I was just telling a story, why is the whole internet urging me to turn myself in?

After hanging up the phone, Shen Feng looked at the screen and rolled his eyes in exasperation.

"Have these capitalists done too many bad things and developed a severe case of paranoia?"

Shen Feng leaned back in his Herman Miller ergonomic chair, worth 100,000 yuan, and sighed deeply. "I haven't even finished the outline yet, and they're already rushing to kneel down, making me look like some kind of cyber terrorist. Xu Zhengyang!"

"Here!" Xu Zhengyang, the newly appointed Chief Risk Officer, pushed open the door and entered.

"Make our studio's disclaimer two sizes bolder and post it in the most prominent place in the live stream." Shen Feng rubbed his temples. "I don't want to be invited for tea by some defense agency again tomorrow."

"Understood! President Shen has put a lot of thought into this. He is using a 'fictitious' shield to make the most rigorous legal separation in order to rectify the chaos in the industry!" Xu Zhengyang's eyes were filled with fervor. He immediately imagined a grand drama and turned around to carry it out.

Shen Feng: "..."

Destroy it, there isn't a single normal person in this company.

Shen Feng had no idea that his casual remark, "purely fictional," had stirred up such a terrifying and overwhelming storm in the outside world.

That night, the entire Kyushu influencer community and MCN agencies were plunged into a sleepless night.

A meeting room of a leading MCN agency in Jiangzhou CBD.

"Quick! Stuff all those dual contracts that forced that internet celebrity to sign last month into the shredder! Drill through the hard drive!"

The boss, sweating profusely, pointed at his legal staff and yelled, "Didn't you see the trailer for Hidden Studio?! 'Grandmaster' has dealt the cards!"

"He can even perform a physical ritual to avenge a five-year-old locked-room murder in Harbin from afar. Do you think he'd even have time to talk about our little problem for five minutes?!"

It wasn't just this one; almost all of the top 50 guilds across the internet were working overnight to clean up any hype related to "rooftop," "jumping off a building," and "cyberbullying."

Those usually arrogant and domineering capitalists who leech off the streamers felt a chill run down their spines when they saw the poster with only one sentence.

Because that man never speaks without a reason.

He wasn't telling a story; he was telling the Book of Life and Death of the King of Hell!

……

Meanwhile, at the Jiangzhou Defense Agency, Special Task Force Monitoring Center.

Su Qing stared at the poster on the big screen of a girl in a white dress standing on the edge of the rooftop, her eyes bloodshot.

The secure hotline on the table suddenly rang, and the caller ID showed: Provincial Cyber ​​Security Department.

"Su Qing, it's me, Lin Jianguo." On the other end of the phone, Captain Lin of the Provincial Cyber ​​Security Brigade spoke with an extremely grave tone. "Did you see the announcement Shen Feng, the guy you've been keeping an eye on, released tonight?"

"I saw it." Su Qing took a deep breath. "Captain Lin, what do you think...?"

"It's not just my opinion, it's the fact that it's right in front of us." Lin Jianguo flipped through the case file in his hand, his tone subdued. "Three months ago, a beauty influencer named 'Rabbit Sauce,' who had two million followers, fell to her death from the rooftop of her apartment in our province. You should remember that, right?"

Su Qing's heart skipped a beat: "I remember. The case caused quite a stir back then, but because there was no one else at the scene, and the surveillance footage showed that she climbed over the fence herself, it was ultimately ruled a suicide. But the case was later upgraded to a higher level by the provincial department because..."

"Because she was doing a two-hour live stream before she died," Lin Jianguo continued. "There were over 100,000 people watching the live stream. The screen was filled with comments, not a single one pleading for her to stay, just 'Go to hell,' 'Plagiarist,' and 'Why aren't you jumping yet?'"

"We know that cyberbullying drove her to her death, but legally, the law does not punish the masses. We cannot determine which of those 100,000 comments was the final straw that broke the camel's back. There is also no evidence pointing to her management company committing a direct criminal offense."

"The case eventually reached a dead end and became an unsolved mystery."

Looking at the photo of Shen Feng's profile with a half-smile on the screen, Su Qing felt a chill run down her spine and straight to her head.

"Captain Lin..." Su Qing's voice trembled slightly, "Shen Feng is going to use his methods to dissect the complete logic of 'murder by online public opinion' in front of millions of people!"

"Keep a close eye on him!" Lin Jianguo shouted sternly. "The Cyber ​​Security Brigade's technical department is working hard to recover the data from 'Rabbit-chan's' smashed phone. I want to see what kind of nonsense this Shen Feng has up his sleeve!"

……

8 PM the following day.

Hidden Culture Media Studio, 68th Floor, Shanghai World Financial Center.

The moment Shen Feng pressed the start button, the entire Tomato Live platform's servers emitted a mournful cry of overload.

[Current online users: 8,000,000+!]

The screen was filled with comments that swept across it like a blizzard.

"Master is dealing the cards! Front row, selling sunflower seeds and cola!"

"Office of National Defense comrades, are you ready to take notes?"

"Which unlucky soul will be physically exorcised today? I can't wait!"

Shen Feng, dressed in a comfortable SpongeBob SquarePants loungewear outfit and holding a thermos cup, sat in front of the camera.

Good evening, everyone.

[Top-notch broadcasting voice] activated.

Shen Feng's deep, mellow voice boomed in the ears of eight million people, "Today, we're going to tell a story... about 'sound'."

"The protagonist of our story, let's call her Xu Nian. She's a beauty blogger who came from a remote mountain village and built a million followers by trying on thirty lipsticks every day."

"She thought she had finally changed her fate. But she didn't know that when a person stands in the spotlight, the attention she receives is seen as a sin by others."

"Xu Nian blocked the path of her peers. Thus, a meticulously planned attack began. Her former assistant was bribed by a rival company for 500,000 yuan to forge an extremely realistic chat log of 'plagiarizing a niche foreign blogger,' and then bribed 300 marketing accounts to distribute it across the entire internet at midnight."

"Overnight, Xu Nian went from an inspirational idol to a plagiarist that everyone condemns."

The number of comments in the live stream gradually decreased.

The netizens who were originally sharing the memes now felt a strange sense of oppression.

"Xu Nian sought help from the company. But what she received was not a public relations statement."

Shen Feng sneered, "It was a 'Supplementary Crisis Management Agreement' submitted by the company's legal department. The company told her that because of her negative public opinion, the company had suffered heavy losses. If she wanted the company to protect her, she had to sign this new performance-based agreement."

"The contract stipulates that the company will take 90% of all her earnings for the next three years. If she refuses to sign or chooses to terminate the contract, she will face a penalty of up to 20 million yuan."

"Capital never believes in tears; it only values ​​surplus value."

"Xu Nian broke down. She didn't have 20 million yuan, and she was almost out of money to pay for her mother's medical treatment. So, on a drizzly night, she climbed to the 24th-floor rooftop of her apartment building and started the last live broadcast of her life."

"She wanted to explain, she wanted to prove her innocence. But what did she see when she looked at the screen?"

Shen Feng suddenly stopped.

Eight million people held their breath, and through the screen, they could almost feel the biting cold wind on the 24th-floor rooftop.

What she saw was a screen full of "Why aren't you dead yet?"

"It's like saying, 'Plagiarists, get out of here and stop wasting public resources.'"

It's like saying, "If you're going to jump, hurry up, I still need to play games."

Shen Feng's voice suddenly rose, carrying a suffocating sense of oppression: "Eighty thousand people in the live stream are reveling and urging each other on like they're watching a free Roman gladiator show! They don't care about the truth at all; they just need a legal dumping ground for their malice!"

Finally, Xu Nian smiled, said "I'm sorry" to the camera, and then... opened her arms, like a kite with a broken string, and fell into the boundless darkness.

"Bang."

Shen Feng tapped his long, slender fingers heavily on the table, producing a dull thud.

The muffled thud was like a heavy hammer blow, striking the hearts of eight million viewers.

The live stream screen froze for a full five seconds. Then, the chat exploded!

"Holy crap! Is this even a story?! I can't breathe while listening to it!"

"I remember now! That bunny girl from three months ago! I was in the live stream back then... I... I didn't insult her, but I didn't defend her either..."

"This was not an accident at all; it was a conspiracy involving 80,000 people to commit murder!!"

Countless people were devastated, and some streamers even publicly lamented the exploitation by capital in the live chat.

……

Meanwhile, the Provincial Public Security Department's Cyber ​​Security Corps, in its three-story underground electronic evidence recovery laboratory.

"drop--"

A crisp notification sound broke the silence.

"Team Leader Lin! The data has been recovered! All the data from Rabbit-chan's shattered phone memory has been successfully extracted!" Technician Xiao Li yanked off his headphones and turned around, covered in sweat.

Lin Jianguo strode forward, shoved Xiao Li aside, and stared at the data that had just been analyzed on the screen.

The first document: a call recording hidden in the phone's internal storage.

In the recording, a man's voice is cold and ruthless: "Your negative public opinion is out of control now. Sign this supplementary agreement, and the penalty for breach of contract is twenty million, which the company will handle for you. Don't sign? Just wait to be sued until you're bankrupt!"

The second document: several screenshots of WeChat chats.

The screenshot shows that Rabbit's former assistant received a screenshot of a 500,000 yuan transfer from an overseas account in a group called "Hunting Operation", with the note: "The material has been sent and the marketing account is ready."

Looking at these data, Lin Jianguo felt a chill run down his spine.

He bribed his assistant with 500,000 yuan! He also paid a 20 million yuan penalty for breach of contract! Even the timing of the chat logs that the former assistant forged was exactly the same as the story Shen Feng told in the live stream!

The most terrifying thing is that this data was only recovered tonight after the phone of Rabbit Girl was smashed to pieces when she fell to her death, and it took the top technical team in the provincial department three whole months!

Even the police only learned of these top-secret details a minute ago!

How did that man, sitting in front of the camera drinking goji berry water in Jiangzhou, know all this?!

"This is insane... Is this even human?" Lin Jianguo felt like his CPU was smoking. He pulled out his phone with trembling hands and dialed Su Qing's hotline at the Jiangzhou Defense Bureau.

The moment the call connected, Lin Jianguo practically roared, "Su Qing! Just what kind of monster is this Shen Feng from Jiangzhou?! The details he described are exactly the same as the damage data we just recovered for the deceased! Even the exact amount of the breach of contract penalty is identical!"

On the other end of the phone, Su Qing was standing in front of the big screen, watching the man in the live broadcast room who was revered as a god by eight million people.

"Team Leader Lin, you'll get used to it."

"This is the fourth time. The synchronization rate between his script and the real case... is one hundred percent."