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

Weiguang Literature Headquarters, Deep Data Monitoring Room.

At 2 a.m., most of the human reviewers had already gone offline, leaving only a few on the night shift still struggling with the high-frequency brain-computer interface.

Liu Feng removed the retinal extension patch, rubbed his aching brow, and took a sip of the now-cold espresso on the table.

He had just finished reading over a hundred "wasteland mecha novels" with similar plots, and his mind was full of messy metal parts and energy codes. He wanted to lean back in his chair, close his eyes, and relax for a few minutes.

At the workstation next to him, his colleague Xiao Chen, who was also on the night shift, suddenly stretched and exclaimed:

"Oh my god, what the hell? It seems like a dark horse has suddenly emerged from the pool of the Spark Cup."

Liu Feng, with his eyes closed, casually asked:

"What the heck? Which studio is spending money to buy their way onto the charts again?"

"It doesn't look like it was bought. The data cable price has risen wildly, and it's all from retail investors' recommendations and monthly votes."

Xiao Chen stared at the large data screen in front of him, zooming in on the curves and marveling at them:

"In less than four hours, it jumped from over 14,000 to over 800! The speed of this increase almost caused the mainframe to detect it as an anomaly and block it."

Liu Feng opened his eyes: "What book?"

Xiao Chen read the name on the screen: "What's it called... 'To Live,' the name is quite short."

Upon hearing those two words, Liu Feng was stunned.

"To Live"?

Isn't that the book he personally lifted the traffic restrictions on a couple of days ago and even specially recommended to Professor Shen Yanqiu?

Liu Feng quickly went through the plot he had seen in his mind.

Fu Gui went bankrupt, his father died in a fall, and yesterday's plot was that Fu Gui was captured and forced to fight as cannon fodder for two years. He returned home after surviving many near-death experiences, only to find that his mother had died and Feng Xia had developed a high fever and become deaf and mute.

At the time, he thought the author had written something truly tragic, that a little girl had lost her voice.

But how could a book that has no satisfying moments and is purely angst-filled suddenly become so popular? And even climbed to the top 800?

Based on his five years of experience as a reviewer, a novel that was originally mediocre suddenly experiences a surge in traffic is often because the plot has reached some extremely intense turning point.

In a book like "To Live," turning points are usually not good things.

Liu Feng's heart skipped a beat, and a thought popped into his head:

Could it be that Fengxia is dead?

If the author were to actually kill off the girl who became mute, it would indeed bring tears to the readers' eyes, no wonder the data would explode.

With this predictive mindset of "professional scrutiny," Liu Feng lost his motivation to continue working.

He put the retinal patch back on and brought up the page of "To Live".

Sure enough, the chapter list showed an additional 50,000 words of updates.

He clicked on the main text and read on, following his progress from yesterday.

The plot was relatively peaceful at the beginning, but then the land reform was implemented and Ryuji was executed.

Having read this far, Liu Feng, a veteran auditor, still had the energy to analyze it further:

This can be considered a minor climax, using someone else to do the dirty work, releasing some of the readers' pent-up emotions, and the pacing was well controlled.

But as he scrolled down the page, his superior "professional mindset" began to crumble little by little.

Three years of famine. Youqing ran around barefoot to feed the sheep and go to school.

Liu Feng watched the part where Youqing had his blood drawn.

He had assumed that even if Yuqing were to die, he would die in a famine or in some accident.

But he never expected that a thirteen-year-old child would have his blood drained dry by the hospital while he was donating blood to the county magistrate's woman.

There was no build-up, no grand reason for sacrifice, and even the question "Did you get it?" was so absurd it sent chills down my spine.

In a book written by an AI model, if a supporting character is going to die, his death will inevitably lead to some kind of awakening in the protagonist, or transform into some kind of energy that drives the plot forward.

But nothing happened to Youqing. He just went to donate blood, and then he became a cold little body, carried by Fugui, and buried under a dark tree.

Liu Feng's finger, which was swiping across the virtual interface, stopped.

He thought that Fengxia's death was already a sign of the author's cruelty, but he was wrong.

The knife was first plunged into the most sensible and vibrant little boy.

Liu Feng felt a tightness in his throat. He didn't stop and continued reading.

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

Upon seeing this, Liu Feng unconsciously breathed a sigh of relief.

As a reviewer who watches killings every day, he actually felt a sense of relief for a fictional deaf-mute girl in the book at this moment.

Things seem to be finally getting better.

Then, in the next chapter.

Fengxia gave birth to Kugen, suffered severe bleeding, and died in her hospital bed.

Liu Feng's half-joking prediction, "Could it be that Fengxia is dead?" had turned into a line of cold, hard Chinese characters that landed squarely on his retina.

He guessed the plot correctly, but he couldn't laugh at all.

Immediately afterwards, Jiazhen lay on her hospital bed, exhausted her last bit of strength, and passed away.

50,000 words.

My son is dead, my daughter is dead, my wife is dead.

Liu Feng sat in the ergonomic chair, looking at the last sentence:

"Jiazhen died well, peacefully and cleanly."

The air conditioning in the monitoring room was blowing on the back of his neck, and he actually felt a little cold.

He worked as a reviewer for five years and saw the deaths of millions of characters.

He had thought he was immune to fictional suffering.

But he now discovers that he is immune only to those poorly made, industrially defective products made for the sake of sensationalism.

When a true tragedy, presented in this simple, descriptive style, stripped of all its ornate rhetoric, leaving only a withered skeleton before him, he will still feel pain.

"Brother Liu, what's wrong?"

Xiao Chen, who was standing next to him, noticed something was wrong. "Why are your eyes red? Is it because you've been using the brain-computer interface for a long time and your optic nerve is tired? Should we put some eye drops in?"

Liu Feng leaned back in his chair, shook his head, and said in a slightly hoarse voice:

"No, I just finished reading the book 'To Live'."

Xiao Chen paused for a moment, then burst into carefree laughter, even with a hint of teasing:

"Seriously, Brother Liu? You've been doing auditing for five years, what kind of storms haven't you weathered? You got all emotional just from reading a book? In our line of work, we see more people die every day than the number of births in the lower city in a year. Your tears are way too cheap!"

Night shifts are already exhausting, and when the other auditors in the monitoring room, who were drinking synthetic coffee to stay awake, heard the commotion, they all slid their chairs over to join them.

"What are you talking about? Did Liu Feng cry while reading a novel?"

"Really? What kind of amazing book could break down Brother Liu's ironclad defenses? Yesterday, that big company submitted a novel called 'Interstellar Sadomasochism,' in which the female protagonist was cut into 108 pieces, and Brother Liu approved it without even blinking."

Xiao Chen pointed to the name that was climbing on the data screen:

"Here, this is it, it's called 'To Live.' It just updated with 50,000 words, and it's only a little over 90,000 words in total. Brother Liu just looked at this one."

"Ninety thousand words?"

A senior auditor scoffed:

"Nine thousand words isn't even enough to lay out the world-building, so what kind of immersion can it provide? Anyway, I don't have much work to do in the latter half of the night, so I'll see how magical this book is and use it to pass the time."

Xiao Chen also became interested.

Feeling bored and looking for something to do during his long night shift, he casually opened the page of "To Live" on his terminal.

"Alright, I'll take a look too. I want to see how Brother Liu sheds these cheap tears."