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

The 30,000-word update silenced millions of people, lasting for nearly an hour on the StarNet.

No one spoke. For the entire hour, they were all engrossed in reading "To Live," reading it word by word.

At this moment, the entire StarNet experienced a rare and unusual state.

There was none of the overwhelming "donations" and "exhilarating excitement" that accompanied the conclusion of any previous blockbuster novel.

No one posted lengthy plot analyses on the forum, nor did anyone send those uniformly formatted "sprinkling flowers" and "urging for updates" emojis.

The official comment section for Weiguang Literature's novel "To Live" is located at the bottom of the last chapter of the book.

The number of comments is increasing at a crazy rate of thousands per second.

However, there are few written records.

[Male Homeless Man]: Lighted up a system-provided gray-white candle icon.

The Night Watchman of the Used Bookstore: He left behind a row of six black periods.

【Pure Love God of War】: sent a blank newline with no content.

【Wasteland Scavenger】: Offered a white virtual daisy.

[Nightclub worker]: A candle icon.

【Cyber ​​Street Slicker】: A candle icon.

Turn the page down, one page, ten pages, one hundred pages, one thousand pages.

They all have the same icons, the same punctuation, and the same blank spaces.

In this most silent way, readers completed their tribute to Fugui's life.

……

The overwhelming sense of tragedy severed everyone's language center; 1.6 million living accounts stared at the screen, their minds blank.

About an hour later...

The initial suffocating feeling that made my scalp tingle began to slowly subside, and the suffocating feeling that had been building up in my chest finally found an outlet.

The reader snapped out of his daze, slammed his hands on the keyboard on the light screen, and typed the first line of characters.

It was like opening the floodgates of a dam.

The official comment section of Weiguang Literature's novel "To Live" experienced a surge in activity.

1.6 million user input requests flooded the server in the same second.

The scroll bar in the comment section instantly transformed into a white waterfall where the text was illegible.

【Pure Love God of War】: "It's too tragic... I'm a 1.9-meter-tall man, and I'm crying so hard in the pipe room in the lower city that I can't straighten up."

[Plot Prophet]: "The first two chapters laid so much groundwork; it's a series of devastating events. I told you yesterday when Jia Zhen died that it wasn't over yet, but you wouldn't believe me!"

[Wasteland Scavenger]: "He wrote 30,000 words overnight, smashed Erxi into mincemeat, and stuffed Kugen to death, leaving not even a chicken for the Xu family."

【That Summer】: "Waaaaah... Who told you all to bash this book? Now look what happened, you're all dead!"

Amidst the wailing, a VIP comment with a gold frame floated up.

[Optimistic and Rational Fan]: "They didn't all die. Didn't the protagonist, Fugui, survive to the end? Didn't he still have a cow by his side?"

The moment this comment appeared, a towering thread of replies appeared below.

[Grumpy Guy] replied to [Optimistic Rational Fan]:

"Fuck your mother." *999+

……

[Heavy Metal Health Preservation]: "Did anyone notice? That cow is also named Fugui! His whole family died, so he bought an old cow and named it after himself! I had already stopped crying, but when I saw this, my brain-computer interface short-circuited."

After the initial outpouring of emotions, the comments section began to shift towards analyzing the text itself.

On Douyin, Xingwang Forum, and various book clubs, more and more lengthy reading feedback posts are starting to flood the screen.

The weight of the 120,000 words completely overwhelmed these readers.

[I don't eat synthetic starch]: "The book is titled 'Living,' but it's all about death. They give someone a piece of candy and then chop off their arm; Youqing gets drained of blood right after winning a race; Fengxia dies on the operating table just as she's starting to enjoy a good life. This author is too ruthless."

[Underlying code]: "Seeing Kugen die from being stuffed with beans, I felt completely numb. There were no villains, no conspiracies, just poverty, just a miserable life. It was so oppressive I could hardly breathe."

【The Stray Cat】: "This author is cutting flesh with a dull knife! Not a single word is wasted, Erxi is directly crushed to death by a cement slab, not even given a dying word... The fewer the words, the more ruthless the knife!"

[History major who failed]: "I'm used to reading AI-generated wish-fulfillment stories, so being suddenly bombarded with this kind of pure carbon-based suffering is really overwhelming."

[The former scavenger]: "His whole family died, leaving only an old man and an old ox. This isn't 'living,' it's 'not dead.'"

[Grammar Analyst]: "I wanted to curse the author, but I couldn't type a single word for a long time. I just felt a tightness in my chest."

As the discussion deepened, a peculiar phenomenon began to spread throughout the federal network. This tragedy, filled with extreme suffering, did not plunge the readers from the lower classes into despair; instead, it produced a strange "cyber antidepressant" effect.

[Working class in Xiacheng District]: "Yesterday, I was thinking of jumping off a building because my prosthetic body loan was overdue. After watching Fugui, I feel like I can hold on for a few more years. Compared to him, my little problems are nothing."

[Old Li, prosthetic repairman]: "I always complain about how tiring life is, but now I feel lucky to even have water to drink. It's better to live a miserable life than to die."

[Attending Physician in Psychiatry]: "When Fugui called out the names of his whole family to the old ox, I got goosebumps all over. I suggest that the Weiguang platform provide psychological intervention subsidies to all its members; this book has a powerful lasting impact."

……

In the contracted author groups of major platforms, people were mechanically exchanging ideas about AI computing power and checking in on spelling words every day.

Before tonight's grand finale, there weren't many colleagues in the industry who were truly paying attention to "To Live," this groundbreaking work.

Aside from those competing authors who were mercilessly crushed by it on various charts and watched helplessly as it drained the site's traffic, the vast majority of ordinary authors never even opened the first chapter.

In this cyber age that heavily relies on AI-assisted writing, grassroots authors rarely read the best-selling and popular works on the charts.

The reason is simple—the plagiarism detection algorithms and plagiarism detection mechanisms across the entire network are too sensitive.

Once you've read someone else's wildly popular masterpiece and subconsciously borrowed plot elements, the AI ​​system can easily flag it as plagiarism and shut it down when generating subsequent outlines.

Therefore, the vast majority of authors work in isolation, hoarding their meager inspirations and feeding them to AI to meet word count targets. People have long since lost their original desire to read online novels.

Until tonight.

When the finale of "To Live" caused a data tsunami on the StarNet, the Weiguang platform personally stepped in to protect it!

A mid-level author who usually just spouts off word counts in group chats suddenly threw out a black link to the Weiguang platform.

Immediately afterwards, he sent a voice message, his voice trembling noticeably and his voice trembling with suppressed sobs:

"A divine book... This is truly a fucking divine book! After reading this, I feel like all the tens of millions of words I've written using AI over the past few years are utter garbage!!!"

The group chat was silent for a few seconds.

"What happened? Old Ghost's account got hacked?"

"What's wrong with you doing out in the middle of the night? What kind of weird book are you reading? Aren't you afraid of getting a plagiarism warning from the AI ​​tomorrow?"

"Even an old fox like Lao Gui, who makes a living by eating large quantities of food, could be fooled? I'd like to see what kind of thing it is..."

This extremely emotionally charged statement instantly piqued the curiosity of everyone in the group.

In an era where everyone is completely numb to fast-paced writing, a work that can utterly crush its peers and leave them questioning their existence is simply unheard of.

Not only lower-level authors, but even a few platinum-level authors who usually stay high and mighty and only look at their own backend data couldn't help but secretly click on the link called "Living".