Chapter 131Double Happiness Town (25) Probability Theory

Probability is a common yet mysterious thing.

It runs through the entirety of life and seems closely linked to the ultimate answer of the world.

In an ideal situation, the probability of flipping a coin one hundred times and having it land heads up fifty times is the same as flipping one hundred coins at once and having fifty of them land heads up.

The former is a linear concept of time, while the latter is a planar concept of space; and with probability as the bridge, time and space merge ingeniously. How is this not a marvelous thing?

Early on, when he became an official player, Qi Si realized the peculiarity of the concept of “probability” in the Eerie Game.

His skill “Soul Contract” had an initial success rate of 20%, with the determination method being to roll two ten-sided dice to see if the total was greater than 80.

Actually, changing the determination method to specifying twenty numbers and counting it as a success if any one of them is hit would have the same effect; the reason it’s phrased as “comparing sizes” is likely just to make it easier for players to understand.

Just like now, the success rate of “Soul Contract” has increased to 23%, and a roll greater than 77 is determined as a success; it can similarly be understood as having twenty-three random numbers, where one must hit any one of them.

Having gone through the instance “Hopeless Sea”, Qi Si learned quite a bit of information and subsequently discovered that “probability” runs through the entirety of the game.

Lu Li’s 【Axo’s Gift】 has a success rate of 10%, Ye Linsheng’s 【Code of Hammurabi】 has a success rate of 10%, and so on.

This is not testing intelligence, but rather testing luck.

Luck implies variables; it might increase the drama of events, but it often makes the development of things uncontrollable.

It is known that in the official pool of the Eerie Game, the ratio of Slaughter-path players to normal players has always been stable at one to four; a game filled with probability cannot form such a stable ratio unless there is external force interfering.

Thus, probability becomes a plaything that higher-dimensional existences can manipulate at will: if they want a player to succeed, they will succeed; if they want a player to die, they will die.

This might be the essential means by which this game maintains balance, but it absolutely cannot be brought out into the open; an unfair game cannot make players give their all, and once this “unfairness” becomes known to everyone, chaos and mutiny are the inevitable results.

One of the key points of Qi Si’s layout is gambling, gambling that the existence behind the Eerie Game is as afraid of trouble as he is and does not want things that disrupt stability to happen.

And another key point is built on the theory that “probability can be fixed”.

The Eerie Game tells him that the definition of a 20% success rate is 【out of one hundred rolls, there must be twenty determined as successes】.

In the “Hopeless Sea” instance, Lu Li used up his items in advance, fixing the success rate of all probability-based items to 0%, thereby creating a fog of pseudo-randomness.

And what Qi Si wants to do is to “consume” the failure rate through multiple instances of skill failure, leading to a one-hundred-percent success.

In the early hours of the day before, upon realizing that Xu Wen was dead, Qi Si developed a bad premonition.

In the silence where only one person was awake, he looked up at the dark void and muttered to himself: “In an experiment with a limited total number of attempts and limited results, specific data can be reverse-engineered. A 23% success rate means that as long as I fail seventy-seven times, the seventy-eighth time must be determined as a success.”

“If the seventy-eighth time is still a failure—” Qi Si paused deliberately for a moment, smiling with a ghostly aura, “Either you mislabeled the probability, or you tampered with it; it seems that in either case, it doesn’t speak well for your credibility.”

The existence in the void did not know whether it had taken his threat to heart, but he did not care anyway.

He prepared a series of clauses that the Eerie Game would absolutely never allow to be realized, such as “immediate clearance”, “instance explosion”, “game destruction”, and the like, rolling the dice a few times whenever he had a chance.

In the second before going down the well, Qi Si had just rolled the dice seventy-seven times, and all were failures.

Whether the seventy-eighth time would succeed was related to whether the entire layout could be realized, and… whether he could successfully clear the instance.

If it succeeded, everyone would be happy; if it failed, Qi Si would truly be done for in this instance.

—He would use the half-hour of time left after leaving the instance to leave a final message, handing important information to Liu Yuhan to disseminate, detonating the player community.

Qi Si knew clearly that he had been pushed into a dead end.

All decisions were like walking a tightrope, gambling on an extremely low probability; the slightest deviation would lead to eternal damnation; yet that “extremely low probability” happened to be the best choice among all options.

He felt relieved instead, thinking that since it was a god with the same status as Qi who wanted to kill him, the scale and formation were impressive enough; thus, he would not be wronged if he died in this instance.

Therefore, with the mindset of having one last hurrah before death, he activated the “Soul Contract” skill for the seventy-eighth time.

At that time, Qi Si asked his own corpse: “It’s still early, interested in signing a Contract?”

The corpse grinned a stiff smile, staring at him.

Qi Si tilted his head slightly and recited word by word: “I exchange my death for you to remain unaffected by the gods in this instance.”

The corpse repeated cheerily: “You exchange your death for me to remain unaffected by the gods in this instance.”

Blood-colored smoke rose in wisps, condensing into an ethereal scroll in the void, with golden handwriting struggling to engrave words upon it.

After every stroke was written, beads of blood dripped from the edge of the scroll, dissipating into misty fog just as they were about to touch the ground.

Qi Si’s face was as pale as a ghost, as if the long scroll had been made by drying out his blood, and every millimeter and inch was scorching his soul.

A sense of suffocation and pain followed one after another, with two diametrically opposed forces battling in the arena of his soul and flesh; one tore him apart, while the other kneaded him together.

On the system interface, large, blood-colored characters were scrawled:

【The Unspeakable Great Existence has glanced at you; your skill “Soul Contract” has changed】

Prompt boxes related to the “Soul Contract” skill popped up uncontrollably, shaking as they appeared.

Countless translucent boxes were stacked together, like an error interface after a computer has been infected with a virus.

Qi Si felt as if his brain had been pierced by countless steel needles from all angles; his vision was a blur of bloodshot red, and he squinted several times before finally seeing the text in the prompt box clearly.

【Name: Soul Contract】

【Effect: You may propose to enter into a Contract with any existence; once the Contract is successfully established, no existence may refuse to fulfill the Contract’s obligations】

【Remarks: Can only be used three times per instance; after exceeding the limited number of times, the player will mutate into a Ghost】

Looking at the last line, which was obviously added in an emergency, Qi Si smiled silently: “That’s more like it.”

He had previously been unable to understand why such a simple method of “consuming” the failure rate had not been thought of by any player in thirty-six years.

Reviewing it himself, he discovered that other players’ skills all had usage limits.

“Strange Tale Notebook” can only be used three times in an instance, and “Puppeteer” can only control three players in an instance, with one new parasite.

—And his “Soul Contract” had no usage limits.

Furthermore, there was no substantial penalty for failure; theoretically, he could use it an unlimited number of times.

I don’t know if there was a bug in the Eerie Game’s settings or if Qi helped him get a back door, but there’s no reason not to take advantage of such a freebie.

Of course, now it seems that everything has a predetermined fate.

Loopholes can only be exploited once, and Qi Si was forced to use this precious opportunity to survive under the Evil God; after this time, the rules will plug this loophole and re-balance the players’ strength.

Qi Si even suspected whether this was also in Qi’s calculations: first give him some means of saving his life, then use the power of the Contract to lure out an Evil God that was hostile to Him…

As for what benefits He could reap from this, that was not something the current Qi Si could figure out.

Qi Si lowered his head, watching intently as the six characters “unaffected by the gods” trembled and settled onto the blood-colored scroll, and only then did he heave a sigh of relief.

A Contract can only bind the contracting party; if the other party violates the Contract after signing, even if it is not out of subjective intent, they will still be punished by the rule.

The initiator of the Contract terms has the right to arbitrary determination, so Qi Si directly raised the preset punishment to the maximum level, which is “erasure.”

He was gambling, gambling that the Contract had invested significant sunk costs in him and would definitely not sit idly by while he truly died.

In this way, the glance from the rule he had just attracted could be effectively utilized.

For example, directly launching a massive reporting technique from outside the field to clear this instance and block all power belonging to the gods…

Qi Si looked up at his own corpse and recited new words: “After I die, you will become me, inheriting all my thoughts, memories, emotional feelings, and behavioral choices.

“At this moment, I voluntarily relinquish all items and skills on me; after you leave this instance as a player, you will regain them.”

Qi Si stopped there, tilted his head, and revealed a slightly mischievous smile: “I’m not sure if you are really ‘me,’ but that doesn’t matter, does it?

“If you are human, then seek survival from the hands of Ghosts; if you are a Ghost, then hunt humans alongside them. Perhaps because you have donned the skin of a ‘Ghost,’ those humans will even think it’s natural for you to kill them. After all, they have always been a contradictory species accustomed to indulging evil Ghosts while being harsh on their own kind.

“Finally, I wish you a pleasant game ahead!”

Qi Si rarely offered words of blessing, and he even amused himself.

He couldn’t stop himself from bending over and clutching his stomach, laughing out loud until tears streamed down his face.

Upon seeing this, the corpse also laughed wantonly along with him.

The identical laughter intertwined, circling in the narrow bottom of the well to form an eerie echo that lingered for a long time.

And amidst the laughter, two ten-sided dice rolled around and finally settled in one spot.

—Two “10”s, 100 points, critical success!

…

In the pitch-black night, the young man put away the blade, the warm blood staining his fingertips, dispelling some of the chill.

He sniffed the scent of blood and watched coldly as Shang Qingbei fell to the ground with eyes wide open in death, instantly engulfed by various Ghosts.

Confirming that Shang Qingbei was dead beyond any doubt, he began to study the changes in his field of vision.

First, in the upper left corner of his vision, a light gray system interface appeared, but it was blank, not even detailing the overview of this instance, like a crude program that had just crashed and rebooted.

Then, at the very bottom of his vision, the inventory appeared, with the icons of the Pocket Watch of Fate, Rose Heart, and other items placed on him appearing one by one.

…And that was it.

The Ghost Drivers Recorder and the Sea-God Scepter, these two items stored in the inventory that were not directly transferred to him, were now nowhere to be seen.

The humanoid evil spirit Identity Card was gone, and the existence of the Soul Contract skill could not be sensed either.

The young man’s expression darkened for a moment, then quickly returned to normal.

Although the feeling of losing half of his important items was not pleasant, the Contract had already stated that after he left the instance, he would “regain them.”

As for whether it could actually be realized, that would have to wait until he achieved clearance of the instance.

“From now on, I am Qi Si.” The young man stated calmly, raising his hand to touch his heart, but felt no beat.

—Clearly, he was still in a Ghost state.

Although the system interface was back, and there was an extra segment of memory in his mind about Qi Si in the world at the bottom of the well, including the confrontation with the god, whether he counted as a player or a Ghost now would probably have to be asked to Schrödinger.

Qi Si actually didn’t have much obsession with being human, nor did he have much sense of belonging or identification with the “human” race.

Avoiding being hunted by Ghosts when human, and avoiding being hunted by Celestial Masters when a ghost; what a simple matter. The only trouble was—

His body was still in the Eerie Game, and if he were judged as a “Ghost,” he might be trapped in this instance and unable to get out.

Shuangxi Town might be large as an instance, but it was still too small compared to a world.

Qi Si felt that if he were truly made to live in this godforsaken place for ten or twenty years, he would absolutely go crazy.

“Hmm, Shang Qingbei was killed by me, Liu Bingding’s fate is grim, and Du Xiaoyu probably won’t live long; ‘Li Yao’ is an NPC, no need to consider her. According to the minimum death count mechanism, I have to survive whether I like it or not.

“Any change in detail will trigger a huge upheaval, especially this kind of core rule related to the balance of power. I hope the Eerie Game isn’t so tacky as to just find someone to resurrect.”

Qi Si’s fingers tapped rhythmically against his thigh, a few drops of blood seeping into his black trousers, making them indiscernible.

The mournful sound of the suona resonated eerily, and wisps of red mist spread over like a veil, with Xu Yao’s figure appearing and disappearing in the red mist.

She wore an intricate red wedding dress, with light rouge applied to her pale, greenish-white face, not appearing terrifying, but rather charming—resembling the image of the Goddess of Joy in the God of Joy Temple.

Beside her, there was no sign of Du Xiaoyu.

The effect of the cognitive distortion had already been lifted, and Qi Si easily recalled the whole story of how she replaced Li Yao and mingled into the player group.

The mysteries were being unraveled one by one; in typical melodramatic plots, either someone is about to die, or the instance is about to end.

Qi Si leaned against the wall and asked with a smile: “Is Du Xiaoyu dead?”

“Dead.” Xu Yao also revealed a smile, but the smile had no warmth, and even her gaze looking at Qi Si was like looking at a corpse.

Qi Si didn’t mind this: “Now it seems I should be able to leave alive. Do you have anything to tell me?”

Xu Yao retorted: “What do you want to know?”

Qi Si lifted his eyelids to look at her: “For example, why you are entrenched in this town, killing those who stumble into it.”

Xu Yao giggled “hee hee,” her laughter like silver bells, revealing a touch of a young girl’s coquettishness.

“We have been trapped at the bottom of the well for too long, so as soon as He proposed that He could help us leave, I agreed to His deal. As long as I do my best to kill the people who come to the town, after a hundred years, I and all the girls trapped in the town can be resurrected. Even if I can’t leave myself, just being able to let them leave is worth it in my view.”

Qi Si asked tepidly: “Have you ever calculated that the people you are killing now likely already outnumber the people you can save in the future?”

“Heh, so what?” Xu Yao laughed mockingly, “Anyway, most of the people I kill are damned men, and the occasional few women are also birds of a feather with those stinking men, meddling and wanting to save them—it’s better that they die!”

Her eyes brewed with undisguised resentment and viciousness, and she seemed to deeply believe in her own logic.

Qi Si nodded as if taught a lesson, the smile on his lips deepening: “Using oppositional thinking to divide the population into different groups, exchanging the death of one group for the life of another—a very twisted utilitarian way of thinking, interesting.”

“But it’s very effective.” Xu Yao’s expression remained unchanged.

Qi Si shook his head and sighed: “This shows that you still consider yourself a human. Do Ghosts need a reason to kill? Not killing requires a reason, doesn’t it? Honestly, I quite like Xu Wen’s perspective: you kill them simply because you are stronger than them.”

Xu Yao widened her eyes, looking at Qi Si as if looking at a lunatic, almost asking, “Am I the Ghost or are you the Ghost?”

Qi Si looked at the woman’s shocked expression, knowing that the other party could not understand his interests, and couldn’t help but feel a sense of isolation and loneliness, losing interest.

He stroked the Pocket Watch of Fate on his wrist and changed the subject: “By the way—after you died for so long, have you ever seen ‘him’ again?”

Xu Yao’s expression changed: “You saw him? Where is he?”