The soft glow from the phone screen illuminated Grant's face in the darkened room. It had worked. Like a patient hunter who had waited for hours in the brush, he had used a single, silver bullet of inspiration to strike his prey with surgical precision.
The tension that had been wound tight in Grant's chest for days finally released. He exhaled slowly, the sound lost against the hum of Arthur's computer fans. He shifted his grip on the phone, his fingertips tapping the screen with a calm, rhythmic speed.
"I am an independent game producer," he typed. "This image is a core concept design for a project I am currently developing. It doesn't have a formal title yet—only a code name: Outlast."
"I've been searching for an artist who can understand the soul of this nightmare. I've looked through hundreds of portfolios, but none of them had the 'wrongness' I was looking for. Until I saw your work."
"Sophie, I am officially inviting you to join my team. Let's make people afraid of the dark again."
In her cramped, cluttered rental room on the other side of the city, Sophie Lee stared intently at her phone. The "Cute Heart-Kitty" commission lay forgotten on her digital tablet, its pink ears and sparkling eyes looking like a grotesque joke compared to the green-tinted horror on her screen.
An independent producer? An invitation?
Her first reaction wasn't joy. It was a cold, sharp spike of wariness. In the freelance art world, "independent producer" was often code for "guy with no money and a bad idea." She had heard too many stories of artists being lured into "shell teams" built on nothing but hot air and stolen assets. She looked at Grant's profile—no picture, no history. Just a blank slate.
She took a deep breath, her heart hammering against her ribs. She needed to know if this was real.
"How many people are on the team?" she typed back, her fingers trembling. "What is the core gameplay? Besides this concept art, do you have detailed settings? A design doc?"
She asked quickly, urgently, as if she were interrogating a suspect—or perhaps, as if she were desperately searching for a single reason to walk away before she got her hopes up.
Grant's reply arrived almost instantly.
"Currently, the team consists of two people: a lead programmer and myself as the designer. But soon, there will be a third: a world-class artist."
The sheer, arrogant confidence in that text made Sophie's heart skip a beat. Before she could process it, a second message arrived.
"As for the core gameplay... you play as an unarmed journalist. Your only tool is a digital video camera with night vision. You infiltrate the long-abandoned Mount Massive Asylum to investigate a dark truth that has been buried for decades."
"You cannot fight. You cannot cast spells. You can only hide and run. You use the lens to record every moment of madness while trying to find a way out. Your enemies aren't just the twisted 'patients' roaming the halls—it's the despair of the asylum itself. It's an abyss, Sophie. And I need you to draw what's at the bottom of it."
Line after line of text acted like a scalpel, meticulously dissecting Sophie's artistic soul.
A journalist. A camera. An asylum. Powerless to fight, but destined to record.
These elements combined into a fatal attraction. This was the exact artistic expression she had been chasing in her private sketches—the ones she never showed anyone because they were "too dark" or "unmarketable." This was the ultimate subjective perspective. This was the beauty of powerless confrontation.
She realized then that this wasn't a scam. No scammer would understand the nuance of "powerless recording" this deeply.
Meanwhile, at the other end of their makeshift studio, Arthur was irritably scratching his already thinning hair. His eyes were bloodshot, reflecting the dense, tangled lines of code crisscrossing his dual-monitor setup.
"No, this lighting algorithm is still trash," he muttered, the words thick with exhaustion. A thin layer of cigarette ash had accumulated on his keyboard.
"I don't want simple darkness," he growled, slamming a hand on the desk. "I want a layered, dynamic atmosphere of horror. I want the shadows to feel alive, like they're breathing and reaching for the player. The existing engine modules can't do it. I have to rewrite the rendering pipeline from scratch, but the math... the math isn't adding up."
To achieve the unique "DV night-vision" texture Grant had described, Arthur had pulled two consecutive all-nighters. He was a coding god, but he was hitting a wall with the dynamic shadow algorithms.
Grant put down his phone and walked over. He stood silently, watching the complex stream of C++ on the screen. He knew Arthur's technical level was elite, but like everyone in this world, Arthur was a prisoner of existing paradigms.
Grant closed his eyes and summoned the System.
> [System, exchange for 'Dynamic Shadow Rendering Technology'.]
> [Warning: This item will consume 370 Reputation Points. Confirm?]
>
Confirm.
> [Reputation Points: 20 remaining.]
> [Core algorithm 'Total Darkness' issued to Host.]
>
A flood of high-level mathematics and rendering logic filled Grant's mind—technology from a world that had perfected the art of the jump-scare. He leaned over Arthur's shoulder and pointed to a specific line of code.
"Arthur, have you ever thought about abandoning traditional baked textures?" he asked casually, as if he were suggesting a different brand of coffee. "What if we use a screen-space-based real-time calculation for ambient occlusion?"
Arthur paused, his fingers hovering over the keys. "Real-time calculation? For an indie project? The overhead would be—"
"Not if we simulate the noise generation logic of a camera's CMOS sensor," Grant interrupted. "Bind the noise to the shadow edges. Use the jitter to mask the calculation gaps. You don't need a perfect shadow if the 'camera' is imperfect."
Arthur snapped his head up, looking at Grant as if he had just watched a man walk through a wall.
"Bind the noise... to the jitter..." Arthur whispered. He looked back at his code. The logic clicked. It wasn't just an inspiration; it was a complete, self-consistent solution that far surpassed any mainstream technology currently used by the giants like Global Nexus or Xunyou.
"Where did you learn that?" Arthur asked, his voice filled with a mix of shock and pure, unadulterated admiration.
"I have a lot of ideas, Arthur," Grant said with a smirk. "You just focus on making the shadows breathe."
Ding.
"Is it convenient for a video call?" Sophie had sent a new message. She needed to see the faces behind the vision. She needed to know if she was joining a revolution or a sinking ship.
"Of course," Grant replied.
When the video connected, Sophie's heart sank. She didn't see a bright, high-tech office with ergonomic chairs and a fridge full of organic snacks.
She saw a cramped, messy apartment.
She saw one man with bird-nest hair and dark circles so deep they looked like bruises, frantically typing at a desk piled with empty ramen cups. She saw another man—the one she assumed was the producer—who looked young, far too young to be an industry titan.
This is the team?
Hesitation resurfaced on Sophie's face. She almost reached for the 'End Call' button.
Grant didn't try to hide the mess. He panned the phone camera around the room, showing the tangled cables, the makeshift desks, and the single window overlooking a gray alley.
"As you can see, we have no office," Grant said, his voice calm and resonant. "We have no venture capital, no marketing budget, and no pretty PowerPoint presentations to show investors."
"We are just two guys who walked away from the biggest companies in the country with nothing but our laptops and a refusal to make another piece of 'pay-to-win' garbage."
He looked directly into the camera, his eyes burning with a conviction that seemed to radiate through the screen. "Our only capital is my belief that Outlast will become the 'Singularity' of this industry. We aren't building a game, Sophie. We're building a legend. And I want you to paint it."
Sincerity is the ultimate weapon.
Sophie fell silent. She looked at the two men—one a genius coder, the other a visionary leader—working in a space that was basically a bunker. She felt a strange, electric thrill. It was the same feeling she got when she drew something that truly scared her.
"I... I'm a dropout from the Academy of Fine Arts," she said softly, sharing her own secret for the first time. "My tutors told me my style was 'morbid.' They told me it was niche and unmarketable. They told me I'd never work in the industry unless I started drawing cute, pink kittens."
Suddenly, a news notification flashed at the top of her phone.
[Xunyou Network's 'Chibi Mecha Squad' surpasses 500,000 pre-registrations!]
She saw Grant's expression change the moment he glimpsed the notification. His face didn't just turn solemn—it turned cold. A mixture of ancient resentment and sharp, focused anger flashed in his eyes.
"That game," Sophie asked tentatively, "the mecha one. You know it?"
"That game," Grant said, his voice dropping an octave, "stole my life's work. They took a hardcore mecha dream and turned it into a plastic toy for a cash-grab."
The puzzle pieces clicked into place for Sophie. This wasn't just a business. This was a war. It was the "little guys" with the big ideas versus the corporate machines that ground creativity into dust.
She thought about the "Heart-making Kitty" on her tablet. She thought about her tutors' dismissive words. And then she looked at the green-tinted eyes of the patient under the bed in the concept art Grant had sent her.
She gripped her phone tight. Her gaze was firmer than it had ever been in her life.
"I'm in," she said.
"I don't care about the money. I don't care about the risk. I just want to prove to all of them—the tutors, the big corporations, everyone—that true art doesn't need a billion-dollar platform to change the world."
The trio was complete.
That night, Sophie arrived at the apartment with nothing but her high-end drawing tablet and a small suitcase. There were no formalities.
"The first level is the Administrative Block," Grant said, laying out the floor plans he had 'retrieved' from the System's version of Outlast. "Sophie, I need the walls to look like they're sweating. I want the blood to look old, dried, and brown—not that bright red 'game' blood. Arthur, the AI logic for 'Chris Walker' needs to be implemented. He shouldn't just kill the player; he should toy with them."
"On it," Arthur grunted, already back in the flow.
Sophie sat down at her tablet. For the first time in years, she wasn't drawing a kitty or a sparkling prince. She began to sketch a hallway. It was dark, narrow, and damp. She added a single flickering light. She added a trail of something dark smeared against the floorboards.
She felt alive.
As the sun began to rise over the city, the "Singularity" studio was a hive of frantic, creative energy. They were working in a rented room, eating cold noodles, and risking everything on a game that went against every market trend.
But as the first playable build of the Outlast demo began to take shape on Arthur's screen, Grant knew.
Xunyou Network was celebrating 500,000 pre-registrations for a toy game.
Singularity was preparing to release a nightmare that would make those 500,000 people forget everything else.
"The era of garbage is over," Grant whispered, his eyes fixed on the flickering green night-vision screen. "Let the games begin."
.