Chapter 1

Feng Bujue opened his eyes to the faint, soft light inside the game pod. Thanks to the all-nighters he'd pulled for the past day and a half—sleeping early, waking up, sleeping again—the biological clock he'd struggled to establish, sleeping from four in the morning to naturally waking up at noon, had been disrupted.

At two-thirty in the morning, he disconnected his neural link, emerged from the game pod, and suddenly felt the urge to write.

Opening the pod door, he took a single step out and immediately trod on something sticky, gooey…

The room was dark, and he wasn't wearing slippers, just socks. In a fleeting instant, he made the very correct deduction: "This isn't cat shit…" He lowered his head. "What the hell else could it be!"

Twenty minutes later, he wiped the floor clean, washed his socks, and sat in his computer chair, face to face with Asathoth, who was sprawled on the desk as if nothing had happened.

These days, people are particular about private space, so the building had excellent soundproofing. Otherwise, a neighbor would have been banging on his door long ago, given Feng Bujue's late-night ruckus, running the washing machine and mopping the floor.

Asathoth's eyes glowed with a bilious green light in the darkness, which could be unsettling if you looked at it for too long. Feng Bujue glared at him for a while, then sighed. "I'll deal with you tomorrow."

He shooed the cat off the desk, turned on the computer, and started writing. He had no idea where the draft for this month's "Second-Rate Detective and the Cat" was, so he seized the moment to write as much as possible while the inspiration lasted.

The matter of the Derivatives preoccupied Feng Bujue. "If the very existence of a life is a mistake, then what is the meaning of its arrival in this world?" This question lingered in his mind.

When he couldn't find an answer, he would write the question into his works. Not to get readers to answer it for him; he knew that some things had no answers. He simply wanted more people to think about it.

Simply put, Feng Bujue's behavior was… when his own entanglement could not be resolved, he transformed one person's entanglement into a group's entanglement, ultimately achieving the effect of everyone being entangled. It could be described as a higher realm of harming others without benefiting oneself.

Of course, Feng Bujue couldn't directly write about his experiences or the game's settings. He had to reimagine a plot and present the story of the Derivatives in another guise, turning it into a story within "Second-Rate Detective and the Cat."

Time always passed quickly when he was focused on something. When he pulled himself out of the story, he found that it was already dawn, and this month's serial draft could be considered to have a landing. Feng Bujue couldn't possibly have finished the entire draft in those five or six hours. He was merely weaving a framework, which was the most mentally taxing step. Once this step was completed, the rest would be relatively simple. Filling in the content within the framework would become a draft, which would then be revised. If all went well, one revision would be enough to produce the final draft. As for the proofreading, he would leave that to the magazine's editor. However, there was usually nothing to proofread in Feng Bujue's drafts; he was a person who paid attention to quality and detail.

It was a Sunday, and the weather was decent. As far as Feng Bujue knew, every Sunday, Wang Tanzhi would go to the kindergarten to help as a social worker, or, in Feng Bujue's words, "hang out with your peers for half a day."

Feng Bujue himself had a rather indifferent attitude toward public welfare activities. Compared to a good youth like Xiao Tan, if he were to participate in similar work… to put it mildly, it would be "somewhat incongruous"; to put it bluntly, it would scare (or corrupt) the children.

Speaking of Feng Bujue, the police officers at the local police station all knew him. Jue-ge was a legendary figure… like a missing corpse from the hospital morgue, a cat giving birth to a dog, a child suddenly being able to blow out a light bulb with telekinesis, crop circles, meteorite fragments, and so on… if someone reported similar situations in all seriousness, finding Feng Bujue was definitely the right move. Anyway, either he did it, or it was related to him. If it really had nothing to do with him, they could ask him to be a consultant.

Feng Bujue himself didn't think there was anything wrong with this. People like him, who didn't like to ask for help, were often very willing to help others. It was less about helping others and more about enjoying the feeling of being "needed." Simply put, he liked people to ask him for help. Moreover, this mentality of his had nothing to do with a sense of social mission; it was purely out of interest.

In any case, this Sunday was going to be another leisurely day for Feng Bujue. He had only slept for two and a half hours last night, and it was spent in the game, in a "dreamlike" state. Afterward, he got up and coded until dawn. He was indeed a little tired at this time. He yawned and went back to bed, falling into a dead sleep.

He woke up and glanced at the clock. It was exactly noon.

This time, Feng Bujue warily checked the side of the bed for any new "landmines" buried by Asathoth. Fortunately, there were none. However, when he came to the living room, he still saw a pile…

As someone who had experience raising cats, he naturally knew what to do. First, he dragged Asathoth to its masterpiece, pinched its face with both hands and massaged it for a while, then picked up the pile with a tissue, put it in the litter box, and then dragged Asathoth to the litter box again, patted its head, and let it recognize the place.

When Feng Bujue was a child, he had tried to train pets to use the flush toilet in this way, but ultimately failed. As a matter of fact, that thing was not designed for cats. They would accidentally fall in, and the consequences were unimaginable…

After cleaning up the mess, he went to cook noodles for himself. He didn't even have any change left after buying breakfast yesterday, so Feng Bujue was now literally "penniless." Fortunately, he had sponged off Bao Daren and Xiao Tan for two meals, which could be considered as having stored some oil in his stomach. For the next nine days, until he received his manuscript fee in the middle of the month, if there were no opportunities to freeload, he would have to strictly adhere to the pre-calculated rations and eat clear soup noodles every meal.

"Meow…" Asathoth looked at Feng Bujue, who was cooking, as if he felt he was making something good and wanted to get a piece of the action.

Feng Bujue glanced down at him. "Your cat food tastes better than this."

Asathoth seemed to understand, turned around, left the kitchen, and went to take a nap on the sofa.

More than ten minutes later, Feng Bujue carried his homemade clear soup noodles to the computer, turned on the monitor, and logged into the Thriller Paradise game forum. At some point, he had developed a habit of having to watch something or chat with someone while eating, otherwise he would feel like he was wasting his life.

He had just sucked a mouthful of noodles into his mouth when his gaze shifted to the screen, and the line of words at the top of the forum almost made him spit out the noodles.

"Due to the number of max-level players exceeding 10% of the total number of internal beta players, the server has been shut down. We will complete a full upgrade within forty-eight hours and open the official public beta version. Please look forward to it."