Breakfast, eight forty in the morning.
Nuwa was perched on her ergonomic chair, knees pressed to the desk's edge, both hands cradling the silver-gray AR glasses as she turned them over and over, eyes round as saucers.
She set the glasses on her face; the temples automatically tightened to fit her ears, and a pale blue startup halo lit up in front of her pupils.
Nuwa's right hand swiped through the air a few times, pulling up a couple of test interfaces, then closing them, then swiping open the settings menu to scan the specs.
"Holy crap! Frame rate maxed out, render latency down to single-digit milliseconds—what's the difference in weight from regular glasses?!"
She pushed the glasses up onto her forehead and turned to stare at Su Yu, standing beside the holographic workstation.
"Be honest. When Sister Eden signed the check for this, did she write the infinity symbol on it?"
Elysia came sauntering over with light steps, holding an iced americano she'd just grabbed from downstairs.
She'd swapped into a loose knit cardigan today, her hair tied back loosely, looking like someone perpetually ready for another overnight crunch.
She set the coffee down by Su Yu's hand, leaned against the edge of the desk, and let her eyes drift over his face with a teasing glint.
"Personally, I don't think this was some spur-of-the-moment thing for Su Yu at all~"
"Look at that new-player guide AI, modeled after me—'Elf Elysia.' You don't polish something like that out of a few months of casual overtime."
She bit down on her straw, toe tapping lightly against the coffee table leg, producing a dull thud, thud, thud.
"However you slice it, this doesn't look like something an ordinary game studio would do. It's more like the opening move of some villain organization plotting to take over the world."
Nuwa nodded vigorously beside her.
Su Yu didn't look up, fingers still tapping away at the keyboard, the screen's blue glow reflecting off his face, expression as unruffled as ever.
"Still though—" Elysia kept the straw of her iced americano pinched between her lips, adding a mumbled coda, "—this time, don't even think about leaving me out!"
The line was delivered with real finesse—layered with double meaning, and carrying an unmistakable air of 'the rightful wife catching her man red-handed with a secret.'
A proper 'wronged little wife,' truly. A certain white-haired figure nearby, playing the role of background snack-eater, choked for a second.
Elysia pulled the straw from her mouth and pointed it in Su Yu's direction.
"I'd love to know just how much mischief is hiding in that little skull of yours!"
Su Yu raised both hands in surrender. "No need to villainize me here—this is all for the players. Pure-hearted joy creation, that's all it is. I'm just a wholesome game producer, above all petty ulterior motives. How could I possibly have any bad intentions?"
Elysia snorted—a look that clearly said, we'll see whether I believe that or not.
Nuwa tactfully turned her gaze back to the screen and stayed out of it.
A little past nine, Bronie's voice came through the console speakers, with the low hum of wind turbines and the faint crackle of some large piece of equipment warming up in the background.
"Projection units are in position at every scheduled site."
"Commercial districts, subway exits, the university district's outer ring, and the plaza beneath the Tower—all the highest-traffic spots have been picked."
She paused a beat before continuing.
"Every location has solid foot traffic."
"Exactly as you specified—so that even people without the headset can still see the Honkai Beast projections."
Su Yu's intent was obvious enough: he wanted publicity, buzz—he wasn't about to let the test players have all the fun to themselves.
Shared joy beats solitary joy, after all.
Every camera in the hands of those bystanders would become a shutter click sending miHoYo straight into the stratosphere.
"Still, for safety, projection modules have only been placed above the key monster spawn points. The announcement's already gone out through the community boards and app push notifications."
"Commissioner Lewis has plainclothes officers keeping order over there, and venue security's been arranged as well."
She paused again.
"All site leads have confirmed. Final full-band countdown—"
The line on the other end went silent for two seconds.
Every plan, every test run, every secret contact, every late-night meeting of these past days had all been compressed into this three-second countdown.
"—Three."
"—Two."
Su Yu listened to each ready-confirmation crackling through his earpiece, and picked up the Skyward Eye that belonged to him alone.
"Now, the game begins."
Elysia straightened up from the desk's edge, tucking the loose strands by her shoulder behind her ear.
She leaned down toward Nuwa and lowered her voice. "What do you think Su Yu's actually up to? This is way too much production for a simple test."
Nuwa bumped her shoulder gently, eyes never leaving the screen, and matched her hushed tone. "Go ask him yourself. Didn't he say, so casually, at that meeting the other day, that he 'just wanted to test how the new tech interacts with reality'?"
"What's the actual deal? I'm not a mind-reader. All I know is, if this tech ever goes to market, we could all buy villas on the moon."
Elysia nodded, watching Su Yu's back, more and more convinced that the man was hiding some enormous secret.
At first glance, rolling out the AR device and game at this particular time seemed to have precedent—that black-tech 4D tremor test in the storm had felt like a kind of omen.
But was that really all there was to it?
At the very least, in her own intelligence network, Elysia had never once heard of anything under Eden's holdings dabbling in the AR industry before now.
But if it wasn't Eden—that super-rich woman throwing gold bars behind the scenes—then who else in this world had the capital to back cutting-edge tech development that could practically be called Outclassed by None?
Meanwhile, over in Europe, Otto let out a massive sneeze.
"Achoo! Hm... could it be my sweet, adorable granddaughter Theresa is missing her dear old grandpa?"
The man who, within Su Yu's plans, played the role of the legendary, unconditional, real-money 'epic sucker' who'd poured in tens of billions was sitting at his ornate desk handling paperwork.
The desktop was buried under files accumulated over the past few days.
On top of one confidential file sat several photos—'test group shots' brazenly posted by miHoYo's official account the very night the Spatial Rift appeared.
In the photos, Su Yu, Rita, and Kiana stood atop Arc City Tower in what was labeled 'high-fidelity cosplay armor,' smiling for the camera and posing with miHoYo staff.
There were even several ultra-clear shots of them in 'stylish combat interactions' with the holographic Honkai Beast projection.
The Weibo comment section under that photo had already been flooded by netizens, packed wall-to-wall with comments like:
[Old thief, 666! Doing cosplay this top-tier and not inviting me!]
[Holy moly, miHoYo's tech is terrifying, that paint job looks completely real!]
[Kiana and Rita look so cool! And by the way, even Su Yu the old thief almost passes for human in that getup.]
Netizens were losing their minds, marveling at the absurd fidelity of the 'cosplay' suits and at miHoYo's tech, as if it had been stolen straight from the future.
But only Otto knew—and Nagamitsu, tearing at their hair in the lab, knew too—
that the material those suits were made of was absolutely not of this world. That wasn't some child's cosplay costume—there wasn't even a single visible screw or seam on the surface.
Seamless, as though crafted by gods.
The craftsmanship went far beyond the publicly known limits of current human technology.
"This is genuinely bizarre, Bishop. I'll be honest with you—if some anime game studio can just casually whip up nano-grade composite materials at this level, I say our entire Schicksal research institute might as well announce it's disbanding tomorrow and go sell sweet potatoes under the overpass with everyone else."
Nagamitsu's griping over the comm had even rattled Otto a little.
But then, this wasn't the first time Su Yu had surprised him—the man had already teleported a whiskey glass across thousands of miles via spatial teleportation before.
At this point, if someone told Otto that Su Yu's true form was actually a steel-bodied superman wearing his underwear on the outside, he'd nod along without a moment's hesitation.
Compared to tearing space apart bare-handed, this era-defying armor tech barely still fit within the vastly, vastly expanded range of things Otto was willing to accept.
Though in modern internet parlance, we don't usually call that 'still acceptable.'
We usually call it: numb to it, fully resigned, bring on the Destruction, whatever, old thief's the man.
Otto set the file down on the desk, checked the time, and pulled up the livestream on his computer—magical girl teriri's outdoor broadcast.
As one of miHoYo's officially signed streamers, Theresa had naturally been handed the 'live sales pitch' assignment for Ordinal Scale, and was already chatting with viewers on the ground in Arc City.
The corner of Otto's mouth curled up, recalling the short message Su Yu had sent him a few days back—summed up in a handful of words: you, pay up; I, save the world.
The tone of it sounded exactly like one of those classic scam forum posts of old:
[Hello, I'm Qin Shi Huang. I'm actually not dead—I just need you to send fifty yuan to unfreeze my assets, and once I've unified the six kingdoms I'll make you a great general.]
But Otto knew perfectly well Su Yu wasn't joking.
In this world, when someone possessed a level of power so absolutely overwhelming, so transcendent, and still hadn't uttered that classic line 'I don't eat beef'—
his mere existence was already the greatest contribution he could make to this fragile world.
Otto paid up without a second thought—didn't even blink. When he'd called earlier and asked, out of curiosity, what enormous scheme Su Yu was cooking up, the reply had come back light and infuriatingly smug: "What's the rush? Let the bullet fly a while. You'll find out soon enough."
And then... then Ordinal Scale, this monster of a project, along with AR tech that made no sense within the era's known tech tree, had descended without warning.
The comm crackled again. Otto answered, and Kallen's voice came through.
"Proceed as planned," Otto said. "Don't waste the opening Su Yu's carved out for us."
These past days, under Otto's quiet orders, Kallen had been secretly tracking down and gathering the whereabouts and fatal leverage on several long-standing internal Schicksal dissidents plotting to fracture the organization.
He wasn't in any hurry to close the net, though—fishing required patience.
After hanging up, Otto looked back at the screen, where Theresa was bright and lively, interacting with the danmaku.
"Heh."
Otto laced his fingers together, the corner of his mouth curling into a knowing smile.
"Old friend, let's see what new tricks you've got for me this time."
At half past nine, the plaza beneath Arc City Tower was already packed with people.
It was Saturday, and the shopping district was lively to begin with.
On top of that, miHoYo had put out announcements days ahead on its official accounts and various platforms, saying several of the first AR beta test locations would be open for offline viewing.
The result: the crowd had surged past the barrier lines long before anyone expected.
A few staff members in miHoYo uniforms handed out drinks and snacks under the sun canopies, while a nearby table was stacked with acrylic keychains printed with HOMU and other characters—first come, first served.
"No way, no way! Now I finally get why my grandma always got up before dawn to grab a front-row seat at those free-egg health seminars! This treatment is insane—just sit here, watch for free, get snacks and drinks, and walk away with limited-edition merch too?"
A young man in a blue baseball cap held up his freshly received can of iced cola, shaking it at his phone's livestream feed.
"Get a good look, everyone—this is free! Old miHoYo is doing charity today!"
Danmaku swept in immediately:
[Damn! Bro, drop the coordinates right now! Can I still make it if I bike over on a shared bike?!]
[I'm freaking out! Where the hell even is your plaza? I'm in south Arc City and there's not a shadow of this anywhere!]
[This is the Ordinal Scale beta launch and they're going this hard? With this kind of offline marketing budget, old thief's really pawned his last pair of pants for this.]
[I've blown a gasket, I'm losing it! Do players outside Arc City just not count as human?! I want to see the offline show too, damn it!]
Beside him, another guy in a plaid shirt chimed in. "I've got a friend who's a game designer—he was so mad last night he nearly flushed his work badge down the toilet. He said after his team watched that AR live demo, his boss went silent for a while, then finally asked just one thing: 'Are the Trisolarans invading?'"
The plaid-shirt guy twisted open his water bottle and took a big gulp, shaking his head with a sigh. "I told him I have no clue either! But old thief Su Yu really did pull some tech out of who-knows-what other dimension that plays by absolutely none of the rules. I'm seriously starting to think he got abducted by aliens and handed alien tech."
"Tech nerds saving the world—no joke, I'm dead serious!"
Someone bumped into his shoulder from behind, dangling a freshly claimed HOMU keychain in his face.
The danmaku kept coming, faster and thicker:
[LMAO, old thief already Outclassed by None'd the whole industry with Honkai Impact 3rd once, now he's cross-industry Outclassed-by-None-ing AR hardware makers too?]
[Forget domestic—I doubt even the big international AR hardware giants can pull off tech at this level... this latency's basically a joke.]
[Forget the device for a second! Didn't that brain-dead ID 'Jiahao' go around bragging he'd grab first place in the Sequence? Has anyone spotted him offline yet?]
[Heard that jerk already posted a server-wide callout for a fight on the forums. My suggestion for anyone in Arc City who runs into him offline: straight-up shoulder tackle followed by an elbow, teach him some manners.]
[Wake up, hasn't the mission not even started yet? I heard the core gameplay's still classic grind-and-level stuff—you're all standing under Arc City Tower, which is supposedly a red-name elite mob zone. No way some hothead just walks up and challenges an elite mob right off the bat, right? That's suicide.]
[Dude above me, you're killing me. I was just at a breakfast place downstairs and already saw three groups of grumpy guys wearing Skyward Eyes wolfing down soy milk and fried dough sticks. They swore up and down that even if no monsters spawn today, they're still hunting down that Jiahao guy and elbowing the stuffing out of him.]
[Damn, the hate's really piling up on this guy... I heard a bunch of the top-tier beta players even started an assassination group chat, all strategizing right now, planning to sweep the whole map hunting for Jiahao the second the servers open.]
The danmaku chattered on and on, with the occasional 'insider tip' comment floating by.
And right at that moment, joy incarnate herself—Sparkle—
was squeezing her way into the center of the plaza like a loach slipping through the noisy, jostling crowd.
She held her selfie stick up high, first sweeping the rear camera across the black mass of the crowd behind her, then flipping it back around to frame her own face.
Perched on Sparkle's head was a construction hard hat pilfered from who-knows-where, four crooked characters scrawled across the brim: "ON-SITE REPORTER."
"Ding-ding-ding-ding—! Hello, everyone! Your beloved Queen, Sparkle, has officially arrived at the crime scene miHoYo spent a fortune staging!"
She extended the selfie stick another notch, framing the sun canopies behind her, the long lines of onlookers, and the massive poster hanging on the Tower's outer wall all into a single shot.
"Tsk, tsk, tsk, would you look at this sea of people, look at all these foolish carbon-based life forms... any guesses how big a snack budget that con artist Su Yu had to approve just to trick this many suckers into being his free background props?"
The livestream's danmaku, as always, reacted faster than she expected:
[Sparkle, shut your mouth! Nothing but venom out of you, huh!]
[Damn! I'm literally on-site right now, don't you dare hide, drop a pin and let's settle this one-on-one!]
[Who's gonna go smack this little gremlin for me offline? I'll call you big bro for life, I'll cover your captain's monthly card next month!]
[Some nobody streamer thinks she can strut around offline like this? Just wait and die—I'm calling a cab right now to give you the five-strike lightning whip treatment!!]
Watching the comments scroll past in a frenzy, Sparkle doubled over laughing, cackling so hard her hard hat nearly slipped off.
She reached up to fix the brim, laughed herself out, then swung the camera around for another slow sweep.
"Oh, don't be so eager~ Look at this—Su Yu's really playing a long game here, so calculated! See, he tells you all to go fight monsters in the east, and you all trot off east like little pre-programmed NPCs. He tells you to grab resources, and you all rush to grab them, eyes shining."
"To all you lucky ones who drew a slot and are now strutting around all smug in your AR glasses—listen up! You're really just Su Yu's cute little pet dogs, the type that fetch frisbees like champs and thank him for the privilege of being sold. Ha ha ha ha ha!"
[MY FISTS ARE ITCHING! My blood pressure can't handle this anymore!]
[Absolutely can't stand it anymore! Is there not one guy in Arc City who can find her offline and beat her senseless?!]
[I'm so mad! I just cross-referenced through the camera and she's less than five meters behind me, but the security barrier's blocking me, I can't push through!]
[Wait, what element is this woman even made of? How's she this slippery? I swear I just saw her over there, and now she's gone in a blink?!]
[Wait, seriously? I've walked three full loops around the plaza and I literally cannot find her. What's going on? Can she turn invisible or something?!]
Watching the helpless rage flood the danmaku, Sparkle lowered her eyes and glanced at the readout only she could see—the Masked Fool Terminal in her mind.
The bar representing her Elation Points was climbing at a rate that would make anyone's blood run cold.
She hummed to herself smugly and cinched the strap of her hard hat tighter.
She kept swaggering through the crowd, shifting position every few seconds, occasionally throwing up a peace sign toward the camera.
Please. Do you mortals have any idea at all what Strength even means?
Do you really think the Elation Points the System collects are only good for buying one-way tickets back into the Honkai: Star Rail universe on the black market?
As a believer of Aha, wasn't it perfectly reasonable, perfectly on-brand, for a Masked Fool to have a passive skill that let her vanish into a crowd, invisible to every passerby's notice?
Ask why? Because the Fool wears a thousand faces and plays across worlds! You're all still on the first floor—Sparkle's already up in the stratosphere!
You poor, helplessly furious little fans, go ahead and come find Sparkle all you want~ As long as I don't drop the disguise myself, you foolish humans will never, ever manage to grab so much as the hem of Sparkle's coat in the third dimension, hee hee!
The minutes ticked by, one after another.
Then, as the ten o'clock bell tolled across the city sky—
the projection base at the plaza's center, disguised as a fountain, suddenly let out a rumbling roar.
The next instant, before everyone's disbelieving eyes, a massive shadow blotting out the sun surged straight up out of the plaza's center!
It was a Chariot-class Honkai Beast.
Its projection was flawless to the extreme.
The white carapace gave off a cold, hard sheen under the sun, purple light glowing faintly from the cracks in its joints.
The entire plaza fell dead silent for two seconds.
The Honkai Beast threw back its head and let loose a bone-shaking roar.
The hidden ground speaker array linked to the projection module fired off a full-power low-frequency physical vibration in perfect sync.
For that one moment, the very ground seemed to tremble; the alarms on rows of parked e-bikes along the plaza's edge blared into a chorus of wails.
Instinct beat reason—every front-row spectator gasped in unison and staggered half a step back.
Then, the next second—
a cracking, off-key male voice exploded out from somewhere in the front row: "Holy—! miHoYo's the goat!!! Old thief Su Yu's the goat!!!"
The whole crowd caught fire like a lit fuse.
The people who'd been frozen in shock a moment ago erupted into a tidal wave of frenzied cheering.
"The goat!"
"Old thief's the goat!"
"Tech nerds rule!"
Some were shouting themselves hoarse, some filmed frantically on their phones, others waved their freshly claimed HOMU keychains high overhead.
The guy in the blue cap up front, standing far too close, was trembling even in his voice.
He switched his phone to the highest-quality livestream mode, circling completely around the Honkai Beast's heel, no longer capable of forming coherent sentences—just a string of pure single-syllable exclamations, over and over: "Holy crap crap crap crap! Oh my god! Look at that lighting! That texture! I can literally see the dust on its leg! Holy crap!"
The entire plaza had boiled over into one enormous, uncontainable carnival of screaming.
Meanwhile, standing at the crowd's edge, Sparkle quietly aimed her phone at the skyward-roaring Honkai Beast.
Watching that illusory yet impossibly vivid monster, her ever-mischievous eyes gradually widened, unfocusing just slightly.
"Heh... heh heh..."
Madness. This was genuinely, utterly madness.
That monster, that living incarnation of Honkai—back in that world, it had been the catastrophe that soaked countless Valkyries' lives into the battlefield, the nightmare that reduced whole cities to rubble.
And now?
It had been reduced to data, stripped of its terror like a coat, standing there dumbly at the center of Arc City's busiest commercial plaza.
That body that once represented death was now absurdly surrounded by Coca-Cola-branded sun canopies and piles of free plastic keychains.
And most absurd of all: at its feet stood thousands of completely unguarded humans.
They weren't screaming and running. Instead, like fans at a top-tier rock concert, necks flushed red, they were screaming "You're the best!" at their species' natural predator.
"Su Yu... you really are a certified lunatic," Sparkle murmured, her body trembling slightly from sheer overstimulation.
"Turning civilization's natural enemy into the ultimate emotion harvester? Look at those foolish humans down there—is there even a trace of death-fear anywhere on their faces?"
"Incredible. Truly incredible. I never imagined that on this achingly peaceful, boring Earth, I'd get to witness something this absurd, this beautiful, a cross-world spectacle for the ages. Just for this much fun, even if Sparkle died right here today, it'd have been worth every ticket price!!!"
The Masked Fool Terminal buzzed and vibrated, the Emotion Point readout climbing at a frenzied pace.
Her rapturous voice drowned in the next wave of cheering, an unnatural flush of color spreading uncontrolled across her pale cheeks, all the way to her ears.
That scalp-tingling sensation... it was like Su Yu's godlike, world-defying move had brushed directly against her soul's deepest pleasure point, leaving her nearly trembling with delight.
Sparkle raised her phone again, framing her own face back into the livestream, and announced in a giddy voice.
"Everyone watching, allow Sparkle to formally declare: this is the single greatest source of entertainment worth following all year! Brought to you by old thief Su Yu—quality guaranteed! Don't ask me why I'm this excited. If you have to ask—"
She yanked her hard hat down lower.
"—the answer is, after a move like this, even if the Aeon Aha himself showed up in person, he'd have to happily hand old thief Su Yu his money!!"
That outrageous line brought even the livestream's danmaku to a brief standstill—everyone was too preoccupied to spare a thought for mocking the 'gremlin streamer' right now.
Everyone present, and the tens of millions watching through their screens, were still fixed, unmoving, on the Chariot-class Honkai Beast.
And just as everyone stood there worshipping the sky, unnoticed in the darkest, most forgotten corner at the plaza's edge—
someone slipped out of the frenzied crowd without a sound.
Black hoodie, black mask—Su Yu moved like a dense patch of shadow, passing even through Sparkle's own camera lens without drawing a single glance.
Except from one person.
The instant she sensed that strange presence, Sparkle stared hard at the direction the black silhouette had vanished into, and froze for a beat.
Her fox-sly eyes narrowed, as though catching the scent of one of her own kind.
"Heh heh heh heh heh... so you're offline too, huh..."
In a voice only she could hear, she whispered to every oblivious player across the entire city:
"You poor little things—open your eyes wide. The real hunt... is only just beginning!"
____
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