I didn’t want to write this article. To be honest, I have had a deep contempt for “character cultivation” since I was a child. I am skeptical of everything that requires repeated labor, does not follow logic, and can only be completed by metaphysics and hard work. But my friend told me that a woman named “Aikefei” is about to appear, a five-star magic weapon character, so I decided to study her breakthrough and development.
This research doesn’t matter, I suddenly had an illusion: I seemed to have become her.
In other words, if I really become Ai Kefei, my life will no longer be “life”, but a series of chaotic systems full of gears, fragments, philosophy books and polluted water. You open your eyes every day not to think about human free will, but to collect 168 blue crystal snails-you don’t even know if they are snails.
According to the information, it costs a total of 7.05 million Mora to upgrade Ai Kefei from level 1 to level 90. What is Mora? To put it bluntly, it is the gold used to do everything in this world, just like the RMB in real life. But you can’t earn Mora directly, you have to do something very trivial and meaningless, such as fighting a mechanical boss that will drop the “Secret Source Gas Throat”. I don’t know who named it, but it sounds like an intestinal disease.
The materials she needs to break through include: Shivada Emerald Silver, Lament Ice Jade Block, Mechanical Spur Gear, Qiji Movement Gear, Beryl Conch, etc. These names sound like an alchemist’s shopping list, but they are more like a poem written by a literary youth after a breakup.
Don’t you think this is absurd in itself? A woman wearing magic may be able to grow through love, faith or philosophy in reality, but in the continent of Teyvat, she can only “sublimate herself” by killing crabs, brushing dungeons, and collecting conchs. What does this mean? It means that in the world of Genshin Impact, there is no difference between self-improvement and brushing credit card points.
Let’s talk about weapons. Her exclusive weapon is called “Aroma Music Player”. It’s a good name, but to upgrade it to the maximum level, you have to pay a nearly abnormal price: 14 pure holy dew drops, 69 units of polluted water, and a bunch of alien sea condensed beads and heterochromatic crystals. This reminds me of when I was young, I read Lu Xun, saying “There is no road in the world, but when more people walk, it becomes a road.” In the original god, there is no weapon in the world, but when more people brush it, it becomes a magic weapon.
What you face every day is not the enemy, but the drop rate. The drop rate is the biggest boss in this game. It is like an invisible hand, pinching your throat, saying “You must be diligent” while giving you only one gear, leaving you 97 short of a breakthrough.
Ai Kefei is not a hero, she is a middle-class intellectual struggling in gears and polluted water. All her talents are not obtained by epiphany, but by “just teaching”, “just guidance” and “just philosophy”. In other words, she is a good girl who improves herself by studying and taking exams. Every level of talent improvement is like attending a college entrance examination review class.
You see, to upgrade her skills, she needs 114 copies of “The Philosophy of Justice”. This reminds me of some courses in college, where students did not understand the content at all, but just memorized the whole book and wrote it on the test paper. She is the same, not asking why justice is, but being forced to accept justice. She does not need faith, only materials.
At this point, you may ask, what is the use of her?
Good question. The answer of Genshin Impact players is generally: she is strong. This answer itself has no logic, but it is the most reasonable logic in the game world. Strong means worth cultivating. As for whether you are bored, anxious, or still brushing the secret source gas throat at three in the morning, it doesn’t matter.
In reality, a person constantly suffers in order to break free from suffering. In Genshin Impact, Ai Kefei constantly suffers in order to suffer better. You work hard to improve her just to let her face higher-intensity monsters, pay more Mora, brush more dungeons-and finally enter a more bitter abyss.
I suddenly feel a little emotional when I write here. If life is like a game, then aren’t we all like Ai Kefei? We also have a bunch of inexplicable tasks: promotion, house purchase, wedding, education for children. Everything requires “materials”, such as money, time, and connections, and the drop rate is very low. Sometimes you have been brushing for five consecutive years, and not even a promotion notice has dropped.
What should you do at this time?
Like Ai Kefei, keep brushing. You know there is no other way, unless you delete your account. But you won’t delete your account, just like you won’t give up your life easily.
So don’t laugh at her, and don’t laugh at yourself.
She is a digital person living in a gear system, and we are real people living in a gear society.
The only difference is that her world is called Genshin Impact, and our world is called reality.
And between these two worlds – there is only liver, no light.