Chapter 6: Ascension, Easter Eggs, and the Cost of 10× Speed

The following plots are purely fictitious and any similarity is purely coincidental.

Opening

There was a nine-day pause.

Not giving up. It’s the kind of state where after you’ve done something to a certain extent, you need to take a moment and look at it again. Two people have to go to work and do whatever they have to do. L occasionally takes out his mobile phone to open his own game and plays two games without changing it. Y occasionally looks through the submission records without speaking.

On the afternoon of February 25, L suddenly sat in front of the computer again.

"Too slow," she said.

It's not that it loads slowly. It's because life is too slow. From birth to death, if a cultivator clicks and waits, it will take several minutes to see the ending. She has played dozens of games. Every time I get a little impatient towards the end.

"I want to fast forward."

Ten times speed

L said to Kimi "Add a speed switch button, 1x and 10x" and then waited. Kimi gave her a version. The principle is simple: run ten loops in one tick. Instead of taking one step every 300 milliseconds, it now takes ten steps every 300 milliseconds. A lifetime has gone from three minutes to more than twenty seconds.

L pressed it and watched as the character rushed from Qi Refining to Golden Pill to Nascent Soul, and the log flew upwards like a barrage.

"It's fast," she said. "It's too fast."

tune. Have Kimi pull the base tick from 300 milliseconds to 400 milliseconds. Try again. A little better.

Conveniently, she also deleted "Ebony Collector's Edition" from the title. I kept that name for two weeks, and I was probably tired of seeing it.

The title starts to shine

In the afternoon of the same day, L and Teacher G discussed an idea: titles should have rarity. Not all titles are equally crowded together. Some should sparkle, and some should be hidden for people to discover.

After chatting she went to find Kimi. All titles are graded. Legendary, Epic, Rare, Common. The legendary one is golden with a pulsing glow animation. The epic one is a purple, softer breathing light. Rare green, immobile. Ordinary gray.

Then she marked a batch of hidden titles. Before it is achieved, it is displayed as "???" on the page, with a dotted purple frame, italics, and it lights up there vaguely. Like a row of locked cabinets. You know there's something in there, but you don't know what it is.

L was very serious when arranging these. They are not ranked by strength, but by "will you want to take a screenshot when you see this name?" Decisions about what to hide and what to reveal don't require Kimi's help. This is her job.

Y See the browser smoking

When L increased the speed by ten times, I probably didn't think about one question: whether the browser could handle it.

The answer is not really.

Y was only discovered on March 3rd. He opened the game, pressed ten times the speed, and watched the page start to freeze. It's not stuck occasionally, it's stuck steadily. The CPU usage skyrockets, the scroll bar jumps around, and the log area feels like it's cramping.

He opened DevTools and took a look. The problem is clear at a glance: in 10x speed mode, the DOM is read and written ten times in each tick interval. Read `scrollHeight` immediately after each write, forcing the browser to reflow. Reflow twenty or thirty times per second. Coupled with the unlimited growth of the log area, there are more and more DOM nodes, and rendering is getting slower and slower.Y doesn’t write the front end himself. This is the first time he has seriously dealt with browser performance. He threw the problem description into Codex and went through several rounds of iterations. The final plan is very straightforward: first save the logs into the buffer in ten ticks at ten times speed, and then insert them into the DOM at once after one round; the UI refresh is also changed from once per tick to once per round; if the log exceeds 200, it will be deleted from the beginning. Codex also helped him write five performance regression tests, all facing the indicator card.

After the modification, the 10x speed finally stopped. It's as smooth as watching a fast-forward video.

L didn't know about this. She just discovered that one day ten times the speed became smoother. She thought the browser had been updated.

The first CLAUDE.md

On the same day, Y also did another thing: wrote the first `CLAUDE.md` of the project.

Where is the architecture, how to change the config, how to move the engine, what is the DOM contract, and what cannot be done. It's all written down. Not long. But with this document, no matter which AI—Kimi, Codex, or Claude—comes to touch this project next time, at least it will know the rules.

When Y wrote this document, he probably realized a problem: L and he used different AI tools. L used Kimi to modify the front-end, and he used Codex to modify the architecture. The two tools don't know what the other has done. `CLAUDE.md` is a common instruction manual for all AIs. Whoever takes over, read this first.

True Immortal Ascension

On March 4th, L made something she had always wanted to do.

She first chatted with Teacher G all afternoon. The theme is the ending. In the past, there was only one fate for cultivators: death. If you live a long life, you will die later, if you live a short life, you will die early, but it is still death. L doesn’t think so. "There must be someone who succeeds in practicing cultivation."

Teacher G discussed with her what ascension should feel like. It's not just a simple "Congratulations on passing the level". There should be a sense of ceremony. Golden light. Golden text. It contrasts with the red color of death. When people take screenshots and send them to the group, they can tell at a glance that they are not dead, but accomplished.

After chatting, L threw the request to Kimi. Cultivation to the tenth realm triggers ascension. A golden light flashed on the page. The background turns pale gold. The title of the pop-up window changed from "Settlement" to "Ascension to Immortality". Write a line of golden words in the diary. The cause of death is no longer listed in the column. Red death turns into golden ascension. One ending went from a funeral to a graduation ceremony.

It took L several attempts to trigger it successfully. The moment she ascended, she stared at the screen for a while and then said, "It's pretty good."

After being quiet for two seconds, he added: "Not enough."

What is she plotting?

March 5th. L's condition is different.

She no longer discusses needs with Y. I don’t talk much to Teacher G either. She thought of something by herself, and then kept going back and forth with Kimi.

What Y can see is: a commit called "Easter Egg" appears in the submission record. Then "Easter Egg 2" appeared the next day. Then there are "Easter egg adjustments". Three submissions, the amount of code is not small, involving config, engine, and HTML. But L doesn’t say what it is.

Y glanced aside. L sat in front of the computer, talking to Kimi, adjusting each sentence, writing one sentence, laughing, changing one sentence, and laughing again. That smile is not the "this bug is finally fixed" kind of smile. It was a smile holding back some bad idea.

"What are you doing?"

"Easter eggs."

"What Easter egg?""You'll know it when you play it yourself."

Y later read the code. A rough scan. I saw some keywords - character rain, dialog box, and way of heaven. He didn't look closely. Some things are better not seen.

What we can say is: this easter egg is related to a certain cause of death in the game. After triggering, some things will happen that will not happen in the normal game flow. God will speak out. And not just once.

L wrote three layers. The first level makes people surprised, the second level makes people laugh, and the third level makes people stunned. Her grasp of the rhythm is very accurate: "Three times is just right, any more will not be funny."

I won’t spoil the specific content. This is a gift for the patient player.

But ascension cannot be too easy

Looking back after finishing the Easter egg, L changed another important thing.

She discussed an issue with Teacher G: If one automatically ascends after reaching the highest level of cultivation, then ascending is just a matter of time, not an achievement. Teacher G agrees. The endpoint should be risky.

L asked Kimi to change the ascension from "automatically triggered after cultivating to the tenth realm" to "must be alive after cultivating to the tenth realm". How to live. Not a good life. She stuffed a batch of exclusive disaster events into the highest realm, all of which were non-exempt - meaning that no matter how lucky you were, you couldn't escape them.

She wrote the text about these disasters herself. The calamity of heaven, the calamity of inner demons, the five declines of heaven and man, and the obliteration of heaven. Each one is a way to die. Some heroic, some cold. One of them she wrote very lightly: "That's it." Four words, and then you are gone.

Ascension is not won by climbing to the top of the mountain. Even after you climb to the top of the mountain, the sky will still hit you. The golden finale must be truly overcome, not endured.

From February 25th to March 6th, this game has more speed, more end points, a batch of more hidden titles, one more easter egg that can’t be said too much, and several more ways to die at the finish line.

L’s approach is the same from beginning to end: talk to Teacher G about how you want to feel, and then let Kimi realize it. She doesn't write code. But she knows where the game should make people laugh and where it should make people nervous.

It's the same on the Y end: when you see a performance problem, throw the diagnosis results to Codex, iterate a solution, and add tests. He doesn't write the front end by hand. But he knows when to take action and when to set rules for AI.

Neither of them is writing alone. But what comes out in the end is their own.