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

"tasty."

Yu Wen replied in a low voice, swallowing the last mouthful of the bitter, artificially flavored paste.

After eating this extremely difficult breakfast, Yu Yin quickly cleaned up the two broken bowls.

She casually splashed water on her face, put on her patched dark gray coat, and slung her faded, tattered satchel over her shoulder.

"Brother, I'm going to school. You stay home and rest well, and don't stare at the screen all the time!"

Yu Yin turned back at the door and gave a word of advice before hurriedly pushing open the rusty iron gate and running into the narrow alleyway in the lower city that never saw sunlight.

The iron gate closed again, and the basement returned to its deathly silence.

Yu Wen's tightly wound nerve finally snapped.

The effects of the cheap nerve relaxant wore off completely, leaving behind an overwhelming fatigue and throbbing pain in the brain. This crippled body, weakened by long-term malnutrition, simply could not withstand six hours of intense mental and physical exertion.

He struggled to turn his wheelchair, almost half-crawling and half-falling as he moved himself onto the makeshift foam bed.

The moment my head hit the pillow, my consciousness was instantly plunged into boundless darkness.

I slept very soundly, without even dreaming.

When I opened my eyes again, I was awakened by a spasmodic, gnawing pain in my stomach.

Yu Wen struggled to open his eyelids and turned to look at the deformed blinds.

The pale, dim light of daytime was gone, replaced by the dazzling, psychedelic holographic neon lights unique to the lower city, projected onto the peeling paint like some kind of toxic fungus.

It was already dusk.

He rubbed his temples, which were still throbbing, and used his hands to support himself on the edge of the bed, lifting himself back into his wheelchair and sliding to the computer desk.

The screen remained lit. Yu Wen's heart skipped a beat. He gripped the mouse and opened the author backend of "Weiguang Literature".

Refresh the page.

The moment the data was loaded, Yu Wen's lips twitched involuntarily.

[Views: 0]

[Collection count: 0]

[Recommendation: 0]

Three clean zeros, like three cold mocking remarks, hung blatantly on the screen.

"Too……"

Yu Wen gave a wry smile. In this era where AI dominates algorithms, how could a new book without a system, without any cheat codes, and not even a cool cover possibly generate its own buzz?

He clicked on the work's details page, wanting to see which category the platform had thrown "Living" into.

When Yu Wen scrolled to the bottom, he was stunned.

In the work's tag section, several blood-red, automatically generated system tags were prominently displayed:

[A True Account of the Apocalypse of a Pre-Civilization]

[Survival without a system]

[An extremely depressing ancient wasteland]

Yu Wen stared at the labels for a full half minute, then couldn't help but clutch his stomach and chuckle softly, laughing until tears almost streamed down his face.

This damn AI logic from a major tech company!

In this cyber world with a severe historical rupture, after the AI ​​mastermind captured and analyzed the first 20,000 words of "To Live," it extracted extremely tragic elements such as "eating tree bark," "famine," "being conscripted to pull cannons," and "scratching shoes from piles of dead bodies."

AI's cold code simply couldn't understand the real rural areas of that era. It directly used the highest matching item in its database to determine that "To Live" was a hardcore post-apocalyptic survival novel describing a "nuclear war apocalypse in a pre-civilization era"!

As for the ox named "Fugui," it was probably identified by AI as some kind of ancient, low-level biological labor mech.

Yu Wen shook his head helplessly. These AI-generated tags are locked, and novice authors have no permission to modify them.

This means that "To Live" has been thrown into an extremely niche and marginal "hardcore wasteland" traffic pool.

In this pool, if there isn't even a single click or favorite within three days, the book will be permanently marked as a dead book by the system and sink into oblivion.

"If the mountain won't come to me, I'll come to the mountain."

Yu Wen took a deep breath, his eyes sharpening.

Having been a seasoned online novel enthusiast in his previous life and a modern person well-versed in the internet ecosystem, he knew all too well how to get started with zero exposure.

Since the AI ​​algorithm won't push traffic to him, he'll use the oldest and most primitive method—manual traffic generation.

In this era, everyone is fed content by AI, and very few people actively post long "book recommendation posts" on forums anymore. This, ironically, became Yu Wen's breakthrough point.

He immediately opened the largest underground online community in the lower city – "Abyss Scrap Metal Forum".

This place is a gathering place for a large number of low-level scavengers who have just finished get off work, black market mercenaries, and virtual experience enthusiasts.

Yu Wen quickly registered three alternate accounts.

Instead of promoting his work as an author, he went straight to the most popular section of the forum: the Hardcore Survival Sensory Experience Zone.

With hands resting on that dusty mechanical keyboard, the devastating impact of modern internet "clickbait" has officially arrived in this cyber age.

He posted a message using his first alternate account:

[Title: Holy crap! Guys, I found a post-apocalyptic survival novel written by a madman on Weiguang Literature today, and I'm dying from the poison! Anyone dare to try it?!]

【content:

Let's not even mention those trashy survival stories that give you gene serums right at the start!

I came across a bizarre book today called "Living," and the author is definitely a masochistic lunatic! The protagonist gambles away hundreds of acres of land at the beginning, without even awakening a system. The most outrageous thing is how realistic it is! The protagonist is captured and sent to the front lines as cannon fodder, scrambling for flatbread amidst piles of thousands of corpses and eating tree bark!

The suffocating feeling of despair inside almost burned out my brain-computer interface!

I strongly advise those with low tolerance for hardship not to search for this book. There are no satisfying moments; it's all slow, agonizing torture! If you want to experience what a truly "hardcore apocalyptic" world is like, try searching for "To Live" on Weiguang Literature. I bet you won't last past 20,000 words!

As soon as the post was published, Yu Wen immediately used two other accounts to frantically reply and stir up trouble in the comments:

Alt account A replied: "OP, are you bragging? There are still survival stories without systems these days? I'll go take a look. If you dare to lie to me, I'll come back and remove your prosthetic body."

Account B replied: "After hearing what the original poster said, I'm actually a little curious. All the AI-driven wish-fulfillment novels these days taste the same. I'll go and see just how addictive this ancient wasteland setting really is."

In this cyber world filled with industrial saccharin and where everyone is chasing instant dopamine stimulation, the more you say something is "toxic," "don't watch," or "extremely depressing," the more it will arouse the curiosity of those who are spiritually empty.

Sending this one isn't the end of it.

With a cold face, Yu Wen's fingers flew across the keyboard as he moved on to another section called "Historical Relics Fantasy Zone," where he posted a second thread in a completely different tone.

You can't just cast one net.