"Memory Erasure..."
Inside the meeting room of the Countermeasures Research Office.
After the new rule was announced, everyone's expressions turned somewhat strange.
It had only been a couple of days since Suroma declared the initial success of their "memory digitization" technology, and now a new rule just so happened to be related to "memory." Was there some kind of connection between the two?
Of course, one was a "digital backup" while the other was a "cleanup and erasure."
Still, this almost served as further proof that the Fire Thief wasn't just mechanically planning all forty-nine rules in advance and releasing them one by one like reading from a script.
Instead, it was observing the survival status of human civilization on Tianshui Star and releasing different rules based on varying circumstances—an undeniably subjective action.
This only made the Fire Thief even more hateful.
If it were just a mechanically operating robot, humans probably wouldn't hate it so much. It was like running a red light and getting caught by a traffic camera—would you blame the camera? No, you'd blame the person who designed it.
But since the Fire Thief possessed "subjectivity," that meant it might very well be the designer itself. If not it, who else would you hate?
However, humanity's hatred for it had persisted for nearly three years now. After so long, most people had become numb to it.
Even the people at the Countermeasures Research Office had stopped bothering to dwell on how detestable the Fire Thief was. Instead, they focused their attention on the rule itself. They needed to ensure human survival first before they could even talk about revenge in the future.
"Having to delete twenty-four hours of continuous memory every day, with a rule period lasting fifteen days—that's half a month of memory in total. Compared to the overall amount of memory humans possess, that's not a very high proportion."
Someone spoke up first, sounding as if they thought this rule was no big deal.
"Yeah, everyone's lived for decades. What's deleting half a month's memory matter?"
"Considering the rule's difficulty, and since it's not a survival-type rule, there probably won't be many casualties."
"Of course there won't be many casualties. Even if you fail the challenge, you won't die, right."
"Is that so? But I think having all your memories wiped clean as a failure penalty... isn't that pretty much the same as dying?"
"Come on, plenty of movie and game protagonists start off with amnesia, don't they?"
"Amnesia and having all your memories wiped clean are two completely different things." Zhang Minglu interjected, refuting that point. "Those protagonists only forget who they are and where they came from. If they forgot basic survival skills like language, eating, and dressing themselves, what do you think would happen?"
"Then..."
Everyone felt a chill run down their spines at his words.
Indeed, the failure penalty was "complete memory erasure," which would undoubtedly include even the most fundamental human skills.
If a person lost all those memories, they would essentially be "reduced" to something like a newborn baby. To survive, they would need someone to care for them around the clock.
At that point, the expert from Beixing's "memory digitization" technology research department spoke up: "Deleting memories is no joke. Human memory has strong continuity. If you accidentally delete some 'connection points,' there's a risk of total collapse."
"It's like the load-bearing walls of a house. Lose those, and the whole building could collapse at any time. As for what memories to delete, I don't have a suggestion for that."
The expert paused, then said under everyone's watchful gaze: "Don't delete your own memories. Instead, first buy other people's memories from the open 'Memory Market,' then delete those. That way, you can ensure you're completely safe."
Everyone's faces lit up with understanding. That really was a great idea!
No matter what memories you deleted from yourself, there were always risks. But if you deleted someone else's memories, that was different. After all, they weren't your memories to begin with, so deleting them didn't matter.
But...
Li Meng frowned at this point. "The prerequisite for that method is that someone is willing to sell their memories. And the more people use this method, the greater the demand for memories in the market."
"Yeah," Zhang Minglu said with a complicated expression. "To pass the rule challenge, a person already needs to delete fifteen days of memory. If they have to sell even more memories on top of that, they'll definitely be putting themselves in a dangerous position."
"There's no helping it, though. Since the Memory Market is open, someone will inevitably be willing to sell. And if someone is willing to sell, someone will be willing to buy."
"That's true. There will always be people who think a lot of their memories aren't important, so they might as well sell them for a big pile of Ascension Coins. Buyers, on the other hand, think every single memory fragment is precious, so they're reluctant to delete any of them..."
Gao Liangwei spoke up at this point: "The research office needs to release a statement first, urging the public not to rush into deleting their memories. It's 9:10 AM now. There's still plenty of time before the midnight deadline."
"The director is right," Zhang Minglu agreed. "Tell everyone to wait. They absolutely must not rush to delete just because the rule was released. At the very least, they should wait and see if the Administrator will sell the hidden rule."
Everyone nodded in agreement. They were all on the same page.
And the holder of the hidden rule they were all waiting for was currently reading it.
After Guan Tong finished reading the content of the new rule, his initial thought was that it seemed simple.
Fifteen days of memory? Even for a young man in his early twenties like him, that wasn't much. For those in their forties or fifties, it was even less significant.
But after thinking about it more carefully, he felt something was off. If you could just delete a few random memories of eating and drinking water to complete the challenge, wouldn't that be way too easy?
Was the Fire Thief really that kind? He recalled that even the Fifth Rule [Night of the Living Dead], which the Fire Thief itself called a "reward rule," had killed plenty of people.
With that thought, he quickly opened his Terminal Panel to check the hidden rule.
[Hidden Rule Twenty-Three: The Complete Price]
[Hidden Rule Content: Deleted memories must maintain observational integrity and cannot be spliced together. Otherwise, the challenge will be judged as a failure at the midnight settlement. When observing items in the "Memory Market," the items will inversely contaminate the observer's own memories. Excessive contamination can cause irreversible mental splitting.]
[Note: Every choice comes with its corresponding risks. The problem is that knowing the risk content of each choice will, in turn, influence the choice itself.]
"..."
After Guan Tong finished reading the hidden rule, he felt a chill settle deep in his bones, and a few cold beads of sweat even began to form on his forehead.
There were so many hidden traps in this rule!
The deleted memories couldn't be spliced together and had to maintain observational integrity... That meant his original plan of stringing together memories like staring off into space or taking quick naps to delete was completely unworkable.
And there was no warning if it was unworkable either. It would just be directly judged a failure at the midnight verification, making the risk extremely high!
There was also the fact that observing commodity memories would inversely contaminate the observer's own memories. That also sent a chill through Guan Tong.
This meant that the act of "browsing memories" probably wasn't a third-person god's-eye view, but rather a first-person immersive perspective.
In other words, when you browsed a memory, you would personally experience that memory firsthand. This would cause some confusion to your own memories after the experience was over.
"...Browsing someone else's memories—the process itself 'records' into your own memory. Indeed, if too many unfamiliar memories flood in, it's impossible not to end up mentally split."
Just imagine two listed commodity memories both involving eating. One memory's owner hates chili peppers, while the other memory's owner loves them. When these two memories simultaneously "contaminate" the observer, it would inevitably create a conflict.
The more such conflicts there were, the more the brain would fall into chaos, and it would almost be inevitable for the observer to end up with mental splitting, turning into a madman.
But this created a paradox.
Guan Tong frowned deeply.
When the rule was first released, he had initially thought about "buying other people's memories to delete" in order to pass the rule challenge. But now that he had read the hidden rule, that idea suddenly became very difficult to implement.
"If you don't observe, how do you know if the listed commodity memory is up to standard?"
He didn't even need to guess to know that many people selling their memories would definitely prioritize selling inconsequential ones.
For example, memories of themselves sleeping or other things that couldn't be observed continuously. Those kinds of memories were unqualified. Even if you bought and deleted them, you'd still fail the challenge.
Buy without observing, end up with unqualified ones, fail the challenge.
Observe then buy, but observing too much easily leads to conflicting memories reverse-contaminating your brain, turning you into a mental case.
...It was completely like opening a blind box.
Guan Tong thought for a moment and decided he should sell this hidden rule first.
He knew that the later he sold it, the more victims there would be.
Even at this very moment, there must already be many people browsing the listed commodity memories in the Memory Market. Many of them probably had the mentality of "just looking, not buying."
After all, personally immersing yourself in someone else's memory fragments and experiencing a different life story was an incredibly thrilling sensation... Without a doubt, the experience would blow any kind of game, even VR and other virtual reality devices, out of the water by ten streets or more.
If Guan Tong didn't sell the rule in time to let these people know the risks, by the time they had browsed too many memory fragments and ended up with mental splitting into madmen, it would be too late.
So he immediately logged into the Ascendant Home to sell the information. Several buyers had been eagerly waiting. Just over ten seconds after he posted his thread, the transactions were completed one after another.
And when these buyers got the intelligence, they couldn't help but have similar thoughts to Guan Tong. They all felt that the depths of this rule went far, far deeper than they appeared on the surface.