I sat in my rental apartment—it hadn't been cleaned in fourteen days, overflowing with takeout boxes—staring blankly at the ceiling, my heart filled with nothing but curses.
Floating faintly on the ceiling was a line of text:
Renunciation Option (Random): Never see the moon again for the rest of your life
Initial Amount (Fixed): 60 million RMB
yes or no?
"What the hell?!"
I reached out with my finger toward the yes on the left. Sure enough, a faint red dot hovered over the hollowed-out yes.
Even an idiot would choose this.
"To hell with the moon!!!!"
I noticed a square envelope lying in the middle of my bed, seemingly appearing from nowhere. I was just about to go over and open it to see what was inside.
At that exact moment, my phone buzzed. A text message made my pupils dilate with shock.
"Your account 9209 received a transfer of 60,000,000.00 RMB on 02/20. Balance: 60,000,300.04."
I was silent for a full ten seconds. Then I swung my arm back and slapped myself hard across the face.
"This is fucking real!" I rubbed my stinging cheek and looked up from my narrow balcony at the pitch-black night sky.
Tonight was supposed to be clear. In a sky full of stars, a small circular area stood out like it had been erased by an eraser.
That was where the moon used to be—a moon I would never see again for the rest of my life.
Did it matter? Ha. I was practically starving to death. Did they think I was Li Bai? Of course it didn't matter.
I took a deep breath, cracked open a can of cola and chugged two mouthfuls, trying to calm myself down.
Having money really does make your brain work faster.
But the first thing I considered wasn't how to spend the money—it was the rules of this game.
I grabbed paper and pen, pushed the furry lunch boxes off the coffee table, and began my deductions:
1. First of all, this was already anti-scientific, an unnatural phenomenon. I couldn't keep using common sense to predict what would happen next.
2. The text that had just appeared contained several key pieces of intelligence that needed careful consideration: Renunciation Option (random), Amount (fixed), yes or no?
3. Renunciation Option (random) meant there had to be more than one participant in this game. Everyone got a different starting "talent." I rolled "never see the moon again"; others might have given up something else entirely. The number of participants and their motives were the first things I needed to figure out.
4. Initial Amount (fixed) could mean two things. One: this was a Monopoly-style game where the goal was to grow 60 million into more, and the game ended when others went bankrupt. Two: this was a battle royale where everyone fought for each other's 60 million, and the last one standing won.
At this point in my deduction, I swallowed hard. My pen tip trembled and my heart raced. But I couldn't stop—I didn't know if the old lady next door had also received 60 million and would soon be coming over with her skewer-selling husband, whose arms were stronger than a mule's, to smash down my wooden door.
5. "Yes or no" meant this game wasn't mandatory. Or in other words, the thing you randomly gave up could be fatal—if you couldn't see something important, or had to sacrifice something crucial like an organ or a blood relative. It allowed you to opt out. This meant it was an intelligence war: whoever figured out more about what others had given up would gain the upper hand in the coming competition.
My heart skipped half a beat:
6. But this also meant—more than eighty percent chance—this was a battle royale. Because only in a battle royale elimination format would knowing your opponent's weakness and finding a way to take their money actually matter.
I pulled out my phone and studied it carefully, discovering another key piece of intelligence:
7. My account balance after paying 2,500 in rent should've been only 300. Now the balance was 60,000,300.04.
That .04 was probably my battle royale number...
There were four standard numbers for battle royale participants:
First was 42—the number of student participants from the original Japanese novel by Takami Koushun.
Second was 13—the number from the Western Christian Last Supper.
Third was 10—the standard number for isolated mansion "and then there were none" settings.
Last was 7—the number from the Holy Grail War.
Considering that the final surviving number was only 1, the second and third options could be ruled out. That left the first or the fourth.
If I factored in the rule of sacrificing a random trait to gain resources, combined with my own otaku background, the closest match had to be...
That's right. The Holy Grail War. The maximum number of participants in this match should be 7, and my number was 04!
---
A sleepless night.
I gazed at the floor covered in crumpled paper from my deductions and stretched as I stood up.
Throughout this process, I'd also been monitoring Weibo, Toutiao, news sites, and even Zhihu.
There was absolutely no media coverage about sixty million.
This meant at least everyone had gone into hiding immediately. According to the Dark Forest principle, whoever showed their face first was asking for trouble.
I also traced the source of the money through the bank's automated customer service. The conclusion: there was no source. The transaction was listed as salary income. And that broken advertising company I worked for, which hadn't paid wages on time in three months—the boss was on the verge of skipping town. Even if he sold the entire company including the rented office, he couldn't scrape together sixty million. What a joke!
But after last night's deductions and experiments, I'd gathered a few more useful pieces of intelligence:
1. The money was spendable. I got hungry in the middle of the night and ordered a roast duck. The amount changed normally, no system popup appeared, and no weird old grandpa suddenly materialized to explain the game rules.
This meant I could use this money to purchase "hunting" vehicles and necessary weaponry.
Just for self-defense. I had no idea if the other contestants were upstanding citizens.
2. The moon had vanished, but the moonlight remained! I could feel it spilling into my palm. I also had the delivery guy look up at the sky—he could see the moon fine. That meant I was the only one who couldn't see the moon, but the moon itself hadn't been eliminated.
This meant that if someone else had drawn "cannot see walls" or "cannot see tables," those things only disappeared visually—their physical properties remained. Nobody who couldn't see walls would suddenly turn into an X-Man who could walk through them.
3. Yesterday's news did mention a meteor from outer space passing near Earth. So the seven of us must have been brought together by some event or object—at the very least, by a common trigger.
The number was 7.
I thought hard about it. Yesterday during the day, there were 9 people at my office. At lunch at the Shaxian noodle shop, there were 20 to 25 people seated. At the skewer stall in the evening, including the owner, there were... 5 people... Damn!
Finally I pulled out my phone and studied it carefully.
I'd been too cheap to activate mobile banking—so how did they know my bank account number?
In a flash of insight, I opened my call log.
3:30—Mr. Zheng, the landlord, calling to collect the heating bill I'd owed for five years!
3:55—Manager Hu, my team lead, reminding me to work overtime on the proposal!
4:21—Unnamed delivery guy from the food app!
5:04—Auntie Mae from next door, telling me my movie was too loud and to keep it down!
6:12—Sissy Chen, fellow suffering advertising dog and intern designer living out in Tongzhou!
So it was you all coming for my life, my opponents...
I stared like a man gazing into the abyss at the last name in my call log:
9:24—Chloe Chen. The note said—
Ex-girlfriend.