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

Friday nights are always the busiest time for cyber network traffic.

Whether they are white-collar workers in office buildings in the central district or low-level miners in the lower district who have just finished a week of high-pressure work, they are used to connecting to brain-computer interfaces at this time and immersing themselves in a cheap dopamine illusion.

Around 8 PM, Weiguang Literature's server promptly pushed an update notification to all terminals that had added "To Live" to their bookshelves.

[The novel "To Live" has been updated. This update contains 50000 words.]

The moment this notification popped up, the first reaction of the thousands of readers who were still observing was surprisingly consistent—stunned, followed by doubt.

[50,000 words? Did I read that right?]

[Just a few days ago he was squeezing out 4,000 words a day, and today he's posting 50,000 in one go?]

[Case solved. The author probably broke his hand from typing so much that he finally faced reality and bought a cheap AI model to write the code for him, right?]

[It must be generated by AI. No matter how fast a human's hands are, how could they possibly type 50,000 words in a day?]

With the preconceived notion that "this book has finally compromised with algorithms," a large number of readers flocked to the latest chapter.

The initial reading experience seemed to confirm the guesses of those readers who enjoy fast-paced, exciting stories.

The plot then moved to the land reform.

Long Er, who had once schemed to swindle over a hundred acres of Fu Gui's land and acted arrogantly, was bound hand and foot and taken away to be shot because of his landlord status.

Before he died, Long Er passed by Fu Gui and shouted, "I'm dying in your place!"

Upon seeing this, the comment section immediately became lively, even reminiscent of a familiar "feel-good" novel.

[Good riddance! The most disgusting villain at the beginning has finally met his end!]

Although the male lead didn't kill him himself, it's still a case of using someone else to do the dirty work, right?

[What goes around comes around; no one escapes the wrath of Heaven! Long Er's actions have truly brought him retribution!]

[I knew it! A 50,000-word update meant the plot was about to take off. With all the villains dead, Fu Gui's family should finally have some good days, right?]

With this expectation of "after hardship comes happiness", readers continued to scroll down the virtual page.

However, they soon discovered that the familiar, rough, earthy smell did not turn into AI-generated industrial saccharin despite the surge in word count.

On the contrary, the hammer of fate swung faster and harder.

To support Youqing's schooling, Fugui gave Fengxia away to someone else.

The little girl who couldn't speak didn't cry when she was taken away. She just clung tightly to the door frame, her eyes full of tears, her face full of grievance and fear, but she couldn't make a sound.

For readers who have reached this point, the initial thrill of seeing Ryuji executed is instantly extinguished by half.

Then came three years of natural disasters and famine.

Jiazhen has rickets and can't do heavy work. Youqing runs barefoot back and forth on the country roads every day to feed the sheep and go to school, and he can't bear to throw away his shoes even when the soles are worn out.

The descriptions of hunger so intense that they resorted to gnawing on tree bark and drinking water to stave off hunger were so realistic that they made the readers in the lower-middle district, who relied on synthetic starch to survive, feel nauseous.

But this is still not the bottom line.

The plot then jumps to the part where Yoo-kyung has his blood drawn at school.

The readers watched as the sensible thirteen-year-old boy happily ran to the hospital to donate blood for the county magistrate's woman.

Watching the doctor drain Youqing's blood bit by bit, completely disregarding the life or death of a child in order to save that "big shot".

And that county magistrate turned out to be Chunsheng, who had crawled out of a pile of corpses with Fugui back then.

Fu Gui, without telling his seriously ill wife Jia Zhen, buried his son under the small tree at the entrance of the village in the pitch black night.

Every night, he would walk alone to the grave, sit on the muddy ground, and talk to his son beneath it.

Later, Jia Zhen found out anyway.

She didn't wail and cry like the mother in the AI ​​novel, nor did she curse the heavens and the earth.

She simply had Fugui carry her to Youqing's grave.

She lay on the grave mound, her hands touching the soil, and sat there quietly for the entire afternoon.

At this moment, countless retinal terminals, glowing with a faint blue light, fell into a deathly silence.

In the third residential area, Zhou Mingxuan sat on a zero-gravity sofa, covering his face with his hands, warm tears seeping through his fingers and wetting the back of his hands.

On the maglev train in the downtown area, several exhausted laborers stared at the projection in front of them, their eyes red-rimmed, biting their teeth to keep from letting out a sob.

In this cyber age where people are used to expressing anger with "world-destroying" and describing sorrow with "rivers of blood," they witnessed for the first time that true grief is something that cannot be expressed with a sound.

But the dull knife kept cutting downwards.

Fengxia grew up and met Erxi, who had a lopsided head.

As readers watched them joyfully get married and Fengxia become pregnant, a faint warmth rose in their hearts, and they prayed that this family, which had suffered so much, could preserve even a tiny bit of its bloodline.

Then, on the very day that the bitter root was born.

Fengxia suffered a massive hemorrhage.

The girl who laughed so hard her gums showed on the edge of the field, but couldn't make a sound, died in the same hospital bed as her younger brother.

Last night, some people were still cursing in the comments section, calling the author a psychopath and questioning why a cute little girl had to be turned into a deaf-mute.

Now, all of them have fallen silent.

They realized they were wrong.

What does it matter if you become deaf and mute? In this book, even living itself is a luxury.

……

It's 11 p.m.

The comments section of "To Live" has seen its most frenzied and also most repressed outburst since the book's inception.

Gone are the previous barrage of vicious insults and those self-righteous, presumptuous predictions.

The comments section was filled with incoherent speech and shock after being deeply affected by these 50,000 words.

【ID Rampage Mechanical Arm】: I'm a grown man, and I was watching this in the workshop while crying. My coworkers thought I had my hand crushed by the machine. Author, you win.

[ID Pure Love God of War]: I apologize for cursing Fengxia for becoming mute yesterday. I was wrong. I thought that was the bottom, but I didn't expect it was just the entrance to the abyss. I couldn't hold back when Youqing died, and I burst into tears when Jiazhen was lying on the grave. This book is too heavy; it's suffocating me.

[The Night Watchman of ID Old Bookstore]: 50,000 words, finished reading. Anyone who says this was written by AI, I'll smash their brain-computer interface. AI can't calculate this feeling of powerlessness, this sense of life being worthless, much less the despair of Jia Zhen, who didn't even have the strength to cry.

[ID Logic Analyst]: I'm feeling a chill run down my spine. This is the author's answer to us: no return of the God of War, no system awakening. The times are a mountain, and Fugui's family are just ants at its foot. We are all ants.

[ID Late Breeze]: I just wanted to read a story, but now I feel like I'm being roasted on a fire. It hurts so much, it really hurts.

These cyberpunk readers, whose tastes had been spoiled by large-scale models and who were used to a satisfying moment every three seconds, had their worldviews shattered and were utterly defeated by the realistic blows of this 50,000-word novel tonight.

They finally realized that they were not dealing with a lighthearted online novel, but a colossal work that could dissect flesh and blood and strike at the soul.