You were supposed to have a fake marriage with the diva, so how did you become her father?

In the third week since its release, the European server data for "Bloody Battle of Shanghai" is almost unbelievably good.

During the morning meeting, Zhou Mingzhe projected the backend report onto the big screen. The download curve hadn't gone down since the first day of release. After hovering for three days, it bounced up a bit and then maintained a slow but steady upward trend.

The combined downloads from the four European countries and the two North American nodes have exceeded ten million.

"I've never seen a single-player game reach this level of popularity before," Zhou Mingzhe said, pointing to the data on the screen with a calm tone that suggested he knew this would happen. "And look at the retention rate, completion rate, and replay rate—they're all high. Many players have gone back to play it a second or third time after completing it, and some have said on forums that they discover new hidden routes and plot details every time."

Zhao Yiming, sitting by the window, added after listening, "Good optimization is also a factor. This game runs even smoother on mid-to-low-end machines than we expected; even students using older laptops can play it smoothly. That alone makes it better than most single-player games on the market. Those AAA titles from big companies often require certain configurations that many computers can't handle, but this one doesn't; even an office laptop from a few years ago can run it."

Lu Ran sat at one end of the long table without saying a word, twirling a pen in his hand. Only after they finished their report did he speak: "What's the sentiment in the comments section?"

The operations team chimed in, "The sentiment is very positive. The vast majority of comments are positive, with negative feedback mainly focusing on the difficulty of the controls. There are two levels that are indeed quite difficult, and some players are complaining that they can't get past them. We've done the statistics, and the levels with the highest pass rates are the seventh and ninth, both of which are urban warfare scenarios with high enemy density, complex terrain, and few ammo resupply points. Someone joked on the forum that 'the older generation had it much harder than we did,' and that comment received tens of thousands of likes, with everyone commenting 'respect'."

Lu Ran nodded and didn't ask any further questions.

He knew why those two levels were designed to be difficult.

The seventh level is a street battle scene set against the backdrop of the Battle of Shanghai. Players need to pass through a street that has been mostly destroyed by bombing. The buildings on both sides are full of firing positions of Japanese soldiers, and there are two heavy machine guns mounted behind sandbags directly in front.

There was almost no chance of a direct assault using normal tactics. The only option was to go around the half-collapsed buildings along the street, climb up floor by floor, climb out of the second-floor windows, and sneak along the edge of the outer wall to the side of the machine gun emplacement.

The internal structure of those buildings was restored by the design team based on old photos and city archives.

The stairs were broken in one section, and you had to jump up by stepping on the broken bricks.

The room still contained the remains of furniture from that time: an overturned table, half a charred bed frame, and an old coat that hadn't been taken with it hanging on the wall.

Outside the window, you could hear continuous gunfire and explosions in the distance. The sounds weren't loud, but they never stopped.

The ninth level is even more difficult.

The scene shifts to a riverside dock, where players must advance along the riverbank towards a Japanese transport ship moored at the dock.

Rows of ammunition boxes and oil drums were piled up on the dock, and two searchlights swept back and forth across the river. When the searchlight beams swept across, players had to find cover to avoid them. If they were exposed to the light for more than two seconds, they would be locked on by snipers on higher ground.

Some players have been stuck on these levels for hours.

Someone posted a complaint on the forum saying, "This game is too hardcore," and someone immediately replied, "Do you know how many people died when our ancestors were conquering these places? You can start over if you die, but when they died, they were really dead." That reply became the number one trending topic at the time. After that, no one complained about the levels being too difficult anymore.

Lu Ran also noticed an interesting phenomenon—many players did not close the game after completing it, but instead returned to the main menu and opened the "Historical Archives" entry.

The entry point is on the bottom line of the main menu, with a smaller font size than the other options. But once you click on it, you can see a text description of the real historical events corresponding to each level, along with photos, screenshots of newspaper front pages, and original reports from war correspondents.

The data is arranged chronologically, from the January 28 Incident in 1932 to the outbreak of the full-scale War of Resistance against Japan in 1937.

Lu Ran had Zhao Yiming export this data from the system; he simply put it into the game.

He didn't expect many people to watch these, thinking that most players would just quit after completing the game.

But the data in the background told him he was wrong—the number of visits to the historical archives was much higher than the number of downloads of the game itself.

Some people on the forum said, "I spent two hours in the archives after completing the game." Others took screenshots of the old photos and posted them on their social media with the caption, "These scenes are more stunning than any game scene." Still others started searching for more historical photos and documents to add to the discussion thread.

European and North American players continued to translate, organize, and discuss historical materials on the forums, but what really caught Lu Ran's attention was something else—some unexpected posts started appearing on game forums in Japan.

The first post that caught his attention was titled "I used a VPN to play a Chinese game".

The post was short. The poster said that he spent some time setting up a VPN, downloading the European version of Bloodbath Shanghai, and completing the game in three days.

He said he felt very uncomfortable when he first saw his country's soldiers as villains in the game, and he quit the game after playing the second level.

But he couldn't resist opening it again because "the game's level design is really interesting."

The post was quickly deleted from the forum.

However, the post was deleted more slowly than Lu Ran had expected. The post existed for about four hours, during which time it accumulated more than a hundred replies. Most of the replies were cursing the poster for being "traitorous" and "pro-China," but a few replies had a different tone.

One of the prompts was, "Can you still say these things after you finish level seven?" Another was even shorter, just one sentence: "I've looked at all the photos in the archives."

The next day, Lu Ran received several links from Jiang Feng.

He had already anticipated what the link contained, but he still clicked on it anyway.

The first link Jiang Feng sent was a post on a niche history forum in Japan. The poster claimed to be a graduate student in the history department of a university in Japan.

He said he saw many details in the game that he had never seen in textbooks before, and then spent a long time researching historical materials from China and reports from Western journalists at the time.

He listed a long string of document names and file numbers, ending with the words: "I used to only know that a war had happened, but I didn't know the specifics. Now I do. It's not a pleasant experience, but it's necessary."

The second link leads to an anonymous post on a message board. The poster, who remained anonymous, wrote: "I watched that street scene in level seven over and over again. My grandfather visited China during the Showa era, but he never told me what he did there. Now I can roughly guess. Those machine gun emplacements, those dilapidated buildings, that suffocating feeling... If it's this difficult in the game, what's it like in reality? I think I can imagine it."

The third link was found by Jiang Feng himself.

He said the link had been deleted once, but someone had reposted a backup.

The backup post contained a passage that roughly said, "I saw some real historical photos in the game. One old photo showed the ruins of a bombed street, with the road surface torn up and only a few walls remaining on either side of the buildings. The accompanying text listed the date of the bombing and the casualty figures. I had no idea about this before; I spent three hours researching to confirm that the figures were accurate."

Jiang Feng added at the end of the message: "I've been keeping an eye on Japanese forums and social media. These kinds of posts are appearing more and more frequently lately. The speed at which posts are being deleted is accelerating, but the number of people posting them is also increasing. For every post that's deleted, someone else reposts it, sometimes with a more detailed angle than the original."

Lu Ran sat in his office chair, read through the links, closed the page, and took a sip of tea. He noticed that Jiang Feng had used the phrase "more and more."

For the next two days, he would take time each day to check the updates from the Japanese forums that Jiang Feng had forwarded.

I received seven links on the first day, more than a dozen on the second day, and by the third day, the number of links in the summary message had exceeded twenty.

Some of those links have been deleted, but most of them are still there.

The discussion gradually shifted from initial emotional venting to more specific content—some people asked about the details of a historical event, some posted links to information they had found, and some replied to others saying, "I've looked into this before," and then the two people started exchanging information to dig deeper.

This discussion wasn't completely suppressed because the posts often masquerade as "game guides" or "level background research." Administrators need a reason to delete posts, but after deleting one, the poster simply reposts it with a different title, and the administrators can't provide a more convincing reason to delete it again.

What truly ignited the discussion in Japan was a short article that circulated within Japanese intellectual circles.

The article was written by a Japanese scholar who studies modern history. He posted a short message on his social media, only a few hundred words long.

He said he recently noticed a game that was generating a lot of discussion, so he went to learn more about it.

He admitted that he initially had reservations, but following the professional habits of a scholar, he checked some of the historical materials in the game archives and found that the materials were basically consistent with the original documents he had.

His conclusion was: "Our own textbooks do have significant gaps when it comes to this part of history. This isn't a problem with a game; it's an academic problem, and it's an educational problem."

This short article was quickly translated into Chinese and English and circulated simultaneously on several platforms.

Several media outlets in China reprinted the story, using restrained headlines, mainly focusing on the angle of "Japanese scholars admitting deficiencies in history textbooks."

The report itself wasn't particularly sensational, but the comments section was quite enthusiastic, with one comment saying "Finally, someone is taking this seriously," which received many likes.

Lu Ran read through the Chinese translation of the short article and found that the content itself was much more restrained than he had expected.

The scholar did not use sentimental language; his attitude was more academic, and his wording was rigorous.

However, this kind of recognition from an academic perspective was actually the most significant in the discussion environment at the time—because those who wanted to refute him found that he was speaking based on historical materials and archives, and if they wanted to refute him, they had to produce equally solid historical materials.

He leaned back in his chair and flipped through the summary Jiang Feng had sent him, noticing that the number of discussion posts from Japan was still slowly increasing.

The discussions among players have extended from the game itself to history, from history to education and memory, and from personal reflection to group dialogue.

Lu Ran realized that they no longer needed to guide anyone. They could keep following this clue on their own, relying solely on the game's built-in archives and the information that the players had dug up themselves.

Although I initially thought it would ferment within historical circles, I didn't expect it to ferment so intensely.

...