Qin Cheng explained, "It's very likely that the Communities where the two Special Players are didn't confirm each other's identities at the beginning, and also didn't use their valuable calls to discuss strategy.
"Or rather, one of the planners among them might not actually be a Special Player's Community.
"Without calling, they used some other means to determine each other's intentions, and very tacitly adopted the same strategy.
"Because they didn't need to confirm who exactly was the Special Player; they only needed to confirm who definitely wasn't the Special Player.
"In other words, Community 10 and we were excluded by them from the start, labeled as 'the two bottom Communities.'"
Zhou Wanlin was a little puzzled. "What do you mean?"
Qin Cheng went on, "Let's start from the beginning.
"From the current situation, the two Special Players are Zhang Lijuan from Community 5 and Li Kan from Community 12.
"The Special Player's Setting Book doesn't directly state the truth, but lists the 'key information that makes it easier to guess the truth.'
"For example, in Li Kan's Setting Book, it says that the problem with Gong Zheng's house was caused by his household registration being canceled. That alone was enough for Chen Guangming to figure out the truth.
"The Setting Book for Community 5 should also contain similar information. It won't directly point to the truth, and won't cause them to leak the truth outright when questioned, but it will greatly shorten the reasoning process.
"These two Communities have different levels of strength, so they adopted different game strategies."
Qin Cheng paused, then continued, "During the first act, the Communities had no communication at all, so they could only perform according to their initial strategy.
"Community 5 clearly realized there was an issue with the Mother's identity. It's very likely that Zhang Lijuan knew about the younger brother being fostered out, and thus confirmed that the Gong Zheng the county high school teachers saw was not the real Gong Zheng.
"So she wanted to try to blur the difference as much as possible between the younger brother's birth mother and adoptive mother, these two Mothers, to prevent the ordinary Communities from discovering the truth.
"But this strategy was obviously a bit risky. They underestimated how many points they would lose for that behavior.
"Because they didn't manage to match the image of Gong Zheng's birth mother very well, their score was relatively low.
"If they kept performing like that, the gap in Actor scores alone could have put them at the very bottom. The quiz scores couldn't possibly make up for it.
"So they were forced to abandon that strategy, changed their costumes later on, and played the role honestly. As a result, their performance score recovered somewhat.
"But even so, the roughly ten-point gap they created in the first act was still hard to make up.
"However, that performance of theirs also had another effect.
"The other Communities keenly realized that they were 'Special Players,' including Community 12, who was also a Special Player, and another ordinary Community that thought it could use this opportunity to manipulate them.
"That Community might be Community 17 or Community 11, but I'm more inclined to think it's Community 17, because overall they seem stronger, and they questioned us directly in the first act.
"Of course, whether that's really the case will have to be verified by the final total scores.
"The Community that called Community 5 in the first act should not have been Community 12, but Community 17.
"Because a call between the two Special Player Communities alone wouldn't be enough for them to launch such a big plan directly in the second act.
"Community 5 is the weakest Community in this game. Even though they were assigned the identity of Special Player, their misuse of it caused them to fall into a huge disadvantage right at the start.
"Community 17 seized on this, offered a strategy to Community 5, and formed a cooperation.
"That strategy was to push Community 10 and us to the bottom as scapegoats."
Zhou Wanlin seemed thoughtful. "The reason Community 5 agreed was that their disadvantage in the first act was too big. If they played normally, they would very likely end up ranked last and their whole team would die.
"So they had no choice.
"Besides, the identities we and Community 10 got really are the weakest ones."
Qin Cheng nodded. "Right. From what's in the Setting Books, the Special Player is a strong identity, and the regular Players are weak identities. But even among weak identities, there are differences.
"The identities we and Community 10 got are the teacher and the professor—two similar but mutually exclusive identities that easily lead to mutual suspicion.
"Not only that, the Setting Books for these two identities only cover Gong Zheng's time in school. We basically know nothing about his life, so from the script's perspective, we are the easiest to fool.
"According to the game's scoring rules, only the last two places bear irreversible consequences: 6th place means the whole team dies, 5th place means the Actor dies.
"All other rankings, even if punished, only lose visa time.
"So, it's hard for everyone to agree on who should be in the top two, but it's easy to agree on who should be in the bottom two.
"Therefore, for Community 17 and Community 5, pushing Community 10 and us to the bottom was the optimal choice.
"But just those two Communities weren't enough, so in Community 17's plan, they also had to rope in Community 12.
"And preferably do it during the intermission of the first act, without using a call."
Huang Shengjie had already thought of the specific method. "I've got it! It's the questioning.
"Community 17 chose to question us, but what they were actually doing was sending information to Community 12.
"I originally thought they were trying to dig information out of our Setting Book to prepare for their future answers, but in fact, they were passing a message to Community 12: 'Community 2's Setting Book is simple, it contains almost no information about Gong Zheng's parents, and they're easy to fool.'
"So after that questioning, Community 12, to be safe, also initiated a questioning once and confirmed this again.
"By that point, Community 12 should have known what to do.
"So before the second act began, these three Communities had already reached an agreement and divided up the roles: all of their goal was to confuse us and Community 10 as much as possible, stop us from seeing through the truth, stop us from answering those questions correctly, and finally push us to the bottom of the rankings.
"But… what about Community 11?"
Qin Cheng explained, "From what we see so far, Community 11 is also an ordinary Community. I don't know whether they've figured out the truth.
"Judging from the questions they asked when they questioned Zhang Lijuan, I tend to think they haven't figured out the truth.
"However, Community 12 should be the one that calls them regularly.
"I guess Community 12 will avoid revealing any information that might help Community 11 discover the truth, but will still try to make use of them: they should claim to have established limited cooperation with Community 11.
"The content of that cooperation is: in the subsequent performances, they will shift their focus to Gong Zheng's family, especially the Mother.
"So Community 11 was effectively dragged into this. The game actually turned into a 4 vs 2 situation: four Communities, all teaming up to lie to us."