“Oh my, oh my, this guest seems a bit shy, doesn’t she? Don’t worry, don’t worry. Once I finish the introduction, she’ll naturally feel more at ease.”
“Your name is Bella. You were born in Siberia in the year 2000. The Second Eruption took your parents from you. From that day on, you made a decision: no matter the cost, I will defeat the Honkai.”
“After that, you held onto that belief and worked hard, bit by bit. You once thought about joining Schicksal and becoming a Valkyrie, but by chance, you learned that your mother’s death was closely tied to Schicksal’s Overseer. So you fled Schicksal and went off on your own…”
Although Bella had no idea what the puppet in front of her was talking about, she was certain that the content had nothing to do with her own experiences—not even close.
Defeat the Honkai? Her? Was she supposed to put on a show called “I Kill Myself”?
Protect world peace? Protect the weak? In Bella’s eyes, if Sirin’s ideas ever conflicted with universal values, then universal values had to be the problem. If the whole world stood against Sirin, then it wasn’t Sirin who was wrong—it was the world.
Put simply, whether Bella was good or bad depended entirely on Sirin’s subjective judgment.
Who knows how much time passed, but the puppet who had been talking up a storm finally stopped, because she noticed that Bella showed no reaction to her words at all—only confusion.
“What’s going on? Why is there no reaction…”
Bella scratched her head and took the initiative to ask:
“Um… are you sure you’ve got the right person? These experiences… more than ninety percent of them have nothing to do with me.”
Clearly, this was Enoxia’s handiwork. She had stitched together other people’s experiences and arbitrarily pinned them onto Bella.
When it comes to spreading information online, what is the one thing that is needed the least? In Enoxia’s opinion, it was objectivity and fairness.
Because she believed that the main thing people do when they go online is seek emotional value.
Seeking emotional value, in other words, means wanting to see what they want to see and not wanting to see what they don’t want to see.
Before someone watches a person’s evaluation of something, they often already have a conclusion in their heart. If the content of the video aligns almost perfectly with what they already think, they’ll consider the creator objective and fair. On the contrary, if the video’s viewpoint contradicts what they believe, they’ll think the creator is spouting nonsense.
For self-media, the most efficient way to profit is to provide a specific group with the emotional value they need. As long as you find the emotional value they’re looking for, there will naturally be people willing to pay. As for objectivity and fairness—those are the least necessary things.
Compared to objective and fair facts, humans clearly prefer hearing conclusions that align with their own views.
Maybe this still sounds a bit abstract. Take a certain well-known company in the mobile game circle—a circle that’s already a total mess. Some people believe this company is the root of all evil, that everything is caused by them. All the drama was stirred up by that company’s loyalists. So at this point, as long as someone stirs up related drama, even if the drama itself is completely illogical, a huge crowd will cheer and egg it on. Anyone who questions it, regardless of whether they’ve ever played that company’s games, gets labeled a loyalist.
On the flip side, there’s a group of people who believe this company is pure and innocent, and that any drama must have been stirred up by hired water armies from competitor companies. So at this point, as long as someone praises how amazing this company is, even if the content completely contradicts reality, people will wave flags and cheer. If anyone questions it at this point, they’re labeled a competitor’s loyalist.
Because they never care about the truth. They only care about whether their emotional value can be satisfied. Questioning them is an act that disrupts the emotional value they want to obtain.
As for the people providing emotional value—if they push emotional value for greater profit and end up crashing? No problem. If things really go wrong, they just call it a large-scale social experiment.
Objective fairness in universal values is the most worthless thing in all of this. If anyone chooses to mediate and take a middle ground, they’ll definitely be treated as a “rational neutral” by both sides and attacked by both.
These mediators might have good intentions, but they fail to see the essence of things. Whether it’s gaming or any other field, drama has always worked like this: if you believe it, it’s real; if you don’t, it’s fake.
For example, a certain company has weathered so much drama and still holds such a large market share. Many people don’t investigate and don’t want to investigate—they just subjectively assume it’s because of a “big hand behind the scenes.”
And when a game developed by Enoxia has a problem, the drama disappears before it can even spread—of course, because there really is a big hand behind the scenes.
The healthy community environment of “Phantom Skies Brawl” is, of course, maintained by Enoxia using methods that transcend any law.
From the game’s launch to now, all kinds of trolls, moles, water armies, and fanatics—already five digits’ worth—have permanently lost their lives. Trolls and water armies might be gloating one second over stirring up conflict and opposition between players, and the next second, a corrosive virus travels straight through the internet cable into their bodies and ends their lives.
Based on this understanding, after the Thousand-Agent Herrscher appeared, Enoxia fabricated a Bella who never existed, based on other people’s experiences.
Of course, the Thousand-Agent Herrscher’s ability to gather intelligence was terrifying—otherwise, they wouldn’t have known Dark Seele’s deepest weak points so clearly. But they ran into Enoxia, who could edit information at will.
Without a doubt, when the Thousand-Agent Herrscher was looking for mission targets, they must have used the internet to filter suitable candidates.
And Enoxia, through all the major platforms, spread information about this character who didn’t actually exist. Once she’d gained some fame, she took down all related videos and banned a batch of accounts. But when taking them down, she deliberately made the related content on self-media accounts with overseas IPs disappear last.
This way, many people would think it was fake news. But there are always people who believe that only re-uploads are the sole criterion for testing truth—that the more severely someone is punished, the more the authorities ban them, the closer their words are to the so-called “truth of society.”
And the extremely world-weary Thousand-Agent Herrscher—rather than normal ways of thinking, they of course prefer imagining nonexistent content, then engaging in conspiracy theories and intense struggle.
Of course, before the Thousand-Agent Herrscher finalized their target, they still went to Schicksal’s classified database to check. Sure enough, they found records of a “Valkyrie Bella who once joined Schicksal and quickly left.”
Rumors and classified documents corroborated each other, while mainstream media kept silent. Now everything lined up. A figure who aspired to save the world but was persecuted by the authorities had appeared. After exploring through various means, the conclusion they reached was completely consistent with what they already believed. Now they had no choice but to believe it.
Except, no matter how classified Schicksal’s database was, to Enoxia it was just text that could be edited at any time.
Any information that humans on Earth can receive might be something Enoxia wants certain people to see. The entire world itself is the biggest information cocoon.
July 1st, night, at Enoxia’s home.
“Although at least for now, the entire Earth hasn’t been affected by the mysterious Aeon [Mythus], as long as you control all the media, playing the role of a fictional historian isn’t difficult at all.”
“When domestic mainstream media, foreign mainstream media, domestic self-media, and foreign self-media all spread fake news about the same event, then in the eyes of the vast majority of people, the conclusion formed by countless cross-corroborating pieces of fake news is the truth in their perception.”
“Huh, the connection with Bella has been cut? Good… The smiles on the Thousand-Agent Herrscher’s faces will disappear very soon…”
