Chapter 13 A Few Words with Brother Long

After chatting with Brother Long for a few words, Feng Bujue logged off. Since he couldn't join the queue for the time being, he could take this time to get some fresh air outside the game pod and prepare dinner.

Playing a 2v2 Slaughter Game and a team survival mode that wasn't quite cleared had already brought him to dinnertime. But when he said dinner, it was essentially just noodles...

His editor had said that the payment for recording the TV program would arrive in his account in the next few days, but "these few days" could mean any day.

So, every time Feng Bujue went to eat, he would instinctively go to the computer first to check if the money in his bank account had increased. If there was money in the account, he would immediately order takeout online.

Of course, the result of this query was still... nothing.

Here, it should be mentioned that Feng Bujue did not have a credit card. In his era, applying for a credit card had become a rather troublesome matter. In the early 21st century, credit card fraud accounted for more than 80% of all economic fraud cases, with cases involving multiple card fraud using the POS machine cash-out function accounting for more than 90%. Even in the era of full citizen ID network supervision after the advent of the third-generation optical brain, this proportion did not show any significant decline.

With the POS machine usage mechanism unable to be changed or replaced, the government could only establish relevant laws and regulations regarding credit card applications to impose certain restrictions. Although completely eliminating credit card fraud was impossible, stricter management clearly had yielded results.

Citizens like Feng Bujue were, to put it nicely, writers. To put it bluntly, they were unemployed. To put it in the middle – freelance writers.

He bought his own medical insurance, paid his own pension, and as for buying a house, haha...

Citizens in this situation could only apply for credit cards with very low limits, and no more than three cards could be held under the same name. Given Feng Bujue's personality, he naturally had no interest in doing that. If he really encountered an emergency, wouldn't it be easier to just borrow a few thousand yuan from someone else?

The novelist profession was mostly difficult, with only a handful of people becoming rich, and the vast majority living even worse than Feng Bujue. At least Brother Jue could lazily support himself, but he didn't know how many passionate young people with literary dreams were living a life where they would starve next month if they didn't write every day. Enduring the contempt of family and friends, harboring a sense of unappreciated talent, the passion for storytelling gradually turned into a habit of stringing together words. Their attitude towards other authors shifted from admiration to jealousy and hatred, and they wrote in this impetuous state day after day, only to realize they had chosen the wrong profession when their youth was wasted...

The general environment of society determined that writers had to bow their heads and compromise with some commercial rules. In this world, if you want to succeed in any field, hard work is essential. Even if you achieve a certain degree of success, you can often only manage to make ends meet. Great success belongs only to a small fraction of people. And those who work hard but don't succeed, or those who don't work hard at all, will truly starve to death, and starve to death in shame, because these days no one will sympathize with failures.

Writing novels also requires consideration of real life. Money has become the primary criterion for measuring a man's worth in this society. Regardless of whether the person is a nouveau riche, a rich second generation, or a corrupt official, even if the person is scum, even if everyone knows his money is ill-gotten, even if he is insane and has a psychological disorder, as long as he is not locked up, there will still be people who will fawn over him.

As the saying goes, in a noisy city, no one asks about the poor, but rich relatives live far away in the mountains. No matter the era, the principle remains unchanged.

Like most middle-class children of this era, Feng Bujue often lamented that he was born in the wrong era. Earlier, the Republican era would have been more suitable for someone like him to get by. Later, when all human organs except the brain were replaced by machines, and drinking two liters of synthetic machine oil could last for half a year's worth of food, he could enjoy true equality and harmony.

But unfortunately, he lived in the 21st century, which was a difficult time. In this era, to paraphrase a line from a certain movie: "In the world of adults, nothing is easy." In fact, even the children's lives are not easy...

Feng Bujue was considered relatively open-minded. He would just live like this. He would cook noodles when he had to, eat noodles when he had to. Maybe one day something would explode in the unknown shadows in his brain, and that would be the end of it; or maybe after the explosion, he would transform into a mutant and become successful... anything was possible. In short, if a person is not satisfied with life, any factor that might change the situation can become something to look forward to.

"In recent days, the air quality in City S has improved somewhat, and heavy pollution is expected to turn into moderate pollution..."

"The plan to expand the parking lot inside Subway Line 9 has been shelved due to an engineering accident..."

"A fifteen-year-old girl exposed her photos on the internet to sell her first night to buy a new cell phone..."

While cooking noodles, Feng Bujue turned on the TV, listening to various unreliable news reports, and continued to do what he was doing numbly.

After busying himself for more than ten minutes, he finished making "dinner." He turned off the TV, took a jar of peanut butter from the refrigerator, sat back in front of the computer, and yawned, saying, "I haven't heard any good news on the news for a long time. Could it be that because the credibility of the media declines every year, they themselves feel that positive reports would have the opposite effect..."

Feng Bujue rarely watched TV programs except for news, because nowadays the TV stations' favorite programs were to find a group of people to sit there and expose their family scandals and privacy, arguing in front of the city and even the country's audience, in order to attract attention. During dinner time, all channels were filled with these stupid things, and it was impossible to find an educational program. And as for TV dramas, they were either killing Japanese devils or killing the Kuomintang, and after killing the Kuomintang, they killed Japanese devils. Feng Bujue really wanted to write a letter to those screenwriters saying: I suggest that you take the time to write a few scripts to fight against Filipinos or aliens, change your thinking a little, and maybe you'll become popular.

While eating noodles, he opened the homepage of Dream Corporation's official website, intending to go directly to Thriller Paradise's subpage, but he caught sight of a very interesting piece of news in the corner of the homepage.

"Our company's second online game product is under development, and a trial sample is expected to be released in May." Feng Bujue read the news, "The game name is tentatively set as... [Crazy Thinking]? The genre is card battles."

He swallowed a mouthful of peanut-flavored noodles: "The first game was just flash tested, and they've already released the development progress of a new game. Dream Corporation's decisions are really puzzling... If it were another company, how could they develop a new work without making a fortune from Thriller Paradise? Isn't this competing with themselves?"

This news only had one line, and no relevant game screenshots or more specific information were released. In a sense, this was clickbait... but this technique successfully piqued the appetite of many players. When Feng Bujue switched to the Thriller Paradise game forum, he saw that there were many posts discussing Crazy Thinking.

Of course, since even the official news had no pictures or proof, the players were obviously just speculating. Some insider parties even found some random pictures from who knows where, posing as game screenshots, claiming they had inside information and so on. The moderators seemed too lazy to care. Today was the first day the news was released, and they wouldn't do anything to extinguish the players' enthusiasm. If there were many false rumors, it meant the players were interested.

"Famous Jianghu Studio player [Kuang Zong Jian Ying] suspected of cheating." Feng Bujue was quickly attracted to such a post.

This was still a hot post, with over 100,000 views and nearly a hundred pages of replies.

The poster was obviously a throwaway account, with a name that was all English letters and felt randomly typed. Although they had a lot of forum experience, a quick look at some of their past comments revealed that, apart from spamming, it was not difficult to see that this account was the mouthpiece of Shi Dao Studio.

Feng Bujue was interested and went to look at the content of the post. What the other party was saying was clearly the script he had played earlier.

"My teammates and I never even saw the other party from the moment we entered the script until we lost the Slaughter Game. The other party disappeared from a closed map environment. This map has a continuous consumption effect on survival value, but the plot synopsis clearly states that the outside map has a more severe consumption effect! I stayed in the map for a very long time and used more than one survival value supplement. May I ask [Kuang Zong Jian Ying], if you weren't cheating, how did you survive longer? Don't tell me your backpack is full of survival value supplements, or tell me you're a medical specialization player. You yourself don't believe that!"

This post didn't explain many things clearly, and this was intentional... Anyway, the most important thing about these posts that badmouth others is to spread the statements that are beneficial to oneself, and to not mention or downplay the unfavorable ones. The only thing worth being gratified about was that this guy only mentioned Kuang Zong Jian Ying's name and didn't point out the nickname Feng Bujue. Of course, the poster also didn't mention their own and their teammates' IDs, and didn't mention anything about belonging to Shi Dao. The reason was hilarious – "Jianghu Studio has great power, and I'm afraid of being retaliated against."

Feng Bujue felt amused when he read it. Even from the perspective of an uninformed bystander, many things in this post couldn't stand scrutiny. Besides, even if Kuang Zong Jian Ying was really cheating, why didn't you contact customer service to report it and instead came to the forum?

At this point, Feng Bujue understood why Kuang Zong Jian Ying disliked the people of Shi Dao so much. These off-game tricks were not very clever, but they were enough to be annoying.

Looking further down, the content of the post became more and more exciting, and it was no wonder it generated so many pages of replies. Many of them were obviously Shi Dao's forum water armies stirring up trouble, echoing the poster's remarks, for example, writing: "Yeah, yeah, Kuang Zong Jian Ying should come out and confront us if he has the guts! Can people from big studios bully us ordinary players as they please? Or do they know they're in the wrong and don't dare to come out?"

This logic was really inexplicable. When Feng Bujue logged off, he saw that Kuang Zong Jian Ying was still in the game. Who would have known that these guys would lose a Slaughter Game and immediately cause trouble on the forum? Even if someone from Jianghu Studio saw it and notified Kuang Zong Jian Ying, he probably wouldn't bother to respond given his personality. You can't bite a dog back when a dog bites you. If some big shot had to come out and explain every time they encountered a throwaway water army cursing in the forum, then the big shots wouldn't have anything else to do but explain.

In addition, there were also many players who were incited and echoed indignantly. They obviously didn't know who Kuang Zong Jian Ying was or had heard of Jianghu Studio before reading the post, but after reading the post for a while, they acted as if they had a deep-seated hatred, following the crowd.

Of course, there were also people who held opposing views and raised questions, such as "The poster should reveal their real ID to speak. Is being afraid of retaliation a valid reason?", "One-sided statements are not credible," and "Are you sure there are no other mechanisms in that script map?" Faced with these replies, the people from Shi Dao naturally chose to selectively ignore them, or quibble, or just start spraying, saying that the other party was a throwaway account from Jianghu Studio... Professional trolls and water armies, this kind of professional quality is essential.

Continuing to scroll down, after about thirty pages, the replies began to become meaningless. There were more replies like "Waiting for the truth," "I'm just passing by to buy some soy sauce," and "Strongly watching, I have cola and melon seeds ready." The rest were just a few people debating back and forth.

This was also the habit of ordinary people browsing forums and reading posts. At least 50% of people only read the first page of a post and never scroll further back, unless the post is a live broadcast or full of pictures of beautiful women, in which case they would make an exception... The remaining less than half of the people would only scroll through the first few pages at most, and if there was no new progress, they would be too lazy to watch others replying and arguing with each other.

Only less than 10% of people would scroll through the post page by page and refresh it in real time. Some of them were really interested in the content and results, some were concerned about whether their replies had been refuted or quoted, and others had a reading habit...

Feng Bujue could eat with his left hand. He wasn't left-handed, and it was difficult for him to write with his left hand, but his left hand could use chopsticks. Eating with his left hand and operating the mouse with his right hand was a skill he had consciously developed. It was this skill that allowed him to finish reading the post while eating the noodles in front of him.

"Hmm... I finished reading it without realizing it." Feng Bujue really hated arguing. He felt that it was the most meaningless thing. This world has justice and truth, but people are unwilling to admit their mistakes and unwilling to suffer losses, so they choose to be unreasonable or resort to tricks.

"I really shouldn't have read it; it affects my mood." Feng Bujue picked up the bowl, wiped the computer desk with a tissue, and then went to the kitchen to clean up.

He didn't immediately lie back into the game pod, because he had just finished eating, and he wanted to exercise, such as... giving the pet a bath or something.

So, he turned his gaze to Asazhi with a predatory look. The latter, who was originally sprawled on the sofa dozing off, suddenly sat up with a jolt as if he had sensed a murderous aura, turned his head, and met Feng Bujue's gaze...