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

Yu Wen took a deep breath and pulled out the last remaining bottle of inferior nerve-blocking fluid from the corner of the drawer.

Looking at the murky pink liquid, he didn't hesitate at all, unscrewed the cap, tilted his head back, and poured it down his throat.

The familiar cool sensation spread down my esophagus again, but this time, the pleasant feeling, like injecting top-quality lubricant into rusty gears, was greatly diminished.

The sharp pain deep in my brain was barely covered by a thin membrane, and it was still throbbing faintly.

The body had developed resistance to these black market defective drugs, and this broken body, which had been severely malnourished for years, was on the verge of collapse after being forcibly overdrawn twice.

"Da...da da da..."

The sound of keyboards echoed again in the basement, but the rhythm was noticeably heavier and slower than the night before.

As Fugui was conscripted by the Kuomintang, struggled to survive amidst piles of corpses and artillery fire, and finally returned to his hometown after a near-death experience, he discovered that his mother had passed away, and his obedient daughter Fengxia had become deaf and mute due to a high fever...

The hammer of fate, transformed into cold, square characters, pounded into the document, one after another.

When the word count barely surpassed the number "10000".

"Bang!"

Yu Wen's hands went limp, and he slammed onto the computer desk like a puppet with its strings cut, his chin hitting the keyboard hard and creating a long string of gibberish.

He was panting heavily, his chest heaving violently like a broken bellows, and cold sweat had completely soaked through his rough, close-fitting clothes.

Everything in my vision was spinning, and all I could hear was a sharp ringing in my ears.

"That's the limit..."

This time, the duration of the drug's effect was shortened by nearly half, but the side effects increased exponentially.

Yu Wen lay on the table for a good ten minutes before he could barely muster the strength to lift a finger.

He gritted his teeth, dragged the mouse, and prepared to throw the 10,000 words he had written with half his life on the line into the draft box, and also check the status of the scheduled release last night.

However, when his gaze swept across the backstage panel displaying the work data, he froze instantly.

[Current total word count of "To Live": 24000 words]

"etc……"

Yu Wen blinked hard to shake off the double image in his eyes.

The book was initially published with 20,000 words. Last night, he clearly set a timer to update the 10,000 words he wrote while staying up all night. Using simple addition, the total word count should definitely be 30,000 now!

Why were only 4,000 words updated?! Who wrote the remaining 6,000 words?!

He frowned, opened the system notification bar, and saw a red-highlighted official message from the "Weiguang Literature" platform's mastermind.

[Warning: Your work "Living" has triggered the platform's "Psychological Defense Protection Mechanism"!]

[Detection Report]: According to the platform's content screening algorithm, the latest chapter of this work has an excessively high level of emotional depression and lacks effective dopamine release points. The plot "toxicity" has been rated as extremely dangerous (S level).

[Outcome]: To prevent readers from suffering excessive psychological trauma in a short period, leading to cyber neurasthenia or large-scale emotional breakdown, the platform has forcibly implemented "anti-depressive traffic restriction measures." The daily update limit for this work has been locked at 4000 words.

[Platform Suggestion]: Authors are requested to arrange for the protagonist to awaken superpowers or obtain a system as soon as possible, and add positive emotional feedback such as "slapping the villain in the face" and "unexpected windfall." Until then, please update a small amount each day to allow readers enough time to recover from their emotional trauma.

Looking at this official warning, which was full of cyberpunk absurdity, Yu Wen sat in his wheelchair, completely speechless.

"Afraid readers won't be able to process this? Forced traffic restrictions?!"

Yu Wen's lips twitched violently; he almost laughed out of anger.

In this era where AI models are used to create mental drugs and cheap industrial saccharin is used to brainwash people into idiots, true literature has become a dangerous substance that needs to be strictly controlled in dosage.

The Weiguang platform is actually afraid that these hothouse flowers, who are used to reading brainless wish-fulfillment novels, will be "poisoned" by Fugui's suffering, so they forcibly locked his update volume at four thousand words?!

Yu Wen glanced at the drafts folder.

The 10,000 words I painstakingly typed out today, plus the 6,000 words that were returned by the system yesterday, make a total of 16,000 words in my draft.

Based on the "safe anti-toxic dosage" of 4,000 words per day on this lousy platform, he has enough words to leisurely keep up for four whole days without doing anything else.

"So what's the point of me risking brain damage by taking drugs and writing 10,000 words today?"

Yu Wen irritably rubbed his messy hair, feeling a deep, absurd sense of powerlessness wash over him.

So all that effort I put into this today was for nothing.

But then he thought about it again and found it extremely ironic.

These cyber readers haven't even seen Fengxia become deaf and mute yet, let alone the later plot points like Youqing being drained of blood, Jiazhen getting rickets, and Fengxia having a massive hemorrhage—plots that could truly pierce one's heart.

The platform's algorithm judged that they "couldn't handle" the situation simply because they went bankrupt and became tenant farmers.

If they were to actually read the whole book in one go, I'm afraid a large number of them would be sent to the mental emergency room in the downtown area because their mental defenses would collapse.

"Fine, then let's impose restrictions."

Yu Wen sneered, reached out and closed the text message, a mischievous glint in his eyes:

"Cutting flesh with a dull knife hurts more."

"Since you're afraid of dying from the poison, I'll feed you four thousand words every day."

Despite saying that, after the mischievous sneer faded, Yu Wen leaned back in his wheelchair, wearily rubbing his throbbing temples. A deep sense of unease and lingering fear began to creep into his heart like cold vines.

His angry words were just that—angry words. As the "porter" who personally brought this classic over, he understood better than anyone the destructive power of traditional pure literature like "To Live".

Traditional literature is not like fast-food online novels; it doesn't rely on short climaxes of a few hundred words to stimulate the senses.

Its impact comes from the weight of a lifetime, and from the suffocating feeling of being utterly crushed by the giant waves of fate after reading it in one go, and from the lingering desolation amidst the extreme despair.

If he could release tens of thousands of words at once, Yu Wen was absolutely confident that he could crush and reshape the values ​​of these readers.

But now, four thousand words a day?

This kind of "online novel serialization" model, which is like squeezing toothpaste, is practically draining the lifeblood of this literary work little by little!

Even worse, readers in this cyber age have long been fed by AI models into extremely impatient monsters who "switch books if they don't see a satisfying moment in three seconds."

The reason the comment section is so popular right now is entirely because of the influencer "Mingmingruyue" who stirred up trouble, making everyone mistakenly believe that the book has a plot twist and is "preparing a big surprise".

"After patiently following up for several days, they discovered that instead of Fugui's cultivation journey and face-slapping moments, or the awakening of the system, the daily updates of four thousand words brought them news of Fugui being conscripted, his mother dying, and his daughter becoming deaf and mute..."

Yu Wen gave a bitter laugh, not daring to think any further.

Nowadays, netizens' curiosity comes quickly and goes even faster.

Once they realize they've been deceived, and that this is truly just a history of suffering filled with despair and devoid of any "dopamine compensation," who would still hold their nose and endure this nonsensical torment?

They would definitely curse "bad luck!" and then ruthlessly remove the book from the shelf, turning their attention to the "fast-paced, exciting novels" on Yuntu Literature that are updated with hundreds of thousands of words every day.

Even if the core of "To Live" is great, what's the point if no one is willing to read it to the end?

We need to find a way to break this deadlock...

Yu Wen sighed.

But right now my body is severely overdrawn, and I feel wave after wave of needle-like sensations in my head.

He knew he couldn't push himself any longer; the feeling of being on the verge of sudden death last night was still vivid in his mind.

He didn't collapse dramatically at the table like in the novels. Instead, he dragged his aching arms and slowly pushed his wheelchair to the bedside, then climbed onto the tattered foam mat with some difficulty.

"Take a nap first, let your body recover a bit, and then think of a solution."

Yu Wen wrapped himself tightly in the thin blanket and closed his heavy eyelids with worry.