Chapter 1 The Aftermath of the Finals

In the early hours of November 19th, the Peak Tournament S2 came to an end.

In the end, a team composed entirely of non-professional players—[Hell Frontline]—won the S2 championship.

Although only two members of their team clashed with members of other teams, this did not prevent them from successfully winning the championship. Because when the members of other teams were either completely wiped out or forcibly sent away from the script, three members of Hell Frontline were still safe and sound in the main universe.

In this competition, Feng Bujue fully demonstrated how much "borrowing power" could play. Looking at the "competition" part alone...he had obviously been laying out the game for a long time before "Twilight of the Gods." On the day of the competition, when the people from Order, Warring States, and Trash Alliance were still clueless, Feng Bujue had already included them all in the game, using the power of all parties...to settle the opponents one by one.

As for the part outside the competition, the "Hyperdimensional Invasion," Dream Inc. still used the old trick—"This is a major event before the version update" to fool everyone.

That night, all the players who had "died" in the disaster regained consciousness in the early morning and safely returned to the real world.

The Council made slight modifications to their memories, preventing them from noticing that "real time had been suspended," and allowing them to sleep for a while after time resumed flowing.

Until 12:37 a.m., the game server suddenly shut down, and all players were forcibly disconnected.

At this time, the awakened players would not question the time, because according to the 1:10 conversion rate, thirty-seven minutes was about six hours, and they all felt that it was not much different from the time they had experienced "just now."

However, after the competition, many people still questioned the various settings of this S2 final. And Order Studio was undoubtedly one of them...

Although the members of Order Team One all expressed their acceptance of defeat, the senior management of the studio was very dissatisfied.

The management had thought that...this time the championship of the competition was already in their pocket. After all, their biggest competitor, the Gods, had already withdrawn, and their dream team lineup had no reason to lose.

Unexpectedly, they still didn't win the championship...

Moreover, there was no recording of this final, and the studio had no idea what exactly happened in the script. To put it bluntly...even if Dream Inc. had engaged in some shady dealings in the competition, they had no evidence and could only stare blankly.

Of course, even if there were doubts and dissatisfaction, Order was still Order, not Corpse Blade.

If it were Corpse Blade, after encountering this kind of thing, they would definitely first launch a large number of online trolls to carry out various unfounded smears and scoldings of Dream Inc. from afar, posing as righteous fighters and tearing apart Dream Inc.

But if Order were to tear apart Dream Inc., they would never use some painless, shrew-like methods. Order's approach was...to directly send people from the public relations and legal departments to conduct non-public negotiations with the relevant personnel of Dream Inc.

In the past few years, Order had used this method to win a lot of benefits for themselves.

In fact, many domestic game agency companies are essentially very weak. Most of them are operating with the mentality of "making quick money." The most common practice is usually to introduce or copy some kimchi online games to do, or to independently develop some games with clumsy gameplay and pure money-making mobile games and web games, relying on various vulgar publicity stunts to attract users...and after doing this for a few years, seeing that the rate of return is about to start declining, they will come up with a golden cicada shedding its shell and start anew.

Game companies like this can be said to be everywhere. Go to the Administration for Industry and Commerce to check their establishment time, and nine times out of ten they are shell companies that have been operating for less than half a year. After a little investigation, it can be found that there are many violations.

Therefore, when a large company like Order takes an attitude of "being serious with you" to negotiate with them, most of the time, they will choose to compromise. And those who do not compromise are mostly the type that is not afraid of boiling water, that is, the kind of company that can't even wait a few years and may pack up and leave at any time.

However, Dream Inc....is very different from the opponents Order has encountered before.

Their attitude can basically be summarized as—even if the government negotiates with terrorists, we will not negotiate with you.

You are not satisfied with the results of the competition? What does it matter to us? If you are not satisfied, tough luck.

Hire online trolls to spray us? Come on, just don't go too far. If you go too far, we will use the optical brain to make an intelligent troll program to spam you for the rest of your life.

Threaten to withdraw the entire studio from the game? Oh, goodbye, good riddance.

Launch a hacker attack on our server? Do you believe that we will let those hackers be blown to death in front of the computer screen?

Take legal action to sue us? Okay, if you win the lawsuit, our boss's name will be written backwards from now on.

What? You have someone above you? It's okay, the person above us can make the person above you disappear from the earth.

The above are all negotiation procedures personally confirmed by Woody, the CEO of Dream Inc. This is only a part...the complete version can be printed out as a small booklet, covering almost all the problems that may be encountered in the negotiation.

Not only that, Woody once personally went to the company's security department to teach the company's security guards how to beat others as painfully as possible without being able to detect any injuries. This is to prevent some "low-quality" visitors from taking some extreme actions after the negotiation fails.

In short, many studios, led by Order, went to Dream Inc. to "talk" after the game, and all of them were undoubtedly turned away...

Even if they were full of resentment, they could only feel helpless.

As for words like "quit," they were just saying it, and no one could actually do it.

Everyone understands that after this competition, the popularity of Thriller Paradise is even greater than before. The ever-increasing player base and the extremely high player payment rate all mean huge business opportunities. As the saying goes, business is business. For this reason alone, the major studios have to swallow their anger...In the end, what they are pursuing is not "fairness in the competition," but profit. As long as everyone can make money, this matter...they can endure it.

By the afternoon of November 20th, various reports, discussions, and complaints about the Peak Tournament were still in full swing on the Internet and in major media.

However, no one knew...a secret war between the game studio and the game company had quietly and quickly ended.

Anyway, for Dream Inc., dealing with those bigwigs in the game industry was just a small matter. The attention of the entire company had already been placed on matters related to the "new version"...