I asked you to write a light novel, but you wrote about living?

Just as Zhou Mingxuan's consciousness had locked onto the red "Exit" button and was about to completely sever the retinal projection, his quick glance suddenly stopped at an extremely inconspicuous sentence.

My dad's getting old, and so is his poop; it's not easy for him to poop out.

Zhou Mingxuan's finger, which was hovering in mid-air, suddenly stopped.

"Is poop getting old too?"

He frowned and muttered the sentence repeatedly to himself.

Suddenly, he realized that this seemingly vulgar statement contained an irrefutable truth.

Without any flowery language, just a few simple words, the author vividly portrays the frail and powerless state of an elderly person in their twilight years.

"This kind of sentence..."

Zhou Mingxuan's keen data analysis intuition told him that something was wrong.

He was using the "quantum speed reading" mode of those AI-powered fast-paced online articles to scan the charts, his mind was full of nitpicking, and he didn't really focus on reading at all.

Upon noticing this sentence, he suddenly became interested.

He lowered the refresh rate of the brain-computer interface, forcibly slowed down his reading speed, and began to re-examine this "garbage" that he had sentenced to death, word by word.

The more Zhou Mingxuan read, the deeper his astonishment became.

He found the book's structure to be extremely bizarre.

It contains almost no fancy rhetoric, using only simple vocabulary that even illiterate people in the lower city could understand, and forming the simplest short sentences.

But it is precisely these simple short sentences, when pieced together, that occasionally produce a vivid expression that he finds incredibly wonderful, even somewhat terrifying.

For example, when writing about the protagonist Fugui's wife Jia Zhen, Fugui said:

You know, your belly looks bigger every time the wind blows.

Zhou Mingxuan was stunned for a moment: "What does that mean? Is this some kind of superpowered mutant physique?"

But after a moment's thought, he instantly realized—this was a very down-to-earth description of how easily women can get pregnant!

"hiss……"

Zhou Mingxuan gasped.

This wonderful metaphor, imbued with the earthy and absurd quality, is something that a large AI model could never generate!

AI can only strictly follow logic trees; they can only write things like "the implantation rate of fertilized eggs in women is as high as 99%." They can never create such seemingly illogical yet extremely vivid human language!

However, before he could finish marveling at the unique writing style, the following plot hit him like a ton of bricks on the head.

Pregnant Jia Zhen went to the casino to persuade Fu Gui to go home, but Fu Gui not only didn't appreciate it, but also felt he had lost face. In front of everyone in the casino, he punched and kicked his pregnant wife, and finally forced her to leave.

Holy crap!

Zhou Mingxuan's brows furrowed deeply, and he almost couldn't help but burst into a tirade:

"Isn't this male lead a complete scumbag?! He abuses the female lead?! He even hits a pregnant woman?! This is just too much!"

While he was mentally cursing "So toxic!", his gaze was fixed on him as if by a magnet, unable to look away.

The subsequent plot developments were like a runaway heavy truck going downhill, relentlessly challenging the limits of his understanding as a bookworm of over a decade.

He was robbed of over a hundred acres of farmland and his grand ancestral home by Long Er's gambling scheme.

The Xu family's fortune, accumulated over generations, was completely squandered overnight!

The father-in-law, amidst gongs and drums, forcibly took away Jia Zhen, who was pregnant.

The once wealthy father was so enraged that he fell off the latrine and died on the spot!

Fu Gui, the young master who never lifted a finger in the kitchen, had to move out of the mansion with his mother and daughter and into a drafty thatched hut. He had to humbly rent land from his enemy, Long Er, and was reduced to a tenant farmer who had to toil in the mud for a living!

When you see the latest 20,000-word update:

When Jiazhen insisted on carrying her newborn son Youqing on her back, wearing a light red cheongsam, back to the countryside to suffer with Fugui, Zhou Mingxuan was completely speechless.

He leaned back on the sensor-activated sofa, stunned, and remained in a daze for a long time.

"Are you crazy...?"

Only 20,000 words!

In the large-scale model of Cloud Atlas, 20,000 words might not even cover the first scene of the male protagonist showing off and getting slapped in the face at the auction!

But what about this book?

Twenty thousand words, crammed with such a complex cast of characters, spanning such a dramatic class fall, the plot unfolds so fast it's like riding a roller coaster without seatbelts!

Zhou Mingxuan felt extremely uncomfortable, as if his chest was stuffed with a wad of waterlogged cotton, making him feel suffocated.

But at the same time, an unprecedented and strange hunger for reading surged up from the depths of his nerves, which had been numbed by industrial saccharin.

What will happen next?

Zhou Mingxuan took a deep breath, his brain began to work frantically, trying to use the established methods he had learned from reading online novels for more than ten years to analyze this book.

"I understand!"

He slapped his thigh suddenly, a smug gleam of self-satisfied excitement flashing in his eyes:

"This is definitely a carefully crafted 'build-up' tactic by the author!"

According to the ultimate logic of online novels, the harder you are trampled at the beginning, the more satisfying the rebound will be later!

"No wonder he squandered his family fortune in just 20,000 words! The male protagonist went from being a top-tier tycoon to the lowest-level tenant farmer—isn't this the most classic 'fall from grace' opening? This suspense is brilliantly crafted; it's much more oppressive and realistic than those stories about annulled engagements or digging up supreme bones!"

The more Zhou Mingxuan thought about it, the more reasonable it seemed, and he couldn't help but smile expectantly.

The worse the start, the stronger the cheat!

This old man Fugui is currently being trampled in the mud. He'll definitely awaken some kind of heaven-defying farm owner system or discover his ancestral cultivation technique, and then he'll pin that Long Er to the ground and slap him in the face, regaining his 100 acres of land—no, his 10,000 acres!

"interesting."

Zhou Mingxuan suddenly felt an intense urge to see how this old man named Fugui would defy fate and carve out a bloody path through this hopeless situation.

He raised his hand and decisively tapped the little star representing "favorites" on the retina display.

After adding "To Live" to his bookshelf, Zhou Mingxuan switched out of the reading interface and followed the trail back to the "Weiguang Literature" forum, where he found the book recommendation post that Yu Wen had initially made but which had gone unnoticed.

The post was originally all alone, with no replies, and it looked like it was about to sink into the bottomless pit of the cyber forum.

Zhou Mingxuan rubbed his fingers together, still feeling a bit unsatisfied, and typed out what he considered to be an extremely insightful comment on the virtual keyboard:

[It's truly ruthless; this opening is chilling. However, I must say the author's writing is actually quite good, with a strangely realistic style, and most importantly, it's very suspenseful. I predict this is a classic "building tension before development" trope; after his wife returns, the protagonist, Fugui, will definitely awaken his cheat abilities and rise to power! Let's wait and see, and see if I'm wrong.]