It had been quite a while, but Jason still couldn't get over the genocide ending.
He only understood part of the game's story.
But that didn't matter. What mattered was that he felt extremely down.
The genocide ending… made him feel absolutely terrible.
Yes, he regretted it.
Just like when he played Mirror. At first, he was excited. Then he lost interest and started to wonder why he even launched the game again.
Now that he'd finished Undertale's genocide route, he felt the same way.
No matter what, after playing through the genocide path, he truly regretted it.
He missed the happy scenes from the pacifist route—laughing with friends, seeing Undyne burn down the kitchen, hearing Papyrus's silly jokes, and eating goat mom's pie.
"I'll do another perfect save file and give this game a proper ending."
Recalling all those memories, Jason took a deep breath and reopened the game.
He wanted to play through the perfect pacifist ending again.
And now, with experience from before, Jason was much more skilled.
He remembered most of the monsters, so he could pick all the right answers without thinking.
Finally, after beating Asriel and watching the sun set, a soft smile appeared on Jason's face.
No matter what, it was all over.
But the next second, the game screen left him completely frozen.
It was a dark night, and the main character was asleep in their room.
Just then, the door quietly opened. Toriel walked in with a butterscotch-cinnamon pie and gently placed it on the floor before quietly closing the door again.
It looked warm and peaceful—until, in the next moment, the seemingly asleep main character suddenly sat up in bed.
It was Chara's face, wearing a creepy and evil smile.
The next moment, a sinister and wicked laugh came through the headphones.
The character left the room, and a black-and-white photo appeared. It was a picture of the protagonist and all their friends from the underground.
But now, everyone except the protagonist had a blood-red X over their head.
Then the screen went black.
Sitting in front of his computer, Jason's eyes were wide open.
He had only read a few guides on how to trigger the Genocide route, but now he finally understood why the post's author had said:
"You'd better not go down the Genocide path, or you'll regret it."
He finally understood some of the strange comments he saw in the game reviews.
[When did it become your turn to decide how this world works?]
Chara's words seemed to echo in his ears again.
Jason stared blankly at the Undertale title screen.
He could already feel the deeper meaning behind this game—or maybe it was better to say, the malice!
Like many other games, you hurt the monsters, then delete the save file and start a new one, acting like nothing ever happened and going back to being friends with them again?
Ha, are you kidding me?
Stop dreaming!
It's like a broken mirror—even if you glue it back together, there will still be cracks.
Since you chose to slaughter the monsters, how could you possibly go back to being close with them again?
In the quiet of night, that bad save you thought you deleted comes back to haunt you, tearing apart your fantasy of peace and kindness.
That twisted laugh, the black-and-white photo...
Even though no words were spoken, Jason felt mocked—
Mocked by the screen in front of him.
It was like someone shouting into his ear through a loudspeaker:
"Drop the act, you fake nice guy!"
Isn't there a way to change all of this?
Jason looked at the closed game window and pressed his lips together.
He logged into an Undertale game forum.
Just as he expected, besides posts discussing the game, its characters, and the story,
There were also many asking about the same problem he had run into.
"Guys, does anyone know how to get back to the true pacifist ending?"
"Same here, same here, massive regret! I messed around and triggered the Genocide route. I want to go back!"
"I know I'm just fooling myself, but I still want to go back!"
"Deleting the game, creating a new account, buying it again with a different profile—it's all useless!"
Reading all these posts made Jason feel a little better.
At least he wasn't the only one.
He kept digging through threads until finally, Jason found a clear answer:
"The corrupted save files overwrite both the cloud save and your system files. You need to do both: reinstall your system and create a brand-new account to buy Undertale again. That'll give you a fresh start—but don't log in with your old account, or the corrupted data will come back!"
So that's how it works!
Jason suddenly understood and quickly made a decision.
Of course, he wasn't planning to reinstall the system. He had saved a lot of class materials from his teachers in there, and some of them were already impossible to find or download online anymore.
Plus, he had always used a single C drive for everything. He never bothered with creating separate partitions.
So, reinstalling the system was definitely off the table.
Now that he knew how it worked, he could just buy the game again using a different computer.
......
In the Nebula Games office, Anna looked super excited.
"We've hit 500,000 copies! And it hasn't even been half a month!"
On the computer in front of her, the total sales of Undertale across all game stores were displayed.
After its great reviews started spreading, almost every major platform put Undertale on their homepage recommendation lists.
As for the official platform, its recommendation system runs on big data and tends to be slow, so at best it'll show up there next week.
Out of the 500,000 copies sold so far, around 70% came from third-party platforms.
"But it looks like a lot of players actually bought the game twice," Lucas said as he looked at the data, a bit surprised too.
He noticed many of the purchases were from users who had never bought a game before—Undertale was their first.
"Yeah, a lot of players played the genocide route out of curiosity, then felt so bad about it that they bought another copy just to feel better," Anna said, clearly more invested in the game than Lucas.
"Isn't that just pretending nothing happened?" said Rachel from nearby.
"How is that pretending? That's love for our game," Lucas thought for a moment and replied.
"Let's publish the sales numbers now—give the hype another push."
As he said that, Lucas logged into his official blog account.
Thanks to all the buzz and Undertale's rave reviews, his follower count had finally passed 300,000.
Still nothing compared to those big-name game devs with millions of fans, but at least he was getting noticed.
And more importantly, under his profile, the description finally had some real detail.
"Game developer, best known for Undertale."
Before that, it was just the little lightning badge with five words: "Game developer."
Even though Mirror had crazy high sales, its genre was pretty niche.
(End of chapter)
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