Survivorship Bias

Chapter 150: Origin of the altar

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How is this going

An Wujiu raised his head, the crack in the sky was getting deeper and deeper, like the disintegrating ice floe in the glacier, gradually deviated from the original position.

Contrary to what they imagined, after igniting the pillar, there was no miracle of rebirth, or it hadn't happened yet.

An Wujiu lowered his head, and found that the number on the back of his hand was glowing, the light flickered for a moment, then disappeared, returning to its original appearance.

That weird power has not disappeared so far, as if it is confronting the power of its own instinct, but no one can conquer the other. The blue flame burned higher and higher, and it spoke a strange and ancient language just like last time, but this time An Wujiu seemed to be able to understand its words directly!

This language is very similar to what my father recorded back then!

[quick! Hurry up and offer the sacrifice to me! ]

An Wujiu held the obsidian sharp knife tightly in his hand, but he still refused to let it fall. Matsuura's calm face was right in front of his eyes, and the low-pitched ravings seemed to be mocking his resistance.

[Stupid human being, do you think you are special now? ]

The god was questioning him.

[Look straight at me so you can see your father, don't you miss him? ]

An Wujiu turned his face away almost uncontrollably, like a stiff puppet, being led away by that powerful force, but at the same time, the countering force in his chest also surged out , When you meet the strong, you will be strong. So he turned back again, without looking at it.

But the flame spread to both sides in an instant, burning into a huge circle, enclosing all of them.

An extremely crazy picture suddenly appeared in front of An Wujiu's eyes. In the picture, he was the same as now, half-kneeling in front of the sacrificer, raising his hand and frantically stabbing the man's chest with the knife in his hand. The face was spattered with blood, and the viscous blood covered a calm and crazy laugh.

No, that's not him.

The sacrificed person was not Matsuura, but an unfamiliar face.

An Wujiu frowned tightly, blood dripped from the corner of his mouth again.

The person in the picture, An Wujiu didn't know who it was, maybe it was him in another possibility. The good side of me now basically merged with the extremely evil side before, and the chaotic and evil part gradually calmed down.

But what if it's the other way around

He could feel his spirit go from stable to chaotic again and again, just like everything in this universe obeys the law of entropy increase.

Destruction in chaos is the only constant ending.

But An Wujiu forced himself to stop, the force in his chest almost tore the whole body in two, in the piercing pain, An Wujiu struggled to break through the pressure of the blue flame, threw the knife in his hand, Throw it under the cliff.

At the same time, Shen Ti hugged him.

"Did you see that? There are numbers on the backs of everyone's hands."

Hearing Shen Ti's voice, An Wujiu looked up weakly, he found a number 98 appeared on the back of Matsuura's hand, and then looked at Wu You and Nan Shan, it was also 98.

Everyone else had the number 98, only Shen Ti, he took off his gloves, and there was nothing on the back of his hand.

Just when they were wondering, an obsidian knife fell from the sky and stabbed into Matsuura's chest.

The moment the blood splashed on An Wujiu's face, a fishy sweet smell penetrated into his brain, and again, he saw the "self" with blood on his face laughing wildly, and looked at him.

[Do you think you can stop me? ]

The voice seemed to come from hell, it was so low that it was difficult to distinguish, like the sound of boiling hot magma, and there were human "screams" one after another outside the cliff, and the red blood moon was forced back in an instant. In the daytime, only the creepy scarlet and coldness remained on the earth.

[Impossible, you can't even control yourself. ]

The bloody sacrifice flew up from the tip of the knife, and automatically fell into the center of the ancient stone plate. The blood flowed down along the ravine on the stone plate and reached An Wujiu's feet.

The sarcophagus storing Matsuura Mori's body closed automatically, no matter how An Wujiu resisted, the sacrifice was still completed. The blood-red moon hangs above his head, like a man-eating blood ball, maybe it will fall down immediately, crush them all one by one, roll into the valley, and be buried in the cold snow.

These hallucinations kept reappearing in his mind, An Wujiu stood up like a walking corpse, the cold wind blew through his bones.

None of them remember how they got back to the temple. If it is said that what the sacrificers donated was their own heart, then what they donated was probably their soul and fear.

An Wujiu couldn't figure it out, Shen Ti didn't have anything on the back of his hand, it's understandable, after all, Shen Ti is different from any of them.

But why is the number on the back of my hand 99, while everyone else is 98? What does this number mean

On their way back to the temple, Shen Ti told him that some memories flashed through his mind after he lit the divine pillar.

"What did you think of?"

Shen Ti frowned slightly, "I'm not sure if it's a real memory, because the pictures I saw are not so much mine, but more like what you can see."

An Wujiu didn't understand, "What do you mean?"

Shen Ti looked at him, "Those are almost the initialization screens after entering different games, but they are not mine, because the upper right corner shows your name and level, from A level at the beginning, to S level, SS level , appear alternately."

An Wujiu couldn't understand why Shen Ti's memory had a perspective that belonged entirely to him

"This is not the strangest thing," Shen Ti told him, "The thing that confuses me the most is that I paid special attention to some of the initialization scenes, none of them are the games I experienced with you, there is no red and black, There are no shelters, there are no casinos, it's all alien, and there are so many."

Shen Ti's words disrupted An Wujiu's original thoughts.

He told Shen Ti the images that kept flashing during the sacrifice.

"Maybe it was me before I lost my memory." An Wujiu thought, it is indeed impossible for him to be rated as SSS as soon as he entered the altar, "Didn't Yang Ming be very afraid of me at that time? I have experienced what you saw. Maybe it was the game I played from entering the altar to meeting you."

But this can't explain why Shen Ti can get his perspective and see everything through his perspective.

The closer they get to the depths of the truth, the more confusing everything becomes.

The two talked a little bit and returned to the temple. There were a lot fewer people here, and it became more and more deserted. Red moonlight casts through every window onto the temple floor, making the place appear hauntingly haunted.

Shen Ti sent An Wujiu back to the room, and the two walked to the door, only to find Zhou Yijue leaning against the wall by the door, as if waiting for An Wujiu.

"What are you doing here?" Shen Ti said in a bad tone.

Zhou Yijue didn't bother to put on a smiling face, he raised his slender eyelids and looked at the two of them.

"Chat?"

An Wujiu raised his eyebrows, "Now? It's time to 'close your eyes' in ten minutes."

"Ten minutes is enough." Zhou Yijue stood up straight, "If it wasn't important, I wouldn't look for you at this time."

He glanced at Shen Ti, "You can do whatever you want."

Shen Ti twitched the corners of his mouth, "What are you doing, you should respect yourself, okay?"

An Wujiu wanted Shen Ti not to use words indiscriminately, but he gave up when the timing was not too good, just took his hand and followed Zhou Yijue away.

Zhou Yijue led them to a quiet room with no windows on all sides and an altar in the center, like the room they had during the warm-up match, and also like a confession room.

Without any foreshadowing, Zhou Yijue told the two directly, "I am actually a testing researcher at the altar."

This sentence exploded like thunder on the ground, but strangely, An Wujiu was not very surprised.

Zhou Yijue was scheming and good at lying. It should be difficult for people to believe what he said, but neither of the two people in front of him questioned it.

"Then your purpose of entering here should be different from ours." An Wujiu looked at Zhou Yijue, "It's just that you have changed later."

A simple sentence summed up Zhou Yijue's mental journey since entering the altar.

"Yes." Under the bloody moonlight, Zhou Yijue's outline was extremely clear, and the moonlight also illuminated the rare loneliness on his face, "My initial task was very easy. Enter the game, find bugs, and push the plot And logic problems, and then feedback to the development department, let them modify. So I play the game in a relaxed state, it doesn't matter if I lose, anyway, I just exit and re-enter, sometimes in order to test the integrity, a copy I may I will go through it several times, so in the early days, I actually didn’t have any sense of game experience.”

An Wujiu listened to him silently, but wondered in his heart, since he is a tester, would he know something about the development background of the altar and who the whole team is.

Before he could say anything, Shen Ti spoke first, but in a less peaceful way.

"What wicked things made this broken game?"

Zhou Yijue didn't care, instead, a smile appeared on the corner of his mouth, "This project was originally planned by a poor individual game designer. It is said that that person submitted the entire planning plan to many companies, but they didn't get any response."

Shen Ti rushed to answer, "The result was chosen by Chauvin?"

Zhou Yijue sneered, "Wrong."

"No game company adopted his plan. Just one year after he gave up this plan, the trailer of this game appeared in the advertisement of Chauvin's largest game company. The overall framework is exactly the same as the plan he submitted, but It's not him who signed it."

Shen Ti smiled, "Evil capitalism."

"This person tried everything he could but failed to sign his name in the game, and finally fell ill because he had no money to become a senior member of the hospital, and finally died of illness. I just became a tester of "Altar" , know about it."

Zhou Yijue told them, "According to the senior executives of the game company, "The Altar" is Chauvin's attempt in neural access games. If it is good, it will be an innovation of virtual games, so they went to the game in a mighty way. It was developed. At that time, all the development backbones of the company participated and poured all their efforts into the development of this game. There were hundreds of testers like me alone. Everyone entered the altar in person and personally Feel the game."

An Wujiu raised his eyebrows, "But as far as I know, the altar has gone beyond the government's control. If it's really just a game, how can people die?"

"That's why I said it was like this at the beginning." Zhou Yijue lowered his eyes, "Then things started to get out of control."

There is nowhere to hide the sadness in his eyes, "I met him in a dungeon halfway, I remember it very clearly, it was my 32nd mission, it was his 47th, he is also a tester just like me We performed four test missions together, and completed several copies back and forth, repeating for a long time, so I also feel that I have known him for a long time."

"Just after we established our relationship, he died in my 36th test mission." Zhou Yijue didn't raise his eyes, was silent for a while, and continued, "He died, and he didn't reload the file to enter the game. I think It's strange, after I survived, I left the game cabin and went to the company to ask those people, only to find that no one from the development department was there."

An Wujiu frowned, "What do you mean by not being here?"

Zhou Yijue looked at him, "Those two floors are empty. I heard that the model they used to write the altar is the latest generative network. That is to say, once the initial model framework is successfully built, it will In repeated iterative calculations and tests, using the huge player neural database, the model will continue to learn by itself, and eventually it can achieve self-repair, and even self-programming. Therefore, the people in the development department gradually lose control of the altar, and the system eventually even controls them. The read and write permissions are set, and even the background login cannot be done.”

The chancel ended up being a self-consistent model.

"So you testers have also been abandoned by the altar." An Wujiu said.

Zhou Yijue smiled, "You're right."

Shen Ti said that he didn't care about his affairs at all, but in fact he still cared about his dead colleague, "Then you went all out to save him?"

"I know it's ridiculous." Zhou Yijue lowered his head decadently, "Obviously we are the ones who test and maintain this system, but we are swallowed by the system in the end. We are people who rely on science and technology to survive. I also know that asking a person to die Resurrection is totally against science, but…”

Why hasn't An Wujiu experienced this kind of struggle

Zhou Yijue sneered, "Fuck the science, I just want him back."

"What happened after that?" An Wujiu asked, "Did they give up this model completely?"

Zhou Yijue wiped his face, "It can't be regarded as giving up completely. There are many problems involved, first of all, Chauvin, they suddenly stopped investing for no reason. Continue this project, but the altar is an extremely intelligent system that can operate by itself, and it absorbs more and more players, and the scale is getting bigger and bigger. So, it is not so much that Chauvin wants to abolish this project, it is better that they want the altar Growing savagely."

As he spoke, he smiled, "But Chauvin is already notorious enough. Those quick-acting drugs and biotechnology, and so many volunteers recruited every year, who dares to say that there are no heinous human experiments behind it."

An Wujiu thought of what Yang Ce said, the executive director of Chauvin Company is not only the core of the human innovation plan, but also the main investor of the altar.

If the altar is really a hotbed of sacrifices for summoning a certain god, sacrifice is his purpose. What is the innovation plan

Isn't the original intention of innovation the human self-help action

Shen Ti suddenly said, "You called us here because you suddenly developed friendship with us, let us listen to you talk about your tragic love story, and then go back to sleep."

After hearing what he said, Zhou Yijue laughed, narrowing his eyes like a fox, "Of course not."

He raised his hand and showed the number on the back of his hand to the two of them, "You probably have already discovered that, except for the two of you, everyone is 98."

He obviously wanted an explanation, but An Wujiu couldn't give a clear explanation, so he could only dismiss Shen Ti first, "He is quite special, you can understand that he is a bug in the altar."

Zhou Yijue was not very satisfied with this statement, but it made sense, he did find that Shen Ti was not pleasing to the eye.

"I'm also looking for the reason why I'm different." An Wujiu said sincerely, and only told Zhou Yijue that he felt that the altar was not completely composed of artificial intelligence, and there were many things in it that the existing technology could not explain.

Having played against An Wujiu, Zhou Yijue could tell whether he was lying or not, and felt that An Wujiu was fairly honest, although he had some reservations, but his attitude was good.

So he put down his hands and told An Wujiu: "You and I think very close, and I don't think it's pure technology."

"But something happened before, I think it may be related to the current number." Zhou Yijue said, "I logged out of the system after the second mission, and I only completed two copies of the game at that time. I remember At the group meeting, a colleague reported a problem about library backup. One of the colleagues said that this model has the ability of self-backup and repair, so don’t worry. I’m curious about this self-building framework, so I went to the developer to see it A peek at the source code."

"I remember very clearly that many models were copied at that time." Zhou Yijue stared straight at An Wujiu.

"The number of the original model is 0, but there are 99 copies, and the number on the back of your hand is exactly 99."