16: The Crimson Dawn: A Ten-Day Losing Challenge

At 4:07 AM, Cheng Mo's right index finger was still hovering over the space bar, like a spring on the verge of snapping. He had just finished refreshing the third round of player feedback; his water cup sat to the right of the keyboard, the surface so still it reflected the new comment on the screen: "Is this game spying on me?"

He didn't smile or reply. He simply took a screenshot of the comment and saved it in a folder named "Precursors to Human Breakdown," numbered 015.

The time in the bottom-right corner of the monitor jumped to 4:12. A hot thread suddenly appeared on the community forum homepage titled "The Ninth Defeat: I Lost, but the Game Has Gone Mad," posted by the ID: Steel Coin.

Cheng Mo clicked on it.

The video played automatically—a Douyu livestream. The six large characters on the background banner, "Challenging Human Limits," were still neatly applied. A handwritten counter sat in front of the camera, with "9th Time" written in red pen.

Steel Coin sported his Shamatte hairstyle, his eyes bloodshot and forehead drenched in sweat. A half-eaten lemon lollipop dangled from his mouth, and he gripped the controller deathly tight. At first, the bullet chat was filled with comments like "If you're bad, practice more" and "Just quit the game, bro," but after the eighth failure, it gradually shifted to "You're stronger than all of us" and "This level shouldn't even exist."

The ninth attempt began.

The character stood on the edge of the jumping platform. The jump was clean and decisive, the airborne trajectory nearly a perfect arc, and the wind speed simulation was stable. However, 0.3 seconds before landing, the system suddenly triggered a hidden disturbance module, shifting the airflow by 0.7 degrees—the character's toes grazed the edge of the platform, and he fell.

Three seconds of silence.

Then, Steel Coin suddenly stood up, grabbed the camera, and smashed it onto the table. With a crack, the screen went black.

Cheng Mo dragged the video into analysis software and replayed it frame by frame. He stopped at frame 867 and zoomed in on the pupil area, discovering that the player's visual focus delay was 0.4 seconds, clearly affected by visual interference.

"So this is where the bottleneck is," he whispered.

He switched back to the code editor and created a new patch file named `vision_jitter_v0.1`. He inserted a dynamic visual disturbance module into the existing level logic: it would randomly adjust the target platform's color saturation, edge sharpness, and contrast fluctuation frequency, refreshing the parameters every 0.8 seconds to force the player's visual system into constant, high-frequency recalibration.

The compilation finished, and he packaged it into a hotfix patch, labeling the version as v0.2.0b.

He opened his private message box, addressed it to "Steel Coin," and wrote only one sentence in the attachment: "Try this."

Sent.

The time jumped to 8:56 AM.

Steel Coin's stream went live again, the title changed to "Revenge Challenge: Goggles Mode." He wore a pair of e-sports grade blue-light blocking goggles, the lenses reflecting a dark purple light. His desk was piled with Red Bull, functional drinks, and half a bag of bitten lemon candies.

The bullet chat scrolled frantically: "Don't try it," "You're not human," "This is an AI war," "The developer doesn't want you to win at all."

He didn't speak. He put on his headphones, took a deep breath, and clicked start.

On the first jump, the target platform's hue suddenly shifted from orange-red to cyan-green. He misjudged the distance, released the key too early, and fell to his death instantly.

He barely passed the second jump, but he wobbled upon landing, his heartbeat data surging to 132.

On the third jump, the edge of the platform began to flicker at a high frequency, creating a visual persistence effect. Double images appeared before his eyes. The moment he jumped, he realized he had made a mistake, but it was too late to pull back.

"Fuck!" he growled, taking off his goggles to rub his eyes, his fingers trembling.

Before the fourth jump, he downed a gulp of Red Bull, put his goggles back on, and gritted his teeth to enter again.

This time, he lasted until the seventh jump.

Before the eighth jump, the platform on the screen suddenly turned entirely gray, its outline blurring for 0.6 seconds. He froze for a moment, his input delayed by half a beat. The jump angle deviated by 2.3 degrees, his aerial posture lost control, and he fell after tumbling twice.

He sat in his chair panting heavily, the veins on his forehead throbbing. His left hand gripped the controller's joystick so hard it almost snapped.

The ninth attempt.

He closed his eyes for three seconds, then opened them, staring at the screen as if he wanted to burn through the jumping platform.

The jump was successful, the airborne trajectory stable, the wind speed normal, and no disturbances were triggered—it looked like he was about to land!

In the final 0.2 seconds, the platform's edge sharpness suddenly increased by 300%, forming a blinding halo. His pupils instinctively contracted, his hand trembled slightly, and his landing point shifted by half a body length.

He fell.

The livestream exploded.

The bullet chat instantly flooded the screen: "He's broken," "This isn't a game, it's torture," "Someone save him."

Steel Coin didn't move. He just sat there, breathing heavily, his face flushed bright red. After seven or eight seconds, he suddenly looked up, ripped off his goggles, slammed them onto the table, and roared into the microphone: "This is not a level a human can pass!"

The camera panned across the monitor, where the version number was clearly visible: v0.2.0b.

Cheng Mo watched the livestream, tapping his fingers twice on the keyboard as he noted the exact time of this failure: 08:43:17.

He opened the backend logs and confirmed that the patch was active, the dynamic vision module was running normally, the server load was at 71%, and memory usage was stable.

He didn't take a screenshot, forward anything, or reply to any messages. He simply dragged the record of "Steel Coin - Ninth Defeat" into the "Valid Test Samples" folder and checked the box to activate the next pending update: **Auditory Misdirection Layer (alpha)**.

A new comment popped up in a window on the left side of the monitor from another streamer's account: "I heard you gave Steel Coin a private update? If you've got the guts, give me one too."

Cheng Mo glanced at it and deleted it.

Another one popped up: "Is your dev team specifically targeting us while we play?"

He replied with an emoji: a cat wearing sunglasses, flashing a peace sign with its paw.

The time jumped to 10:12 AM, and Steel Coin's stream was still on. He had given up counting and was just jumping randomly; he could pass a few levels each time, but he never succeeded more than five times in a row. His voice was hoarse, his hair was stuck to his forehead with sweat, his goggles were lopsided, and a small piece of the controller's casing had been picked off.

Some in the bullet chat urged him to stop, some called him stupid, and others sent Rocket gifts to support him.

He suddenly stopped, took a lemon candy from the table, stuffed it into his mouth, and said indistinctly, "I don't believe it... that no one can beat this."

Then he started again.

Cheng Mo stared at the footage of his eleventh attempt. He saw that just as the character jumped, the system triggered a dual-frequency color oscillation—the target platform switched rapidly between red and green channels, making it nearly impossible for the naked eye to capture the true boundaries.

Steel Coin messed up again and fell.

He didn't curse or smash anything. He just leaned back against his chair and closed his eyes for three seconds. When he opened them again, his gaze was somewhat hollow.

Cheng Mo noted the reaction time: 3.2 seconds to recover the will to operate. A high-resilience sample.

He opened another monitoring panel and filtered for the top twenty high-intensity players currently online. He found that seven of them had behavior patterns highly similar to Steel Coin's—they wouldn't quit immediately after repeated failures but would restart over and over, with an average single challenge duration exceeding four hours.

"This group... is quite durable," he muttered to himself.

He exported the IDs of these seven people and created a new tag group, naming it "Pain Knight Candidates."

At this point, Steel Coin finally announced a break in the stream, saying he was going to wash his face. The screen switched to a black countdown, with a line of small text appearing in the corner: "Next Round: 12:00 PM, Synchronized Challenge Across All Platforms."

Cheng Mo checked the time; there was still an hour and a half left.

He stood up, his cargo pants rustling against the edge of the desk. He walked to the water dispenser to get some water. The paper cups were stacked too high, and he knocked over a pile when he reached for one. He didn't bother picking them up, just grabbed one and used it.

He filled the cup about seventy percent full and walked back to sit down. He placed the cup to the right of the keyboard, not far from a broken pen barrel.

On the monitor, the stream hadn't resumed, but the backend data stream was still scrolling. The latest player feedback popped up: "Does the developer live inside our heads? Why does something always go wrong just when we're about to succeed?"

Cheng Mo stared at this sentence for two seconds.

He raised his right hand and lightly tapped the space bar. The page refreshed.

A new wave of curses surged up.