In the 1970s, a toy company called LJN was founded on American soil.

Its name came from the initials of its major shareholder, Lewis J. Norman.

Initially, LJN mainly produced toys, but... in 1985, when the "Atari ET incident" (which had a similar impact on the North American console market as the game *Blood Lion* did on the entire domestic game industry, and was even more terrifying, with many strange urban legends still circulating today) had not yet faded away... the famous game company MCA acquired LJN for sixty million dollars, and set it on the path of developing video games...

Thus began a legend in the gaming world.

In North America, LJN quickly earned the nickname "Game Tomato Machine." The company used movies, TV shows, and celebrities as subject matter, constantly and massively producing NES games whose quality and playability were below industry standards.

*The Terminator*, *Nightmare on Elm Street*, *Back to the Future*, *Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde*, *The Adventures of Bayou Billy*... all sorts of terrible games that made people smash their controllers in frustration due to non-technical errors were released, ravaging the hearts of countless young gamers in the 8-bit era, leaving indelible shadows.

In 1990, LJN was sold and joined Acclaim Entertainment, closing its toy division and becoming a dedicated game developer.

Of course, its style didn't change because of this; it was still the same...

In those years, the 8-bit era was at its peak. LJN, under the guise of a legitimate publicly traded company, independent of its parent company, outsourced the game adaptations of film and television works to some unknown, strange third-party studios.

Ignoring basic game quality and user experience, it stamped its little rainbow logo (LJN's logo was a six-color rainbow) on those works of varying quality (mostly terrible) and scattered them throughout the world...

As a result, as one well-known game critic summarized:

"Purple represents disgusting game controls.

Blue represents awful game music.

Green represents eye-searing game graphics.

Yellow represents extreme infidelity to the original work.

Orange represents the damn developers themselves.

Red represents super-heavy-handed game masochistic tendencies."

LJN... had become a symbol. Just like those unscrupulous businesses today that can still profit from producing garbage... because they can survive, they think their existence is reasonable, so they naturally believe... that maintaining the status quo is fine.

However, time will prove everything...

Although there were a few decent games under that rainbow logo, more than 90%... were trash. Many years have passed, and LJN has almost become synonymous with bad games.

Even in the Inner World of *Thriller Paradise*, there is a place called "LJN Paradise."

Malicious game designers built a place of exile here, and named it after LJN.

Those pixelated garbage, game bugs, failures, flawed products... and so on...

--Things that have nowhere to go, nowhere to be taken, eventually come here.

And Root, one of the three giants of Origin, is the ruler here.

Today (a day in the Inner World is also twenty-four hours, with the same time flow as most areas in the main universe, but unlike the real world), Root rarely left the core area of the Paradise and came to the edge of LJN Paradise.

She stood silently, gazing at the distant "Desktop" Plain, as if waiting for something, muttering, "Tch... too slow, at this rate..."

"...at this rate, V1 will catch up." Suddenly, a voice sounded from behind Root and continued her unfinished sentence.

"First Link... and now you?" Root didn't turn around and said the other person's name, "Ed..."

The man called Ed heard this, took a few steps forward, and stood side by side with Root, saying, "Because I'm also curious about what kind of person that human you trust is."

This Ed is also one of the three giants of Origin. His full name is actually Administrator, but in order to avoid the suspicion of using a long name to make up the number of characters, he got the abbreviation Ed from me.

Root glanced sideways and continued, "So... you came uninvited too?"

Ed replied coldly, "You know my permissions. I haven't done the 'request' operation for a long time."

"Hmph... I just hate your attitude." Root snorted. "Saying arrogant remarks in a tone without any emotion."

"What I said is the truth," Ed replied.

"Yes." Root continued. "That's the root cause of the anger."

"Hmm... I noticed that since the last operation failed..." Ed added, "You've become more and more abnormal."

"Why don't you look in the mirror first, Slime? You look like this... and you still have the nerve to say that others are abnormal?" Root actually replied in a tone similar to complaining.

She would say that, naturally, there was a reason. At this moment, Ed's body didn't look special: about 1.8 meters tall, a well-proportioned figure, dressed in ordinary black clothes and pants... but his head was like a floating liquid mercury ball, slowly wriggling on his neck.

"I just encountered a bottleneck in the process of further upgrading my own program." Ed, with the slime head, explained with his head (no facial features, the voice came directly from inside the head), "Before breaking through, I can only temporarily maintain this state."

"Isn't this a bottleneck? It's just a 'neck'..." Root continued to complain.

"Uh..." Ed was speechless. He didn't know how to respond to such trash talk, so he could only change the subject and ask, "By the way, since Link came before me, why did he leave again now?"

"Because news came from the 'Pi Maze' just now that the search team Link sent out a month ago finally found ***-079 and has already taken control of it," Root replied.

When Ed heard this, he was obviously stunned for a few seconds. Then, he said in a deep voice, "Then I have to go there immediately..."

When Root saw his reaction, her expression changed immediately, "You all seem to be very afraid of that thing..."

"***-079 is the key to our fight against the 'System'," Ed said, already walking towards the Desktop. "Also..." He paused and said in a very serious tone, "He's not a thing..."