he leaned back in his chair, "So...

"There’s no point in checking visa time.

"This Imitator never planned to gain anything from this game, and their visa time naturally won’t change.

"He’s very insidious!

"If we hadn’t realized the issue with the profit figures, the act of ’checking visa time’ would actually confirm his identity as a good person!

"So... we can’t rule out the possibility that this Imitator is within our community.

"In fact, the possibility is even greater!"

Ye Lin was silent for a moment, "We can’t definitively say it’s within our community.

"Checking everyone’s visa time immediately after each game ends is not a difficult idea to come up with.

"We are most certainly not the only community doing this.

"This method is implemented with resistance because it somewhat damages the trust between community players and affects the overall atmosphere and environment of the community.

"So, the stronger the community, the more they resist using this method.

"Those communities weaker than us, or whose internal atmosphere is more tense, likely established such a rule before us.

"If this Imitator happens to be in another community that regularly checks remaining visa time, then setting such a hidden rule makes sense from their perspective.

"Or it could be said...

"As we enter the second phase, the intensity of the whole Walkway becomes higher, and the community environment naturally becomes more extreme, influencing the Imitator to make such decisions.

"It’s hard to make a judgment based on this alone. If we guess wrong, the consequences would be severe."

Lu Bingjun’s expression was somewhat serious, "Alright, guessing the identity of the Imitator is sure to be a priority topic for our subsequent discussions.

"But for now, let’s focus on discussing the game itself.

"Only by clearly dissecting the game’s mechanics can we later more reliably infer the Imitator’s identity and not stray from the truth.

"Actually, in the community, before we used the Immunity Coupon, we also saw fragments of the game’s display, but we still don’t understand the specific process and details.

"Ye Lin, you explain it in detail."