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

His expression changed drastically. He abruptly put down his wine glass, braced his hands on the holographic worktable, and stared at the completely unfamiliar tan book cover at the top of the screen.

"Living? What is that? Is it a new IP that some major company is secretly developing?"

The man's brows furrowed into a tight knot, his fingers sliding rapidly through the air:

"Immediately retrieve the backend data for the book 'To Live'! Check which streaming algorithm and story engine they're using!"

"Initiating reverse engineering of the underlying code..."

Countless complex waterfalls of green code flashed across the holographic screen, and a few seconds later, the analysis report from the Pangu Engine popped up.

"Analysis complete."

"Target work: 'Living,' current total word count: 91,000 words."

"AI-generated trace detection: 0%. The target text was 100% manually entered using a physical keyboard."

"Dopamine stimulation point calculation: 0. No typical pleasure points, upgrade paths, or revenge mechanisms were detected."

"Business conversion rate and audience model: Unable to establish. The mastermind determines that this text violates all current formulas for creating viral online articles."

As he looked at the report, the man's pupils contracted slightly, as if he had seen some monstrous creature that defied common sense.

"A 90,000-word, hand-typed, flawed work? Not even a single dopamine-inducing moment?"

He laughed in exasperation, loosened his tie, and a hint of absurdity and anger flashed in his eyes:

"Have these ranking manipulation studios become this brazen? Using garbage data that's even worse than AI drafts to wreck my data? Show me the actual data; I want to see what kind of gimmick they're up to!"

The screen flashed, and the main text of "To Live" filled the man's vision.

He quickly skimmed through the first few chapters. There were no cheat codes, no system, no cool cybernetic bodies; the whole book was filled with yellow earth, old oxen, dilapidated thatched huts, and those pathetic, mundane things that, in his opinion, weren't even worthy of being called "inspiration scraps."

"This kind of rough writing is not even as good as the mastermind's basic polishing."

The man snorted coldly and immediately dragged the progress bar to the latest updated chapter, trying to find a flaw in the other party's data manipulation.

His gaze fell on the part where Yoo-kyung had his blood drawn.

The holographic screen cast a deep blue light on his face.

The apartment was extremely quiet, with only the slight hum of the central air conditioning unit.

The man's gaze lingered on the lines "Youqing's blood has been drained" for a long time.

He subconsciously tried to recall the "anger template" from the larger model in his mind to deconstruct the plot, attempting to label it negatively as "forced violence," "illogical," and "lacking in the satisfaction of revenge."

But as he watched Fugui carrying his son's frail body, walking lightly under the moonlight, and saw that line:

"I looked at that winding path leading into the city, and I couldn't hear my son running barefoot towards me..."

The man's sarcastic words suddenly caught in his throat.

In his proudest work, Cyber ​​Ascension, the protagonist, seeking revenge, wields a rusty chainsaw and carves a bloodbath in a tycoon's building.

He used the most ornate language and the most precise emotional codes to package "pain" and "pleasure" into the ultimate product.

But in the face of the despair in "To Live," which is like cutting flesh with a dull knife and has no skill or embellishment, his meticulously calculated "chainsaw revenge" suddenly seems like a ridiculous clown in plastic armor yelling on stage.

The inexplicable weight of suffering that strikes deep into the soul of carbon-based life is something that the Pangu Engine could never calculate, no matter how many trillions of times it runs.

"Pangu..."

For some reason, the man's voice had a very rare dryness.

"Yes. Do you need me to generate a PR statement to suppress this work?"

The mechanical female voice remained cold.

The man did not answer.

He looked at the top right corner of the screen, where the real-time popularity data for "Living" was still outpacing his "Cyber ​​Ascension" at an unreasonable pace.

After a long while, he weakly released his grip on the table, slumped back into his leather swivel chair, and stared at the holographic screen, as if asking the AI, or perhaps muttering to himself:

"Purely handmade...not even 100,000 words...don't these poor bastards from the lower city need any satisfying moments?"

In the spacious, river-view penthouse, no one could answer him.

Only the ice cubes in that glass of red wine melted slowly in the quiet.

There was a long silence.

But after all, he was a trader who had climbed to the top of the pyramid in the brutal battle of data. After a brief moment of shock and disorientation, his instinctive sense of crisis about the loss of control over the business order quickly overwhelmed the rare literary inspiration he felt.

He didn't believe that something that completely defied market principles could really keep him in check for long.

"Pangu".

The man steadied himself, his voice regaining its usual coldness and rationality, "Show his live stream on Douyin."

"Instruction received."

On the enormous holographic workbench, elaborate data charts receded to both sides.

A few seconds later, a 2D live stream with poor image quality and no basic beauty filters was projected onto the center of the luxurious penthouse.

"Click, click..."

The moment the connection was established, the dull, dry sound of mechanical buttons emanated from the top-of-the-line surround sound system.

The man narrowed his eyes slightly.

The screen didn't show the professional team from the big company he had imagined, there was no tear-jerking background music, and he couldn't even see the streamer's face.

The camera only framed a blackened, dilapidated wooden table, rusty water pipes, and an antique keyboard with severely worn keycaps.

And, a pair of hands belonging to a carbon-based organism.

Those hands, roughened by years of hard work, were trembling slightly from the intense exertion of their muscles.

A drop of sweat fell from off-screen, landing next to the space bar and leaving a small water stain.

The typing speed was outrageously slow in his eyes, a "top influencer" who was used to seeing AI write tens of thousands of words per second.

Despite the slow, clumsy, and even slum-like visuals, the number of online viewers in the upper right corner remained firmly above one million, with each jump representing a massive amount of real traffic.

The man's gaze darted back and forth between his trembling hands and the data on the screen, his brow furrowing deeper and deeper.

That's so true.

Without a script, without AI assistance, only one person in a cramped corner, at the cost of physical exhaustion, chiseling out those despairing stories that could crush a person, line by line.

This primal vitality, born from the soil, cannot be replicated by any large-scale model, no matter how well it is simulated.

Seeing those paying readers who usually only pay for "excitement" and "cheat codes" now humbly begging the author to spare the characters in the book, the man's eyes turned completely cold.

He felt a real threat.

It's not because the other party writes so well, but because the other party is breaking the "dopamine consumption logic" that the entire online literature industry has carefully constructed for thirty years.

If readers begin to become addicted to this kind of crude realism and suffering, then the artificially sweetened and bloodthirsty novels he produces in bulk with AI will become worthless pieces of paper.

"We can't let him finish telling the story so easily."