I clicked on the card drawing interface on a slightly sultry night. The light bulb in the store downstairs flashed, as if to remind me, or as if to laugh at me – this kid, it’s started again.
This is not the first time. The game has been updated to 4.0, and he is back again. That character, the one who appeared three times in my dream, he stood in front of the castle at dusk, holding the golden spear in his hand, looking at me calmly, as if saying, “Are you not going to draw me?”
I drew. How could I not draw. I am not a particularly stubborn person, but I have no way out in the face of such things. Friends have already started to show off: who drew out the tenth time, who drew three times in a row but it was worth it, who only spent a thousand to realize his dream. The phone screen is a little hot, as if it was pressed too hard, or it was burned by someone’s eyes.
I know the rules. There is a minimum of about 80 draws, and some people say 90 is also OK, but to put it bluntly, it is the waiting between 70 and 90, which is the suspense piled up with money. Even more cruel is the word: crooked. You think you are finally qualified, but the system is like an indifferent waiter, pushing you to a character you don’t want, saying: This is also five stars, keep drawing.
So I calculated: 6480 Genesis Crystal can draw fifty or sixty times, at least two of these bags, and more is three. About 300 US dollars. The balance in the upper right corner of the screen reminds me that this is not game currency, but my life.
When I recharge, I always feel the wind outside the window, but I close the window. I enter the credit card password very quickly, almost instinctively. I don’t think I am a particularly impulsive person, I am just a little superstitious, and I want to grab something.
When I clicked the first ten-shot, the screen of the mobile phone rippled like the moment when a stone was thrown into a pond. I held my breath unconsciously. Blue light flashed, purple slid by, and golden light was delayed. I sat in the chair and felt that time suddenly disconnected from the outside. The clock on the wall pointed to late at night, and the cat downstairs meowed twice.
I thought about giving up. But my fingers kept on tapping. I started biting my nails on the 70th draw, and I stopped talking on the 80th. The phone screen was on, and for a moment I thought that person had appeared, but it turned out to be a permanent character – I don’t even remember his name.
I sat there, and the light in front of my eyes turned gray. It was not loss, but a sense of deprivation that I hadn’t experienced for a long time, after being accurately calculated by the system. I spent more than 3,000 yuan, but I didn’t even get my dream.
I opened the customer service page and tried to ask if I could get a refund or if I could draw again. They replied quickly and politely, saying “refunds are not supported” and “everything is handled according to the rules.” Looking at that sentence, I seemed to see a street sign on the corner that said “This road is blocked.”
I remembered that my friend had recommended other platforms, saying that they were cheap, that the account was fast, that you could charge enough at one time, that you didn’t have to pay three times repeatedly, and that you didn’t have to worry about lag, handling fees or payment failures. I went to see it. They asked me to submit my account, email, and ID information. I stared at the upload page and felt that my shadow was pulled into a piece of paper and stuck to the data wall, unable to move.
I closed the page and didn’t continue.
The moon hung outside the window, still not full. I looked at my phone, as if looking at a distant country. I think, it’s not that I don’t want to have that character, but I’m afraid that if I press it again, there will really be nothing to come back.
The card drawing thing is sometimes like a dream, and sometimes like a debt. I don’t know if that person will come back, but at least tonight, I won’t gamble again.