215: Chapter 215 Who says virtual girlfriends are no good? The entire internet's feminist community is furious!

Su Qingxue didn't turn around. While watching the shoe styles constantly switching in the mirror, she continued:

"Buying things online before was too much like opening a blind box."

"The pictures were edited to look incredible, the videos were filmed like they were produced by gods, and the comment section was full of people hyping them up."

"Only when the item actually arrived in your hands did you realize it was a completely different story."

Lu Li hummed in agreement, his gaze dimming slightly.

He certainly remembered.

Back when he used to scroll through short videos, he hadn't been immune to falling into those traps either.

Once, he saw a video of a cream-filled bread that was filmed so exaggeratedly that the cream looked so full it seemed like it would flow right off the screen with one bite. The comments below were all, "Amazing," "Bought it three times," and "You'll regret it if you don't buy it."

But when the item actually arrived, the crust looked decent enough, but when he bit into it, the filling inside was pitifully sparse—just a thin layer, not even enough to fill the gaps between his teeth.

Returning it was also a hassle.

For items costing a few or a dozen yuan, many people couldn't be bothered with the hassle and would just curse a couple of times and let it go.

Yet it was precisely this "letting it go" that made those messy products increasingly unscrupulous.

Thinking of this, Lu Li spoke lazily:

"I didn't make this to drive anyone to their death."

"I just think it's fine to sell things, but at the very least, you have to show what the item actually looks like first."

"Whether it's good or bad, worth it or not, suitable or not, edible or not—you have to let people know roughly what they're getting."

He paused and gave a light scoff.

"Otherwise, what is online shopping?"

"A competition to see who has the thickest filters, the most sales talk, and who is better at fooling people?"

Hearing this, Su Qingxue's lips curved slightly.

"So you want to weed out those products that rely on filters, editing, and cutting corners to get by."

"Pretty much."

Lu Li leaned back, his tone still lazy.

"At least don't let people spend their money and then have to bear the bad luck themselves."

As his voice fell, Su Qingxue happened to return to the main street of the mall.

A floating news board slowly unfolded above the virtual street.

It was the update for the global annual game hit list.

She had only glanced at it casually, but the next second, her movements noticeably paused.

"Lu Li."

"Hmm?"

"Look at this."

Lu Li looked up, his gaze landing on the top spot of the list, pausing slightly.

perfect life》.

He was quiet for two seconds, then suddenly chuckled.

"These people are even more realistic than I thought."

Lu Li wasn't actually surprised that perfect life》 had reached the top.

What really surprised him was that it won so thoroughly.

Originally, everyone thought the top spot would most likely be world of warcraft: Virtual Remake》.

After all, the IP was strong enough, the user base was large enough, and the nostalgia and content depth were all there.

Even Tencent spent two months porting 《Battlegrounds》 completely to the Virtual Helmet platform. Not only did it have the PC foundation supporting it, but it also had Tencent's entire mature technical team doing the optimization.

Yet now, the one at the very top was the game perfect life》 that he had come up with on a whim back then.

To put it bluntly, this was almost like taking human desires, fantasies, and compensation psychology, packaging them up, and selling them back exactly as they were.

Su Qingxue opened the details of the list, and the player comments and backend data spread out.

The highly-rated comments were more realistic than the last.

[Ten thousand yuan in reality, after paying rent, paying off credit cards, and eating a few decent meals, might not even make a sound.]

[But in perfect life》, with ten thousand yuan, I can buy a Panamera, buy a river-view villa, and even casually learn sword flight.]

[Don't tell me this is fake.]

[Of course I know it's fake.]

[But the problem is, reality doesn't let me feel good, but in the game, at least it's willing to let me feel good for a while.]

[The Jiuzhaigou dungeon is amazing.]

[I originally just wanted to look around in the game, but after I finished, I immediately ordered a ticket for the real-life scenic spot.]

There was another one that was even more outrageous, and the number of likes was surprisingly not low.

[My virtual girlfriend is too perfect, both pure and seductive, but every time I want to interact further, I have to pay extra, making me feel like I'm running a premium membership.]

[The evil Genesis Game Studio, oh no, the evil Lu Li! How could they charge separately for this kind of feature!]

Su Qingxue looked at these comments, her tone still calm:

"What you've provided isn't a game."

"It's another way of living."

She paused, her eyes carrying a faint trace of a smile.

"As for the virtual girlfriend part, it will probably make quite a few people unable to sit still."

Lu Li nodded lightly.

Because she was indeed right.

The reason perfect life》 exploded wasn't essentially because of how powerful it was.

It was because it turned those "things unattainable in reality" directly into low-threshold daily life.

Sports cars, luxury mansions, flight, scenery, status, enjoyment, social interaction—

Things you couldn't reach in reality, in the game, you could not only reach them but also experience them to your heart's content.

And even more exaggeratedly, this system had started to form a closed loop with real life.

After the Jiuzhaigou dungeon update, over a dozen scenic spots in Southern Sichuan had obtained collaboration authorization in the game.

Players would first experience the scenery, routes, and projects in the virtual world, and after finishing, the system would then take the opportunity to launch real-life tickets, guides, and merchandise.

For the scenic spots, this was promotion.

For the game, this was content.

For the users, this meant that after getting their fill in the virtual world, they could seamlessly connect back to reality.

"Win-win" wasn't enough to describe it.

This was a triple win.

Of course, every benefit has its drawbacks.

On a certain software focused on product recommendations and lifestyle sharing, he was therefore heavily criticized by a group of extreme accounts.

The reason was simple.

Virtual girlfriends, bionic companionship, virtual emotional projection—these things themselves would make some people who relied on gender relations to harvest emotional value and real-world interests feel uneasy.

Not to mention, once bionic Robots matured, many things that were originally assumed to be "only obtainable in real-life relationships" would be redefined.

Consequently, some people started frantically labeling him online, cursing him for "creating social pathology," "destroying normal intimate relationships," and "encouraging escapism."

On Weibo, there were even people using him as a target every day, wishing they could hang him up and curse him eight hundred times.

Lu Li couldn't even be bothered to give a reaction to this.

A dragon never cares whether the ants at its feet are wailing or cursing.

Besides the game side completely exploding, what was truly more exaggerated was the user count of the Virtual Helmet.

Lu Li pulled up the total backend data, and just looking at those numbers felt a bit subtle.

Global users: 500 million.

Among them, the Dragon Kingdom alone accounted for over 400 million.

This was no longer a concept of "the product selling well."

It was that the Virtual Helmet had started to transition from a high-tech device into a true household-level portal.

In the past, families bought TVs, computers, and mobile phones.

Now, many families already viewed the Virtual Helmet as a new terminal for daily life.

What was even more outrageous was overseas.

Especially the United States.

The ban imposed by President Trump on the Virtual Helmet had long been no different from paper.

On the surface, the ban was still there.

Official import channels were indeed tightly sealed.

But the underground black market was already rampant beyond measure.

A single Virtual Helmet could sell for fifty thousand or seventy thousand US dollars on the United States black market, with top-tier versions even reaching one hundred thousand US dollars.

And, people were actually buying them.

Not just one or two.

They were buying them in batches.

The reason was simple.

The profit was too high.

It was more profitable than drugs.

And much safer than drugs.

Drugs had high risks, short supply chains, and heavy criminal pressure.

What about the Virtual Helmet?

High premiums, high demand, high repurchase ecosystem, and the users were mostly middle-class, wealthy, and young high-consumption groups.

Smuggling this was almost like selling a ticket to the future.

Who wouldn't want to make a killing—

Thinking of this, Lu Li paused himself, then immediately suppressed that rough thought in his mind.

He scrolled down and could even see transaction analyses of several underground channels.

The monthly profit of one line was already nearly catching up to the annual turnover of some traditional contraband networks.

He couldn't even be bothered to curse anymore.

He just felt that President Trump's ban was stupid with a certain level of skill.

The more it was banned, the more valuable it became.

The more valuable it became, the crazier people were to snatch it up.

The crazier they snatched it up, the more the helmet felt like a status symbol.

Especially for those middle-class and wealthy people in the United States, what they were buying was long since not just a device.

It was the future that they were forbidden from touching.