To ascend, I had no choice but to create games

Chapter 298: 192 Chapter Transnational Team (One More) _1

With Tang Mo’s hint, Alan thanked him and then turned to Qiu Yu, “What’s in the water jar in the initial room?”

“The water jar? I’ve been searching it for a long time at the beginning, but there’s nothing. Wait a minute!”

Qiu Yu stared at the patterns at the bottom of the water jar, feeling something was off.

He had thoroughly investigated every item in Newbie Village, checked the gender of every stray cat, and tried to see if each egg could hatch a chick, so naturally, the water jar was no exception.

At a cursory glance, the jar was big enough to hide a person, and its porcelain was solid and durable, showing grooves worn from prolonged use.

There was water in the jar, and with a pinch, he cast a spell to empty it. Qiu Yu jumped into the water jar and inspected it closely for a long time, even checking the traces inside from different angles of light, eventually noticing something different.

The cracks at the bottom seemed to have increased a little.

There were originally some cracks at the bottom of the water jar, which were not visible when it was filled with water and no player would care to inspect such supposed patterns.

If it wasn’t for Tang Mo’s hint, Qiu Yu would not have noticed this detail at all.

Starting a new game, Qiu Yu compared screenshots of the water jar bottoms from two runs and discovered that the patterns at the bottom had indeed increased by a few lines.

The additional patterns looked like a special symbol, but the strokes blended perfectly into the other patterns, making it difficult to discern what the symbol actually signified.

Since the game’s textures wouldn’t change arbitrarily, if Fang Cheng Studio had deliberately replaced the water jar’s texture, it could only mean one thing, that it was related to some very important function.

After realizing this, a thrilled smile appeared on Qiu Yu’s face.

Indeed…

Fang Cheng Studio had indeed hidden an easter egg!

At that moment, Qiu Yu felt an epiphany, instantly alert, and began to search for relevant information anew.

He started the game over, and after each small stage, he would return to observe the water jar’s bottom patterns, comparing them for any changes.

After clearing the game with a new character again, he restarted the cycle, and when he returned to the water jar, he discovered that an additional pattern had appeared on the inner side.

From this, he concluded the following.

That is, the patterns on the bottom of the water jar were related to the number of cycles of clearing the game.

Other players had already stated that a perfect ending required a high number of playthroughs, which obviously seemed like a rumor at the time, but this rumor seemed to have accidentally struck the truth.

Afterward, Qiu Yu encountered a new problem.

Exactly how many times did one need to play through the game?

In the game, clearing it counted as one cycle of reincarnation. Each time the final boss was defeated, players were maliciously sent back to the beginning of the game by the boss, but the protagonist remembered nothing.

The more cycles they cleared, the more tragic the storyline seemed, and the difficulty of the game also increased, becoming ridiculously hard in the end.

Although he didn’t know exactly how many cycles were necessary, Qiu Yu decided to give it a try himself.

He had already cleared the game six times and was now on his seventh cycle. The game was now so difficult that he was considering using a cheat tool, but like other games from Fang Cheng Studio, “Heavenly Demon” was completely unmodifiable.

Struggling through the seventh cycle, he noticed another change in the patterns, but looking at them in isolation, they still seemed incomplete.

After comparing with previous changes, he felt he needed to clear at least nine cycles.

Realizing he was reaching his limit, Qiu Yu understood that he couldn’t do this alone.

“Alan, is there a dedicated gaming forum on the external network?” Qiu Yu asked during a break.

“Yes, I’ve already found one for you. The ladder is already set up, you can just go have a look.”

“…You really are a good person.”

“Don’t think I don’t know you’re cursing me.”

Upon logging into the forum Alan had found, Qiu Yu discovered it was quite large, with a high volume of daily posts, most of which disappeared as soon as they emerged.

Foreign players were even more fanatic about “Heavenly Demon” than Qiu Yu had imagined.

These players were hardcore and had high stress tolerance. They didn’t mind suffering while playing as long as the game was fun.

Moreover, although “Heavenly Demon” didn’t have as much freedom as Fang Cheng Studio’s other games, foreign players hadn’t played those other games, and “Heavenly Demon” alone was enough to astonish them.

So, although the game had been released for a while, discussions in the forum were still lively, convincing Qiu Yu that a good game truly had universal appeal.

Even more outrageous to Qiu Yu was that, in this forum, players didn’t refer to each other as buddy or comrade, but as Daoist friends.

They addressed each other as Daoist friends, and some even started reading translated xianxia and fantasy novels, discussing everything from cultivators to mystical adventures.

Some players even taught themselves Chinese, adopting complicated characters such as Qi as their usernames, giving Qiu Yu a sense of magical reality.

And those who had cleared multiple cycles were referred to as having passed through several trials, with the strongest player having cleared eight trials and embarking on the ninth.

Even more terrifying was that this section had opened a new Chinese language learning forum, and many players, eager for a deeper understanding of “Heavenly Demon’s” context, even started to learn Chinese on their own, reminding Qiu Yu of his own days mastering the world map to play “The Age of Great Navigation.”