He chatted with Long Ge for a few words, then Feng Bujue logged off. Anyway, he couldn't join the queue for the time being, so he might as well take this time to get some fresh air outside the game pod and prepare dinner.

After playing a 2v2 Slaughter Game and a Team Survival mode that wasn't quite a clear, it was already dinnertime. But even though it was called dinner, it was essentially just noodles...

The editor said that the payment for recording the TV show would arrive in the next few days, but there was no telling which of "these few days" they meant.

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

Of course, the result of this query was still... negative.

It should be mentioned here 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, and cases of multi-card fraud using the POS machine cash-out function accounted for more than 90% of these. Even in the era of full citizen ID network supervision after the advent of the third-generation optical brain, this proportion had not decreased significantly.

In the absence of a way to change or replace the POS machine usage mechanism, the government could only establish relevant laws and regulations to impose certain restrictions on credit card applications. Although it was impossible to completely eliminate credit card fraud, stricter management had clearly been effective.

Citizens like Feng Bujue were, to put it nicely, writers; to put it bluntly, unemployed; or, to put it in a compromise—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 were allowed under the same person's 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?

Most novelists lead a poor life. Only a handful of people make a fortune, and the vast majority of people may be living even worse than Feng Bujue. At least Jue-ge can lazily support himself. Little does he know how many passionate young people with literary dreams are living a life where if they don't write, they'll go hungry the next month, enduring the disdain of family and friends, harboring a sense of being unappreciated, and seeing their passion for storytelling gradually turn into a habit of stringing together words, their attitude toward other authors changing from appreciation to jealousy and hatred, writing day after day in this impetuous state, and finally realizing that they've chosen the wrong profession after wasting their youth...

The overall environment of society dictates that writers have to bow their heads and compromise to some commercial rules. In this world, to get ahead in any industry, struggle is necessary. Even if you achieve a certain degree of success, you often only manage to make a decent living. Great success belongs only to a very small number of people. And those who struggle and fail, or don't struggle at all, will truly starve to death, and starve to death in shame, because no one will sympathize with losers these days.

Writing novels also requires considering real life. Money has become the primary criterion for measuring a man's worth in this society. No matter if the person is a nouveau riche, a rich second generation, or a corrupt official, even if the person is scum, even if everyone knows that his money is ill-gotten, even if he is insane and psychologically twisted, as long as he is not locked up one day, there will still be people who lick up to him.

As the saying goes, in a noisy city, no one asks about the poor; in the deep mountains, there are distant relatives of the rich. No matter the era, the principle remains the same.

Like most middle-class children of this era, Feng Bujue often lamented that he was born in the wrong era. Earlier, the Republic of China might be more suitable for someone like him. Later, when all human organs except the brain are replaced by machines, and drinking two liters of synthetic oil can last half a year's worth of food, he can enjoy true equality and harmony.

But unfortunately, he lives in the twenty-first century, which is called living in a predicament. In this era, to paraphrase a line from a certain movie: "In the world of adults, nothing is easy." In fact, even children are having a hard time these days...

Feng Bujue can be considered relatively open-minded, so he just lives like this. He cooks noodles when he needs to cook noodles, and eats noodles when he needs to eat noodles. Maybe one day something will explode in the unknown shadows in his brain, putting an end to everything; or maybe after the explosion, he will transform into a mutant and become a success from then on... anything is possible. In short, if a person is not satisfied with life, any factor that can potentially change the status quo can become something to look forward to.

"Recently, the air quality in S City 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 self-exposes photos on the Internet to sell her first night in order to buy a new mobile phone..."

While cooking noodles, Feng Bujue turned on the TV, listening to all kinds of outrageous news messages, 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 again, took a bottle of peanut butter from the refrigerator, sat back in front of the computer, and yawned, "I haven't heard any good news on the news for a long time. Is it because the media's credibility decreases every year, so they themselves feel that positive reports will have the opposite effect..."

Feng Bujue rarely watched TV programs except for news, because the programs that TV stations like to make the most these days are finding a bunch of people to sit there and expose their family scandals and privacy, arguing in front of the city and even the national audience, in order to attract attention. During dinnertime, all channels are full of these nonsense things, and there are no educational programs to be found. And the TV series are all about killing Japanese devils after killing Kuomintang soldiers, and killing Kuomintang soldiers after killing Japanese devils. Feng Bujue really wants to write a letter to those screenwriters saying: It is recommended that you take the time to write a few scripts to fight against Filipinos or aliens, change your thinking a little, and maybe you will become popular.

While eating noodles, he opened the official website homepage of Dream Inc. He originally wanted to go directly to the Thriller Paradise subpage, but he caught a glimpse of a very interesting message in the corner of the homepage.

"The company's second online game product is under development and is expected to release a trial demo in May." Feng Bujue read the news, "The game name is tentatively set as...【Crazy Thinking】? The type is card battle."

He swallowed a mouthful of peanut-flavored noodles, "The first game was only flash-tested, and the research and development progress of the new game has been released. Dream Inc.'s various decisions are really puzzling... If it were another company, how could they develop a new game without making a fortune on Thriller Paradise? Isn't this competing with themselves?"

This news only had one line, and did not release any relevant game screenshots or more specific information. In a sense, this is clickbait... but this technique has successfully aroused the appetite of many players. When Feng Bujue turned to the Thriller Paradise game forum, he saw that there were many posts discussing Crazy Thinking.

Of course, even the official news had no pictures or truth, and among the players, it was obviously pure wishful thinking. Some insider parties did not know where they found some messy pictures, posing as game screenshots, claiming that they had inside information and so on. The moderators seemed too lazy to care. Today is the first day the news was released, and they would not do anything to extinguish the players' enthusiasm. The more fake news, the more interested the players are.

"Well-known Jianghu Studio player 【Kuang Zong Jian Ying】 suspected of cheating." Feng Bujue was quickly attracted by such a post.

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

The poster looked like a sock puppet, the name was all English letters, and it felt like it was randomly typed. Although he had a lot of forum experience, but after looking through some of his past remarks, in addition to water posts, it was not difficult to see that this account was the mouthpiece of the Corpse Blade Studio.

Feng Bujue went to read the content of this post with great interest, and what the other party said was clearly the script he had played earlier.

"My teammates and I never even saw the other party's face 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 synopsis clearly stated that the outer 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 are not cheating, how did you survive longer? Don't tell me that your backpack is full of survival value supplements, or tell me that you are a medical specialization player. Even you don't believe that!"

This post did not explain many things clearly, and this was intentional... Anyway, the most important thing about this kind of post that slanders others is to put out the arguments that are beneficial to oneself, and not mention or downplay the unfavorable ones. The only thing worth rejoicing is that this guy only mentioned the name Kuang Zong Jian Ying, but did not point out the nickname Feng Bujue. Of course, the poster did not mention his and his teammate's IDs, and did not mention anything about belonging to Corpse Blade. The reason was very funny—"Jianghu Studio has a large force, I'm afraid of retaliation."

When Feng Bujue saw it, he only felt amused. Even from the perspective of an uninformed bystander, there were many places in this post that could not stand scrutiny. Besides, even if Kuang Zong Jian Ying really cheated, why didn't you contact customer service to report it, and instead ran to the forum?

At this moment, Feng Bujue understood why Kuang Zong Jian Ying didn't like the people from Corpse Blade so much. These off-game tricks weren't clever, but they were disgusting enough.

Looking further down, the content of the post became more and more exciting, and it was no wonder that so many pages of replies were brushed out. There were many forum water armies from Corpse Blade who were obviously stirring up trouble, echoing the poster's remarks, such as writing: "Yes, yes, Kuang Zong Jian Ying, if you have the guts, come out and confront! Can people from big studios bully ordinary players like us at will? Or do you know that you are in the wrong and dare not come out?"

This logic was really inexplicable. When Feng Bujue went offline, he saw that Kuang Zong Jian Ying was still in the game. Who would know that you guys would stir up trouble in the forum as soon as you lost a Slaughter Game. Even if someone from Jianghu Studio saw it and notified Kuang Zong Jian Ying, with that guy's personality, he probably wouldn't bother to pay attention. If a dog bites a person, the person can't bite the dog, right? If some big shots have to come out to explain every time they encounter sock puppet water armies scolding in the forum, then the big shots would have nothing to do but explain.

In addition, there were many agitated players who echoed indignantly. They didn't know who Kuang Zong Jian Ying was or 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 there were also those who raised questions, such as "The poster should reveal his real ID, is being afraid of retaliation a valid reason?", "One-sided words are not credible", "Are you sure there are no other mechanisms in that script map?", and so on. Facing these replies, the people from Corpse Blade naturally chose to ignore them selectively, or quibble, or just start spraying, saying that the other party was a sock puppet from Jianghu Studio... Professional sprayers and water armies, this kind of professional quality is essential.

Continuing to scroll down, after about thirty pages, the replies started to become unnutritious. There were more replies like "Waiting for the truth", "I'm just passing by to buy some soy sauce", "Strongly watching, cola and melon seeds are ready", and the rest were a few people debating with each other.

This is 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 back, unless the post is live or full of beautiful pictures, they will make an exception... The remaining less than half of the people will only scroll through the first few pages at most. If there is no new progress, they are too lazy to watch others replying and arguing with each other.

Only less than 10% of the people will turn the posts page by page and refresh in real time. Some of them are really interested in the content and results, some are concerned about whether their replies have been refuted or quoted, and some are because of reading addiction...

Feng Bujue can eat with his left hand. He is not left-handed, and it is difficult for him to write with his left hand, but his left hand can use chopsticks. Eating with his left hand and operating the mouse with his right hand is a technique he consciously trained himself in. It was this technique that allowed him to finish reading the post while finishing the noodles in front of him.

"Well... I finished reading it without realizing it." Feng Bujue actually hates arguing. He thinks that is the most meaningless thing. There is justice and truth in this world, but people are unwilling to admit their mistakes and unwilling to suffer losses, so they choose to make trouble unreasonably or play tricks.

"I really shouldn't have read it, it affects my mood." Feng Bujue picked up the bowl, wiped the computer table with a tissue, and then cleaned up in the kitchen.

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 stared at Asathoth with a fierce gaze. The latter was originally sprawled out on the sofa in a starfish shape, dozing off, but suddenly sat up with a jolt, as if sensing a murderous aura, and turned to meet Feng Bujue's gaze...