118: Chapter 118 No, virtual reality headsets are out now, so you're not going to keep acting, are you?

Mingzhu City.

Tianqiong Interactive Entertainment Technology Co., Ltd.

Unlike the grief and indignation of the outside world, the atmosphere here was filled with a sense of joy.

Chairman Fan Jianguo had even opened a bottle of Romanée-Conti Grand Cru red wine that had been cellared for many years.

“Good, what a great ban!”

He swirled his red wine glass, watching the news reports about the sanctions against Guanghui Technology, a cruel smile playing on his lips.

“This is the consequence of not playing by the rules.”

He took out his phone and dialed the number of his son's lawyer at the detention center, his tone light and cheerful.

“Tell my foolish son to bear with it a little longer.”

“That Lu Li who sent him in is about to be finished.”

“Although I can't get his sentence reduced right now, I can let him witness the complete collapse of Guanghui Technology!”

“And who knows, if Guanghui Technology really falls, the higher-ups' attention on my son might decrease as well. With a little pull behind the scenes, a sentence reduction might not even be impossible!”

...

That night, some wept while others laughed.

It was as if Guanghui Technology's tombstone had already been carved, merely waiting for dawn to be buried.

However.

At this very moment, in some corner of the internet.

An inconspicuous spark was quietly ignited.

On Bilibili, an alternate account named 'Grade Six Class Two's Little Handsome' with only a few dozen followers uploaded a video.

The title was written very casually, almost like clickbait from a marketing account:

[Internet Premiere! My classmate's cousin's new toy is practically a second world. The realism is off the charts! And the zombies are way too terrifying!]

For the first ten minutes after the video was posted, nobody paid attention to it.

Until 'Lao Hei', a late-night insomniac gaming uploader, stumbled upon the video out of sheer boredom.

He wasn't even in the mood to click in and leave a couple of comments calling it clickbait.

After all, there were too many videos like this on Bilibili.

Yet, looking at that lifelike zombie thumbnail,

for some reason, he just couldn't move his mouse away.

He hesitated for a moment but clicked on the video anyway.

Instantly, upon seeing the first-person perspective footage,

Lao Hei's left hand, which was holding his phone, froze in mid-air.

In the footage,

sunlight filtered through pixel-style leaves, casting mottled shadows.

Those shadows were not just flat textures.

Instead, they were dynamic light shafts that changed in real-time on the ground as the leaves swayed.

Immediately after, the owner of the perspective—the chubby kid named Wang Peng—charged into the zombie horde brandishing a wooden sword.

*Crack!*

The wooden sword hacked into the zombie's decaying shoulder.

There was no clipping.

No clunky hitboxes or rigid animations.

The wooden sword bent slightly from the immense reaction force, the zombie's body flashed red from the attack, and even the fragments of rotting flesh falling off the zombie followed a perfect physical parabola.

“Holy... crap?”

Lao Hei sat up abruptly in his gaming chair, his eyes nearly popping out of his skull.

He had built his career making gaming videos and had watched countless clips.

None of the AAA masterpieces on the market, not even 'Watch Dogs 2' which was still in the hype-building phase, could possibly have this level of physical engine interaction!

Which company's CG promotional video was this?

This lighting calculation... was it rendered by a top Hollywood special effects team over the course of a whole year?

With trembling fingers, Lao Hei dragged the video progress bar back.

He watched it frame by frame.

The more he watched, the more shocked he became.

The more he watched, the more his scalp tingled.

Because he noticed a terrifying detail.

The subtle movements in the chubby kid's perspective in the video even carried a physiological micro-tremor unique to humans—the specific shaking when neck muscles exert force.

This was a 'human touch' that was extremely difficult for any CG animation to simulate.

“If this is really a game...”

Lao Hei swallowed hard, his throat feeling dry.

“...then every single game currently on the market belongs in the trash!”

He didn't say another word, immediately giving it a triple-combo of like, coin, and favorite, and then forwarded it directly to his group chat of a thousand fans.

His caption had only one sentence:

[Brothers, don't sleep! Get up and check out this brand-new version of a game!]

...

A single spark can start a prairie fire.

Within just one short hour,

the video spread like a virus from Bilibili to Weibo, and from Weibo it cut its way onto Douyin.

On this tragic night when Guanghui Technology was sanctioned,

this video titled 'The Game at My Mysterious Cousin's House' carved out a bloody path like an anomaly.

Voices of doubt also came flooding in overwhelmingly.

“Fake! Absolutely fake!”

“It's clearly CG-composite. Is this uploader crazy for clout?”

“Current game engines cannot achieve this level of fluid simulation at all. Look at the bodily fluids splashing when that zombie is blown up—that's real-time calculation of the Navier-Stokes equations. Even a top-tier GTX 980 Ti graphics card would start smoking!”

“Exactly. And 'my cousin's new toy'—who is your cousin? Iron Man?”

The tech gurus online mobilized one after another, trying to find flaws of 'composition' in the video.

They magnified the video dozens of times to analyze anti-aliasing and lighting logic.

But the results broke them.

They couldn't find any.

They couldn't find a single trace of composition.

It was as if... as if someone had actually taken a camera and run into another real world with slightly lower image quality to film it!

Just when the entire internet was arguing heatedly, and some even began to doxx this 'Grade Six Class Two's Little Handsome',

a second video was leaked.

This time, it wasn't a screen recording of the game.

Instead, it was a 'third-person perspective' real-life recording posted on WeChat Moments by an ID named Lu Yaoguang, which was screenshotted and forwarded.

The background of the video was a typical Chinese-style villa living room.

On the TV screen, the 'off-the-charts realistic' game footage was playing.

And in front of the TV,

a chubby kid in loungewear was lying motionless on the sofa, wearing a highly sci-fi silver-gray helmet.

There seemed to be two or three other people in front of him, but none of their faces were captured.

The most critical point was,

even though the chubby kid lay completely still, the in-game character was constantly showing off all kinds of maneuvers.

It was continuously hacking and slashing zombies with the wooden sword.

Boom—!

If the first video was a depth charge,

then this second video was a nuclear bomb detonated directly at the center of the internet.

All voices questioning it as 'CG composition' vanished instantly.

Replaced instead by a frenzied eruption after a dead silence.

The design of that helmet was just way too sci-fi, wasn't it?

“No way, bro, could this helmet be a Virtual Helmet?”

“Holy shit, my mom asked me what I was watching. I said it's a second world, she said I was dreaming and kicked me right away.”

“Awesome, you're not even trying to hide it anymore, are you?”

“If you were at least sitting in front of a computer playing the game like this, I might believe it. But you're freaking wearing a helmet, your body isn't moving at all—how are you controlling it?”

“Yeah, how is it controlled? Don't tell me it's controlled by consciousness. If this is controlled by consciousness, I'll eat my keyboard on the spot!!”