Infinite Weird Game

Fujiwara Shinno entered the weird game at the age of 22. Now, 26 years have passed, and he is no longer young, or perhaps psychologically he has never been young.

Before entering the game, he was a suspense novelist, a most mediocre mortal who insisted on entering the sacred profession that required the most talent, relying on redoubled efforts in the middle of the night and using clumsy words to disguise himself as a genius.

To trace the root of the problem, it is nothing more than that he is unwilling to be an ordinary person and wants to stand under the spotlight like a god and receive flowers and applause.

After several years of this, he was exhausted both physically and mentally, and finally one midnight he took an overdose of sleeping pills, intending to end his upside-down life with death. In his heart, he may have had some delusions of leaving behind a good story and being buried with a good name.

——After all, in Sakura no Fu, suicide is a common ending for writers.

At this time, the weird game appeared. The first copy was a puzzle copy. He used the suspense reasoning routines accumulated over the years to try and error one by one, and methodically found all the clues to pass the level.

Although the second and third copies were not pure puzzles, he happened to be in deep depression at that time and his perception of everything was very dull, so he did not feel too much fear. He just calmly and steadily completed the puzzle-solving part and survived to the end.

After becoming an official player and completing three or four copies, he casually uploaded a few videos of TE completing the copies, which unexpectedly attracted the attention of some players. He even received an olive branch from the Weird Investigation Bureau and became the deputy director of a department.

He was flattered, and as he looked at his name hanging high on the newcomer list, a sense of pride gradually grew in his long-dried heart.

He even thought at one point that he had finally found his talent - he was able to adapt to the weird game very well, and then, while enjoying the admiring looks from others, he adapted his experiences in the dungeon into a novel in exchange for more praise for his genius in real life.

Unfortunately, the good times didn't last long, and bad news came one after another. After the new book was published, someone accused him of plagiarizing a deceased author. He suddenly remembered that the copy of the weird game was not a one-time copy, and someone might have obtained the material before him.

After ten copies, his name was removed from the rookie list and out of the overall list. He realized that he had always been mediocre, but his disguise was perfect, which led the investigation bureau to make a wrong judgment.

At that time, the name "Fu Jue" was already high on the list, second only to the Ark President "Lin Jue". When players talked about the latest developments in Sunset Ruins, most of them could not avoid the existence of these two. Fujiwara Shinno was envious in his heart, thinking that they were also members of the Weird Investigation Bureau, and he felt honored.

Apart from that, he didn't have the energy to come up with more ideas. The first thing he did when he woke up every day was to spend time in the information room of the Bureau of Tricksters, memorizing all kinds of knowledge that might be helpful in clearing dungeons; then he practiced fighting skills and trained his physical fitness...

In this way, he cleared one dungeon after another, most of which ended in TE, and even a few dungeons were permanently closed by him by accident. His ranking also moved higher and higher, and finally appeared on the overall leaderboard.

Because he had always kept a low profile, he was not required to attend the Ragnarok 22 years ago, but instead survived; and because he survived to the end, his ranking gradually climbed to the top 500, and continued to move towards the top 200. It was at this time that the name "Fu Jue" replaced "Lin Jue" to become the top of the comprehensive strength list.

No one knows how Fu Jue survived the catastrophe. The internal statement of the Bureau of Weird Investigation is that he was the successor designated by Lin Jue. Lin Jue anticipated the possibility of failure and deliberately saved some of his strength for the next round of the game.

But the fact is, after Ragnarok, the distinction between "Lin Jue" and "Fu Jue" has been blurred, and the existence of "Lin Jue" has gradually ceased to be mentioned, and has become an obscure piece of history known only to a few people; when asked about the chief player and the recognized "savior", most players' answer is: that person has been Fu Jue from beginning to end.

In 2016, Fujiwara Shinno became the deputy director of the Sakurafu Branch of the Weird Investigation Bureau. The director is an ordinary person in charge of administration sent by the federation. In matters related to the weird game, Fujiwara Shinno is undoubtedly the real person in power.

He had to spend more energy to improve his abilities in all aspects, and try his best to disguise himself as a true "genius" worthy of this position, appearing calm and rational, and even imitating Fu Jue in places where he didn't even notice, as if that was a standard answer that would never be wrong.

Until... Hanako Nishijima was chosen by the strange game.

Hanako Nishijima has known Fujiwara Shinno for many years. She is his pen pal in real life and a truly talented writer. He had picked up countless fragments of inspiration to pretend to be a genius from Hanako's words. Now that he finally found an opportunity to repay the latter in another field, he naturally had to seize it.

Therefore, he immediately invited Hanako to join the Ghost Bureau, not only lending her various life-saving props, but also explaining the experience of dealing with death points with all his heart. Hanako lived up to expectations and smoothly cleared the dungeon in the novice pool, rushing to the top of the newcomer list in one fell swoop.

In Fujiwara Shinno's opinion, Hanako is undoubtedly a genius, and even more adept than him in the weird game. But fortunately, he disguised himself well, and Hanako looked at him with admiration from beginning to end, just like many years ago when she did not realize his "plagiarism" at all and worshipped him as a real great writer.

The feeling of being admired by a genius made Fujiwara Shinno proud, but it also put him under greater pressure. He was afraid of discovering his mediocrity, and refused to team up with Hanako more than once, using lame excuses like "I don't feel comfortable using the team ring I found from Xila."

Therefore, after seeing Hanako and Fu Jue matched into the same copy in the live broadcast, Fujiwara Shinno breathed a sigh of relief from the bottom of his heart: After witnessing such a brilliant person, even if he noticed his mediocrity in the future, he would just think that his threshold had been raised, right?
But what he didn't expect was that Hanako was contaminated in that copy, and after returning to reality, the degree of alienation surged to the critical point of 50%.

Before Ragnarok, this level of alienation was no more than enough to require dispatching a psychologist for treatment, but as more and more strange invasions occurred, the Bureau of Weird Investigation tended to conduct a one-size-fits-all review and containment of all investigators whose alienation levels skyrocketed.

This is a gray area. As the deputy director, Fujiwara Shinno has the right to decide how to deal with Hanako. He sat there for half an hour, signed the assignment order that implied a cover-up, and finally realized that he could not be a heartless god, but just an ordinary person with selfish desires.

Later, everything got out of control. Hanako Nishijima was completely transformed into a ghost on the way, and pollution broke out. Fu Jue issued several arrest warrants and finally rushed to Hokkaido in person. While clearing the pollution, he also killed Hanako Nishijima.

Fu Jue at that time was even more inhuman than he is now. He didn't seem like a living person at all, but more like a precise machine that observes and disguises humans.

After dragging the unrecognizable corpse of Hanako Nishijima back to the Sakura Prefecture Branch and issuing an order to strictly handle pollutants, he glanced at Fujiwara Shinno standing in the shadow of the corner, adjusted his flat-frame glasses with his index finger, and analyzed coldly: "You are very angry. This is a stress reflex behavior of self-protection consciousness formed by the autonomic nervous system. Adrenaline increases your heart rate and strengthens myocardial contraction, which allows the low-intelligence group to increase their intelligence in a short period of time and process more information.

“You liked Nishijima Hanako, so you were angry about her death. The most fundamental reason is the need for animals to pass on their genes. But it is obvious that her death is irreversible, and you cannot achieve your goal no matter what you do for her.” At that moment, Fujiwara Shinno’s blood ran cold. For the first time, he intuitively knew the meaning of the word "inhuman feeling". He finally knew what kind of god the Bureau of Weird Investigation needed. Ha, absolutely rational, always calm, and without personal feelings, but would such a being really be willing to save mankind?
Then what? He heard Fu Jue continue in a confused tone: "I think you have calmed down. Your anger now comes from fear and the self-protection mechanism of the brain to fight fear. You are afraid that one day you will be alienated and die miserably like Nishijima Hanako, right?"

He couldn't bear it any longer and stood up to wrestle with Fu Jue, but was forcibly held back by the investigators around him.

After that day, he was dismissed from his post for "sheltering a criminal", and although he was not detained after being investigated, he was seriously injured and could no longer participate in decision-making. He was merely a powerful blade, sent to various places by his interest groups.

Instead, he felt relieved. At least he no longer had to force himself to pretend to be something he could not be. Instead, he could be a mortal who could feel fear, anger, and sadness. He often wondered if the ending would have been different if he had accepted Hanako's invitation to form a team that day.

Participating in the investigation of Fu Jue was a task assigned to him by the top brass of Yingzhifu, while killing Fu Jue was partly selfish on his part.

That night after the review, Fujiwara Shinno found Fu Jue privately and asked him frankly, "The second half of the live broadcast of the copy seventeen years ago was blocked. Tell me, what happened to cause Nishijima Hanako to be so seriously polluted that even you couldn't save her?"

He learned that Fu Jue was protecting Ning Xu, and mistakenly thought that after seventeen years, this cold machine might have changed. He wanted an answer, even if it was false, as long as it made sense logically, he would just treat it as an explanation to himself.

But Fu Jue just stared coldly at the void in front of him, and said in a tone without any emotion: "You owed a lot to Hanako Nishijima when she was alive, so after her death, you blamed yourself out of irrational emotional inertia, and in order to relieve the moral pressure, you forced me to be included in the ranks of those who bear the responsibility.

"The report on that incident has been submitted. Are you coming to me now because some of my behavior has led you to misunderstand that I would give a different answer?" he asked, and then commented on himself, "It's an irrational slippery slope fallacy and a stupid exaggeration of the interpretation."

At this moment, Fujiwara Shinno had his arms grabbed by two representatives who were obviously in an abnormal state and was pressed to the ground. He looked up and saw the silver light flashing in their eyes and the faint filaments in the air. After many years, he once again felt a chill like a knife climbing up from his spine.

All the clues were woven into a chain, and he finally understood everything. It was the puppeteer! Fu Jue was the puppeteer!

A person can have multiple identity cards... They live together at the top of the pyramid and have lived in peace for many years... Almost at the same time, after Ragnarok, they are at the peak of their powers in the weird game...

It turns out that these two players, who represent the highest strength of the righteous and the massacre flow, are the same person from the beginning to the end. Fu Jue did not send Ning Xu out of compassion at all. It is estimated that he just wanted to transfer her away from Jiangcheng to prevent the secrets behind her from being revealed during the investigation.

Most of the people in the Bureau of Investigation might have already become Fu Jue's puppets, and the investigation might have been promoted and planned by Fu Jue himself, in order to trick out those who opposed him and then catch them all in this copy.

Fujiwara Shinno suddenly wanted to laugh. He felt that he had been shouting at the top of his lungs these days, just like a clown in a farce. Fu Jue had set up the stage, and the puppets took turns to perform, but he was the only one who was foolishly performing with all his heart.

The so-called "chief" who is hailed as the "savior" is the "puppet master" who pursues social Darwinism and kills countless people. If this were to be made public, it would probably be regarded as an April Fool's joke, right?
Unfortunately, he could no longer laugh. Cold threads spread down his arms, wrapping around his little finger. He felt like a bug sealed in amber, having difficulty breathing and unable to move.

There is a small picture deep in my memory that gradually becomes clearer. It was the last time Nishijima Hanako saw him.

The woman, whose alienation degree had reached 50%, was already unconscious and unable to speak, but she suddenly stared at the spider web on the ceiling in a trance, and raised her hand to point at it in his ears.

It turns out there was a hint, but he never found it...

……

In the temple hall, Qisi sat at the head of the long table, resting his chin on his hand, looking at the man in flat-frame glasses opposite him with interest: "Interesting. To be honest, I originally thought that after you realized that the puppets could not bind small cards, you would leave a few alive and bring them into the final instance. I didn't expect that over the years, you have also developed the habit of cutting the grass and eradicating the roots."

"It's not necessary." Fu Jue said calmly, "As rational people, I will manipulate them to make the best decision, and they will be responsible for increasing the number of participants and providing sufficient computing power. The benefits are far higher than letting them do irrational and foolish things and consume themselves."

"You are still as arrogant as ever." Qi Si laughed, "You have lifted yourself out of the group and control the fate of everyone as a dictator. Although you have not yet obtained the status of a god, you are actually doing what only gods would do. Do you really think you can still represent mankind?"

"If one follows Protagoras's teaching that emotions are the key element of human nature, then I am indeed no longer a human being after Ragnarok."

Fu Jue's tone did not change, and a spider web pattern was reflected in his light grey eyes: "No matter what my nature is, my position will not change: after the final ending, humans will choose themselves, without the need for weird games or interference from gods."

When Qi Si heard this, he bent over and laughed out loud, as if he had heard an absurd joke. "You are so righteous, just as great as you were 22 years ago, hahahaha! Familiar tone, familiar thoughts, even if you have changed your shell, you are still a disgusting guy.

"Then I want to ask - where should you be placed if you want to become a new god?"

Strong sarcasm and malice grew in his words, but Fu Jue still did not show any unnecessary emotions.

He calmly gazed at the god who had returned to the throne in front of him, and said word by word in a declarative tone: "After I put an end to all weirdness and mystery and build a true ideal country, I will destroy myself or let humans kill me on the throne -

"From now on, there will be no more God in the world." (End of this chapter)