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

8 PM is widely recognized as the "golden peak traffic" in the cyberpunk online literature industry.

Countless office workers, fresh off virtual work pods or high-pressure assembly lines, habitually connect to brain-computer interfaces, ready to enjoy the cheapest dopamine rush every day.

On the extremely rudimentary website of Weiguang Literature, the update status of "To Live" changed from gray to a bright green.

As the update notification sounded, hundreds of readers who had added the book to their bookshelves because of last night's "highly toxic" controversy flooded into the reading interface like cyber sharks smelling blood.

However, when they scanned the top right corner and saw the message "[New word count: 4000 words]", everyone was speechless for a second.

Immediately afterwards, the comment section of "To Live" was like a high-explosive electromagnetic mine had been thrown in, completely causing chaos.

Before even reading the main text, everyone scrolled to the bottom and started furiously posting comments and reviews.

【？？？？？？？？？？？】

[What's going on? Am I blind, or did the brain-computer interface's transistor burn out? 4000 words?!]

[What happened? Did the author's finger get crushed by a rolling mill? Yesterday he posted 20,000 words, and today it's down to 4,000? Is he getting worse as he gets older?]

[This is hilarious! It's already 2077 in the Star Calendar, and there are still authors who dare to only update 4,000 words a day? The massive output of Cloud Atlas Literature next door is more than 4,000 words just from a sneeze!]

[No need to read any further. The author definitely can't salvage the collapsed plot; he's probably experiencing writer's block! At this update speed, even if I scattered rice on my keyboard, a cybernetic android chicken could peck out more words than him!]

[Too short! Too weak! One-star review, you're welcome!]

In this fast-paced era where updating 100,000 words a day is considered "barely diligent," 4,000 words is simply an insult to the reader's retina.

Countless newcomers joined in the frenzy, flooding the book review section of "To Live" with negative comments, pushing it to the top of the daily trending list on the Weiguang platform.

In the third residential area, in Zhou Mingxuan's Hengwen Apartment.

Mingming Ruyue, sporting a gleaming gold badge that reads "V8 Star Booker - 15000 Hours of Reading," stared anxiously at the retinal projection.

"Four thousand words?" Zhou Mingxuan frowned.

He had been waiting all day! Last night he spent the whole night imagining how Fugui would "awaken the system," "reclaim his ancestral property," and "powerfully slap his father-in-law in the face," just waiting to see the climax today.

After all that effort, the author only served a dish that wasn't even enough to fill a tooth gap.

"What kind of scarcity marketing is this? This author is so pretentious!"

While cursing and swearing, Zhou Mingxuan's body language betrayed him as he slid the virtual cursor and clicked on the concise four thousand words.

"I'd like to see what kind of flowery language you can come up with from these four thousand words... Hmm?"

Ten minutes later, Zhou Mingxuan suddenly sat up straight on the zero-gravity sofa, his eyes fixed on the projection.

In this 4,000-word plot, there was neither the "unearthing of the ancient Shennong Cauldron in the field" that he had envisioned, nor "Long Er coming to provoke the protagonist and being punched to death by the male lead."

The story is about Fugui, who, in order to support his large family, puts on coarse linen clothes and reluctantly enters the mansion that originally belonged to him.

He humbly bowed to Long Er, the enemy who had schemed to swindle him out of his entire fortune, addressing him as "Master Long" and begging him to rent him five acres of land to cultivate.

After Long Er arrogantly mocked him, he rented him the five acres of the most difficult-to-cultivate land. Fu Gui was actually grateful and thanked him profusely!

"Holy crap!!! How could they tolerate this?!"

Zhou Mingxuan slapped his thigh hard. Seeing the male lead bowing and scraping before his enemy, his blood pressure was about to explode.

But just three seconds later, his eyes suddenly flashed with a terrifying light, and he became as excited as if he had taken a high-purity stimulant.

"I get it! I completely get it! So that's the trick!"

With the speed of someone who's been single for thirty years, he switched back to the comments section and, amidst a chorus of insults like "short," "garbage," and "the male lead is a cuckold," unleashed another long, heart-wrenching post:

[Mingmingruyue]: "Shut up, you who are criticizing the short story and the male lead's cowardice! You don't know anything!"

This four thousand-word passage is hardly a writer's block; it's a divine plot twist, the ultimate application of the most classic "survivalist" and "endurance" styles in online novels!

Think about it: why did Fugui specifically go to Long Er for help?

Was he really begging? He was playing a game of deception! He voluntarily asked for five acres of the most difficult-to-cultivate, inferior land. Why?

Because beneath those five acres of land, there are definitely treasures left behind by the Xu family's ancestors (such as spiritual veins or ancient mechanical cores)!

The author deliberately only published four thousand words to portray the protagonist Han Xin's forbearance in the face of humiliation.

The more humble Fu Gui is now, the more exhilarated he will be when he discovers the cheat code and kills Long Er's entire family!

He's developing rapidly right under his enemy's nose—the plot tension is off the charts! The author is playing a grand, sweeping game; these four thousand words are all build-up to the climax!!!

Zhou Mingxuan's wildly imaginative post instantly gave a boost to readers in the comments section who were struggling to find their way.

[Wow, after this expert's analysis, I suddenly find these 4,000 words surprisingly appealing!]

[Case solved! I knew the male lead couldn't be that useless; he was acting like a ninja turtle, saving up his ultimate move!]

[That's right, even the worst five acres of land must hold hidden opportunities! I know this trick well! I'm getting excited, waiting for Fugui to dig out his secret weapon and teach Long Er a lesson!]

Just as Zhou Mingxuan and his group were frantically using online novel tropes to "play dumb to fool the enemy," several newly registered IDs in the depths of the comments section were eerily quiet.

They didn't participate in the chaotic insults, nor did they follow Zhou Mingxuan's lead in imagining any exciting plot twists.

ID: [Raven and Writing Table]

This is a blank account that hasn't even had a profile picture set yet.

Behind the screen, a pair of deep and sharp eyes read those four thousand words back and forth three times.

He lingered for a long time at the part where Fugui bent down and called out "Master Long".

Subsequently, this "raven" left a very strange comment in the paragraph review with extreme restraint:

"Four thousand words, not a single wasted byte of code. The raw feeling of being utterly broken by life, the humility of falling from the clouds into the mud and still having to force a smile... these are emotional parameters that AI algorithms cannot simulate. This author's 'engine' is old, but exceptionally terrifying."

After sending that message, he casually gifted the highest-level virtual gift on the Weiguang platform—[Eternal Starfire]—and then quietly logged off.

Meanwhile, another ID: [Wind Above the Clouds].

The owner of this account doesn't seem to take those "the rise of the righteous path" arguments seriously.

She gave the book a perfect score directly in the book's rating system and left a short review that was completely different from Zhou Mingxuan's fervor:

"They're all waiting for your protagonist to unearth the treasure and become a god. But I have a strong feeling you're writing about a human. A mortal who will be crushed by the gears of time, yet clings desperately to the earth in an attempt to survive. Four thousand words a day—perhaps it's not that the author can't write fast, but rather that the writing is too heavy, so heavy that even the server running it would feel suffocated if it exceeded four thousand words. I'm starting to look forward to it."

In this chaotic comment section, filled with complaints about the length and "unrestrained speculation,"...

These two newly emerged IDs, with their extremely incongruous styles, were like faint fireflies occasionally flashing in the deep sea, quickly submerged in the massive torrent of data.