Ascendant Home had activated a function that only the Administrator had the authority to use, issuing a latest statement.
【Site-Wide Announcement: Effective today, the original Commissions/Items sections of Ascendant Home will be merged into the Transaction section, supporting free user-to-user transactions. Each transaction will incur a fixed 5% handling fee for the website.】
As soon as the new announcement was posted, threads quickly flooded the platform.
"A handling fee for every transaction???"
"I see the Administrator is getting greedy, starting to milk us users."
"Charge it, charge it all, I'll foot the bill."
"Might as well charge it, at least the security is guaranteed. Other platforms are too risky to trust, leaking personal info is way too dangerous."
"Administrator, you've lost your mind! If you need more Ascension Coins, just double or triple the price for selling rule intelligence. Only big organizations and national governments would buy that anyway, at least it doesn't screw over the poor!"
"Above... do you think those big organizations and national governments got their massive Ascension Coin wealth out of thin air? The wool comes from the sheep..."
Users were divided on the Administrator's new rule—some supported it, others opposed it—but regardless of stance, everyone ultimately had to accept this new regulation.
Having no alternative options doomed Ascendant Home to its unique status, and 5% was still acceptable to many. Sacrificing 5% for transaction security wasn't too much of a loss.
After the new rule was announced, information quickly began flashing before Guan Tong's eyes.
[You have acquired 10 Ascension Coins through your Authority.]
[You have acquired 15 Ascension Coins through your Authority.]
[You have acquired...]
The notifications came in an unending stream, and Guan Tong hurriedly found a way to enter the Terminal Panel and disable the display. Otherwise, with them popping up all day long, he wouldn't be able to do anything else but stare at this.
"As long as I hold the Impermanent Tax Authority, I can keep passively collecting coins until the source essence runs out, without needing to spend time collecting them myself... It's even more convenient than earning money from a bank."
Guan Tong thought to himself, and while the computer was still on, he scrolled through some other news.
Although he wasn't a heavy internet user, he would check the news every now and then to stay updated on what the general public knew.
Currently, the most widely discussed and, in his opinion, significant event was the work report released after the Human Consortium meeting concluded.
After the report was published, vigorous reconstruction campaigns began across all nations.
The main goal of this round of construction was to complete the nuclear-powered conversion of numerous abandoned cities, providing massive energy support for plans including, but not limited to, "space exploration" and "digital memory backup."
This gave many ordinary people who had been idling away their days something to do. After training, they could operate construction equipment for demolition, building, and other tasks.
Although some of this could be handled by robots, many ordinary people voluntarily requested to participate in the labor. This wasn't out of passion—it was simply using "having legitimate work to do" to offset the hollow, empty internal drain of drifting through each day in a daze.
But more than the construction itself, Guan Tong was more focused on one of the goals of this massive campaign: digital memory backup.
The Human Consortium's work report stated that Suroma would conduct public testing of this plan in September.
If the test succeeded, people would surely go crazy for it.
But for Guan Tong, who had just experienced the Ancient Gamble, this plan looked a bit like "flowers in a mirror, the moon in water"—illusory and unattainable.
Could human digital memory backup technology ever compare to the Life-Hunting Avatar in the Gambling Space?
Why did the Gambling Space close early? Wasn't it because the Life-Hunting Demon lost the Ancient Gamble to Guan Tong, and its original consciousness was annihilated by the Fire Thief?
Exactly. This was what bothered Guan Tong.
After the Life-Hunting Demon's original consciousness was annihilated, all its avatars were wiped out, causing the Gambling Space to close early.
Since the Fire Thief had this ability, would it allow humans to cheat through the Doomsday Rules using "memory backup" as a loophole?
If humans couldn't complete the rules challenge, would no matter how you digitized or backed up, the Fire Thief simply annihilate the original consciousness, taking out all digitized uploads and backups along with it?
Even without experiments to confirm this, Guan Tong believed this outcome was highly likely.
The Fire Thief seemed rigid, like a program, but in reality, it should possess "intelligence." Otherwise, how could it have orchestrated the Ancient Gamble between Guan Tong and the Life-Hunting Demon, set the stakes, acted as a witness to the outcome, and annihilated the loser?
It could be said that the more Guan Tong understood the Fire Thief, the harder he felt it was to cheat through the rules challenge by taking shortcuts to deceive it—yet he himself had succeeded several times, and each time, it was with the help of the Wordless Book.
"...In the Life-Hunting Demon's memories, that mysterious gambler said an unknown civilization had sealed some kind of Authority Key crafted within this book. If that's the case, could the book itself already possess part of that Authority's power?"
Guan Tong wondered. From the Wordless Book's characteristics, as long as the Mind Power upper limit was sufficient, whatever was written on it could transform from illusion to reality according to the holder's will... Could that Authority possess the power of "creating something from nothing"?
Moreover, the mysterious gambler seemed able to foresee the future and had prophesied that a certain civilization would break the cosmic cycle... This information deeply concerned Guan Tong. Initially, he had only aimed to uncover the truth behind the Fire Thief and the Doomsday Rules, but now his appetite was growing larger and larger.
He wanted to know not just about the Fire Thief, but also the identity of that mysterious gambler, what the giant tree hung with countless Authority fruits truly was, which civilization could break the cosmic cycle, and what kind of Authority that civilization had crafted...
Beyond curiosity, he also felt an inexplicable sense of dread.
The mysterious gambler had told the Life-Hunting Demon that it would one day see this book. This seemed entirely like a prophecy that Guan Tong would enter the Gambling Space, initiate the Ancient Gamble with the Life-Hunting Demon, and stake the Wordless Book as a bet.
What terrified Guan Tong was this: was the future already predetermined?
He had read some discussions on Tianshui Star about "cosmic determinism." The gist of it was that time was an illusion, essentially nonexistent—only the state of matter in motion existed.
That meant if some entity knew the state of motion of all matter in the universe, it could know everything that happened in the universe and even deduce all past and future events.
"...That 'cosmic cycle' the mysterious gambler mentioned that a certain civilization could break—what kind of cosmic cycle was it?"
If the cycle was literal, it meant the universe was constantly repeating itself. Could it be that his own fate, and the fate of everyone else, was also in repetition?
Dwelling on this question would likely lead to an endless abyss, so Guan Tong stopped his train of thought in time.
He felt that he wasn't yet capable of exploring the truth behind this, but his thirst for the truth only made him loathe Bruce and the others even more.
With so many important matters urgently needing humanity's collective strength to seek breakthroughs, they were instead busy killing each other and eliminating dissidents. Did people like that even deserve to be leaders?
After pondering for a moment, Guan Tong glanced at the date.
Tomorrow, a new rule would be announced. During this time, Scarface hadn't seen Han Qiu at all—or maybe he had but hadn't notified him, but Guan Tong considered that highly unlikely.
"In that case, there's no reason for me to drag this out any longer."
He retrieved Iri's corpse from the Storage Ring. True, the Storage Ring couldn't store living things, but items placed inside wouldn't decay over time, and corpses were no exception.
He opened Ascendant Home and, using his "Shadow Himself" account, posted a thread.
The content was simple: he stated that he had eliminated the Fire Thief Worship Cult's Your Holiness, destroyed the cult's last stronghold, the Underground Diocese, and attached a photo of Iri's corpse.
As for his purpose in doing this, it was naturally to further muddy the waters on the eve of the new Doomsday Rule's release and continue piling psychological pressure on those enemies still in Suroma.