Monday, January 4th. The staff of Yangfan Studio returned to work.

With a quarter of an hour still to go before the official start of business, those who had arrived early were clustered together catching up.

“Wings of Dreams really outdid themselves this time — their new game launches, and the whole thing ends up making Palace Storm look like a masterpiece by comparison.”

“I tried City of Home myself. Got my motorbike wedged into a wall corner and couldn’t get out. That’s when I knew it was finished.”

“Ha! Nothing like a little healthy competition. Do you think the year-end bonuses will be six figures again? I’ve had my eye on a new car…”

The mention of bonuses made everyone’s eyes light up.

The previous spring, Xie Yunfan had handed out year-end bonuses running into six figures — a number so staggering that half the office had stared at their bank alerts in disbelief. No one had imagined the boss would be so generous.

Spring Festival was still a month away, and this year’s bonuses would be calculated against Palace Storm‘s revenue. The holographic RPG had maintained consistently strong earnings throughout its run. Knowing the boss’s track record, another six-figure payout wasn’t out of the question.

Shi Xiaoyu from the art team quietly pulled up her banking app. A year and a half at Yangfan Studio, and she had already put away two hundred thousand yuan. At this rate, buying her own apartment and car wasn’t a distant fantasy — it was a matter of when. She, who no one had expected much of, had quietly become the highest earner in her graduating class.

Chu Yue was in much the same position. Currently serving as deputy team lead of the art group and director of environment concept art, he had managed to save a considerable sum in just two years out of university. Yangfan Studio provided a meal subsidy, so most staff ate in the canteen. If you didn’t smoke or drink, there was genuinely nowhere for your salary to go — which meant most of it ended up sitting in savings every month. Factor in the year-end bonus, and sudden wealth was only a matter of time.

Shi Xiaoyu turned to him curiously. “Yue-ge, Palace Storm probably won’t be getting any more updates, right? Do you think the boss is going to greenlight a new project?”

Chu Yue smiled. “Our boss has a boundless imagination. Whatever the next game is, he’s already got it mapped out in his head. All we have to do is keep up.”

Before anyone could respond, Ning Sha knocked and poked her head in. “Everyone — the nine o’clock meeting in the conference center. Let’s get moving.”

---

The conference center filled quickly.

There were plenty of faces from Qihang in the room alongside the Yangfan staff — a clear sign that the next game would once again be a joint venture between the two companies.

The partnership had been smooth for the better part of a year. The occasional friction got resolved quickly, usually with both founders steering things back on track. Some people had started speculating quietly: “Is Director Luo actually putting down roots in Rongcheng?”

Luo Hang hadn’t returned to Qihang’s headquarters in the capital for a full six months since opening the local branch. He was a fixture in Building A, showing up to find Xie Yunfan so regularly that some people had started treating his presence as background scenery.

True to form, he walked into the conference room today at Xie Yunfan’s side.

Xie Yunfan picked up the microphone. “Welcome back, everyone. The holiday’s over. We’ll start this morning by looking at what Palace Storm actually achieved.”

He brought up a summary deck. Month-by-month charts laid out the game’s performance in clean, readable terms — playership numbers, revenue figures, the arc of a hit that had stayed hot across six months since its August launch. Total gross revenue had cleared the six billion yuan mark.

Of course, the upfront costs of holographic game development were significant, and with profits split between the two companies, the net take was lower than Journey to the West in absolute terms. But by any measure of the holographic market over the past year, Palace Storm had been an exceptional performer.

Xie Yunfan looked genuinely pleased. “Bringing intelligent NPCs into a holographic game was an experiment neither Director Luo nor I had done before, and the results far exceeded what either of us expected. You all made this happen — and you should know it.”

The applause from the floor was warm.

“Spring Festival is next month,” he continued. “I’ve already spoken to Finance. This week, everyone will receive last year’s year-end bonuses.”

Luo Hang added his voice: “Same on the Qihang side. Bonuses out this week. Go into the holiday with peace of mind.”

The applause this time was louder.

Once it settled, Xie Yunfan resumed. “Palace Storm has now received its full content roadmap. The Faction War mode landed well with players, and we should be able to ride that momentum for a few more months yet.”

He paused and glanced at Luo Hang. “Director Luo and I have agreed: we’re moving quickly on the next project.”

Every person in the room sat up a little straighter. What was the boss going to build this time?

Xie Yunfan opened a prepared proposal document. “Quick show of hands — how many of you have played Werewolf?”

More than half the room raised a hand.

“Good. The game we’re making this time is best understood as Werewolf — but with defined characters and a real story. It goes by another name: murder mystery.”

The room exchanged glances.

Murder mystery games didn’t exist in this world. But Werewolf was popular enough among young people that most of them had played it at least once during university. Murder mystery — that sounded more elaborate. As a holographic game, it was intriguing.

Xie Yunfan explained. “In a murder mystery scenario, each player has a character identity and a background story. They’ve gathered in one location for some reason — and someone in the room is a killer. The other players must reason their way to the truth through deduction and investigation.”

“Director Luo and I have decided to approach this in two phases. Phase one: we play to our strengths and build something in the ancient style, drawing on the player base we’ve built through Ghost Realm and Palace Storm while also attracting puzzle and mystery enthusiasts who want to try holographic murder mystery.”

“Once the game has built its name and momentum, phase two: we expand. Modern settings, sci-fi scenarios, entirely new mystery frameworks.”

“Beyond that, we plan to open a player portal and establish a rights management division. Players who write their own scripts can submit them. We’ll vet and produce the ones that clear the bar, and offer revenue sharing to reward the creators.”

“At that point, the game becomes something more than a murder mystery game. It becomes a large-scale murder mystery platform — a space for social play and creative collaboration.”

“That’s where the game’s longevity comes from. Players feeding creativity back into the system, keeping the content fresh indefinitely.”

“Everything Yangfan has made until now has been a short-cycle project. Journey to the West ran for six months of updates. Palace Storm wrapped its full content rollout in six months as well.”

“If this murder mystery game finds its footing, it becomes something we operate for the long term — new scripts every month, no ceiling on content, no natural endpoint.”

“The possibilities don’t run out, because the scripts don’t run out.”

Silence — and then a wave of barely contained excitement.

The boss just thought differently.

Other companies were still asking themselves how to make a game profitable. He was already thinking about turning a game into an open creative platform.

If a holographic murder mystery platform actually took off, the implications were staggering. Thousands of players submitting scripts. Talented people from all corners of the country contributing their ideas. The writing team would never have to worry about running dry. A design philosophy that respected players would earn their loyalty in return.

And for skilled player-creators whose scripts went on to become popular — this game could make them rich overnight.

Official curation to keep quality high. Player participation to keep content limitless. This game could outlast all of them — four years, five years, eight, ten. And eventually, they’d all be watching the revenue roll in without lifting a finger.

Compared to Wings of Dream, who had rushed a half-finished product to market days ago only to watch their stock crater — Xie Yunfan’s philosophy of planting for the future rather than grabbing for today was quietly extraordinary.

---

Xie Yunfan walked them through the production timeline.

A public beta in four months. Monthly content updates thereafter. A spin-off expansion by year’s end.

Because the murder mystery format was built on self-contained instances driven almost entirely by narrative, the critical path ran through the writing team. The other departments would be pacing themselves to the writers’ output.

That said, the instance-based architecture was a relief for the engineering and data teams. Isolated instances were far less prone to cascading bugs than a seamlessly interconnected world — and when issues did appear, they were contained and fixable. Compared to Palace Storm, where touching one element could ripple across the entire game, this was a much more forgiving structure to work in.

After the meeting, Xie Yunfan and Luo Hang walked back up together to the twenty-first floor office.

Xie Xinhe was already there waiting. When the two of them came through the door, he crossed the room immediately. “Yunfan, I’ve finished negotiating with the campus property manager.”

Luo Hang looked over. “Negotiating what?”

“I’m renting the entire Building A,” Xie Yunfan said.

Xie Xinhe grinned. “Good thing I moved quickly. Two other companies had been eyeing floors below ours — contracts hadn’t been signed yet, so I got there first. They’ve gone to look at other buildings. The whole tower is ours now.”

The building had over thirty floors. When Xie Yunfan had first moved in, he’d rented one. Then it wasn’t enough, so he’d expanded to five. By the time Palace Storm was in development, they were occupying eight floors.

The pace of expansion said something about this world — the AI-assisted tools available here had compressed production cycles to a degree that would have been unimaginable in his previous life. In two and a half years since arriving, he had shipped four hit games. Back home, one game in two years would have been considered fast.

He had genuinely underestimated, early on, how fast a game company in this world could grow and earn. Now that he understood it clearly, he’d asked his brother to move ahead and lock down the whole building before someone else took what they’d eventually need.

“You won’t use all of it anytime soon,” Luo Hang observed.

“We’ll get there,” Xie Yunfan said, with the calm certainty of someone who had already run the numbers. “Better to design and fit it out properly over time than to scramble for space later.”

Luo Hang rubbed his jaw, thoughtful. “In that case, I should probably get ahead of myself and take Building B.”

Xie Xinhe laughed. “Director Luo — are you planting your flag in Rongcheng? Becoming our permanent neighbor?”

“Is that unwelcome?” Luo Hang asked, with a mild smile.

“Of course not,” Xie Yunfan said. “If The Cases of Di Renjie and the murder mystery platform that follows it become long-running operations, we’ll need a dedicated project team — dedicated space, dedicated people, long-term. A project like that starts at a hundred staff, minimum. We’ll each pull some people in, set up the Murder Mystery team together, and base them here.”

He paused, then added with quiet deliberation: “And when we eventually build a large-scale online game, that’ll need its own independent team as well. You might as well take Building B now while you can.”

Luo Hang nodded without hesitation. “Done. Between the two buildings, we’ll have more headcount than Wings of Dream’s entire headquarters.”

They looked at each other and smiled.

Xie Yunfan hadn’t said it outright, but Luo Hang understood. The goal had never been this plot of ground. The goal was open ocean.

This little sailboat would, one day, become something much larger — something built to cross every sea. And Luo Hang was content to sail alongside it.

---

January 5th. Recruitment notices appeared simultaneously across every major job platform in the country.

Yangfan Studio — New Year Hiring. We’re looking for you.

The response was immediate.

Yangfan Studio had become the most compelling dark horse in the industry — two years old, four hit games, a reputation for treating its people exceptionally well, minimal overtime, and year-end bonuses that reportedly ran into six figures.

The new posting opened positions across every department.

What puzzled people was the inclusion of two departments that had never been listed before: rights management, and legal affairs.

Yangfan Studio was setting up its own rights division? Were they planning to acquire IP from smaller studios or student creators for adaptation?

Applications flooded in.

In the industry, the announcement landed differently. Those who saw it felt a cold knot form somewhere in their stomachs.

The little sailboat is loading up for another big move.

Liu Muyao, head of HR, was already at her limit. The department spent most of the year in relative calm — but whenever the boss authorized a recruitment drive, the volume of incoming applications became physically overwhelming.

Somehow, over the past two years, Yangfan Studio had become the first-choice destination for game design graduates across the country. Students from some of the top universities were fighting for spots.

This round alone had generated hundreds of high-quality applications from every province. Liu Muyao had been sorting through them until her vision blurred.

The competition had gotten steeper every year. The early employees who had boarded this ship at the very beginning genuinely had no idea how lucky they’d been. The acceptance rate now was frightening.

On January 15th, Xie Yunfan sat in on interviews alongside the team leads, running the latest cohort of candidates through the studio’s now well-known holographic group interview format — efficient enough that other companies had started copying it.

Around fifty people were selected. Every department gained new members, and Xie Yunfan made a point of extending chances to fresh graduates.

For the newly formed rights management department, he hired a woman named Yi Yang, who had spent years at a film and television company handling IP acquisition. The entertainment industry and the games industry were different worlds, but the core of rights acquisition was the same in both: market instinct and the ability to recognize a good story.

Murder mystery lived or died on whether its stories were worth telling. Yi Yang, leading the negotiations and acquisitions for player-submitted scripts, seemed like exactly the right person.

The new hires cleared background checks and started officially on January 20th.

Xie Yunfan asked each team lead to mentor the newcomers personally. As they were still in their probationary period, the new staff wouldn’t be involved in anything at the core of the project — they’d be assisting with secondary work and learning the rhythms of their departments.

---

January 20th. The Cases of Di Renjie entered formal development.

The art team started on NPC concept art. The writing team began work on scripts.

Ye Xiang, despite his experience as a screenwriter, had never written a murder mystery before. After several days of considerable struggle, he produced a story outline and brought it to Xie Yunfan. Xie Yunfan read it and, without ceremony, rejected it.

He gathered the writing team’s senior members for a small working session and explained patiently: “This case is too transparent. I could identify the killer from the first page.”

“Try expanding your frame. Imagine a wealthy merchant who throws a birthday banquet for family and close friends. The following morning, he’s found dead in his bedroom — and the door was locked from the inside, with no sign that anyone had entered. A locked-room murder. Every guest becomes a suspect. Players are watching each other, sealing off the scene, hunting for evidence—”

“Or consider this: a manor house where a murder occurred years ago. Now, for different reasons, various people have found their way back — one of them the killer who was never caught. Years have passed and most of the evidence is long gone. Clues buried in a dry well, under a tree, maybe inside a grave. Layer in ghost stories and local legends. Make it unsettling. Players searching for a killer while everything around them is designed to make their skin crawl.”

“A murder mystery doesn’t have to be an active crime in progress. It can be a cold case — told in retrospect, pieced back together from what remains.”

“Every playable character needs a full backstory: where they came from, who they are, why their behavior makes sense given what they know and want. The internal logic has to hold.”

“And players need choreography. On a given day, at a given hour, a given character should be in a given place — for a reason that fits their story. That structure gives players a sense of real participation.”

Ye Xiang scratched his head. “I think I follow. Each player has a different character, and their objectives can vary from player to player?”

“Exactly. The character playing the killer is trying not to be caught. Among the others, some might be covering for the killer, some are trying to expose them, and some have no stake in the case at all — they’re there for their own reasons, chasing their own goals. That gives you multiple factions operating inside the same story.”

Ye Xiang nodded slowly. “Got it. A more layered script has more than just killer and detective — you can bring in third-party players with their own agendas. That makes the whole thing much richer.”

Zhou Shiyue raised her hand. “The game is called The Cases of Di Renjie — so what’s Di Renjie’s actual role? How do we design him?”

“He’s the moderator,” Xie Yunfan said. “He guides players, keeps the experience from descending into chaos, signals when the game’s moving forward or hitting a new phase. And at the end, he steps forward in his official capacity to lay out the truth — what actually happened, and how.”

Zhou Shiyue looked relieved. “I thought, given your setup, Di Renjie was going to be this brilliant detective who just… solves everything for the players.”

Xie Yunfan smiled. “That would take the game away from them — just following a genius and watching him win. We’re making a game, not filming a drama. Di Renjie’s presence can’t eclipse the players. He’s there to move the story forward, to push players toward the truth — not to find it for them.”

“Right,” Zhou Shiyue said. “He’s the narrative guide — basically the same role as the judge in Werewolf.”

Shen Xingye spoke up. “Can the player running the killer actually win? Can our players be the villain?”

“Of course. Same logic as Werewolf — the wolves can win too. The outcome is entirely in the players’ hands.”

---

The writing team spent the entire morning in animated discussion with the boss, and by the end of it, the internal logic of murder mystery design had become much clearer.

Back at their desks, Ye Xiang started assigning work.

With murder mystery, every script was its own closed world — having everyone try to build one together would only create confusion. He asked each writer to develop a story outline independently first, then they’d reconvene, pool the best ideas, and refine collaboratively.

That way the initial creative work could happen without interference. And once a script was complete, any logic problems that surfaced could be caught and fixed in relative isolation.

Zhou Shiyue was a novelist by nature — building characters and plots was second instinct to her. Within three days she had produced a complete mystery scenario with multiple reversals woven through the resolution.

Shen Xingye had a gift for emotional texture. Her scenario centered on a group of sisters, built around a revenge arc — and the moment the truth came to light hit in a way that was quietly devastating.

Ye Xiang’s imagination pulled toward the unsettling. He drafted two horror-inflected scenarios: one built around a ghost marriage, one around a haunting legend. Paired with the right visuals from the art team — the right lighting, the right atmosphere, the right emptiness in the rooms—

Players searching for a murderer while a crime scene tried its best to terrify them. The thought alone was enough to make the scalp prickle.

---

Spring Festival that year fell on February 4th. Yangfan Studio observed the full holiday.

When everyone returned to work, Xie Yunfan found four murder mystery outlines waiting for him from the writing team.

He read through each of them carefully, more than once.

Zhou Shiyue’s The Fortune Inn. Shen Xingye’s The Five-Year Promise. Ye Xiang’s Midnight Terror and The Embroidered Shoe.

He called Ye Xiang in and put a hand on his shoulder. “Your two horror scripts. They scared me.”

Ye Xiang laughed and rubbed the back of his neck. “I was pretty fired up writing them. Not sure how the players will take it.”

“Don’t worry about that. Our players handled the Ghost Realm setting just fine. We’ll include a horror rating on each script — that alone will draw in players who want exactly that.”

“Do these outlines actually pass?” Ye Xiang asked.

“The stories hold up. The player action paths and clue placements need more detail — I’d recommend doing internal run-throughs before you bring them back to me. Walk through each script yourselves.”

“Play through it ourselves?”

“That’s the only way to find the logic gaps. Take a week, run them internally, smooth out everything you catch, then let me see the finished versions.”

“Understood!”

With the writing team’s frameworks in place, the art team moved quickly into character illustration.

A week later, all four outlines had been refined to a genuinely strong level, and the art side was progressing smoothly. The other teams began syncing up.

Xie Yunfan noticed that the early development phase of this project was running significantly smoother than Palace Storm had.

The instance-based format helped. There was no need to build and maintain the extensive intelligent NPC infrastructure that Palace Storm had required. The writing team could divide the scriptwriting work cleanly between them.

And each writer’s voice was already distinct enough to be an asset.

Zhou Shiyue led in structural ingenuity and plot reversals. Shen Xingye handled emotional undercurrents with precision. Ye Xiang owned the space where imagination turned strange and dark.

Between them, they could cover a wide range of player tastes. Players who preferred one flavor of mystery would find their scripts; players who wanted something entirely different would find those too. A single dominant tone would eventually wear thin. Variety was a feature.

At this pace, there was a real chance the game could be ready ahead of schedule — potentially shipping in three months rather than four.