Thriller Paradise

"I think we need to reassess our understanding of their strategy…"

"Hmm… What exactly are they up to?"

When Doomsday Assault and Final Assault came across the partially undressed headless body and the pulp of meat that was not far away, they were overwhelmed by panicked confusion. Doomsday Assault asked, "If the human head earlier was to scare us, what is the purpose of all this?"

"Do you think it's possible that…" Final Assault's tone started to assume a weird change. "… after they decapitated the man, they split up temporarily? Flashes of Sword carried the man's head back to place it where we found it, and the other…"

He paused to glance at the menu. "… called Feng Bujue stayed behind and did something to this dead body?"

"Is the man insane?" Doomsday Assault questioned. "But didn't Thriller Paradise set some kind of limitation to actions that desecrate dead bodies. What could he have done?"

"How would I know?" Final Assault replied. "I'm just attempting a guess. Perhaps we've misunderstood everything. They were probably being very thorough when they searched the body."

"I hope you're right…" Doomsday Assault swallowed his saliva. These two from Zombie Blade felt great terror looming over their hearts. This cast a bigger shadow on them compared to when they saw the decapitated head.

But their expressions were as unaffected as before, and that could be explained by 'that medicine' that they mentioned…

As Flashes of Sword had said, the members of Zombie Blade were known to cheat. It was too far to call them the cancer within the industry. They merely had their own way of approaching things.

In the film industry, for example, an unknown scriptwriter could have spent more than ten years to write his script and find sponsor before finally producing a product, and the film might gross about five times his investment.

But for another scriptwriter who had some connections, he could spend several months coming up with a passable script, finding a few famous actors to be in his movie, and coming up with a topic-worthy promotion to get the people into the cinema. Similarly, he would be able to earn quite a bit from the box office.

The profit earned by these two would be the same in the end, the difference being that the former might garner some reputation while the latter would be overwhelmed by negative reviews. Ultimately, though, human beings are forgetful creatures. When the former disappeared from the public eye to focus on his writing, the later would continue to produce similarly horrible films every year, but he would end up with the same amount of income each year.

This example could be used in any other industry. In this world, to achieve a goal, there was more than one way to do it. In fact, after one removed the manacle of morality or principles, the choices opened up even more.

Zombie Blade gaming studio had provided immense contributions to the gray area of online gaming. Speaking of finding loopholes and exploitable bugs, they were even more of an expert compared to bigger names like Brahman. Of course, even though this was what Zombie Blade specialized in, they still lagged behind Regulation. After all, Regulation was the top dog in the industry, and a studio that depended on alternative methods like Zombie Blade could not be counted as the top in the industry.

However, they managed to flourish in their own way. To be frank, everyone's goal was earning money. Reputation, what was that? This world was a realistic one. As long as there was money, there would naturally be people who came to ask for one's service.

The players and workers at Zombie Blade did not even have a contract with the studio. Instead, most of them signed the cooperation through a third party, so when there was a legal altercation, it would be easier to push the blame around. At worst, the company would dissolve, and they would rise again under a different name.

If they were already doing that in the real world, one could imagine how much worse they were in-game. Zombie Blade had a team that specialized in writing cheats. In most of the games that they had been involved in, they even sold the cheats to other players.

In such 'exhaustible' games, they did not mind if their accounts were banned. Since most of such games were free to play and pay to win, the gaming company's goal was to earn as much money before the hype blew over. Therefore, they did not limit IDs from registering accounts, and one person could register many accounts. Thus, being banned was merely a formality because they could register a new account easily. One could easily understand the players' psychology; they wanted to have the most fun and win the most battles. For that, the way to do it was to throw money against other players. Instead of wasting the money on the gaming company, they might as well they spend it on cheats. It brought the same amount of fun, and the money spent would be less than purchasing those limited equipment and items. They could stop whenever they felt bored.

However, in the age of the fourth photon computer, it was hard to evade discovery when using cheats. Even with the attachment of undetectable, illegal hardware, that was hard to do. As long as the gaming company and the game itself were not too trashy, cheating would eventually be discovered.

For that, Zombie Blade came up with other methods. They turned to research some illegal assistant 'software'. These kinds of software had the same purpose as cheats, but they were more like assistants in nature. For top players, they would provide little to no effect, but for normal players, the use of such tools would provide immense advantages.

Other than that, Zombie Blade had no care about their studio's reputation, which was dropping by the day, and often committed horrible acts against their competitors. Of course, they would not go after big names like Regulation and Brahman; they still knew their limits. However, against studios that were on the same scale as them, they would not hold back. Spreading untrue rumors, attacking other people's servers, those were common occurrences for them, and they had destroyed a few competition this way before.

In conclusion, those people were professional, and they had carved out a path for themselves with their own unique way of surviving.

But as the idiom goes, as high as the squirrel jumps, one day, it will fall to the ground.

Zombie Blade finally found their match in a gaming company… and the game in question was Thriller Paradise.

The game's system was flawless, and they could not cheat at all on a technical level. Therefore, they organized a secret DDOS attack on Dream Inc's server to see how powerful they were.

And… they were burned. Zombie Blade not only failed to take down Dream Inc's firewall, Dream Inc retaliated. An unknown virus leaped across numerous fake IPs and puppet CPUs to infect and destroy Zombie Blade's system.

That day, on the computers in the company building, there was a round cartoon face. It was a dirty-looking man with glasses making a mischievous laugh. "Hue hue hue…"

All the data in their hard drive was wiped, and the loss was unimaginably huge. They did not only lose their limbs—their spine was snapped.

That day, the laptop on the director's table even exploded. He had only seen something like this in the movies before. An FBI-level hacker remote-controlled the enemy's laptop to overheat its hardware and cause it to explode. He did not expect that he would be the target of such an attack in his life.

Since they were the aggressor, the members of Zombie Blade could only suffer the grievance in silence, and they did not dare scheme against Dream Inc anymore…

Then, Zombie Blade's hardware development team reached a bottleneck as well. They had tried all types of illegal attachments, but they were useless on Dream Inc's gaming hub. The technical issue was undetectable. Even if they dismantled the gaming hub, they got no closer to the truth.

This situation had not happened before. With so many technicians, they had failed to even come up with some small cheats in an online game! Was that even reasonable? Was Dream Inc secretly the country's defense agency?

Therefore, the members united their passion to break down this wall. After many meetings and a lot of research, they finally came up with the solution. Since they could not do anything to the game, they would work on the player.

'PU63' was the code for the medicine. What happened during the process of researching PU01 to PU62, no one knew. In any case, PU63 became the only advantage that Zombie Blade had in Thriller Paradise.

The complicated relationship that Zombie Blade had with a certain heartless pharmaceutical company is a topic for another time.

In any case, after a player consumed this medicine, they would enter a state called 'lucid anesthesia'. This oxymoron was actually easy to understand. One could see it as a 'state of forced calmness'.

All the research data showed that players who consumed PU63 would never have their Terror Points rise over fifty percent even in the most distressing part of the scenario. The medicine would not affect their mental acuity and would even increase their resistance toward pain and their reflexes in emergencies.

To put it plainly, this was a type of steroid given to players.

The gaming hub merely tested the player's heartbeat, pulse, and blood pressure. It did not contain the power to check for medical element, so they could use this kind of drug without worry.

Currently, only the inner members of Zombie Blade were using PU63. They were not prepared to sell this drug to the public even though the advertisement and promotion were being made already. In the next two months, this thing would probably appear on the third-party market, but that was a matter for later.

Anyhow, the duo's confidence was not baseless. With the aid of the medicine, even though they would still feel fear, the level would be dampened, at least physiologically.

With this kind of advantage and the level advantage in-game, it was normal for them to assume that they would win.

"Wait… What is that?" Final Assault said as he squatted down again. His eyes focused and discovered that there was some kind of trail on the man's tank top, which was half lifted up.

Doomsday Assault also got closer to take a look.

Final Assault lifted the shirt to get a clearer look. Just above the dead body's stomach, a sentence was carved deep into the flesh.

"Why so serious?" Doomsday Assault read the sentence and then turned to ask his teammate, "What's the meaning of this?"

"This is…" Final Assault was confused as well. Suddenly, he noticed that, around the question mark of the sentence, a metallic wire was poking out from underneath the skin. He reached out his fingers to pick at the wire, attempting to pull it out…

…

BANG!

At the same time, on the other side of the lab, Feng Bujue heard the explosion. He glanced at the menu and sighed rather disappointedly. "Sigh… we only got one…"