Chapter 1 In the Beginning

In the 1970s, a toy company called LJN was founded in the United States.

Its name came from the initials of its major shareholder, Lewis J. Norman.

Initially, LJN mainly produced toys, but... in 1985, when the fallout from the "Atari E.T. incident" (an event that impacted the North American console market similarly to how *Blood Lion* impacted the domestic game industry, but far more terrifying, with urban legends still circulating today) had not yet subsided... the famous game company MCA acquired LJN for sixty million dollars and led it down the path of video game development...

Thus began a legend in the gaming world.

In North America, LJN quickly earned the nickname "Game Tomato Manufacturing Machine." The company used movies, TV shows, and celebrities as themes, constantly and massively producing NES games with quality and playability below industry standards.

*The Terminator*, *A Nightmare on Elm Street*, *Back to the Future*, *Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde*, *The Adventures of Bayou Billy*... various terrible games that made people smash their controllers due to non-technical mistakes were released, ravaging the minds of countless passionate teenagers during the 8-bit era and leaving indelible shadows.

In 1990, LJN was sold and joined Acclaim Entertainment, closing its toy division and becoming a dedicated game developer.

Of course, its style did not change. It was still the same...

During those years, the 8-bit era was at its peak. LJN, under the guise of a legitimate publicly traded company, independently outsourced the game adaptations of various film and television works to some unknown, strange third-party studios.

Ignoring basic game quality and user experience, it stamped those works of varying quality (mostly terrible) with its little rainbow logo (LJN's logo was a six-colored rainbow) and spread them throughout the world...

As one well-known game critic summarized:

"Purple represents disgusting game controls.

Blue represents terrible game music.

Green represents eye-straining game graphics.

Yellow represents extreme infidelity to the original work.

Orange represents the damn developers themselves.

Red represents ultra-heavy game masochistic tendencies."

LJN... had become a symbol. Like those unscrupulous merchants today who continue to profit while producing garbage... because they can survive, they feel their existence is justified, and they take it for granted that... maintaining the status quo is fine.

However, time will prove everything...

Although there were a few decent games under that rainbow logo, more than 90%... were terrible. Many years later, LJN has become almost synonymous with garbage games.

Even in the *Thriller Paradise* Otherworld, a place called "LJN Paradise" appeared.

Malicious game designers built a place of exile here and named it after LJN.

Those unwanted pixel garbage, game bugs, failures, flaws... and so on...

— things with nowhere to go and nothing to offer, eventually came here.

And Root, one of the Origin's Trinity, is the ruler here.

Today (a day in the Otherworld is also twenty-four hours, the flow of time is consistent with most areas of the main universe, but different from the real world), Root rarely left the core area of the Paradise and came to the edge of LJN Paradise.

She stood silently, gazing at the "Desktop" plains in the distance, as if waiting for something, murmuring, "Tch... too slow, at this rate..."

"...at this rate, V1 will catch up." Suddenly, a voice sounded from Root's side, continuing her unfinished words.

"First Link... now you?" Root said without turning her head, naming the person, "Eid..."

The man called Eid heard this, took a few steps forward, and stood side by side with Root, saying, "Because I'm also curious about what kind of person the human you trust is."

This Eid is also one of the Origin's Trinity. His full name is Administrator, but to avoid the suspicion of using a long name to fill up words, he got the abbreviation Eid from me.

Root glanced sideways and continued, "So... you came uninvited too?"

Eid replied coldly, "You know my permissions. I haven't done the 'request' operation in a long time."

"Hmph... I just hate that attitude of yours." Root snorted, "Saying arrogant things in an emotionless tone."

"What I said is the truth." Eid replied.

"Yes." Root continued, "That's the root cause of the annoyance."

"Well... I've noticed that since the last operation failed..." Eid continued, "You've become more and more abnormal."

"Why don't you look in the mirror first, Slime? You look like that... and you still have the nerve to say others are abnormal?" Root actually replied in a tone similar to complaining.

There was a reason for her to say that. At this moment, Eid's body didn't look special: about 1.8 meters tall, a well-proportioned figure, dressed in ordinary black clothes and pants... but his head was like a floating liquid mercury ball, slowly wriggling on his neck.

"I just encountered a bottleneck in the process of further upgrading my program." Eid, with the slime head, explained with his head (without facial features, the voice came directly from inside the head), "I can only temporarily maintain this state before breaking through."

"That's not a bottleneck, it's just a 'neck'..." Root continued to complain.

"Uh..." Eid was speechless. He didn't know how to respond to such trash talk and could only change the subject. "By the way, since Link came before me, why did he leave again?"

"Because news came from the 'Pi Maze' that the search team Link sent out a month ago finally found ***-079 and has already taken control of it." Root replied.

Eid was visibly stunned when he heard this. After a few seconds, he said in a deep voice, "Then I have to go there immediately..."

Root's expression changed immediately when she saw his reaction: "You all seem to be very afraid of that thing..."

"***-079 is the key to our fight against the 'System'." Eid said, already walking towards the Desktop, "Also..." He paused and said in a very serious tone, "It's not a thing..."