Since the game Blood-Red Golden Triangle: Survivor was modeled on his previous life,
Chen Jiajun had striven from the very beginning of its design to restore the game’s background as faithfully as possible, replicating the world of his previous life to the greatest extent.
However, the world of his previous life was far too vast and complex. Trying to stuff it whole into a single game would be no less difficult than building a rocket by hand.
Thus, many of the current in-game settings still remained only at the conceptual stage.
For example, the game’s world map had, for the time being, only opened up one corner of Myanmar.
As for other maps such as the United States and the Island Nation, although they had been written into the background setting, they had not actually been produced.
Players could obtain information and clues from the background materials and plot,
but those place names were currently nothing more than coordinates.
Players could know of their existence, but they could not find a path to reach them.
As for whether these maps should be implemented one by one in the future, Chen Jiajun was still weighing the matter.
To fully replicate the cultural information of an entire world, the computing power and server resources required would be an astronomical figure he could not currently afford.
With his present abilities, he was still far from being able to support such ambition.
“Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh…”
The howl of the wind sounded beside his ears.
A violent jolting sensation dragged Chen Jiajun out of his stupor.
Chen Jiajun opened his eyes. His head felt as though it had been filled with lead—heavy and throbbing with pain.
Outside the car window was an endless expanse of wild grassland.
The vehicle was driving along a pitted dirt road, and every jolt made Chen Jiajun’s stomach churn.
Where was this?
Lines of text began to surface in his pupils.
【You were invited to Tailande to attend an electronic music festival.】
【Last night, at a landmark bar, a local man speaking broken English kept praising you, saying you were as handsome as a celebrity and had a great physique.】
【Listening to his compliments put you in a good mood, so you clinked glasses with him.】
【Not long after finishing your second drink, you began to feel dizzy.】
【You knew your own alcohol tolerance very well. Just two cocktails could not possibly have gotten you drunk.】
【Realizing something was wrong, you made a prompt decision and got up to take your leave.】
【That guy, however, was abnormally enthusiastic and insisted on seeing you off. Half-pushing and half-guiding you, he shoved you into the back seat of a car.】
【You didn’t know whether it was a ride-hailing car or something else…】
【The final image you saw was his warm, smiling face as he closed the car door.】
The fragmented textual information vanished.
Chen Jiajun looked around.
Several unfamiliar faces sat in the vehicle, each of them dark-skinned and cold in expression.
The driver glanced at him through the rearview mirror. That look was like he was sizing up a piece of goods he had just acquired.
“Hiss—”
“Sometimes, being too realistic isn’t necessarily a good thing.”
The virtual helmet had simulated every bit of that hangover sensation.
Wouldn’t the pain be about the same?
At that thought,
Chen Jiajun could not help shivering.
When he got back, he would have to adjust the realism of certain negative status effects.
Otherwise, sooner or later, something would go wrong with the game.
Chen Jiajun felt his pockets. His phone and passport were still there.
Judging from the information currently available, he should be on the way to some telecom-fraud compound.
Once he arrived, he would lose his freedom completely.
There were now two choices before him.
The first choice was to sit obediently in the vehicle and cooperate with these people as they sold him into the compound.
The other choice was to take a gamble—jump out of the vehicle and run.
Chen Jiajun hesitated for only an instant before making his decision.
He was going to jump!
If this were reality, he definitely would not choose to jump from the vehicle.
First of all, he had no idea where this place was, and he was a stranger in a strange land.
Second, his phone had no signal, which meant he could not call for help in time.
There was no way he could blindly jump out.
Unfortunately, this was not reality after all.
It was the game world he had developed.
Chen Jiajun glanced at the others in the truck bed. Taking advantage of the moment when the escorts were distracted, he braced himself with one hand, flipped over, and jumped straight out.
His body rolled several times across the ground. Fortunately, they were all just abrasions, and he quickly scrambled to his feet.
Almost at the same time,
the shrill sound of tires scraping against the ground rang out.
“Don’t run! Stop right there, damn it!”
“Stop! Don’t run!”
Muddled roars came from behind him.
Without even looking back, Chen Jiajun plunged into the wild field by the roadside.
“You think I’m a fucking idiot?”
“You tell me to stop, and I stop?”
He cursed inwardly, but his feet did not dare slow down.
Bang!
A gunshot rang out behind him.
The bullet struck the ground not far away, kicking up a clump of dirt.
Chen Jiajun froze for a moment, but he did not look back. After coming back to his senses, he chose to keep sprinting.
With marksmanship this awful, they were clearly a bunch of amateurs who had barely practiced.
He still had a chance to escape.
But if he stopped and was caught, who knew how they would torture him.
Bang! Bang, bang!
Several more bullets whizzed past near his feet.
Amid the wild gunfire, one bullet hit its mark.
Bang!
A sharp pain shot through his calf, and Chen Jiajun lost his balance, crashing heavily to the ground.
Three men charged up in a fury, spewing curses in a language he could not understand, then began punching and kicking Chen Jiajun viciously.
Agonizing pain surged through him.
Without hesitation, Chen Jiajun used his player privileges.
The scene immediately sank into darkness.
Chen Jiajun’s heart was pounding, clearly still not recovered from the shock.
“Fuck me…”
He gasped for breath.
“Sometimes I really want to give myself a cheat code.”
“Sigh, forget it, forget it. I can’t keep playing. I’d better go torment the players instead.”
At that moment, lines of blue text appeared before his eyes.
【Game failed!】
【Dear player, this survival challenge has been terminated.】
【In the real world, every misplaced trust may lead to an abyss from which there is no return.】
【The world is not a game, and life has no restart.】
【May your journey always be clear-headed, safe, and free.】
Chen Jiajun had specially designed this final failure message.
Whenever a player died, the system would generate a prompt based on the experience of the character the player had controlled.
It could also be considered a small contribution toward anti-fraud awareness and prevention.
With the game over, Chen Jiajun had no intention of starting another round.
Starting another round would just be pure self-torture, wouldn’t it?
After this experience, Chen Jiajun discovered quite a few areas that could be improved.
Early the next morning, Chen Jiajun exited the virtual helmet.
He immediately operated his computer, continuously entering new commands into the game model.
He overturned his original idea of making Blood-Red Golden Triangle: Survivor an open-world game capable of accommodating everyone.
That concept could wait until a suitable opportunity in the future, when he could launch it as a brand-new game mode.
But for the current stage, it was not applicable.
Once the number of players increased, with Myanmar being only so large, the compounds would absolutely not be enough.
That would mean having to expand the game map and upgrade the servers.
All of it would require a large amount of capital.
Rather than burn money, it was better to find another path.
Each server would have a fixed number of players, with an upper limit of one thousand.
Those one thousand players would struggle to survive in different compounds across Myanmar.
After resolving the server population issue, the next thing to address was the death mechanism.
Player safety was the foremost principle. The virtual helmet had to monitor players’ vital signs at all times, and once abnormal fluctuations appeared, the game would be forcibly interrupted immediately.
In addition, in-game pain could be adjusted freely.
The upper limit was 200%, and the lower limit was 5%.
In order to instill in players the most basic reverence for “life,” and also to save photon computing power,
each time a player died, they would be forced into a one-hour cooldown period.
During this time, they would be unable to log into the game.
But they could read the anti-fraud and fraud-prevention publicity manual.
As for the game’s core gameplay, Chen Jiajun had no intention of making any changes.
The game had no quests.
If there had to be a main storyline, then it would be to escape from the telecom-fraud compound.
To achieve this goal,
players could use anything they could make use of, including firearms and ammunition.
The premise was that they had to be capable of getting their hands on them.